As the new millennium approaches, the crucial need of the human race is to
find a unifying vision of the nature of man and society. For the past
century humanity's response to this impulse has driven a succession of
ideological upheavals that have convulsed our world and that appear now to
have exhausted themselves. The passion invested in the struggle, despite
its disheartening results, testifies to the depth of the need. For,
without a common conviction about the course and direction of human
history, it is inconceivable that foundations can be laid for a global
society to which the mass of humankind can commit themselves.
Such a vision unfolds in the writings of Baha'u'llah, the nineteenth
century prophetic figure whose growing influence is the most remarkable
development of contemporary religious history. Born in Persia, November
12, 1817, Baha'u'llah(1) began at age 27 an undertaking that has gradually
captured the imagination and loyalty of several million people from
virtually every race, culture, class, and nation on earth. The phenomenon
is one that has no reference points in the contemporary world, but is
associated rather with climactic changes of direction in the collective
past of the human race. For Baha'u'llah claimed to be no less than the
Messenger of God to the age of human maturity, the Bearer of a Divine
Revelation that fulfills the promises made in earlier religions, and that
will generate the spiritual nerves and sinews for the unification of the
peoples of the world.
If they were to do nothing else, the effects which Baha'u'llah's life and
writings have already had should command the earnest attention of anyone
who believes that human nature is fundamentally spiritual and that the
coming organization of our planet must be informed by this aspect of
reality. The documentation lies open to general scrutiny. For the first
time in history humanity has available a detailed and verifiable record of
the birth of an independent religious system and of the life of its
Founder. Equally accessible is the record of the response that the new
faith has evoked, through the emergence of a global community which can
already justly claim to represent a microcosm of the human race.(2)
During the earlier decades of this century, this development was
relatively obscure. Baha'u'llah's writings forbid the aggressive
proselytism through which many religious messages have been widely
promulgated. Further, the priority which the Baha'i community gave to the
establishment of groups at the local level throughout the entire planet
militated against the early emergence of large concentrations of adherents
in any one country or the mobilization of resources required for
large-scale programs of public information. Arnold Toynbee, intrigued by
phenomena that might represent the emergence of a new universal religion,
noted in the 1950s that the Baha'i Faith was then about as familiar to the
average educated Westerner as Christianity had been to the corresponding
class in the Roman empire during the second century A.D.(3)
In more recent years, as the Baha'i community's numbers have rapidly
increased in many countries, the situation has changed dramatically. There
is now virtually no area in the world where the pattern of life taught by
Baha'u'llah is not taking root. The respect which the community's social
and economic development projects are beginning to win in governmental,
academic, and United Nations circles further reinforces the argument for a
detached and serious examination of the impulse behind a process of social
transformation that is, in critical respects, unique in our world.
No uncertainty surrounds the nature of the generating impulse.
Baha'u'llah's writings cover an enormous range of subjects from social
issues such as racial integration, the equality of the sexes, and
disarmament, to those questions that affect the innermost life of the
human soul. The original texts, many of them in His own hand, the others
dictated and affirmed by their author, have been meticulously preserved.
For several decades, a systematic program of translation and publication
has made selections from Baha'u'llah's writings accessible to people
everywhere, in over eight hundred languages.