Bahá'í & New Faiths

In July 1850, in the Persian city of Tabriz, a young man who called himself the Báb — "the Gate" — was suspended by ropes before a firing squad of 750 soldiers. The first volley, it is said, cut his ropes and left him unharmed; when the smoke cleared he had vanished, found back in his cell finishing a conversation. A second regiment was brought; the second volley killed him. He was thirty. He had proclaimed that a new messenger of God was about to appear — and out of the movement he founded grew what may be the only major independent world religion born in the modern age: the Bahá'í Faith, whose whole purpose is to declare that all religions are one.

A faith for a united world

The Bahá'í Faith rests on three "onenesses": the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity. It teaches that there is one God, unknowable in essence; that all the great religions come from that one God and form a single unfolding story; and that humankind is one family, now come of age and destined for unity. It is at once one of the youngest of the world's religions and one of the most geographically widespread, with communities in virtually every country on earth.

The Báb and Bahá'u'lláh

The faith has two founding figures. The Báb (Siyyid ʿAlí Muḥammad, 1819–1850), a merchant of Shiraz, declared in 1844 that he was the herald of one greater than himself, and his Bábí movement spread rapidly through Persia — and was savagely persecuted, with thousands of followers killed and the Báb himself executed in 1850. Among the Bábís was Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí, 1817–1892), a Persian nobleman who, in 1863, declared that he was the one the Báb had foretold — the promised Manifestation of God for this age. Exiled by the Persian and Ottoman authorities ever farther from home — to Baghdad, Constantinople, Adrianople, and at last to the prison-city of ʿAkká (Acre) in Ottoman Palestine — he spent the rest of his life a prisoner, writing the enormous body of scripture on which the faith is built. It is from ʿAkká and neighboring Haifa, on Mount Carmel, that the Bahá'í world center grew, its golden-domed Shrine of the Báb and terraced gardens now among the most famous sights of the region.

Progressive revelation

The intellectual heart of the Bahá'í Faith is the doctrine of progressive revelation. God, it teaches, has never left humanity without guidance, but has sent a succession of Manifestations of God — Divine Educators — each renewing religion for a new age and preparing the way for the next, roughly every five hundred to a thousand years. Among these Manifestations Bahá'ís count Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, and Bahá'u'lláh. Each brought the same eternal truth in the form suited to their time and people; the apparent conflicts between religions are differences of social teaching fitted to different ages, not of essential truth. And the process has no end: future Manifestations will come. In this single framework the Bahá'í Faith attempts to gather the entire religious history this archive has surveyed into one continuous, divinely-guided story — an audacious and characteristically modern claim.

The teachings for a coming age

Bahá'u'lláh's social teachings were strikingly ahead of their 19th-century origin, and they define the faith's public character: the elimination of all prejudice of race, class, and nation; the full equality of women and men; universal education; the harmony of science and religion (neither to be sacrificed to the other); the adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty; and, above all, world peace secured through a global federal commonwealth of nations. The faith is, in effect, a religion organized around the project of human unity.

Scripture without clergy

Bahá'u'lláh left a vast written revelation, including the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (the "Most Holy Book," the book of laws), the Kitáb-i-Íqán (on progressive revelation), and the lyrical Hidden Words. The faith has no clergy and no priesthood; instead it is governed by a distinctive elected administrative order, with local and national Spiritual Assemblies and, at its head, the Universal House of Justice — a nine-member body, elected every five years by all the national assemblies, seated in Haifa. Bahá'í Houses of Worship are built with nine sides and a central dome, open to the adherents of all religions.

Persecution

From its birth the faith has been persecuted, above all in the land of its origin. In Iran, the Bahá'ís are the largest non-Muslim religious minority — and, especially since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the target of a systematic state campaign: their holy sites destroyed, their young people barred from universities, their livelihoods restricted, their leaders imprisoned and sometimes executed. International bodies have condemned this as persecution rising, at times, toward the threshold of genocide. To be a Bahá'í in Iran is to hold a faith of universal peace under sustained attack.

