The Kitáb al-Íqán or Kitáb-i-Íqán (, "Book of Certitude") is one of many books held sacred by followers of the Baháʼí Faith; it is their primary theological work. One Baháʼí scholar states that it can be regarded as the "most influential Quran commentary in Persian outside the Muslim world," because of its international audience. It is sometimes referred to as the Book of Íqán or simply The Íqán. Background The work was composed partly in Persian and partly in Arabic by Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, in 1861, when he was living as an exile in Baghdad, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. While Baháʼu'lláh had claimed to have received a revelation some ten years earlier in the Síyáh-Chál (lit. black-pit), a dungeon in Tehran, he had not yet openly declared his mission. References to his own station therefore appear only in veiled form. Christopher Buck, author of a major study of the Íqán, has referred to this theme of the book as its "messianic secret," paralleling the same theme in the Gospel of Mark. The Íqán constitutes the major theological work of Baháʼu'lláh, and hence of the Baháʼí Faith. It is sometimes referred to as the completion of the Persian Bayán. Shoghi Effendi referred to the work as follows: A model of Persian prose, of a style at once original, chaste and vigorous, and remarkably lucid, both cogent in argument and matchless in its irresistible eloquence, this Book, setting forth in outline the Grand Redemptive Scheme of God, occupies a position unequalled by any work in the entire range of Baháʼí literature, except the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Baháʼu'lláh's Most Holy Book. History The uncle of the Báb, Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid Muḥammad, had been perplexed to hear that the promised one of Islam was his own nephew. When he was told that this was the same objection voiced by the uncle of the prophet of Islam, he was shaken and decided to investigate the matter. In 1861 he traveled to Karbala, Iraq, to visit his brother, Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥasan-ʻAlí, and then went to Baghdad to meet Baháʼu'lláh. There he posed four questions about the signs of the appearance of the promised one in writing to Baháʼu'lláh. The 200 pages (in original languages) of the Kitáb-i-Íqán were written in the course of at most two days and two nights in reply about January 15, 1861. The Kitáb-i-Íqán was probably the