The Bahai Faith: One Revelation, Many Messengers
The Bahai Faith is the youngest of the independent world religions, founded by Bahaullah in nineteenth-century Persia and now present in more than two hundred countries and territories. This guide covers what Bahais believe, the Bab and Bahaullah, progressive revelation, the writings that count as scripture, prayer and the nineteen day fast, the elected order that governs without clergy, and the persecution of Bahais in Iran.
What is the Bahai Faith, and what do Bahais believe?
The Bahai Faith is an independent world religion founded in nineteenth-century Persia by Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri, known as Bahaullah, and it teaches that there is one God, one human family, and one unfolding religion revealed in stages by a succession of divine Messengers. Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad belong to that succession, and so, Bahais hold, does Bahaullah, each of them bringing teachings suited to the capacity of the age that received him. God is held to be unknowable in essence, so what humanity can know of God arrives through these Messengers, whom Bahai texts call Manifestations of God. Much of the rest follows from that. Prejudice of race, nation, class and creed has no standing, women and men are equal, science and religion must agree, and every person is obliged to investigate truth independently rather than inherit it from family. The faith has no clergy and no sacraments. It is administered by elected councils of nine, and its scripture is the written word of its own founder rather than an oral tradition committed to paper generations later. The name is often written Baha'i, from the Arabic baha, meaning glory or splendor.
Two features separate the Bahai Faith from the movements it tends to be filed alongside. The first is documentary. Bahaullah wrote his own scripture, either in his own hand or to secretaries who read it back to him for correction, so the textual uncertainty that hangs over older founders barely arises. Nobody is reconstructing what he said from the recollections of a later generation. The second is the Covenant. Bahaullah named his eldest son Abdul-Baha as his successor and sole authorized interpreter in a sealed document, the Kitab-i-Ahd, and Abdul-Baha in turn appointed his grandson Shoghi Effendi. That written chain of authority is the usual explanation for why the Bahai Faith has produced far less lasting schism than most religions had produced by a comparable age. Small breakaway groups exist, descending mainly from Mirza Muhammad Ali, who contested the succession after 1892, and from Charles Mason Remey in 1960. No independent census of them has been published, and none has ever demonstrated a following on anything like the scale of the main body. Outsiders often describe the faith as syncretic, or as an interfaith movement rather than a religion. Bahais reject both labels. They hold that theirs is a distinct revelation with its own laws, calendar, holy days and institutions, not a compound assembled from other faiths.
Is the Bahai Faith a new religion or a reform movement?
An independent religion. The Bahai Faith has its own founder, its own revealed scripture, its own body of law set out in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, a calendar of nineteen months, its own holy days and its own administrative institutions. Scholars of religion classify it that way and Bahais insist on it, much as Christians decline to be called a Jewish sect.
What is the shortest summary of Bahai belief?
The shortest summary Bahais use themselves runs to three statements: God is one, religion is one, humanity is one. The rest is commentary. Every Manifestation of God has taught the same spiritual truths and adjusted the social laws to fit the age, and the purpose of a human life is to know and worship God, to grow qualities that outlast the body, and to carry forward what Bahaullah called an ever-advancing civilization.
How does the Bahai claim differ from Theosophy's hidden wisdom-religion?
Theosophy places a single esoteric wisdom behind all religions, transmitted by hidden Masters and recovered through study. The Bahai claim is public and historical instead. Named Messengers appeared at datable moments, spoke openly, and left texts anyone can read, with nothing reserved for initiates and no secret doctrine. Helena Blavatsky: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices sets out the Theosophical position on its own terms.
Who was Bahaullah, and how did the faith begin with the Bab?
Bahaullah was born Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri in Tehran on November 12, 1817, the son of a minister at the Persian court, and he took the title Bahaullah, the Glory of God, after declaring in 1863 that he was the Messenger whose coming the Bab had promised. The story begins with the Bab. On the evening of May 22, 1844 in Shiraz, a young merchant named Siyyid Ali-Muhammad told a visiting seminary student, Mulla Husayn, that he was the Qaim, the promised figure of Shia expectation, and took the title the Bab, meaning the Gate. His movement spread across Persia within a few years and was met with force. The Bab was executed by firing squad in Tabriz on July 9, 1850, at thirty, and thousands of his followers were killed in the campaigns that followed. Bahaullah had accepted the Bab's claim in 1844 without ever meeting him, and had become one of the movement's leading figures. He was arrested in August 1852 after a small group of Babis attempted to assassinate Nasir al-Din Shah in revenge for the Bab's execution, an attack whose participants historians count variously as two, three or four men, and he was chained in an underground Tehran dungeon called the Siyah-Chal, the Black Pit, where he later wrote that he first became aware of his own mission.
