Birth of Baha'u'llah

The Birth of Baha'u'llah commemorates the birth in 1817, at Tehran, of Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri, known as Baha'u'llah ("the Glory of God"), the founder of the Baha'i Faith, whom Baha'is regard as the most recent in the succession of divine messengers that includes Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and others. It is the second of the Twin Birthdays, kept on the day after the Birth of the Bab; because the two were born on consecutive days by the Islamic lunar calendar, Baha'is celebrate them on two successive days set by a lunar reckoning, usually falling in October or November.

Baha'u'llah's life, from Persian nobleman to prisoner and exile carried across the Ottoman Empire to the prison-city of Acre, and his voluminous writings, are the foundation of the Baha'i teaching of the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity. The day is one of the nine holy days on which work is suspended, observed with devotional gatherings, prayers and readings. As the birthday of their faith's founder, it is among the most significant and joyful of Baha'i anniversaries, and its pairing with the birth of the Bab links the messenger to the herald who announced him.

The Shrine of Baha'u'llah at Bahji, near Acre in modern Israel, marking the place where he died in 1892 after decades of imprisonment and exile, is regarded by Baha'is as the single most sacred spot on earth and functions as their Qiblih, the fixed direction toward which Baha'is around the world turn when reciting obligatory prayer, occupying the same structural role in Baha'i devotional life that Mecca occupies for Muslims, even though most Baha'is will never travel to the shrine in person.

UNESCO inscribed the Baha'i holy places in Haifa and the Western Galilee, including the Shrine of Baha'u'llah and the terraced gardens surrounding the Shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel, as a World Heritage Site in 2008, formal international recognition of a religious landscape built almost entirely within the twentieth century around events that had occurred, by the standard of most world religions' holiest sites, comparatively recently, a modern instance of a fast-growing religion establishing a physically permanent sacred geography still within living historical memory of its founder's own life and exile.

Until 2015, Baha'i communities in different countries sometimes kept the Twin Birthdays a day or two apart, since the dates depended on local sightings of the new moon under the Badi calendar. The Universal House of Justice, the faith's global governing body, resolved this in 2014 by fixing the dates through astronomical calculation from the Baha'i World Centre rather than local observation, so that Baha'is everywhere now keep the Birth of Baha'u'llah on the same globally calculated day for the first time in the religion's history.