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The Baháʼí Faith traces its beginnings to the religion of the Báb and the Shaykhi movement that immediately preceded it. The Báb was a merchant who began preaching in 1844 that he was the bearer of a new revelation from God, but was rejected by the generality of Islamic clergy in Iran, ending in his public execution for the crime of heresy ...
The Shaykhi movement was a school of theology within Twelver Shiʻa Islam that was started through the teaching of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsá'í.Shaykh Ahmad's teachings included that the Imams were spiritual beings and thus, in contrast to the widespread Shiʻa belief, that the Imams existed within spiritual bodies, and not material bodies. [9]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Baháʼí Faith.. Baháʼí Faith – relatively new religion teaching the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people, established by Baháʼu'lláh in the 19th-century Middle East and now estimated to have a worldwide following of 5–8 million adherents, known as Baháʼís.
The Baháʼí Faith was first mentioned in the United States in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. [1] Soon after, early American converts began embracing the new religion. Thornton Chase was the most prominent among the first American Baha'is and made important contributions to early activities. [2]
In "The Baha'i Faith 1957–1988: A Survey of Contemporary Developments" (Religion: 1989), Baháʼí authors Momen and Smith provide the following estimates of the Baháʼís in the world over 3 decades, broken out by cultural areas. They derived numbers from, "calculation of approximate numbers from the number of Bahá'í organizations ...
The word faith, for Baha'is indicates a sense of "conscious knowledge" and conviction that is expressed in "the practice of good deeds". [53] Faith must also involve sincerely and wholeheartedly serving the public interest. [54] Thus in the Baha'i Faith, as one writer puts it, "reason is necessary but not sufficient". [55]
Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, claimed to be the most recent, but not the last, in a series of divine educators. He mentioned the Jewish prophets , Zoroaster , Jesus , Muhammad , and the Báb as other divine educators before him, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá (his son and successor) also mentioned Krishna and Gautama Buddha .
The Baháʼí conception of God is of an "unknowable essence" who is the source of all existence and known through the perception of human virtues. The Baháʼí Faith follows the tradition of monotheism and dispensationalism, believing that God has no physical form, but periodically provides divine messengers in human form that are the sources of spiritual education.