What followed was forty years of exile that carried Bahaullah steadily further from Persia. Released from the Siyah-Chal in 1853 and banished to Baghdad, he spent a decade in Ottoman Iraq, two years of it withdrawn alone into the mountains of Kurdistan between 1854 and 1856, and over that period wrote the Book of Certitude and the Hidden Words and drew the scattered Babis back around him. When the Ottoman authorities ordered him to Constantinople in 1863, he spent twelve days in a garden outside Baghdad, afterward called the Garden of Ridvan, and there announced to a small circle that he was the promised one the Bab had described. From Constantinople he was sent to Adrianople, and in 1868 to Akka, the Ottoman penal colony on the coast of what is now Israel, where he arrived as a prisoner with his family and companions. Confinement eased over the years, and he was eventually allowed to live outside the city walls at the mansion of Bahji, where he died on May 29, 1892. His half-brother Mirza Yahya, whom the Bab had appointed as a nominal head of the Babi community, rejected his claim outright. The breach between them at Adrianople is the reason a small Babi remnant, the Azalis, survived separately in Iran.
What did the Bab claim, and why was he executed?
The Bab claimed to be the Qaim of Shia expectation and, more radically, a Manifestation of God bringing fresh revelation and a new book of laws, the Bayan, which set aside parts of Islamic law. That second claim made him an apostate in the eyes of the Shia clergy and a political threat to the Qajar state. He was tried, imprisoned in the mountains of Azerbaijan, and shot in the barracks square at Tabriz in 1850.
What is Ridvan, and why is it the greatest Bahai festival?
Ridvan is the twelve-day festival running from April 21 to May 2 that marks Bahaullah's declaration in the Najibiyyih garden outside Baghdad in 1863. Bahais call it the Most Great Festival, because it dates the beginning of their religion as something separate from the Babi movement that produced it. It is also the season of elections. Every Local Spiritual Assembly in the world is elected on the first day of it, and national conventions are normally held inside the same twelve days, following an instruction of Abdul-Baha rather than a fixed law.
Who was Abdul-Baha?
Abdul-Baha, born Abbas Effendi in Tehran in May 1844 on the night of the Bab's declaration, was Bahaullah's eldest son and the successor named in his written will. He shared the exiles from the age of eight, was freed from Ottoman confinement in 1908, and traveled through Egypt, Europe and North America between 1911 and 1913 explaining the faith in public lectures. He died in Haifa in 1921.
What is progressive revelation, and which messengers does it name?
Progressive revelation is the Bahai doctrine that God has guided humanity through a series of Messengers, each founding a religion suited to the capacity and circumstances of the people who received it, and that the series has no final member. Bahai texts call these figures Manifestations of God, and the ones named in the writings are Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Bahaullah. The list is explicitly open, since Bahaullah wrote that Messengers have appeared whose names are lost and whose records perished. In this teaching each Manifestation reflects the attributes of a God who cannot be approached directly, the way a polished mirror carries the image of the sun without containing the sun. The teachings they bring divide into two kinds. Spiritual teachings, such as the obligation to worship God, to speak truthfully, and to treat others as one would be treated, do not change from one Messenger to the next. Social teachings, covering marriage, diet, punishment, ritual and the ordering of society, are provisional and are replaced when conditions change. Religions decay, in this account, because the social shell hardens and outlives its usefulness while the spiritual core goes untended.
Where this doctrine meets other faiths, the friction concentrates in two places. Refusing finality to any revelation puts Bahais at odds with the Islamic doctrine that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, and with Christian claims about the uniqueness of the incarnation. Then there is the roster itself. Filing Krishna and Buddha under the same heading as Moses and Jesus is a move that Hindu and Buddhist teachers never asked for and have largely declined. The 14th Dalai Lama: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices covers the Buddhist tradition on its own terms rather than through a Bahai frame. Within the category itself Bahai texts draw a further line. Abdul-Baha, in the table talks Laura Clifford Barney recorded at Akka between 1904 and 1906 and published in 1908 as Some Answered Questions, separated independent Manifestations who bring a book and a law, among them Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Bahaullah, from prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah who work inside a dispensation already given. The distinction does real work. It is why Bahais can honor the Hebrew prophets without adding them to the list of nine, and why founding a religion, rather than receiving a vision, is what the word Manifestation marks.
