Antipodean Bahá’í Studies

Peter Terry has finally made available after many years of toil his translation of Louis Alphonse Daniel Nicolas’ biography in French of the life of the Bab, Seyyed Ali Mohammed dit le Bab (Paris, 1905). Not merely a translation, the book is heavily annotated and footnoted  to expand or correct with later research Nicola’s pioneering work.

ALM Nicolas was a translator at the French Legation in Tihran and became acquainted with the life of the Bab and his writings and over the course of several decades published a number of studies and translations of the Bab and the Babi movement. Nicolas was so captivated by the eloquence of the Bab that he describes himself as having become  “bit by bit profoundly and uniquely a Babi”. A Prophet in Modern Times is published on demand by lulu.com and is available from the usual onlne stores.

This volume represents Volume 1 of a series of planned translations of Nicolas’s Babi works and it is hoped that this version of Nicolas’ biography can be expanded to include those chapters that refer to the Bab’s colleagues, the Letters of the Living, some of which has been published recently elsewhere, as well as useful additions such as an index and an aggregated bibliography of the many cited sources in the footnotes.

 Nicolas personal library was acquired in part by the International Baha’i Library and constitutes one of its special collections. The French edition of the book translated here was reprinted a few years ago in the Elibron Classics series. It is also available in a digitised format from the H-Bahai Digital Library.