The ultimate — what this line takes as final
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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Prophets & messengers — who carries the word between
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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Founders & teachers — the ones who opened the way
S
Shoghi Effendi.
Twenty-four years old, at Balliol, when he learned from a telegram that he had been appointed head of a world religion. He spent thirty-six years building an administrative order out of scattered groups, translating the central texts, and mapping systematic expansion plans. He died suddenly in London in 1957, without children and without appointing a successor.
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Saints & exemplars — lives held up as the pattern
'
'Abdu'l-Bahá.
He went into exile at eight, was a prisoner of the Ottoman state until the Young Turk revolution released him at sixty-four, and then travelled to Europe and North America. Bahá'ís are careful about his station: he is not a Manifestation, and he is the perfect exemplar — the demonstration that the teachings can be lived by a human being.
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T
Táhirih.
A poet and theologian from a distinguished clerical family, so learned that she taught from behind a curtain, and the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples. She was strangled with her own scarf in a Tehran garden in 1852. What she is reported to have said before it — you can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women — is quoted constantly and is not securely attested.
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B
Bahíyyih Khánum.
Sixty years of exile, imprisonment and household management, and twice she held the affairs of the entire faith — during 'Abdu'l-Bahá's travels in the West, and again after his death while the newly appointed Shoghi Effendi was abroad and recovering from the shock. No woman has held a comparable position since, and the faith's own writings on her are unusually warm.
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M
Mullá Husayn.
A young cleric who had searched for the promised one for years and who, on the evening of 22 May 1844, accepted an invitation to tea from a merchant in Shiraz. The Bahá'í calendar counts from that conversation. He died five years later commanding the defence of a shrine in Mázindarán against a besieging army.
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Adversaries — named in order to be refused
T
The Covenant-breakers.
People who accepted Bahá'u'lláh and then contested the succession he had appointed in writing — his half-brother Mírzá Yahyá, and later his son Mírzá Muhammad 'Alí. Bahá'ís must shun them completely, including relatives. It is the faith's only expulsion, it is decided by the head of the faith alone, and it has been applied to a few dozen people in a hundred and eighty years.
⚖ contested within
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The shared center — held across the tradition
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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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
One creation, educated in stages by one God
After death
The soul journeys on — worlds of God without end