What Is the Bahai Faith? A Nineteenth-Century Religion Built on Unity

The story begins with a young merchant in Shiraz who in 1844 took the title the Bab, meaning the gate, and announced that he was the herald of a greater figure soon to come. The movement spread rapidly through Persia, alarmed the clergy and the state, and was suppressed with thousands of deaths; the Bab himself was executed by firing squad in Tabriz in 1850. Among his followers was a nobleman of Tehran, Mirza Husayn-Ali, imprisoned in an underground dungeon in 1852, who while confined experienced what he described as a revelation and who in 1863, on the eve of being exiled from Baghdad, declared himself the figure the Bab had foretold, taking the name Bahaullah, meaning the glory of God. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire, moving from Baghdad to Constantinople to Adrianople and finally to the prison city of Acre in what is now Israel, writing continuously; his works run to many volumes, and he died in 1892 still technically a captive.

The theology begins from a single God who is unknowable in essence and who has revealed the divine will progressively through a series of messengers, each suited to the capacity of the age. The named figures include Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Bahaullah, and the sequence is explicitly not finished, with another expected in no fewer than a thousand years. From that starting point follow the principles that define the community:

• •The oneness of God, the essential oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity, described as the three core teachings
• •The abolition of all forms of prejudice, racial, national, religious and class
• •The full equality of women and men, stated explicitly in the nineteenth century and unusually early for any tradition
• •The harmony of science and religion, with the insistence that a religious belief contradicting established science should be abandoned
• •Independent investigation of truth, meaning that faith must not be inherited or imposed
• •A universal auxiliary language, universal compulsory education, and the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty
• •A world commonwealth with an international tribunal and collective security, proposed in the 1870s

There are no priests, ministers or monks, and the functions clergy perform elsewhere are handled by the community and by elected bodies. Each locality with enough members elects a nine-member Local Spiritual Assembly annually, each country a National Spiritual Assembly, and those national bodies elect the Universal House of Justice, a nine-member international body seated in Haifa, every five years. The elections are unusual by design: there are no candidates, no nominations, no campaigning and no discussion of individuals, and every adult member votes by secret ballot for nine people they consider suitable, so that seeking office is regarded as disqualifying in spirit. Decisions within these bodies are taken by a process called consultation, in which an idea once offered belongs to the group rather than its proposer, which is intended to remove ego from deliberation. Worship is correspondingly plain: obligatory daily prayer said privately, readings from scripture without sermons, a nineteen-day fast from sunrise to sunset each March, and a calendar of nineteen months of nineteen days.

The community is small and extraordinarily dispersed, with adherents in more countries than almost any faith except Christianity, and the largest populations in India, the United States, Kenya, Vietnam and several Latin American countries rather than in the land of its origin. Its world centre is in Haifa, where the terraced gardens around the shrine of the Bab are a World Heritage Site alongside the shrine of Bahaullah at Acre, and where the administrative buildings stand. There are a small number of continental houses of worship, each with nine sides and nine entrances symbolising approach from every direction and open to people of any faith, including the lotus-shaped temple in Delhi, which is among the most visited buildings in the world. There is no missionary organisation in the conventional sense, and growth has come largely through community activities, study circles and children's classes run by members locally.

In Iran the faith is not legally recognised, unlike Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, and its followers, numbering perhaps three hundred thousand, are the country's largest religious minority and its most systematically targeted. Since 1979 the pattern has included the execution of more than two hundred people, most of them in the first decade, the dissolution of the elected assemblies, the confiscation of property and cemeteries, dismissal from public employment, and exclusion from university, which the community answered by founding an underground institute teaching by correspondence in private homes, itself repeatedly raided. A government memorandum from 1991, later made public by the United Nations, set out a policy of blocking their progress and development. The community's response has been to refuse political activity of any kind, which is a general principle rather than a tactic, since members everywhere abstain from partisan politics while being required to obey the government of whatever country they live in. International bodies, including the United Nations General Assembly, have condemned the treatment repeatedly for four decades.

Founded in Persia by Bahaullah, who declared his mission in 1863 after the execution of his predecessor the Bab, the faith teaches that one unknowable God has revealed the divine will progressively through messengers including Abraham, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad, and that the work of this age is the unity of humanity. It has no clergy, governs itself through nine-member bodies elected without candidates or campaigning, and holds to the equality of women and men and the harmony of science and religion. Its members in Iran have been persecuted systematically since 1979.