The Baha'i Faith Reaches The United States

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ibrahim George Kheiralla, a Syrian-born Baha'i teacher, brought the faith to the United States by way of New York, where he had begun teaching classes, before moving on to Chicago in 1894. Chicago was not a random choice of city: the religious enthusiasm the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions had generated there the previous year gave Kheiralla's teaching a substantial American following it had not found in New York.

That following did not stay informal. Kheiralla's students in Chicago went on to form the earliest organised Baha'i community in the United States, turning a teacher's individual classes into a religious community with an institutional life of its own, the first such community the faith had anywhere in the country.

What this changed for the Baha'i Faith's spread was the creation of an American foothold that grew, over the following decades, into one of the religion's most significant communities outside its Middle Eastern homeland. The Chicago community that Kheiralla's students founded became the seed of a national presence substantial enough that the United States would go on to build one of the faith's earliest Houses of Worship, at Wilmette, Illinois, just outside Chicago itself, a landmark standing on the same ground the religious enthusiasm of 1893 had first opened to Kheiralla's teaching.