A Tehran nobleman nicknamed Father of the Poor founded a worldwide faith
Born into Persian aristocracy in 1817, Baha'u'llah turned down a government post, gave his wealth to charity, and backed a banned movement. Chained in an underground Tehran dungeon, he said God revealed his mission to him. He spent the next four decades as an Ottoman exile and prisoner.
His birth name was Husayn-Ali, son of Mirza Buzurg, a vizier to a Qajar prince. Married at 18 to Asiyih Khanum, he refused the career his family expected and spent his twenties on charitable work. At 27 he received a tablet carried from the Bab, a young Shiraz merchant who in 1844 had proclaimed himself a new messenger of God, and accepted it at once, teaching the new creed across his home province of Nur.
At a gathering at Badasht in 1848, where 84 followers met for 22 days, he steered the debate towards treating the Babi movement as a break with Islamic law, and took the title Baha, meaning glory. Persecution was ferocious. The Bab was shot by a firing squad in Tabriz in 1850, and after two young Babis fired birdshot at the Shah in 1852, at least 10,000 believers were killed that year. Baha'u'llah spent four months chained in the Siyah-Chal pit, scarred for life, and there experienced the visions Baha'is treat as the start of his mission.
Cleared of the plot but stripped of his property, he was banished. In the brutal winter of January 1853 he travelled for three months to Baghdad, where in 1863 he announced his claim publicly. Iranian pressure pushed the Ottomans to move him further: to Constantinople, to four years of house arrest in Edirne, then two harsh years inside the prison-city of Acre, before restrictions slowly loosened.
He wrote at least 1,500 letters, some the length of books, among them the Hidden Words and the Kitab-i-Aqdas, covering mysticism, the soul, social needs and religious institutions. His followers, now reckoned at 5 to 8 million across 236 countries and territories, regard him as a Manifestation of God in a line including the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. The nine-pointed star they use comes from the numerical value of Baha. Only two photographs of him exist, both from Edirne, and Baha'is prefer they not be shown publicly. He died near Acre in 1892.
Source: Baháʼu'lláh
