The Bahai community is small but exceptionally dispersed. Estimates run from about five million, the figure long cited by the faith's own institutions, to around eight million in more recent Bahai statements. Independent enumeration is difficult because the community is thinly spread and, in some countries, unsafe to count. There is a Bahai presence in most countries of the world, with the largest national community in India and substantial numbers in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States and Latin America. Much of the twentieth-century growth came from mass enrolment campaigns in rural Africa, India and the Andes, and the gap between formal enrolment and active participation is a known difficulty in the faith's own statistics.
In Iran, where it began and where it remains the largest non-Muslim religious minority, the Bahai Faith is not among the religions recognised by the constitution, and its adherents have no standing as a community in law. Persecution has been recurrent since the nineteenth century and intensified after 1979: the national administrative bodies were dissolved and members of them executed, the House of the Bab in Shiraz, a principal place of pilgrimage, was demolished, and Bahais have been barred from universities and from public employment. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, reports of the Secretary-General, and successive Human Rights Council resolutions have documented arbitrary arrest, confiscation of property, denial of education and closure of businesses, and describe the persecution as persistent and continuing rather than historical.
Bahai teaching forbids partisan political activity and requires obedience to civil government, which leaves the community little recourse beyond international advocacy on its behalf.