Baha'i House of Worship

Baha'u'llah's Kitab-i-Aqdas instructs Baha'is to build a House of Worship in every city, naming it the Mashriqu'l-Adhkar, the dawning place of the remembrance of God, but leaves its architectural form largely open. Over the movement's first temples, a convention fixed itself that later rulings of the faith's institutions confirmed as normative: nine sides around a central hall beneath a dome, nine being a number Baha'is read as a symbol of completeness and of the nine extant major world religions the building's practice honors. Each of the nine sides typically opens onto its own entrance and garden, so that the building itself expresses the idea that people may approach truth from more than one direction and arrive at a common center.

Inside, the design serves a single, deliberately restricted purpose. No pulpit, altar or images furnish the hall; there is no clergy to officiate and no sermon is preached. Congregants read or chant scripture aloud, drawn from Baha'i writings and, distinctively, from the sacred texts of other religions as well, so that a service inside a Mashriqu'l-Adhkar may include verses from the Qur'an, the Bible, or Hindu or Buddhist scripture beside the Baha'i writings, unified only by devotional intent rather than a fixed liturgy. The buildings are open to visitors of any religion or none, a policy the Baha'i administration treats as inseparable from the institution's purpose rather than as a courtesy.

The first Mashriqu'l-Adhkar was built in Ashgabat, then part of the Russian Empire's Central Asian territory, beginning in 1902 under a flourishing Baha'i community that Soviet religious policy later dismantled; the building was confiscated in the 1920s, damaged by an earthquake in 1948 and demolished by Soviet authorities in 1963, leaving no continental-era temple standing from the faith's first phase. Construction on the Wilmette temple, on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago, began in 1920 to a design by the French Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois; building proceeded through the Depression and the Second World War in stages as funds allowed, and the building was formally dedicated in 1953. It is the oldest Mashriqu'l-Adhkar standing today and is known within the faith as the Mother Temple of the West.

Shoghi Effendi's guardianship and the Universal House of Justice that followed it extended the form deliberately, placing one continental temple on each inhabited continent: Kampala, Uganda, for Africa in 1961; Sydney, Australia, for Australasia the same year; Panama City for Central America in 1972; Apia, Samoa, for the Pacific in 1984; and the widely photographed Lotus Temple in New Delhi, shaped as an unfolding lotus flower rather than a plain nine-sided drum, completed in 1986 and among the most visited buildings in the world. A newer generation of national and local Houses of Worship, smaller in scale, has since been built in Norte del Cauca, Colombia; Battambang, Cambodia; Matunda Soy, Kenya; Bihar Sharif, India; and Vanuatu's capital Port Vila, extending the institution below the continental scale for the first time.