1980); Kanan Makiya [Samir al-Khalil], The Monument:
Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1991); Paul Wheatley, The
Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands,
Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001).
Bahai Faith
The Bahai Faith is a new religion that grew out
of the Shii environment in iran in the mid-19th
century. It presents itself as a new universal Faith
that believes in world peace, religious tolerance,
and unity and equality among all people. It has its
own scriptures in Persian and Arabic, but it also
recognizes the fundamental truths expressed in
the sacred writings of other religions. There are
currently about 6.8 million Bahais, or followers
of this religion, of whom about 300,000 still live
in Iran. In that country, they have been treated
as apostates and subjected to persecution, espe-
cially since the creation of the Islamic Republic
in 1979.
The founder and prophet of the Bahai Faith
was Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri (1817–93), who took
the surname Baha Allah, “splendor of God,” from
which the religion gets its name. Baha Allah (or
Baha Ullah) was born to an influential family in
Tehran, the capital of Iran, and joined the Babi
movement with his half-brother Mirza Yahya in
the 1840s. babism was a radical Shii sect that chal-
lenged religious and political authorities in Iran
and iraq and preached the coming of the Hidden
imam, who would initiate a golden age with a new
universal religious law that was to surpass the
sharia. The Babis were violently suppressed as
heretical by the Iranian government with the back-
ing of the Shii Ulama, and Baha Allah and other
surviving Babis were forced into exile in Baghdad,
Iraq, in 1853. In 1863, he announced to associates
that he, Baha Allah, was the awaited imam of the
Babis. The majority of Babis who followed him
became the Bahais; those who did not but con-
tinued to follow his brother Mirza Yahya (known
as Subh-i Azal) became the Azalis. In 1867, after
being forced to move to Ottoman tUrkey, Baha
Allah publicly proclaimed his divine mission by
sending letters to many of the world’s leaders,
thus formally renouncing Islam and launching
the Bahai Faith. Ottoman authorities, concerned
by the trouble he might cause with such claims,
imprisoned him near Akka, Palestine (now in
Israel), where he died in 1892. He was succeeded
by his son Abd al-Baha (d. 1921), a gifted leader
who helped both organize and internationalize the
religion after Baha Alla’s death. He won new con-
verts from Christianity in Europe and America,
where the Bahai Faith soon established branches.
The Bahais now have nearly 20,000 local spiritual
assemblies in some 233 countries.
Baha Allah’s writings are the most important
sacred scriptures for the religion. They are believed
to be divine revelations, replacing the qUran and
Islamic law. The most important of his books
are The Book of Certainty (Kitab-i iqan) and The
Most Holy Book (al-Kitab al-aqdas). Both uphold
the idea of God’s oneness as well as the values of
equality, social justice, learning, and the unity of
all people. Like Islam, there is no clergy in the
Bahai Faith, and all adherents are expected to per-
form specific ritual obligations, which include an
annual fast, abstention from alcohol and nonmed-
icinal drugs, and daily prayers. Women hold equal
status with men, and, unlike Islam, marriage is
monogamous. Not unexpectedly, the Bahai Faith
has flourished in modern secular societies. On the
other hand, the persecution and discrimination
Bahais are experiencing in Iran and other Muslim
countries is due partly to the fact that their reli-
gion is seen as apostasy by Muslim authorities and
also because it is thought to be too much under
the influence of Western countries and Israel,
where its main religious center is now located.
See also shiism.Further reading: Mojan Momen, The Bahai Faith: A
Short Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Oneworld Publica-
tions, 1999); Peter Smith, The Babi and Bahai Religions:Bahai Faith 85 J