13 Sultan 166 B.E. (Baha'i Calendar)
Soundtrack in my head: Tosca, "My First"

Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog posted entitled "I am a total calendar geek," which talked about my fascination with the Badi (Baha'i) calendar.  Now I just read "Time and the Baha'i Era--A Study of the Badi Calendar" by Gerald Keil.  It's a book I've been wanting to read for some time and it was at the top of my Christmas list.  Now that I have finished reading it, I realize I have been "out-geeked" by a factor of nineteen.

Keil spends the first third of the book talking about the evolution of the way that humanity has marked time--when and how it became necessary to do so, and the evolution of tracking the time of day, the day, month, and year, and the impact of innovations such as the clock and the calendar.  He then looks at different calendars in history, including the Zoroastrian calendar, the Iranian calendar, the Jewish calendar, the Islamic calendar, and the Graeco-Roman calendar which evolved into today's Gregorian calendar.

The author then goes into the Badi calendar, talking about how the calendar was introduced by the Bab and clarified by Baha'u'llah.  He delves into the symbolism of the calendar--the symbolism of the sun and the moon, the symbolism of the start of the year (Naw-Ruz), the symbolism of the number nineteen, the signficance of the start of the Baha'i day at sunset, and so on.  He finds the notions of renewal, the plan of God, unity in diversity, the agreement between science and religion, darkness and light, and other concepts symbolically interwoven into the Baha'i calendar.  Indeed, in reading about the symbolism inherent in the calendar, I felt like I was getting a refresher course on several aspects of the Baha'i Faith. 

The last half of the book talks about practical aspects of introducing the Badi calendar. Keil devotes 53 pages solely to the subject of determining the exact point that Naw-Ruz begins. Apparently it isn't as simple as I thought, and the way Baha'is mark it now is merely a temporary convenience.  The text intermixes interpretation of statements by Baha'u'llah, 'Abdu'l-Baha, and Shoghi Effendi with astronomy and geometry, and at times draws on my high school trigonometry which I have long since forgetten.  He also explores the practical aspect of tracking and scheduling time in a day that begins at sunset.  Finally, he speculates what the rhythm of life would be like with a nineteen-day month. 

Indeed Keil acknowledges that much of what he writes about the introduction of the calendar is, at best, speculative, and merely the beginning of a discussion that should continue.  He does not draw any firm conclusions about Naw-Ruz, the time of day, or the rhythm of the month.

In any case, I found the discussion fascinating, and it gave me yet another vantage point from which I could appreciate the Baha'i Faith.