Bahaullah, born Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri in Tehran in 1817, spent the last forty years of his life in Ottoman custody, moved from Baghdad to Istanbul to Edirne and finally in 1868 to Akka, a prison city on the Palestinian coast. He wrote the Kitab-i-Aqdas there in Arabic around 1873, some twenty years after the experience in a Tehran dungeon that Bahais count as the beginning of his mission and about ten years after his public declaration.
The book does not read like a legal code. Its laws are dispersed among passages of exhortation, warning and address, including direct summonses to the rulers of the day. Its provisions are extensive for so short a work. It sets an obligatory daily prayer and a nineteen-day fast in the month of Ala preceding the Bahai new year at the spring equinox. It fixes Huququllah, a payment on wealth to the head of the faith. It prohibits alcohol and opium, gambling, slavery, backbiting and the carrying of arms without cause. It abolishes monasticism and asceticism, forbids confession of sins to any person, and abolishes the professional clergy outright, there are no Bahai priests, and the community's affairs are run by elected bodies. It legislates on marriage, requiring the consent of all living parents, on divorce with a year of waiting, on inheritance where no will exists, and on burial, which must be within an hour's journey of the place of death. It ordains the Mashriqul-Adhkar, the house of worship, and the Universal House of Justice, the elected international body first constituted in 1963 and empowered to legislate on matters the revelation does not address.