One God, one human family, one unfolding revelation.
Founded by Bahá'u'lláh out of the Bábí movement in nineteenth-century Iran: all the great teachers — Abraham to Muhammad and beyond — as chapters of one progressive revelation, and the unity of humankind as this age's assignment. A departure from the Shia line that became a world religion of its own.
DeitiesOne God, held to be unknowable in essence — not mysterious in the sense of not yet explained, but inaccessible in principle to a created mind. Nothing is therefore said about God directly. What is accessible is the line of Manifestations — Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — who are held to be perfect mirrors rather than incarnations, each bringing what the age could carry. Prayer is addressed to God, but the Manifestation is where anything about God can be read.
Founded1863 CE · Baghdad — proclaimed in the Garden of Ridván
FounderBahá'u'lláh
AfterlifeThe soul journeys on — worlds of God without end
TextsKitáb-i-Aqdas · Writings of Bahá'u'lláh
The map
The Bahá'í Faith’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
610 CE Islam 632 CE Shia Islam 1863 CE The Bahá'í Faith
God cannot be known.
Not mysterious in the sense of not yet explained — inaccessible in principle. The gap between creator and created is held to be unbridgeable from below, so nothing whatever can be truly predicated of the divine essence, and every apparent statement about God is really a statement about a Manifestation.
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Religion is one story told in chapters.
Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — one God educating one humanity through successive teachers.
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One line of teachers.
Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — and others whose names are lost. They are not incarnations and not merely inspired men: the image the faith uses is a mirror, which shows the sun perfectly without the sun ever entering the glass.
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Humanity is one people.
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens — racial and national prejudice named as the disease to cure.
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Revelation has not stopped, and it has not sped up.
Each Manifestation brings what the age can carry, so religious truth is relative to its moment and the differences between faiths are matters of timing and social context. But Bahá'u'lláh set a floor: no further Manifestation for at least a thousand years, and anyone claiming otherwise before then is to be rejected.
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Science and religion cannot finally contradict.
Truth is one; a religion at war with reason is, on this view, misreading itself.
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Women and men are equal, and it is not optional.
Stated as a principle rather than an aspiration, with the argument that humanity is a bird with two wings and cannot fly on one. Where resources are scarce, the teaching is that a daughter is educated before a son, because she will teach the next generation.
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Truth must be investigated independently.
No clergy: each believer must see with their own eyes, not through their neighbor's.
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Every prejudice has to go.
Racial, national, religious and class prejudice are named individually and treated as the direct cause of conflict rather than as unfortunate attitudes. 'Abdu'l-Bahá called racial prejudice the most vital and challenging issue facing America, in 1912.
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The extremes of wealth and poverty must be abolished.
Not wealth as such — the faith is explicitly not communist and defends private property and profit. What is targeted is the extremes at either end, through graduated taxation, profit-sharing, and a mandated floor. Voluntary charity is held to be insufficient and structural remedy is called for.
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The soul goes on, and keeps going.
It comes into being at conception, is not pre-existent, does not return to another body, and after death continues to develop through worlds the living cannot picture. Heaven and hell are conditions of nearness or distance from God, not places, and progress after death remains possible.
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Work done in a spirit of service is worship.
Not a metaphor and not a consolation — the stated ranking is that such work is accounted the same as worship. Monasticism is abolished, mendicancy is forbidden, and idleness is condemned. A craftsman at his bench is doing the thing a monk would have withdrawn to do.
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G
God.
Addressed constantly and described never. Bahá'í Houses of Worship contain no image, no altar and no representation of anything; prayers use a great many names and the writings state plainly that all of them describe the worshipper's conception rather than the reality. It is one of the most thoroughgoing apophatic positions in any living religion.
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B
Baha'u'llah — the promised one.
A Persian nobleman who spent forty years in exile and prison, writing the unity of humankind into scripture from a cell.
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T
The Manifestations.
A single succession stretching back before record and forward past the present, each fulfilling the last and promising the next. They share what the faith calls a station of divinity and a station of humanity — so Jesus is right to say he and the Father are one, and equally right to say the Father is greater, and both statements refer to different stations of the same being.
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T
The Bab — the gate.
A merchant of Shiraz who declared the dawn, gathered followers, and was shot by a regiment — the herald whose promise Baha'u'llah answered.
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The obligatory prayer.
Three prayers exist and each Bahá'í picks one each day: a short one said between noon and sunset, a medium one three times a day, or a long one once in twenty-four hours with prescribed bows and standings. You choose freely, you say it alone, and nobody asks which you chose or whether you said it.
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The Nineteen-Day Feast.
Worship, consultation, fellowship — the devotional and administrative heartbeat of a clergy-less faith.
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Ninety-five times.
Alláh-u-Abhá — God is Most Glorious — repeated ninety-five times a day after washing. It is also how Bahá'ís greet each other, and its calligraphic form, drawn by a nineteenth-century Persian calligrapher, is the closest thing the faith has to an icon and hangs in a great many Bahá'í homes.
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The Fast.
Sunrise to sunset without food or drink, nineteen days — the year hinged on a season of restraint.
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Where next
the museum exit — every door leads deeper inSources
8 cited texts
- Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, XXVI (Shoghi Effendi translation) where it is cited →
- Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, verse 37 (rendered) where it is cited →
- 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in the United States, 1912 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, verse 33 (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bahá'u'lláh, Words of Wisdom (rendered) where it is cited →
- 'Abdu'l-Bahá, on consultation (rendered) where it is cited →
- Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic 1 (Shoghi Effendi translation) where it is cited →
- Human Rights Watch, The Boot on My Neck, April 2024 where it is cited →
These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.