I looked up the Bahá’í Faith after reading an irreverent Clickhole article that ranks it as the second best world religion (quote: “Couldn’t quite clinch the number-one spot, but second place is nothing to be ashamed of.”)
Reading about the Bahá’í Faith, I wondered if it was a relative of or derivative of another Iranian religion, Manichaeism — but Manichaeism was founded over a millennium earlier and was extinct by the time the Bahá’í Faith was founded.
The similarities between the two religions are striking. Both were syncretic religions that fused and expanded upon the speech and writings of other major religious leaders, and both specifically cite the Buddha and Jesus Christ as alternate incarnations of the same god. Both were persecuted by their rival (and source) religions — Manichaeism by Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Buddhist, and secular leaders, the Bahá’í Faith by Muslim leaders. And both were founded by Iranian men who were ultimately punished for their dissent from the state religion of the time.
Here’s some background on the two religions:
The Bahá’í Faith is a religion that was founded in 1862 AD the prophet Bahá’u’lláh, an Iranian exile to Iraq. He was a follower of the Báb Faith, an Abrahamic faith based on Islam, who borrowed from the Báb’s teachings and claimed that he was the latest in a line of manifestations of God. He cited Jesus, the Buddha, and Muhammad as his immediate predecessors in the line of divine reincarnation. The Bahá’í Faith’s intimate relationship to the major religions has allowed it to become a significant minority religion in a number of regions worldwide — including South Carolina, where followers of the faith make up the second largest religious group. In 2007, Foreign Policy Magazine listed it as the world’s second fastest growing religion after Islam. Today, it is estimated that there over 7 million followers of the faith worldwide.
Why did Iran produce, on two occasions over a millennium apart, religious leaders with such similar revelations? Iran has always been in a unique position in terms of religion. In its ancient imperial periods, Iran was officially Zoroastrian, but it controlled areas with high populations of polytheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and other religions. Greeks, Arabs, Israelites, Hindu Indians, and many other groups coexisted under the Achaemenid and Sassanid Empires. As such, religious tolerance and syncretism were sometimes a necessity for ancient Iranian leaders.
When the Rashidun Caliphate, the first Islamic caliphate, came to prominence and captured Iran, there was resistance from the predominantly Zoroastrian Iranian community — in 644 AD, an Iranian slave assassinated the sitting caliph of the caliphate. Over the following centuries, Iran remained under Islamic control, and it ultimately became one of the leading regions in Islamic theology and philosophy. But it retained elements of Zoroastrianism and independence from the Arabic world. Today, Iranians still celebrate Nowruz, the Zoroastrian new year celebration, and some even speak resentfully of the “Two Centuries of Silence” that followed the Islamic conquest of Iran.
Like Mani, Bahá’u’lláh lived under a theocratic government that nonetheless ruled over people of various religions. By the 19th century, Islam had had extensive cross-cultural exchanges with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity, among others. Iran in particular had cultural ties with the Mughal Empire in India, which came into close contact with Buddhism and Hinduism. Bahá’u’lláh and Mani may have attempted, in a similar manner, to unite the ideology of their leaders with their personal ideologies and their respect for the religions of imperial subjects.
Iran has been on both sides of imperial acquisition, and has a rich, complex history of religion as a result. Phenomena like this can be found in many regions of the world: in China, where Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism historically coexisted with folk religions, various Buddhist sects, quasi-religious forms of Confucianism, and even Christian cults arose from the local environment. Along the Swahili Coast, traditional aspects of Bantu religions became associated with Islamic and Christian practices after, respectively, the medieval Indian Ocean trade period and 19th century colonialism. Yet the convergence of religious ideas between Mani and Bahá’u’lláh remains remarkable for the parallel between their reinterpretations of Christian and Buddhist ideology in the context of the ruling religions of their respective times.
Note: I use the phrase ‘the Buddha’ several times here, despite the fact that ‘Buddha’ is often used by Buddhists to refer to various figures who have achieved enlightenment. Both Mani and Bahá’u’lláh borrowed specifically from Gautama Buddha, but may have been influenced by other forms of Buddhism.