Baha'u'llah

Baha'u'llah, born Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri in Tehran in 1817, was a Persian religious leader who founded the Baha'i Faith, one of the youngest independent world religions. He was an early follower of the Bab, a Persian religious figure whose movement Baha'u'llah joined as a young man and whose teachings he came to see as preparing the way for a further messenger of God; in 1863, while in exile in Baghdad, he declared himself to be that promised figure, a claim that most of the surviving Babi community came to accept and that marked the effective founding of the Baha'i Faith as a distinct religion. Persian and Ottoman authorities, viewing his growing following as a political and religious threat, subjected him to a long series of forced exiles and imprisonments across the Ottoman Empire, moving him from Baghdad to Constantinople, then Adrianople, and finally to the penal colony of Akka in present-day Israel, where he remained under increasingly relaxed confinement until his death in 1892. During these decades of exile he produced a large body of religious writing setting out Baha'i teachings on the unity of God, the unity of religion, and the unity of humanity, along with calls for world peace and the elimination of prejudice, texts that remain the central scripture of the Baha'i Faith. The faith he founded has since spread to become one of the most geographically widespread religions in the world, with communities established in most countries.