Iran's Largest Religious Minority Was Founded by a Persian Merchant Executed in 1850

On the evening of May 22, 1844, a 24-year-old merchant from Shiraz named Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad announced to a young theology student that he was the Báb — "the gate" — through whom the next great prophet of God would soon arrive. The Báb's movement, originally a reformist current within Twelver Shia Islam, gathered tens of thousands of adherents across Persia within six years. The Qajar government and the Shia clerical establishment found the messianic claims and the rapid mobilization unacceptable. The Báb was tried at Tabriz in July 1850 and executed by firing squad in front of about 10,000 spectators. The first volley failed; he was executed at the second.

In 1853, the Persian government exiled most surviving Bábís to Baghdad, then under Ottoman administration. One of them was Mírzá Husayn-'Alí Núrí, a member of a noble Persian family. In April 1863, in a Baghdad garden the Bahá'ís now call Ridván, he announced he was the prophet the Báb had foretold and took the name Bahá'u'lláh — "Glory of God." The Ottomans moved him from Baghdad to Constantinople, then to Adrianople, then in 1868 to the prison-fortress at Acre on the Palestinian coast. He spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1892, and produced an enormous corpus — over 18,000 distinct works of which only about 8 percent have so far been translated into English.

Bahá'u'lláh's son Abdu'l-Bahá led the community after him. Today the faith claims roughly 7 to 8 million adherents in nearly every country and has its administrative seat at the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel. The Bahá'í community is the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran, where it remains officially unrecognized and routinely persecuted.