The Baha'i Faith

What is it about?

A chapter in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (eds. Michael Stausberg, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, Anna Tessmann) The Bahā’ī Faith arose in Iran in the middle of the 19th century. From the 1880s onwards, a large number of Zoroastrians and Jews became Bahā’īs in Iran. This chapter surveys the Zoroastrian conversions from their start into the early 20th century. It then examines the possible factors that may have brought about these conversions and the course taken by these Zoroastrian converts as they separated from their former community and were integrated into the Bahā’ī community. The chapter briefly explores the role played by these converts in later Bahā’ī history. The first interactions between the Bahā’īs and leading Zoroastrians occurred through Manekji Limji Hataria (1813–1890), known as Manekji Sahib, the agent of the Indian Parsi community. The Zoroastrian converts to the Bahā’ī Faith similarly carried their cultural norms, including abhorrence of their Shī;’ī persecutors. The bulk of the Zoroastrian conversions occurred between 1884 and 1924.

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