Oneness of God, Religion, and Humanity

This affirmation is a central and defining principle of the Baha'i Faith, founded in nineteenth-century Persia, and it stands alongside the twin teachings of the oneness of God and the oneness of humanity. From it flow the tradition's emphases on the elimination of prejudice, the harmony of religion and reason, and the goal of world unity. The Baha'i view distinguishes it from the exclusive truth-claims some traditions make for themselves, since it regards each as a genuine, time-bound expression of one religion of God, while itself claiming to be the revelation appointed for the present age.

The Bab, Baha'u'llah's forerunner, was executed by firing squad in Tabriz in 1850, and Baha'u'llah himself declared his own mission in the Garden of Ridvan outside Baghdad in 1863, events the faith reads as confirming the pattern of rejection its doctrine of unity predicts. Because the exclusivist claims of the older religions persist, Baha'is in Iran, the faith's birthplace, have faced sustained state persecution since the nineteenth century, including, since the 1979 revolution, exclusion from universities and confiscation of property, treatment the Iranian state justifies by denying the Baha'i Faith is a genuine religion at all. Baha'i teaching holds that a new Manifestation appears roughly every thousand years or whenever humanity's capacity requires it, though the precise interval is not fixed doctrine.