Baha'i Religious History: Introduction
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Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Todd Lawson, Baha'i Religious History: Introduction, bahai-library.com.
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Journal of Religious History
Vol. 36, No. 4, December 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2012.01224.x

TODD LAWSON
Special Issue Editor*

Baha’i Religious History

The Baha’i Faith is heir to the distinctive Abrahamic cluster of myths and
religious grammars or styles of piety so familiar to scholars and students of
religion. The inheritance has a pronounced islamicate tonality because of the
time and place in which the Baha’i Faith arose as an identifiably Iranian version
of the venerable Abrahamic religious elan. (This, of course, means that it also
displays certain features suggestive of more purely Iranian religious pheno-
mena such as Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism.) For example, the earliest
extended doctrinal work by the founder of the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah, is a
commentary on the Qur’an and Hadith having to do with the end of time and
the return of the Hidden Imam of Shi‘i Islam. Perhaps the single most striking
and defining element of the Baha’i Faith, and its precursor, the Babi religion,
is the conviction that God has spoken to the world again — and would continue
to speak to the world as long as it lasts — through a specifically chosen
individual of the same type he had spoken to the world through in the past:
Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, to name only three. Such a prophetic history —
what Baha’is term “progressive revelation” — is also Islamic in form; but, by
going beyond the confines of usual Islamic belief which states that there will be
no prophets after Muhammad, the Baha’i Faith casts itself in the unique and
problematic position of being inherently Islamic in structure while being
beyond the pale in actuality. So a question could arise: is the Baha’i Faith a
legitimate or an illegitimate heir to islamicate Abrahamic ethical monotheism?

Todd Lawson is Associate Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations,
University of Toronto, Canada.
* I am very grateful to the editors of the Journal of Religious History for this most interesting
assignment, especially to Associate Professor Carole Cusack, general editor, and Anna Haunton,
tireless chief of the editorial office at the journal. Both have been exceptionally kind, patient, and
perspicacious during the process of putting this special issue together. I am also grateful to the
authors of the articles included here who have with equal parts grace, diligence, and poise
responded to my sometimes unreasonable and precipitate requests. I am especially grateful to
Christopher Buck, Omid Ghaemmaghami, Graham Hassall, Anthony Lee, and Will C. van den
Hoonaard for assistance and support above and beyond the role of author. I would also like to thank
Rebekah Zwanzig for her kind editorial assistance at various stages along the way. Finally, for his
suggestions and encouragement, I am most grateful to Franklin Lewis. This special issue has been
made better by the generous input of numerous anonymous reviewers. We are all most grateful for
their comments, criticisms, and suggestions. We are also grateful to the Spiritual Assembly of the
Baha’is of Springfield, Illinois who kindly made available the negative for the frontispiece (p. iv).

© 2012 The Author
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464                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

