The Baha'i World Centre

The Baha'i World Centre is administrative and devotional at once, and the two functions sit in different places. Haifa holds the Shrine of the Bab on the slope of Mount Carmel, with the Seat of the Universal House of Justice and the other permanent institutions of the Baha'i administrative order arranged on the arc of terraces above and below it. Acre, a short distance north around the bay, holds Bahji, where Baha'u'llah spent the last years of his life and where he is buried. Baha'is turn towards Bahji in obligatory prayer, which makes it the qiblih of the faith, and pilgrimage to the World Centre is a recognised devotional obligation for those able to undertake it.

The arrangement was not chosen for convenience. Peter Smith notes that both locations are consequences of exile: Baha'u'llah was sent to Acre as an Ottoman prisoner in 1868, and the Bab's remains, hidden for decades after his execution at Tabriz in 1850, were interred on Mount Carmel in 1909 at a spot Baha'u'llah had indicated during a visit. A religion's permanent centre therefore stands on ground its founder was brought to under guard. The properties in Haifa and Acre were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008.

The Baha'i World Centre presents a situation with few parallels among world religions. Its administrative and spiritual centre stands in a country where the community itself does not seek members and where ordinary Baha'is do not settle. Baha'is come to Haifa and Acre as pilgrims for a fixed period, and the resident population at the World Centre consists of volunteers serving terms in its institutions.

The community does not teach its faith to Israeli citizens, a position it has maintained since the state was founded and which is generally described in Baha'i accounts as a policy of not proselytising in the country that hosts the World Centre. Moojan Momen and Peter Smith both treat the arrangement as an unusual settlement rather than an incidental one, since it separates the seat of a religion from any national community of that religion. The gardens and terraces at Haifa are open to the public and are among the most visited sites in the city, while the shrines themselves are places of prayer. The atlas describes the arrangement as the community and the scholarship on it report, and does not take a position on the wider political questions attached to the location, which are outside its subject and are contested by parties whose claims it is not the atlas's place to adjudicate.