Does progressive revelation mean all religions are equally true?
No. Bahais hold that each revelation was true for its age, which is a narrower claim. A social law given in one century can be superseded in another without either version having been false. Bahais also accept that scriptures have been altered in transmission and that later doctrinal additions may not reflect what a Manifestation taught, so accepting a religion's origin is not the same as endorsing everything done in its name.
Will there be another Manifestation of God after Bahaullah?
Bahai teaching says yes, though not soon. Bahaullah wrote that the next Manifestation will not appear before a full thousand years have elapsed, and that anyone advancing such a claim earlier is an impostor. Bahais understand his revelation as the opening of a cycle expected to run for at least five hundred thousand years, with further Messengers appearing at intervals inside it.
How do Bahais read the return of Christ or the Mahdi?
Bahais read prophecies of return as fulfilled by the appearance of a new Manifestation carrying the same spiritual reality, not by the reappearance of the same individual. Bahaullah is understood as the return of Christ in glory and as the fulfillment of the Gospel promises, and the Bab is understood as the Qaim, the figure awaited in Twelver Shia Islam. Abdul-Baha treated most apocalyptic imagery as symbolic rather than physical.
What are the Bahai writings, and which books count as scripture?
Bahai scripture is the revealed writing of the Bab and Bahaullah together with the writings and authenticated talks of Abdul-Baha, and the body of it is very large. Bahai sources put the number of tablets and letters from Bahaullah alone at more than fifteen thousand, though that is an estimate rather than a shelf count, the number of individual texts held in the archives at Haifa is smaller, and fewer than five hundred have appeared in authorized English translation. The central book of law is the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book, written in Arabic at Akka around 1873 and issued in a full authorized English translation only in 1992. Four other works of Bahaullah are read constantly. The Kitab-i-Iqan, the Book of Certitude, composed at Baghdad in January 1861 in answer to questions from a maternal uncle of the Bab and traditionally said to have been written in two days and two nights, is the main statement of progressive revelation and of how prophecy should be interpreted. The Hidden Words, from 1858, gathers short ethical passages, seventy-one in Arabic and eighty-two in Persian, cast as the voice of God addressing the human soul. The Seven Valleys describes the stages of a mystical search and was written in answer to questions from a Sufi judge. And the tablets Bahaullah addressed to the rulers of his day, among them Queen Victoria, Napoleon III, Pope Pius IX and the Shah of Persia, announce his claim and press for disarmament and collective security.
Bahais draw a firm line between revelation, interpretation and legislation, and that line explains what a shelf of Bahai books actually holds. Only the Bab, Bahaullah and Abdul-Baha produced scripture. Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the faith from 1921 until 1957, produced authoritative interpretation, which binds Bahais without being revelation, along with the English translations most Bahais read and a history of the faith's first century, God Passes By, published in 1944. The Universal House of Justice produces binding legislation on matters the revealed texts leave open, and can repeal its own rulings, but cannot touch a revealed law. Shoghi Effendi's translation style is deliberately archaic, modeled on the English of the King James Bible, and he also fixed the transliteration system that gives Bahai names their accents and underlined letters. One institutional practice draws steady criticism. Manuscripts by Bahais about their own faith pass through a pre-publication review, which the historians Juan Cole and Denis MacEoin, both former Bahais, have argued cannot coexist with independent scholarship. Cole resigned from the community in 1996 and has written against the practice since. Bahai institutions have long described review as a temporary provision and have narrowed what it covers.
What is in the Kitab-i-Aqdas?
The Kitab-i-Aqdas sets out Bahai law: obligatory prayer and fasting, marriage and inheritance, burial, the prohibition of alcohol and of confessing sins to another person, the outline of the Houses of Justice, and the payment called Huququ'llah. It abolishes monasticism and the priesthood and sets aside the Islamic category of ritual impurity, declaring instead that all things are made new. Ablutions before obligatory prayer are kept, but reduced to washing the hands and the face. It also states that work performed in a spirit of service ranks as worship.
Are the writings of the Bab still read?