The record of history of prophets and their claims and communities is
considered divine revelation. In the Baha’i instance, the most recent recipient
of the revelation bears the title “Baha’u’llah,” an Arabic combination of two
words: the first one, baha, means splendour or glory; the second is the usual
word for God in Arabic, Allah, slightly transformed here, due to the laws of
grammatical liaison, into the above ligature which then may be understood as
“the splendour of God” or “the glory of God.” The semantic substrate need not
detain us except to notice that in the extra-Qur’anic Arabic word baha we
should also hear references to beauty, light, and precious treasure and under-
stand thereby that through the linguistic algebra inherent in the poetics of the
epithet it also connotes knowledge and wisdom of the highest value. The
religious teachings, books, doctrines, and institutions identified with this name
date from after 1853; however, the Baha’i era or cycle of history — an
elemental feature of what may be thought of as a Baha’i philosophy of history
or Heilsgeschichte — is held to have begun on 23 May 1844 when a young
merchant laid claim to direct contact with the Hidden Imam of Ithna-‘ashari
(Twelver) Shi‘ism. This figure, who is most widely known today as “the Bab”
(Arabic for “gate, door”), was the founder of a short-lived religion whose chief
purpose, Baha’is believe, was to prepare the way for the coming of
Baha’u’llah; however, Baha’is also recognize that the religion of the Bab was
a distinct, freestanding system of beliefs and values articulated in the specially
charged atmosphere of Shi‘i messianic expectation. The twelfth or Hidden
Imam of the Shi‘a had gone into hiding a thousand years earlier and a large part
of Twelver Shi‘i piety, belief, and practice developed around the religious
problem(s) connected with the identification and validation of true spiritual
(and, as it happens, temporal) authority in the absence of the leader whose
return is expected to inaugurate that glad day when injustice will be changed to
justice throughout the world. During the first half of the nineteenth century,
Shi‘i messianic expectation ran very high, especially in Iran. The success of the
Bab’s claims to be simultaneously the representative of the Hidden Imam and
the return of the Hidden Imam himself, was due in part to the intensity of this
expectation and the way in which this expectation had acquired a unique
technical and discursive language in the writings of a particular sect of Twelver
Shi‘ism, known to history as the Shaykhiyya. All of the Bab’s earliest disciples
and followers were either members or sympathetic to their philosophical and
rationally based discussions of the otherwise supra-rational tenets of Twelver
Shi‘ism, a chief one being, in this instance, the unnaturally prolonged life of
the Hidden Imam from the year of his disappearance in 874 to the time of his
reappearance or advent (zuhur) in 1844 (1260 AH).
For Baha’is, history has both a horizontal and vertical dimension: it is both
problem and sacrament. It is through what the uninitiated call “history” that the
will of God becomes more accurately known and participated in by humanity.
According to Baha’i teachings, 1844 marks the beginning of a new cycle or era
in this history, one that is destined to be characterized by the spiritual matu-
ration of the human race, perhaps a variation on the well-known Islamic
mystical doctrine of the Perfect Man or Perfect Humanity (al-insan al-kamil).
© 2012 The Author
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INTRODUCTION                                               465
This is frequently expressed in Baha’i literature in reference to the fact that the
days of prophecy are finished and that we are now living the days of fulfillment.
Muhammad can thus retain the title “seal of the prophets.” Whereas formerly,
humankind was expected to wait for perfect guidance, Baha’is believe that this
perfect guidance has now come. It remains only for this guidance to be
properly followed, embodied, realized.
In typical Baha’i discourse, Baha’u’llah is not called a prophet or a mes-
senger or even an Imam, as one might expect given the Shi‘i Islamic context of
his teachings and his claims. Rather the operative term used to describe his
status and to indicate the nature of his religious authority is one taken from the
mystico-philosophical lexicon of Islamic intellectual culture: manifestation of
God, or, more accurately, “divine manifestation” or “manifestation of divinity”
(in Arabic, mazhar ilahi). The most proximate source, apart from the Qur’an
and the Hadith, for such terminology and the style its use would ultimately
assume, is the characteristic, not to say poetic, Shi‘i mystical and philosophical
theology developed over several centuries, to be bequeathed to the Baha’i
tradition through the numerous dense and influential works produced by the
first two masters of the above-mentioned Shaykhiyya, Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i
(d. 1826) and his successor, Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1843). To a greater or
lesser degree, this process was heir to the vast “ocean without shore” of one
whom current scholarship has come to regard as possibly the greatest mystic of
any tradition, Muhyiddin ibn al-‘Arabi “Ibn Arabi,” (d. 1240), whose prolific
writings, including his seminal theorizing on the previously mentioned topic of
the Perfect Man, would influence all later Islamic spiritual and philosophico-
theological discourse. The manifestation in question is, in reality, the place
where something appears, not the thing that appears. A mirror is the place of
manifestation for the reflection we see in it. Because the relationship is so close
— beyond contiguity, as it were — there is thus frequent confusion about who
is who and what is what. This has been a fecund and generative trope in
islamicate mystical poetry from the very beginning. Ibn Arabi’s achievement
was to provide conceptual and terminological tools for a refinement of the
discourse, a contribution of the first water to the ongoing and perhaps impos-
sible task of making love reasonable.
In the Baha’i writings, those who were formerly known as prophets and
messengers (for instance all of the twenty-five figures explicitly named in the
Qur’an, from Adam to Muhammad and presumably the 124,000 others theo-
rized by the extra-Qur’anic learned tradition) are now best understood as
having been divine manifestations, or places where the divine appeared most
perfectly to the world. The number 124,000 may sound odd, both too precise
and not precise enough. It should be remembered, however, that such doctrines
were developed at the height of Islamic cosmopolitanism during which the
religious sciences began consolidating and elaborating the basic religious spirit
and identity indicated in the Qur’an, which insists that historically there has
been no human community without a divine messenger;1 that each messenger

