IB World Religions 1.10.1. the Bahá'í Faith in Context: Bahá'u'lláh and the Manifestations of God Notes

1.10.1. The Bahá'í Faith in Context: Bahá'u'lláh and the Manifestations of God

The Báb and the Bábís

1. Bahá'ís date the beginning of their religion to 1844 in Persia, the country now called Iran. In that year a young merchant of Shíráz took the title Báb, Arabic for gate, and announced that God had given him a new revelation.
2. His given name was Siyyid 'Alí-Muhammad. He taught that his own mission was preparatory, and that his task was to ready people for a greater teacher he called Him whom God shall make manifest.
3. The Bábí movement spread quickly through a country governed under Shí'ah Muslim authority, where the claim that revelation had continued after Muhammad was heard as a direct attack on Islam.
4. Thousands of Bábís were killed in the campaigns that followed. The Báb himself was executed by firing squad at Tabríz in 1850, six years after his declaration and at the age of thirty.
5. Bahá'ís do not treat him as a herald only. They count him as a Manifestation of God in his own right, which is why the faith looks back to two founding figures rather than one.

Bahá'u'lláh's exile and writings

1. Bahá'u'lláh, a title meaning the Glory of God, was taken by Mírzá Husayn-'Alí, a nobleman born in Tehran in 1817 who gave up his position to become a leading Bábí.
2. He was arrested in 1852 and held in the Síyáh-Chál, an underground water reservoir in Tehran used as a dungeon. He later wrote that God's revelation first came to him in that pit.
3. He was exiled rather than executed, and spent his remaining forty years moving under guard from Baghdad to Constantinople, then to Adrianople, and finally to the prison city of 'Akká in Ottoman Palestine.
4. In a garden outside Baghdad in 1863 he told a small group of companions that he was the one the Báb had promised. Bahá'ís keep those twelve days each year as the festival of Ridván, their most important.
5. He wrote continuously through the exile, and Bahá'ís treat what he wrote as scripture. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Most Holy Book) contains the laws, and the Kitáb-i-Íqán (Book of Certitude) explains how he reads the scriptures of earlier religions.
6. He died in 1892 at Bahjí outside 'Akká. His shrine there is the Qiblih, the point Bahá'ís face when they say their daily obligatory prayer.

Manifestations of God

1. A Manifestation of God is, in Bahá'í teaching, one of a small number of figures through whom God has revealed himself to humanity across history.
2. Bahá'ís hold that God's own essence lies permanently beyond human reach. Nobody can know God directly, and what people can know is God's attributes reflected in these figures.
3. The Manifestations Bahá'ís name include Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh. The writings add that others came whose names have been lost.
4. A Manifestation is not held to be God, and not held to be an ordinary human being either. Bahá'í writings describe the station as a third thing, distinct from both.
5. Bahá'ís hold that Bahá'u'lláh is the Manifestation for the present age, and that others will follow him, though not for at least a thousand years.

Succession and the Covenant

1. Bahá'u'lláh named his eldest son 'Abdu'l-Bahá (1844 to 1921) in writing as the one authorised to interpret his teachings after his death. Bahá'ís hold that this removed the usual grounds for argument about who speaks for a founder.
2. 'Abdu'l-Bahá travelled through Egypt, Europe and North America between 1911 and 1913, and the public talks he gave on that journey introduced the faith to Western audiences.
3. He in turn appointed his grandson Shoghi Effendi as Guardian. Shoghi Effendi translated the central texts into English and built the elected system of administration the community still uses.
4. Since 1963 the head of the faith has been the Universal House of Justice, a body of nine members elected every five years, with its seat on Mount Carmel in Haifa.
5. Bahá'ís call this written chain of appointment the Covenant. They treat accepting it as part of accepting Bahá'u'lláh, and they credit it with keeping the community from splitting.
6. There is no clergy of any kind. Spiritual Assemblies of nine members are elected locally and nationally by secret ballot, with nomination and campaigning both forbidden.

The community today

1. Bahá'ís number somewhere between five and eight million. That is a small population, but it is spread across more countries and territories than almost any other religion.
2. The largest communities are in India, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the United States. Most Bahá'ís today have no Persian ancestry and no family memory of the religion's origins.
3. Iran still holds the largest Bahá'í community in the Middle East, and is also where members are most restricted. They are not recognised as a religious minority, and have been barred from state universities and from many kinds of work.
4. Local communities run children's classes, study circles and devotional gatherings, generally open to neighbours who have not joined the faith. Because there is no clergy, ordinary members lead them.
5. Elected assemblies take their decisions by consultation, a structured method of group discussion set out in the writings, in which an idea belongs to the group as soon as it is offered.
6. Denominational division is unusual here. A few small groups broke away over questions of succession, but the great majority of Bahá'ís recognise the Universal House of Justice, so there is no close parallel to the branches found in older religions.
7. Cultural variety is a different matter and is considerable. Bahá'í devotional life takes up local music, language and art wherever the community has grown, so a gathering in Uganda and one in Bolivia can look very different while using the same texts.