Yes, though far less than Bahaullah's. The Bab's principal works are the Persian and Arabic Bayan and the Qayyumu'l-Asma, and Bahais treat them as revelation while holding that most of the Bayan's laws were abrogated by Bahaullah. Only a portion has appeared in English, mainly in the compilation Selections from the Writings of the Bab. A great deal of the original corpus was destroyed during the Persian persecutions.
Where can you read Bahai scripture?
The authorized English texts are published by the Bahai Publishing Trusts and are also available without charge through the online Bahai Reference Library maintained by the Bahai World Center, which carries searchable versions of the Aqdas, the Iqan, the Hidden Words, Gleanings and the works of Abdul-Baha and Shoghi Effendi. Local Bahai communities will usually lend or give copies to anyone who asks for one.
What does the Bahai Faith teach about the oneness of humanity, equality and social justice?
The Bahai Faith teaches that humanity is one species with one origin, and that prejudice built on race, nation, class, sex or creed is a disease to be cured rather than a preference to be tolerated. Abdul-Baha turned the principle into a set of specific commitments that Bahais still recite: the independent investigation of truth, the equality of women and men, universal compulsory education, the harmony of science and religion, the abandonment of every prejudice, the elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty, a universal auxiliary language taught alongside mother tongues, and an international tribunal with authority to settle disputes between states. Some of these were unremarkable in 1912 and some were not. The equality of women and men was stated flatly, with the instruction that a family able to educate only one child must educate the daughter, since she will teach the next generation. On wealth, Bahai texts reject both unregulated accumulation and the abolition of private property, proposing profit-sharing, graduated taxation and voluntary giving instead. Bahais take no part in partisan politics anywhere, which they treat as a discipline rather than as indifference to public life.
The record of applying these teachings is uneven, and worth stating plainly. Abdul-Baha pressed race unity on American Bahais at a time when their own meetings were segregated in practice, spoke at Howard University in Washington in 1912, and encouraged the marriage that year of the Black lawyer Louis Gregory and the white Englishwoman Louisa Mathew, which was scandalous in the country he was visiting. Shoghi Effendi later wrote in The Advent of Divine Justice, published in 1938, that racial prejudice was the most vital and challenging issue facing American Bahais. He named Gregory a Hand of the Cause after Gregory died in 1951, the first African American to hold that rank. The Bahai International Community has held consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since May 1970, added consultative status with UNICEF in 1976, and works chiefly on the advancement of women, education and human rights. Against that, two positions draw sustained criticism. Only men are eligible to serve on the Universal House of Justice. And Bahai law confines sexual relations to marriage between a man and a woman, so same-sex marriages are not performed, though the institutions instruct that no one is to be shunned over it.
What did Abdul-Baha teach about racial prejudice?
Abdul-Baha told American Bahais during his 1912 visit that unity between Black and white members was the test of whether they believed their own teachings. He meant it as a test they were failing. He insisted on integrated meetings at a time when many were not, and spoke at Howard University and at churches in Washington and Chicago. His recurring image was a garden whose beauty depends on flowers of different colors sharing one bed.
Why are women not elected to the Universal House of Justice?
Bahai law restricts membership of the Universal House of Justice to men, and the texts give no reason. Abdul-Baha stated that the wisdom of it would in time become as clear as the sun at midday, which Bahais accept as a deferral rather than an argument. The restriction stops at that one body. Women serve on every other Bahai institution, including local and national assemblies, the appointed Continental Boards of Counselors and the International Teaching Center at Haifa.
What do Bahais teach about wealth and poverty?
Bahai teaching accepts private property and differences in wealth, but treats extremes at either end as a defect in the social order to be corrected by law and by voluntary giving. The result sits between socialism and laissez-faire, and satisfies partisans of neither. The named measures include profit-sharing with workers, graduated taxation, a village storehouse supporting those who cannot work, and Huququ'llah, a confidential payment on accumulated wealth above a threshold.
What do Bahais do day to day, and how do prayer, fasting and the nineteen day feast work?