1.   Qur’an 10:47.

© 2012 The Author
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466                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

spoke or revealed the will of God in the language of their community2 and the
racial, linguistic, and cultural differences which seem to separate the members
of the human family are, in reality, designed so that all may share the mutually
enriching experience of getting to know one another — not to despise each
other.3
The Baha’i Faith is interesting to historians of religion because it provides an
example of how heresy becomes orthodoxy. It began in the middle of the
nineteenth century in Iran — or Persia, if you prefer — emerging from within
the bosom of its parent religion, Ithna-‘ashari (Twelver) Shi‘ism. Using terms
such as “heresy” and “orthodoxy” in the study of Islam and its various inter-
pretations is quite problematic and should usually be avoided. Nevertheless, in
the case of the Baha’i Faith it is useful at least to think of its genesis and
development within Islam as heretical or at least heterodox, even though from
its very beginning, during the Babi phase of what is referred to in the literature
as the Baha’i era, it is quite clear that such heresy or heterodoxy was not the
function of a lack of piety and devotion to the central symbols and figures of
Islam, especially Shi‘i Islam. What is clear, however, is that from the very
beginning, the new religion espoused an uncompromising anti-clericalism (as
distinct from being anti-Islamic) even as many of its strongest intellectuals and
preachers had themselves been qualified at one degree or the other in the Shi‘i
clerical hierarchy. The two most important figures were not, however, members
of the priestly class. I am referring here to the actual founders, Sayyid ‘Ali
Muhammad Shirazi (1819–1850), known to history as “the Bab,” founder of
the Babi religion, and Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri (1817–1892), known chiefly as
“Baha’u’llah,” founder of the Baha’i Faith proper.
If the Baha’i Faith is anti-clerical, it is also fully committed to a notion of
religious authority that encompasses both the spiritual and temporal realms.
In the process of articulating the role and nature of such authority a number
of central themes acquire absolute importance. Not least of these “sacra-
ments,” history itself is understood as a shared experience through which the
particular ethical monotheism of the Baha’i Faith acquires and produces
meaning. Thus when we speak of “religious history” in connection with the
Baha’i Faith we are engaged in pleonasm because, in a sense, all history is
religious. As in the Qur’an and Islam, the experience of humanity on earth
has been punctuated over time by the appearance of prophets and messengers,
all of whom are implicated in the primordial divine covenant that the Qur’an
describes as having occurred at a mysterious time and in a mysterious place
before creation.4 In the case of Islam (and the Baha’i Faith) this myth of the
covenant is also a myth of the birth of consciousness and history. The differ-
ence between Islam and the Baha’i Faith here is quite simple: the latter
teaches that two new, post-Muhammad, divinely guided messengers have
appeared with new revelations and new religious laws, and that such

2.   Qur’an 14:4.
3.   Qur’an 49:13.
4.   Qur’an 7:172.

© 2012 The Author
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INTRODUCTION                                               467

