The Bahá’í Faith

The Bahá’í Faith was born in Iran. On 23 May 1844, in Shiraz, a young merchant named Sayyed Ali-Mohammad announced that he was the Báb, ‘the Gate’, and that his mission was to prepare the way for a greater messenger. His teaching spread rapidly, and the religious and state authorities of Qajar Iran answered with force. The Báb was executed by firing squad in Tabriz on 9 July 1850, and thousands of his followers, the Bábís, were killed.

Among them was the poet Táhirih (Qurrat al-Ayn) of Qazvin, who appeared unveiled before a gathering of Bábís at Badasht in 1848 and was put to death in Tehran in 1852. That same year Mirza Hossein-Ali Nuri, a nobleman whose family came from Nur in Mazandaran, was imprisoned in the Siyah-Chal, an underground dungeon in Tehran. He later wrote that there he received his revelation. Exiled to Baghdad, he declared himself in 1863 as Bahá’u’lláh, ‘the Glory of God’, the one the Báb had foretold. Further exiles took him to Istanbul, Edirne and finally Akka in Ottoman Palestine, where he died in 1892.

Teachings and practice

Bahá’ís believe in one God who has revealed Himself through a series of messengers, among them Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad, followed by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. Central teachings include the oneness of humanity, the equality of women and men, the harmony of science and religion, universal education and the abandonment of prejudice. Bahá’u’lláh wrote in Persian and Arabic; among his works are the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Kitáb-i-Íqán and the Hidden Words. Much of the Bahá’í devotional literature is therefore Persian.

Bahá’ís have no clergy. Local and national assemblies are elected, and the Universal House of Justice in Haifa leads the worldwide community. The year follows the Badí’ calendar of nineteen months of nineteen days; it begins at Naw-Rúz, the spring equinox, and a fast is kept from sunrise to sunset in the last month before it. Communities meet every nineteen days for a Feast of prayer, consultation and fellowship.

Persecution

Bahá’ís are not among the religious minorities recognised by the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Persecution came before 1979 too, including a campaign in 1955 when army officers helped demolish the dome of the Bahá’í national centre in Tehran. After the revolution, the UN and the Bahá’í International Community reported more than 200 Bahá’ís executed or killed, among them members of elected Bahá’í assemblies. The House of the Báb in Shiraz was destroyed. A 1991 government memorandum, made public by the UN Special Representative on Iran, set out a policy to block the progress of Bahá’ís, including expulsion from universities. In 2024 Human Rights Watch concluded that the treatment of Bahá’ís in Iran amounted to the crime against humanity of persecution, and Amnesty International has documented arrests, property confiscations and the destruction of cemeteries. Members of the community’s informal leadership, the Yaran, have been imprisoned repeatedly since 2008.

Bahá’ís in Iran have answered in their own way, most famously with the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education, founded in 1987 to teach young people barred from university, often in private homes. Across the world, from Haifa to Tajikistan, Bahá’ís still read the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh in the Persian of nineteenth-century Iran.