Bahai practice rests on daily private prayer, an annual fast, and a community gathering every nineteen days, with no clergy involved in any of them. Each Bahai over fifteen chooses one of three obligatory prayers revealed by Bahaullah and says it alone: a short one recited once between noon and sunset, a medium one said three times a day, or a long one said once in twenty-four hours. Ablutions come first, and the worshipper turns toward Bahji near Akka, where Bahaullah is buried. Many Bahais also repeat the phrase Allah-u-Abha ninety-five times daily, and the writings ask for a passage of scripture morning and evening. The Fast occupies the last month of the Bahai year, usually March 2 through March 20, ending at Naw-Ruz, with the dates shifting by a day in some years because Naw-Ruz is fixed by the equinox. It means nineteen days of abstaining from food and drink between sunrise and sunset, binding on Bahais between fifteen and seventy, with exemptions for illness, pregnancy, nursing, menstruation, hard labor and travel. The Nineteen Day Feast falls on the first day of each Bahai month and runs in three parts, always in the same order: devotional readings, then consultation on community affairs with the Local Spiritual Assembly, then food and company.
The Bahai year runs on the Badi calendar, which Bahaullah adopted from the Bab: nineteen months of nineteen days, each month named for an attribute of God, beginning at Naw-Ruz on the spring equinox around March 21. That leaves four days over, five in a leap year, inserted before the final month as Ayyam-i-Ha, which falls immediately ahead of the Fast. Nine holy days suspend work: Naw-Ruz, the first, ninth and twelfth days of Ridvan, the Declaration of the Bab, the Ascension of Bahaullah, the Martyrdom of the Bab, and the twin birthdays of the Bab and Bahaullah, which are calculated on a lunar reckoning and so shift against the Western calendar. Readers interested in how a modern religion assembles a festival year from scratch can compare Wicca for Beginners: Beliefs, Deities and the Wheel of the Year. Alongside the calendar sit four activities every locality is asked to run: devotional meetings, children's classes, junior youth groups and study circles. The study circles work through the Ruhi curriculum, written at a Bahai institute in Colombia and pushed worldwide by the Universal House of Justice from 1996, which is why a Bahai in Ohio and a Bahai in Zambia are often reading the same booklet in the same week.
Do Bahais have any congregational worship?
Bahais have no congregational prayer except the prayer for the dead, which one person recites while the others stand. Devotional gatherings consist of readings and chanting from scripture, with no sermon, no officiant and no ritual. Inside a Bahai House of Worship only the revealed word may be read or sung, and it is sung unaccompanied, which is why those buildings hold choirs rather than organs.
What is Ayyam-i-Ha?
Ayyam-i-Ha is the four or five intercalary days that fall between the eighteenth and nineteenth Bahai months, from about February 25 to March 1. The name means Days of Ha, after the Arabic letter whose numerical value is five. Bahaullah fixed their position in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, immediately ahead of the Fast, so a season of hospitality, presents and charity for the poor runs straight into nineteen days of abstinence.
Are there Bahai dietary or lifestyle laws?
Yes. Bahais do not drink alcohol or use narcotics except on medical advice, do not gamble, and are asked to avoid backbiting, which the writings treat as the most corrosive of sins. Sexual relations are confined to marriage, a marriage requires the consent of all living natural parents of both parties, and the dead are buried rather than cremated, within an hour's journey of the place of death.
How is the Bahai Faith governed with no clergy, and what is the Universal House of Justice?
The Bahai Faith is governed by elected councils of nine at three levels, with no clergy, no nominations and no campaigning of any kind. At the base is the Local Spiritual Assembly, elected each year on April 21 by the adult Bahais of a locality. Above it is the National Spiritual Assembly, elected annually by delegates at a national convention. There are now close to two hundred of these bodies, against twelve in 1954, and that growth tracks how far the faith spread in the second half of the twentieth century. At the top is the Universal House of Justice, a nine-member body first elected in 1963 and elected every five years since by all the members of every national assembly voting together. Every Bahai election works the same way. Voters write nine names on a secret ballot, choosing from among all eligible adults in the relevant community, and the nine names appearing most often are elected. Anyone who solicits votes, assembles a slate or announces an ambition to serve disqualifies themselves in practice. Elected bodies decide collectively, and an individual member holds no authority whatever outside the meeting, which is the structural reason the faith has no priesthood to reform.
The transition to that system produced the sharpest crisis in Bahai history. Abdul-Baha's Will and Testament provided for a line of Guardians and for the Universal House of Justice, but Shoghi Effendi died suddenly in London in 1957 without children and without naming a successor. The faith was administered for six years by the Hands of the Cause, a group he had appointed, who concluded that no further Guardian could be named and called the first election of the Universal House of Justice for Ridvan 1963. A minority rejected that reading, most visibly Charles Mason Remey, who claimed the guardianship in 1960 and was expelled; his followers persist as small separate groups. Alongside the elected institutions runs an appointed arm with no decision-making power at all: Continental Boards of Counselors and their Auxiliary Board members, whose task is to encourage, advise and protect. Bahai writings call this the learned arm and are explicit that it carries no authority over anyone, an arrangement meant to keep influence and power in separate hands.
