Baha'u'llah

Baha'u'llah, a title meaning the Glory of God, borne by Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri (1817-1892), is the founder of the Baha'i Faith and, for Baha'is, the most recent in the line of divine Messengers. Born into a noble family of Tehran, he declined a court career and, in 1844, became an early and prominent follower of the Bab, the herald whose movement was then spreading rapidly and drawing fierce persecution across Persia.

In the wave of repression that followed an attempt on the Shah's life in 1852, an act Baha'is stress was carried out by Babis acting without sanction, Baha'u'llah was imprisoned in a notorious Tehran dungeon, the Siyah-Chal or Black Pit, where he later said he first received intimations of his mission. Stripped of his property, he was exiled from Persia, and spent the remaining forty years of his life as a prisoner and exile of the Ottoman state, moved successively to Baghdad, Constantinople, Adrianople, and finally to the prison-city of Akka in Ottoman Palestine.

He died near Akka in 1892, and his shrine at Bahji is the holiest place of the Baha'i world, the point to which Baha'is turn in daily prayer. His entire public ministry was conducted in banishment.

The turning point of Baha'u'llah's life, and the founding moment of the Baha'i Faith, came in 1863 in a garden outside Baghdad which Baha'is call the Garden of Ridvan. There, on the eve of a further exile, he declared to a small circle that he was the one whose coming the Bab had foretold, He whom God shall make manifest, the Messenger for this age. The declaration at Ridvan is commemorated as the greatest Baha'i festival.

His central teaching is progressive revelation: the idea that religion is one and unfolds in stages, that the founders of the great faiths, Abraham, Moses, Krishna, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, are successive Manifestations of God, each renewing eternal spiritual truths and bringing social teachings suited to the needs of their time. On this view the world's religions differ not in their source, which is one God, but in the era and circumstances they addressed.

From this flow the faith's characteristic principles: the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity; the abandonment of prejudice; the harmony of science and religion; the equality of women and men; universal education; and the goal of a peaceful, united global civilization, including proposals for a world tribunal and an international auxiliary language.

Baha'u'llah left an enormous body of writing, Baha'is speak of many volumes, which they regard as revealed scripture. Among the best known are the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book, which sets out laws and the framework of Baha'i community life; the Kitab-i-Iqan, the Book of Certitude, an exposition of progressive revelation and the interpretation of prophecy; and the Hidden Words, a collection of short ethical and mystical utterances that functions almost as a devotional handbook.

A distinctive feature of the faith is its emphasis on an explicit Covenant governing succession and unity. Baha'u'llah appointed his eldest son, Abdu'l-Baha, as the authorized interpreter of his writings and the centre to whom the community should turn, a written provision intended to prevent the schisms that Baha'is see as having fractured earlier religions. Authority passed in turn to a Guardian and, since 1963, to an elected international body, the Universal House of Justice, seated with the faith's world centre at Haifa and Akka in present-day Israel.

The Baha'i Faith today is a small but genuinely worldwide religion, present in most countries, and its adherents continue to face severe persecution in the land of its origin, Iran, where they are the largest religious minority and are denied recognition.