About

Birth

Seventy-two years after the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh in 1892, I was born on the eleventh of September 1964 in the village of Khatir-Kala near Qá'im-Shahr, close to the fortress of Tabarsí. My father, Shaykh Muhammad-Sádiq Yahyazadeh, named me Askari. I studied through the fifth grade at the state school and learned the Qur'án in the school of my uncle (Mullá Haydar), then went with my elder brother to Mashhad.

I lived the first twenty-five years of my life with an intense devotion to Khomeini and a spirit of jihad and martyrdom. I took part many times in the Iran–Iraq war and was wounded in battle. As a disabled war veteran, I entered the religious seminary of Mashhad.

Studies

Having memorised the Alfiyya of Ibn Málik, I began teaching in the seminary. I studied rhetoric, principles of jurisprudence, jurisprudence, hadith and Qur'án under a number of leading teachers of Mashhad, and the higher courses of jurisprudence and principles under further masters. I learned the philosophy of Mullá Sadrá and theoretical mysticism in the presence of Sayyid Jalálu'd-Dín Áshtíyání.

A First Rebirth

At thirty, through my acquaintance with a sincere mystic from Afghanistan, I came to understand the question of the Promised One (Mahdíism) on rational, mystical, and philosophical grounds. The Special Court for the Clergy tried me on a charge of claiming Mahdíism; but with the support of seminary and university teachers, my family, friends, and the veterans' foundation, I was spared execution and instead sentenced to internal exile in my birthplace and barred from teaching.

During my exile I wrote many books. Forty years old, with more than forty works to my name, I was forced to leave my beloved Iran; after nearly two years in Syria I sought asylum in Germany. From my first year there, in 2004, I founded the "Association for the Defence of the Aims of the Prophets and Saints," and was active in the House of Peace — including making a half-hour film, "The Taboo of Bahá'ísm in Iran," in which more than fifty members of my association took part.

A Second Rebirth

The film, the pandemic, and other circumstances gave me the time and occasion to choose anew — from among all the religions I had spent years researching and defending — the Faith of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh, and to study it afresh. After continuous research into the writings of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh — the Bayán, the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá', the Íqán, the Hidden Words, the Aqdas, and the Book of the Covenant — no doubt remained for me that the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh are the latest Manifestations and proofs of God on earth. A dawn-time vision of meeting Bahá'u'lláh kindled such flames within me that it overturned my whole life and placed it beneath His matchless light.

Voluntarily, to acquaint my fellow human beings, I translated, illustrated, and recounted the Book of Íqán from beginning to end in one hundred and fifty-two online parts; and because the Íqán is shoreless, I again translated, interpreted, and published it in eleven volumes. I likewise unveiled the Book of the Covenant of Bahá'u'lláh in nineteen sessions and published it under the title "The Will of Light." Now I live and breathe in such a way that my whole being is under the care and guidance of Bahá'u'lláh, and I am deeply glad to be engaged, in this school and university of Bahá'u'lláh, in offering works of the divine Cause.