Baha'u'llah, a title meaning the Glory of God, borne by Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri (1817-1892), is the founder of the Baha'i Faith and, for Baha'is, the most recent in the line of divine Messengers. Born into a noble family of Tehran, he declined a court career and, in 1844, became an early and prominent follower of the Bab, the herald whose movement was then spreading rapidly and drawing fierce persecution across Persia.
In the wave of repression that followed an attempt on the Shah's life in 1852, an act Baha'is stress was carried out by Babis acting without sanction, Baha'u'llah was imprisoned in a notorious Tehran dungeon, the Siyah-Chal or Black Pit, where he later said he first received intimations of his mission. Stripped of his property, he was exiled from Persia, and spent the remaining forty years of his life as a prisoner and exile of the Ottoman state, moved successively to Baghdad, Constantinople, Adrianople, and finally to the prison-city of Akka in Ottoman Palestine.
He died near Akka in 1892, and his shrine at Bahji is the holiest place of the Baha'i world, the point to which Baha'is turn in daily prayer. His entire public ministry was conducted in banishment.