What is Bahai consultation?
Consultation is the required Bahai method for group decisions. Participants offer their views frankly, and the moment an idea is voiced it belongs to the group rather than the speaker, so it can be criticized without anyone losing face. The body seeks unanimity and takes a majority vote when it cannot reach one. Once a decision is made, everyone supports it, including those who argued against it.
Can the Universal House of Justice change Bahai law?
The Universal House of Justice can legislate on any matter the revealed texts do not address, and can repeal or amend its own past legislation as conditions change. It cannot alter or abrogate anything Bahaullah revealed, and it does not claim the right to interpret scripture, a function that belonged to Abdul-Baha and Shoghi Effendi and ended with them. Its rulings bind Bahais.
How is the Bahai Faith funded?
The Bahai funds that support the faith's own institutions, buildings and teaching work accept contributions only from enrolled Bahais, which the institutions present as a matter of principle rather than of solvency. Money offered by people outside the community is discouraged rather than categorically refused, and where it is accepted the guidance is that it be applied to charitable and humanitarian purposes only. Giving is confidential and voluntary, and no amount is ever announced. Above ordinary contributions sits Huququ'llah, the Right of God, a payment of nineteen percent on wealth remaining after essential expenses, administered separately from the funds.
Why have Bahais been persecuted in Iran, and what is happening now?
Bahais have been persecuted in Iran since the movement began there in the 1840s, and the persecution intensified after the 1979 revolution because the Islamic Republic's constitution recognizes Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians as protected minorities and does not name Bahais at all. Without that status, roughly three hundred thousand Iranian Bahais, the country's largest non-Muslim religious minority, have no legal standing as a community. More than two hundred Bahais were executed in the years after 1979. All nine members of the national assembly were abducted in August 1980 and never seen again, and eight members of the assembly elected to replace them were executed in December 1981. In June 1983 ten Bahai women were hanged in Shiraz for refusing to recant, among them Mona Mahmudnizhad, who was seventeen. Bahai administrative institutions were banned outright in 1983 and have not operated in Iran since. Cemeteries have been bulldozed, including the main Bahai cemetery in Tehran, businesses have been sealed and property confiscated. Much of the pressure is bureaucratic rather than violent: marriages left unregistered, inheritance denied, pensions withdrawn, licenses refused.
A confidential 1991 memorandum on the Bahai question, prepared within the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council and signed by Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, set the approach down in writing. Bahais were to be allowed to live, but their progress and development were to be blocked, they were to be expelled from universities once identified, and they were to be kept out of positions of influence. The document was obtained and published in 1993 by Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, then the United Nations Special Representative on human rights in Iran, and it remains the clearest evidence that the exclusions are national policy rather than local excess. None of this began with the revolution. In 1955 the preacher Mohammad Taqi Falsafi used a run of Ramadan broadcasts on Radio Tehran to attack the Bahais with government approval, and troops then occupied the national Bahai center in Tehran and demolished its dome, with the army chief of staff taking part. In 2008 seven Bahais who informally coordinated community affairs, known as the Yaran, were arrested and sentenced to twenty years, of which they served ten. Two of them, Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, were re-arrested in 2022 and sentenced again, in the same season that security forces demolished Bahai homes at Roshankouh in Mazandaran province.
Why does Iran target Bahais specifically?
Iranian clerical opposition rests on a charge of apostasy. The Bahai Faith began among Shia Muslims and claims a revelation after Muhammad, which Islamic orthodoxy treats as a denial of the finality of prophethood. Official rhetoric adds a political charge, describing Bahais as agents of foreign powers, usually Israel, because the Bahai World Center sits in Haifa. Bahaullah was exiled there by the Ottoman authorities in 1868, eighty years before Israel existed.
What is the Bahai Institute for Higher Education?
The Bahai Institute for Higher Education, founded in 1987, is an underground university created after Iranian Bahais were expelled from state universities. It has never had a campus. It has taught thousands of students through correspondence, classes in private homes and later online instruction, staffed by volunteer faculty. Security forces raided it in 1998 and again in 2011, seizing equipment and imprisoning teachers. Some of its graduates have been admitted to postgraduate programs abroad.
