Short introduction of the Baha'i Faith by Geoffrey Nash

In the topic I have chosen to write about postcolonial analysis alerts us to the imperial dimensions behind the birthing of a new eastern religion. The focus here is on the nineteenth-century Islamicate world and on a faith which traces its origin to an Iranian Mahdi. Ali Muhammad Shirazi, or the Bab as he is more generally known, was the founder of a movement whose followers staged a number of uprisings in Iran in the late 1840s. After the Bab was executed in 1850, the remaining Babi leaders were exiled to Ottoman domains where Babism was re-launched and came to be known as Bahaism, after its founder Bahaullah, a former Babi. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the movement spread to North America and Western Europe where it was further modified in the hands of Bahaullah’s eldest son and designated successor Abdul Baha also known as Abbas Effendi, after whom a street on Mount Carmel was posthumously named. He was an outstanding notable still embedded in the Islamic character of the Akka and Haifa areas of Palestine. In the local mosque and on the occasion coinciding with the opening of the Woking Mosque near London in 1912, Abdul Baha maintained the formalities of Islamic worship. However, liberal clergymen in Britain and colonial officials and leading military figures in Palestine tended not to associate him with the Islamicate world. (Interestingly, the Military Governor of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs described him dressed in white robes “noble as a Prophet of Michael Angelo” rather than, say, a Sufi shaykh) (Storrs 1939, p. 232). Bahais were inspired by Abdul Baha, who journeyed to Europe and North America between 1911 and 1912, to exchange Islamic terms of reference (though not the many Islamicate concepts Bahaism contains) for a cosmopolitan message of peace and world unity encoded within a discourse of religious modernity and addressed to a world stage. However, it was under the aegis of Shoghi Effendi, a grandson of Abdul Baha who appointed him to the Guardianship (wilaya) of the Bahai faith that it self-identified as a new religion.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2