What is the Bahá'í Faith?
Reproduced from The Baha'is:
A Profile of the Bahá'í Faith and its Worldwide Community.
- The Bahá'í Faith is among the fastest growing
religions in the world.
- With significant communities in at least 205 countries and
dependent territories, the Bahá'í Faith has become, in
only a century, the second most widespread religion, after
Christianity.
- The six milion members of the worldwide
Bahá'í community come from virtually every nationality,
religious background, ethnic group, and social class.
- The Founder of the Bahá'í Faith is
Bahá'u'llah (1817-1892), a Persian nobleman who suffered 40
years of imprisonment and exile. Baha'is believe that He was the latest
in a line of Messengers from God that includes Abraham, Krishna, Moses,
Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, and Muhammad.
- The main theme of Bahá'u'llah's message is unity.
He taught that there is only one God, that all the world's religions
represent one changeless and eternal Faith of God, and that all
humanity is one race, destined to live in peace and harmony.
- Baha'is work towards the creation of an ever-advancing,
sustainable world civilization, based on the following principles:
the oneness of humankind; equality of women and men; racial
integration; economic justice; universal education; the harmony of
science and religion; the adoption of a universal auxilary language;
and the creation of a world commonwealth of nations which keeps the
peace through the principle of collective security.
- In recent years, Bahá'í communities around the
world have launched more than 1,800 educational, environmental, social
and economic development projects, ranging from village-level
tutorial schools to environmental study centers.
- There is no clergy in the Bahá'í Faith. It conducts
its business through a distinctive system of global administration,
which features a network of democratically elected national and
local-level governing councils in more than 18,000 locations in 165
countries.