messengers will continue to appear for the purpose of teaching humanity to
carry on an “ever-advancing civilization.”
The Islamic teaching that Muhammad was the seal of the prophets is well
known. It is therefore important to point out that Baha’u’llah himself refers to
Muhammad with devoted respect as the seal of the prophets and, as far as I
know, never assumes for himself, the designation “Prophet” (nabi), though
there are rare appearances of the word “Messenger” (rasul ) in his writings,
just as there are very infrequent occurrences of these words in the writings of
the Bab. These seem to exist to draw attention to the terminological refine-
ment theorized and put forth in the use of “Divine Manifestation” the pre-
ferred term, mentioned above, for the cognate role of one who receives divine
revelation. The basic teachings of the Baha’i Faith are an insistence on the
oneness of humanity, the oneness of God, and the oneness of religion through
a universally applicable historical narrative. Such a preoccupation with unity
is also obviously Islamic. But its centrality now seems to spring from two
sources: the timeless and eternal metaphysical “Abrahamic” oneness familiar
to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and explicated and theorized through neo-
platonism, plus a kind of communal and existential exhaustion with the dis-
unity and mutual animosity abroad in the greater Islamic world, especially
during the age of European colonialism and adventure, when the Baha’i Faith
was born.
Other central teachings of the Baha’i Faith may have an islamicate genesis,
such as the commitment to the harmony of “science and religion,” the
primacy of education, the equality of men and women, the centrality of com-
munity life and so on. For the interested reader, there are numerous sources
available that outline the central tenets and history of the Baha’i Faith. While
the articles included here may touch on some of these questions, none of
them is devoted to the highly interesting and extremely important problem of
the doctrinal and intellectual genesis of the Baha’i Faith “out of ” Islam. After
all, each of its most important “theoreticians” was Muslim and its earliest
literature was cast in the form of scriptural, viz Qur’anic, commentary. There
is thus much to attract interested scholars with the necessary languages
(Arabic, Persian, sometimes Turkish) and specific historical and cultural
knowledge. The articles included here are occupied with more self-contained
problems, that is to say problems and questions arising from within the
“Baha’i ghetto,” whether in Iran, Australia, Canada, Cameroons, or the
United States.
For a number of reasons, the Baha’i Faith has not captured the attention of
the academy to the extent one might have predicted when, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, its ideas were embraced in the West as not only exotic
and refreshing spiritual truth from the more spiritual and mysterious East, but
also because they seemed to be remarkably in tune with the challenges and
concerns of contemporary global society. When ‘Abdu’l-Baha (see photo-
graph, p. iv), the son of Baha’u’llah, visited Europe and North America in
1911, 1912, and 1913 he was given a reception befitting a true holy man and
sage with meetings and audiences in churches, synagogues, and universities all
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468                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

along his highly publicized itinerary. His central concern, on the eve of World
War I, was peace. And his central conviction was that peace is impossible
without religious harmony. This became the mantra and desideratum of the
small but growing Baha’i community: to privilege social and “political” peace
as a religious value and to work for it with religious devotion. Here religious
and social unity is an icon or reflection of the divine unity that serves as its
central teaching and wellspring. This same Baha’i community was equipped
with numerous teachings from the central figures, the Bab, Baha’u’llah, and
‘Abdu’l-Baha, his son and “Center of the Covenant.” These teachings included
new prayers, new religious principles and laws, and what is considered a
divinely ordained new system of organization whose purpose was, in the first
place, to safeguard the unity of the Baha’i community itself so that it might, in
the second place, reflect an image and example of such far flung and variegated
unity to a world divided and at odds in every conceivable way. While Baha’i
history and teachings have interested and existentially engaged individuals
from all walks and strata of life, they still have not become a central concern
in the academic world. The logical place for their scientific and systematic
study and analysis is in university departments and faculties of religious
studies. As perhaps the only “Islamic movement” of recent history to have
“escaped the gravitational pull of Islam” and acquire a distinctive post-Islamic
identity, it is clear that the Baha’i Faith offers an important cluster of questions
to scholars of religion. Again, the articles collected in this issue are only
tangentially or accidentally concerned with Baha’i doctrines and practices or
institutions per se. No article takes a particular Baha’i belief or teaching and
discusses it in terms of a broader and more inclusive or comparative religious
history.
The articles included in this issue, however, are written by many of the
leading experts in Baha’i studies. They are arranged in rough chronological
order according to the central problem or event discussed, beginning with
Momen’s historical overview of the first years of the Baha’i Faith’s history in
Qajar Iran. In the course of this investigation of the way in which the Baha’i
community of Isfahan safeguarded and consolidated its own special identity
against the adverse pressures of society, both political and religious, we are
given insight into the subtle and complex workings of identity formation. In
the next article, Ghaemmaghami focuses on a single topic, eschatology, to
consider how the Baha’i insistence that the time for waiting had ended may
have influenced the work of one of the more prominent and prolific Shi‘i
scholars of the late nineteenth century. It will be remembered that in Twelver
Shi’ism there is no more important doctrine than that of the Hidden Imam
and the concomitant waiting for his return. This article illustrates perfectly
just how acutely (and phobically) the new interpretation could be felt in
some religious quarters. Vejdani has nuanced and explored the fascinating
problem of Baha’i community identity and community formation through the
optique of bibliographic history and, most importantly, print culture. In the
process, he has also identified and privileged two important Baha’i religious
“modalities” — communion with the divine word and universalism or
© 2012 The Author
Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
INTRODUCTION                                               469

transnationalism — and their problematization vis-à-vis technologically and
deceptively “neutral” agencies such as printing.
Baha’i teachings are quite specific: if a family can afford to educate only
one child, it is the girl who must be educated because she stands to become
the primary educator of the next generation through her maternal role.
Zabihi-Moghaddam’s article regarding the pioneering attempts by an Iranian
Baha’i community to provide schools for women and girls highlights the
central Baha’i value of obedience to its religious teachings and its eventful
and influential history in a specific case. Echevarria singles out the early
Baha’i community of Canada to study the ways in which Baha’i women
assumed roles of administrative agency, perhaps in advance of similar devel-
opments in the wider Canadian society. The approach here is sociological
and enriched with meticulous qualitative and quantitative research. Racial
harmony has been a central Baha’i preoccupation from the very beginning.
Buck tackles a somewhat vexed episode, or series of episodes, in the history
of the American Baha’i community, specifically as it engaged with the
African American population it was trying so hard to reach, during the Jim
Crow era of legalized segregation. The intensity of Baha’i efforts to counter
this pernicious, painful social disease may be thought to have been far in
advance of that obtaining in the general public of the time. This is borne out
by the initial attraction, (discussed here), to Baha’i teachings of “race amity”
by the brilliant, eloquent, and influential W. E. B. Du Bois, among others
within black intelligentsia. Hassall offers a rich and probing investigation of
the character of the relatively small Australian Baha’i community during an
obviously crucial phase in its growth. He raises many questions for further
consideration, especially as one considers the relationship of the Baha’i com-
munity to the “host” religious institutions of the time. Lee focuses on Africa
and the spread of the Baha’i Faith in the Cameroons during the 1950s and
early 1960s. In the early 1950s, the Baha’i Faith was introduced to West
Africa and grew rapidly; but beyond growth, Lee attempts to investigate the
social forces that contributed to early Baha’i conversions and allowed it to
develop as a religious movement in the British Cameroons. He also demon-
strates how this spread depended upon the way in which the new Baha’i
principles and administrative order came into conversation with existing reli-
gious forms and debates. Finally, Yazdani brings the discussion up to more
recent date exploring in great detail the systematic othering of the Baha’i
community in Iran through the writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, especially in
the period leading up to what was once characterized as the most successful
revolution in modern times. In this fascinating article, it is also shown that it
was not only during the nineteenth century that Shi‘i messianism loomed as
an influential social and religious mobilizer, but that it continued to play a
crucial role in the Iran of 1979–80.
It is hoped that these nine articles will be of interest to the professional
historian of religion as well as to the more general reader. Unlike at the
beginning of the twentieth century when the Baha’i Faith acquired notoriety for
its ideas, its “social gospel,” today when it is encountered it is frequently in the
© 2012 The Author
Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
470                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

deplorable context of its continued persecution in its motherland. These articles
combine to demonstrate that the worldwide Baha’i community has continued
to maintain its dedication to its challenging and lofty religious ideals even if it
has from time to time been distracted from directly pursuing them in order to
fight for its very survival, particularly in Iran.

© 2012 The Author
Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
-- Baha'i Religious History: Introduction (Used by permission of the curator)