The wider new world faiths

The Bahá'í Faith is the most successful of a distinctively modern kind of religion: the new world faith that arises in an age of global contact and sets out to unite or transcend the existing traditions. Others share the impulse. Caodaism, founded in Vietnam in 1926 as "the Great Way of the Third Era of Redemption," worships a supreme God, Cao Đài, through an elaborate pantheon of spirit-guides that famously includes not only Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, and Jesus but Victor Hugo and Joan of Arc — a deliberate fusion of East and West. The Ahmadiyya, founded in India in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed to be the awaited Mahdi and Messiah of several traditions at once, is a messianic movement within Islam, energetic in missionary work and persecuted as heretical by other Muslims. And Tenrikyo, founded in Japan by the peasant woman Nakayama Miki in 1838, teaches a path to the "Joyous Life" drawn from Shinto roots. (Other modern faiths — Rastafari, the many new religious movements — are treated in ch35 and ch40.) Together they mark the modern religious impulse to answer a newly interconnected world with a newly universal faith.

The believer's lens

For Bahá'ís, God has spoken to humanity through a series of Manifestations, the founders of the great religions, each suited to the age in which they came; this is progressive revelation. In the nineteenth century the Báb, "the Gate", announced a new messenger, and Bahá'u'lláh declared himself that messenger, whose writings are scripture for a coming age of human unity. Its heart is the three onenesses: of God, of religion and of humanity. From these follow the social teachings: the equality of women and men, the harmony of science and religion, universal education and the abolition of prejudice. There are no clergy; the community governs itself through elected councils, under the Universal House of Justice in Haifa. The nine-sided Houses of Worship express the faith's universal hope. The Báb's martyrdom, and the persecution Bahá'ís have suffered since, are to believers the price of a new revelation.

The skeptical lens

The historian can document the history in detail: the Bábí movement and its violent suppression, the Báb's execution in 1850, Bahá'u'lláh's exiles and imprisonment at ʿAkká, his large body of writings, the Universal House of Justice established in 1963, and the systematic persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran, especially since 1979, which is well attested and internationally condemned. The story of the first volley that cut the Báb's ropes is the tradition's account, not a verified event. The theological claims (that the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh were Manifestations of God) are matters of faith. Progressive revelation is the faith's own interpretive framework, not a neutral description of history: mainstream history does not treat Krishna, the Buddha, Jesus and the others as a single divine succession. Adherent numbers, often cited as five to eight million, are estimates and debated. Other modern faiths, Tenrikyo (1838), the Ahmadiyya (1889) and Caodaism (1926), show the same ambition to renew or unite religion.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The nine-pointed star. The number nine — the highest single digit, a symbol of completeness and unity, and the numerical value of the word Bahá ("glory") in the Arabic abjad (ch10, ch21) — is the master-symbol of the faith: the nine-pointed star, the nine sides of every House of Worship, the nine members of the Universal House of Justice. Unity encoded in a number.
• The Greatest Name. The calligraphic rendering of Yá Bahá'u'l-Abhá ("O Glory of the All-Glorious") and the ringstone symbol — three horizontal strokes (the worlds of God, the Manifestations, and humanity) joined by a vertical line, flanked by two stars — encode the whole Bahá'í cosmology of the descent of revelation and the link between God and humankind.
• The terraced mountain. The golden Shrine of the Báb amid the great garden terraces of Mount Carmel encodes the faith's claim to gather and fulfill the sacred history of the very region where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born.
• The Divine Eye. In Caodaism, the left eye of God (the Divine Eye), radiant within a triangle, is the central symbol — the all-seeing conscience encoded as a single watching eye.

Connections

The Bahá'í Faith stands to Shia Islam (ch21) somewhat as Christianity stands to Judaism — a new revelation grown from within an older one and then declaring its independence. Its doctrine of progressive revelation universalizes the prophetic successions found in Manichaeism (ch55) and Islam, gathering the founders of every tradition in this archive into one lineage. Its drive to unite all religions echoes the perennialism of Theosophy (ch37) and the comparative spirit of this whole book, and it belongs among the new religious movements of the modern age (ch35). Fittingly, the archive's final chapter is the tradition that most explicitly tries to make one story of everything the preceding chapters have told.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch65.html · a comparative library of the sacred.