Bahá'í Faith

A religion whose central doctrine is that all religions are successive stages of one revelation — and whose adherents are the most systematically persecuted religious minority in Iran.

What it is

The religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in nineteenth-century Persia, followed by around five to eight million people across more than two hundred countries — one of the most geographically dispersed religions relative to its size.

Three unities organise it:

The unity of God. One God, unknowable in essence, known through messengers.

The unity of religion. This is the distinctive doctrine — progressive revelation. Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh are successive Manifestations of God, each bringing teaching suited to the capacity and circumstances of their age. Religions do not compete; they are chapters. Differences between them are attributed to historical context and to subsequent human accretion.

The unity of humanity. One species, one earth, with divisions of race, nation and class treated as obstacles to be dismantled.

From these follow a set of social principles unusually explicit for a religion: the elimination of all forms of prejudice; the equality of women and men; the independent investigation of truth rather than inherited belief; universal compulsory education; the harmony of science and religion; the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty; an international auxiliary language; and world governance.

Where it came from

It begins with the Báb — Siyyid ʿAlí Muhammad of Shiraz — who in 1844 announced himself as the gate to a coming Manifestation. The Bábí movement spread rapidly, was violently suppressed, and the Báb was executed by firing squad in Tabriz in 1850. Thousands of his followers were killed.

Bahá'u'lláh — Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí Núrí (1817–1892), a Persian nobleman and Bábí — declared in 1863 that he was the one the Báb had foretold. He spent the rest of his life in exile and imprisonment, moved by Ottoman authorities from Baghdad to Constantinople to Adrianople and finally to the prison city of ʿAkká in Palestine, writing continuously. His son ʿAbdu'l-Bahá and great-grandson Shoghi Effendi led the community afterwards.

How it is practised

Without clergy. There are no priests, no ordained ministry and no professional religious class. Affairs are administered by elected bodies — local and national Spiritual Assemblies, and the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, elected every five years — chosen by secret ballot with no nominations, no campaigning and no canvassing, which is a genuinely unusual electoral design.

Individual practice includes daily obligatory prayer, a nineteen-day fast from sunrise to sunset before the new year at the spring equinox, the study of scripture, and the Nineteen Day Feast, a community gathering combining devotion, administration and social time.

Consultation — a structured method for group decision-making in which ideas belong to the group once offered — is central to how communities operate.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the persecution is severe, ongoing and thoroughly documented. Bahá'ís are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran and are not recognised as a religion under its constitution, which protects only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

The consequences are systematic: exclusion from universities and public employment; confiscation of property and businesses; desecration of cemeteries; arbitrary arrest. More than two hundred Bahá'ís were executed in the years following the 1979 revolution, including the entire membership of the national Spiritual Assembly — twice. The community's informal leadership group, the Yárán, was imprisoned for a decade from 2008. United Nations special rapporteurs have reported on it repeatedly.

The community's response has included establishing an underground university to educate excluded students, which has itself been raided.

We can say the progressive revelation doctrine is a distinctive position on the question raised under perennialism and constructivism, and that it faces the standard objection: the religions do not merely differ in emphasis but contradict one another on central claims, and reconciling them requires deciding which parts are essential and which are accretion — a decision made by the later tradition about the earlier ones.

We can note criticisms fairly. The faith's position on homosexuality — same-sex relationships are not permitted — sits awkwardly with its equality principles and is a live point of tension, particularly for Western Bahá'ís. Membership of the Universal House of Justice is restricted to men, in a religion whose second principle is the equality of women and men; the explanation offered is that the reason is not presently known. And the administrative order's handling of dissent, including provisions for shunning those declared covenant-breakers, has drawn comparison with the mechanisms described under coercive control — a comparison the community rejects, and which is worth noting rather than adjudicating here.

We cannot assess the central claim, which is of the same order as every other in this section.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading