Baháʼí Faith
monotheistic religion revealed by Bahāʾullāh
The Baháʼí Faith is a religion, established by Baháʼu'lláh in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people. It initially developed in Iran and parts of Western Asia, where it has faced ongoing persecution since its inception. The religion has 7–8 million adherents, known as Baháʼís, who are spread throughout most of the world's countries and territories.
The Baháʼí Faith has three central figures: the Báb (1819–1850), executed for heresy, who taught that a prophet similar to Jesus and Muhammad would soon appear; Baháʼu'lláh, who claimed in 1863 to be the expected prophet and who had to endure both exile and imprisonment; and his son, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá (1844–1921), who made teaching trips to Europe and the United States after his release from confinement in 1908. After ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's death in 1921, the leadership of the religion fell to his grandson Shoghi Effendi (1897–1957). Baháʼís annually elect local, regional, and national administrative bodies that govern the religion's affairs, and every five years an election is held for the Universal House of Justice, the nine-member governing institution of the worldwide Baháʼí community that is located in Haifa, Israel, near the Shrine of the Báb.
According to Baháʼí teachings, religion is revealed in an orderly and progressive way by a single God through Manifestations of God, who are the founders of major world religions throughout human history; the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad are cited as the most recent of these Manifestations of God before the Báb and Baháʼu'lláh. Baháʼís regard the world's major religions as fundamentally unified in their purpose, but divergent in their social practices and interpretations. The Baháʼí Faith stresses the unity of all people as its core teaching; as a result, it explicitly rejects notions of racism, sexism, and nationalism. At the heart of Baháʼí teachings is the vision of a unified world order that ensures the prosperity of all nations, races, creeds, and classes.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Baháʼí Faith” is monotheistic religion revealed by Bahāʾullāh. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Baháʼí, Faith and monotheistic, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22679. The Library of Congress control number is sh85010990. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1819, 1850, 1863 and 1844.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baháʼí Faith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.