Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Among the new religious movements clamouring for attention in the modern West, Baha'ism (the Baha'i faith) stands out as something of an anomaly in being both sufficiently independent to be regarded as a religion in its own right and yet small enough to be treated as a sect or church in the sociological sense.The movement originated in the 1860s as a faction within Babism (founder: the Bab, 1819–50), a messianic sect of Shi'a Islam (see p. 206 above) that began in Iraq and Iran in 1844. The founder of Baha'ism, Baha’ Allah (1817–92), claimed to be a new prophet and expounded his religion as the latest in a long line of divine revelations. Had it remained confined to the Middle East, it is likely that Baha'ism would have joined the ranks of the numerous heterodox Islamic sects there, with most of which it shares common features. But in 1894 the movement became one of the first missionizing Eastern religions to reach the West, arriving in the United States while still in a state of flux after its emergence from Shi'a Islam.Unlike the Ahmadiyya and some recent Sufi groups that have sought converts in Europe and America, the Baha'is had consciously broken their connection with Islam and were in search of a means of defining their identity as a community based on a separate revelation, something which had proved difficult in Islamic countries but which they found possible in more pluralist ... log in or subscribe to read full text