This panel explores different dimensions of Bahá’í thought during the roughly 180 years of this faith's history. Key issues discussed include the thought and practices of female heroines and martyrs, themes of concealment and disclosure in early Bahá’í scriptures, ideas of justice and divine order in key legal texts, and the history of ideas concerning the harmony of science and religion.
This paper examines how their knowledge, agency, and martyr-like status have been memorialized and politicized within their traditions. Using a historical and comparative methodology, it will analyze primary sources—hadiths, sermons, poetry, and historical accounts—alongside secondary scholarship to explore their intellectual authority, modes of resistance, and how subsequent religious movements have mobilized their legacies.
By juxtaposing Fatima Zahra and Tahirih Baraghani, this study highlights the intersection of gender, power, and religious authority, questioning how memory and historiography shape contemporary understandings of female scholarship and activism in Islam and the Bahá’í Faith. This research contributes to broader discourses on women’s authority in religious traditions and the politics of historical remembrance.
This paper explores the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, and their role in unveiling the religion. Written primarily in Arabic and Persian from 1852-1892, his massive collection of writings includes a wide spectrum of topics that are central to the study of religion. The central question of this paper is the dialectic of concealment and disclosure, in which Bahá’u’lláh gradually revealed his divine station and teachings, analogous to the rising sun. This study takes a historical and linguistic approach to understand why and how he concealed and disclosed his message. Focusing on his writings that were penned during the decade that he lived in Baghdád, this paper concludes that Bahá’u’lláh established himself as the spiritual leader of the Bábí community while outwardly concealing his divine station. This study contributes to religious studies scholarship by examining the interplay of the manifestation and hiddenness of the divine.
This presentation examines the ontology of justice through Bahá'í perspectives on law, being, and divine order, contrasting them with Greek, Roman, Islamic, and modern secular traditions. While classical Greek thought conceived of justice as a cosmic principle governing all existence, later traditions confined it to human affairs. The Bahá'í writings, however, go beyond merely restoring a tragic Greek conception of justice by introducing a fundamental insight: justice is ultimately articulated by the Divine Manifestations, whose laws express the deeper structure of reality, and the achievement of which requires resolution of the rights-versus-duties dichotomy. This talk explores how Bahá’í jurisprudence reframes justice (‘adl) as a multi-dimensional, ontological reality, linking divine revelation, moral order, and the laws that govern existence itself.
This paper analyzes the intellectual development of the Bahá'í principle of the harmony of science and religion through the works of Alimorad Davoudi, William Hatcher, Farzam Arbab, and Todd Smith. Over the last fifty years, these scholars have conceptualized the relationship between science and religion, evolving the discourse from Davoudi’s early delineation of their distinct yet complementary roles to Hatcher’s critique of materialism and emphasis on rational religious argumentation. Arbab and Smith build upon these foundations, integrating the philosophy of science and addressing key issues such as theory-ladenness and underdetermination. While affirming the complementarity of science and religion, they reject positivist limitations, proposing a dynamic, constructive interaction between the two systems. This paper traces the evolution of Bahá'í thought on this subject, highlighting its implications for both theoretical and practical applications in the understanding of knowledge.