How have Bahais responded to the persecution?
Bahais in Iran have not organized armed resistance or opposition politics, which their own teachings forbid, and have pursued documentation and legal appeals instead. The Bahai International Community publishes case records and submits them to United Nations bodies. Names, dates and case numbers are the whole strategy. The General Assembly has named their treatment in resolution after resolution on Iran since the mid-1980s, and successive Special Rapporteurs have reported the same pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Bahais are there in the world?
Estimates of the global Bahai population run between five and eight million, and the range is wide because the counting methods differ. The community's own enrollment figures, reported through national assemblies, give something above five million in more than one hundred thousand localities. Independent surveys of world religion tend toward the higher end. Census data sometimes returns far lower numbers than community records, most strikingly in India, where the community reports well over a million members and the national census counts a few thousand. On the country estimates compiled in the World Religion Database, the largest communities are in India, the United States, Kenya, Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Iran, where the faith began, is thought to hold something near three hundred thousand, a small share of the world total.
Is the Bahai Faith a branch of Islam?
No. The Bahai Faith emerged from a Shia Muslim context in nineteenth-century Persia, by way of the Babi movement, but it is an independent religion with its own founder, scripture, laws, calendar and institutions. Bahais honor Muhammad as a Manifestation of God and accept the Quran as revelation, which is why the relationship is often compared to Christianity's relationship with Judaism. Most Muslim authorities reject that comparison and classify the Bahai Faith as apostasy, since it claims a revelation after Muhammad and so denies the finality of prophethood.
Do Bahais believe in Jesus?
Bahais believe Jesus was a Manifestation of God, born of Mary, whose teachings were divine in origin and whose station Bahai teaching places in the same rank as Moses, Muhammad and Bahaullah, while distinguishing the Manifestations by the scope of the revelation each was given. They read the Gospels as scripture. Where they part from Christian orthodoxy is interpretation: Abdul-Baha explained the resurrection as a spiritual event rather than the reanimation of a body, and Bahais do not hold the doctrines of the Trinity, original sin or vicarious atonement. They also understand the promised return of Christ as fulfilled in the appearance of Bahaullah.
Can you stay Christian, Muslim or Jewish and also be a Bahai?
No, not as a formal dual membership. Enrolling as a Bahai means accepting Bahaullah as a Manifestation of God and accepting the authority of the Bahai institutions, and the community does not register members who also belong to another religious body. What Bahais keep is the earlier scripture itself. A Bahai from a Jewish family continues to regard the Torah as revelation, and Bahai devotional gatherings routinely include readings from the Bible, the Quran and Hindu and Buddhist texts alongside Bahaullah's writings.
Why are Bahai temples nine-sided?
Bahai Houses of Worship have nine sides and nine entrances because nine is the highest single digit and is read as a figure of completeness, with the nine doors standing for the many paths that arrive at one place. Nine is also the numerical value of the word Baha in the Arabic abjad system, in which letters carry numbers. Bahai texts require the nine sides, a central dome and surrounding gardens; everything else is left to the architect, which is why the temples in Wilmette, New Delhi and Santiago resemble each other so little.
Where is the Bahai world center, and can anyone visit it?
The Bahai World Center is in Haifa and Akka in northern Israel, where Bahaullah was exiled as an Ottoman prisoner in 1868. The Shrine of the Bab sits on the slope of Mount Carmel amid nineteen terraced gardens opened in 2001, with the Seat of the Universal House of Justice above it, and the Shrine of Bahaullah is at Bahji outside Akka. The gardens and shrines are open to the public without charge, and UNESCO added the sites to the World Heritage List in 2008. Formal pilgrimage lasts nine days and is for Bahais only.
What does the Bahai Faith say about heaven, hell and life after death?
Bahai teaching holds that the soul comes into being at conception, survives the death of the body, and continues to progress through worlds beyond this one. Heaven and hell are conditions rather than places: nearness to God and remoteness from God, experienced in this life as well as after it. In this account nobody is damned forever. There is no physical resurrection, no eternal punishment of the sort found in some Christian and Islamic teaching, and reincarnation is rejected outright. Bahai writings compare this life to a womb, in which the soul grows the qualities it will need once it is out.
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