I grew up a Bahá'í, and I grew up on Asimov. So when Julian Norris asks, in an essay now recommended for study at the Bahá'í national convention, whether the Faith is the real Game B, I find myself reaching for a different shelf. Game B is a set of design principles for a civilisation that has not yet been built. Asimov wrote about something older: the preservation of a civilisation that is about to fall.

His premise is simple and severe. The mathematician Hari Seldon develops psychohistory, a science that reads the future of whole populations the way physics reads a gas, and foresees the fall of a galactic empire and thirty thousand years of barbarism. He cannot stop it. What he can do is shorten the dark age, from thirty millennia to one, by founding a vessel to store what the civilisation has learned and carry it across the ruin. A civilisation facing its end can be stored, carried, and made to begin again.

Read the Bahá'í Faith through that lens and it stops looking like a creed and starts looking like a Foundation, a sacred vessel built at the edge of an age, holding a civilisation against the very collapse its own scriptures foretell. And as in Asimov, it has two poles. Terminus, the small world at the galaxy's edge, holds the living unity of the origin; Trantor, the old imperial centre, holds the proliferating multiplicity that grows around it.

Every Foundation begins as a small band. The Faith began with the Báb and the eighteen who first knew him after his declaration at Shiraz in 1844, the Letters of the Living, the poetess Táhirih among them, nineteen souls in all. There is Norris's whole lesson in one image: a civilisation turning on a single intimate core. And that core is Terminus, the edge and the origin: Qajar Persia in the nineteenth century, the One declared in the Arabic and Persian of the Revelation itself, a unity crystallised at the moment its world was passing out of history. That unity is the heart of the whole teaching, the oneness of God and, flowing from it, the oneness of the human family, the single claim everything else unfolds from. To read those words in the original is to hold a Persia the twentieth century otherwise demolished, in the high tongue of Hafiz and Rumi.

Asimov's Foundation runs on foresight, but where Seldon read the fall of empire as a mechanical decline to be outlasted, the Faith reads the same wreckage as birth pangs, foretelling, in Bahá'u'lláh's nineteenth-century words, a coming turbulence and, beyond it, the Lesser Peace of the nations and the Most Great Peace of a united earth. There is the Seldon Plan of the Faith: the collapse foretold, and a course laid through the dark. If anyone here plays the mortal architect it is Shoghi Effendi, the Beloved Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, who read his own century against scripture and raised the elected order that carries the Revelation forward, yet the analogy stops where it must, for Bahá'u'lláh is no planner with mathematics but, to a Bahá'í, the Supreme Manifestation Himself, the source the whole sacred vessel exists to keep, above the frame and never inside it.

If Terminus is the One, Trantor is the many: the centre where the single Revelation proliferates into institutions, languages and cultures. It is this pole, the Anglo-American order of the early twentieth century, that took the Persianate seed and carried it into English. Here Norris, for all his warmth, reads the instrument backwards. He calls the idiom of the writings a "flowery 19th-century" style, and elsewhere balks at the Faith's monotheism, its preference for unity over dissent, and a vision of perfection that strikes him as a manicured garden rather than a wild ecosystem.

But the manicured garden is only the One seen from far off. When Shoghi Effendi rendered the exalted Arabic and Persian into English, he chose, consciously, the tongue of the 1611 King James Bible, the English of Shakespeare's century and the high-water mark of sacred prose in our language; the Faith's own authorities are explicit that the register echoes the seventeenth-century translators of the Bible, to carry the elevation of the original. What Norris mistakes for Victorian decoration is the vessel at work, a Persianate revelation sealed inside the most enduring English ever written. The unity he recoils from is the source that generates the multiplicity, never the flattening of it. The One does not abolish the many; it spawns them. From a single Revelation grows a wild proliferation of institutions and cultures, the older devotions of a hundred peoples folded into new prayers, so that what looks from a distance like a manicured garden is, up close, a wild one.

This is what the Faith is doing, and what Game B has not yet learned to do. Game B drafts the civilisation to come. The Foundation preserves the civilisations that were. And it does not set out to. The mission is universal, the oneness of humanity and the peace meant to follow; the preservation is the byproduct, the residue of embodying an eternal claim in one century and one tongue. A revelation, to reach anyone at all, must arrive in some particular century and some particular speech, and having arrived it carries that century and that speech forward long after the world that spoke them is gone.

Every great faith does it. Christianity keeps first-century Judea and the late-Roman Latin of Jerome and Augustine. Islam keeps the seventh-century Arabic of the Qur'an and, in its sciences, the ninth-century Baghdad of the Abbasids. None of them set out to be an archive; each became one, through its sacred writings, while reaching for something eternal. The Bahá'í vessel keeps a nineteenth-century Persia the world otherwise let go, and an early-twentieth-century English we are already forgetting how to write, and beneath both, in a station above every analogy, the thing they were built to keep. It is not a museum; it is a seed, a civilisation folded small enough to survive the winter and carry a whole spring inside it. When the present finishes its long implosion, these are the shelves one would want someone to have stocked.

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