This panel brings together four historically grounded studies that examine how the Bahá’í community has navigated questions of religious practice, gender, memory, and social action under conditions of cultural tension and political constraint. There is a particular focus here on Iran. From the legacy of Táhirih and the community’s cautious approach to hijab under the guidance of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, to the evolving forms of obligatory prayer instituted by Bahá’u’lláh in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the papers highlight how religious law and practice develop in response to social realities while maintaining core spiritual principles. The panel also explores how narratives of sacrifice—especially the 1983 execution of Bahá’í women in Shiraz—are preserved and reinterpreted through contemporary initiatives that shape collective memory and identity. Finally, it examines how Iranian Bahá’ís have responded to persecution following the Iranian Revolution through strategies of constructive resilience, including efforts such as the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education. Together, the panel offers a nuanced portrait of a community balancing fidelity to religious conviction with adaptive, non-adversarial approaches to social change.
The Bahá’í religion, emerging from the Bábí movement, was widely perceived as having broken with Islamic law on the question of hijab. In 1848, the Bábí heroine Tahirih appeared unveiled before a gathering of Bábí men; she was the first woman in modern Iranian history to publicly discard the veil. Yet it was not until the 1930s that many Iranian Bahá’í women, perhaps even the majority, removed the veil. It therefore seems paradoxical that despite Tahirih’s powerful legacy, the Bahá’í community did not actively promote unveiling. ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá in fact instructed Bahá’ís in Iran and other Muslim-majority societies to conform to prevailing public norms regarding hijab, a stance that contrasts sharply with his strong encouragement of the community playing a leading role in advancing girls’ education. This paper investigates the underlying considerations that shaped the Bahá’í community’s cautious approach to hijab.
This paper examines how narratives of women martyrs are remembered and transmitted within contemporary Bahá’í community life through an ethnographic study of the global campaign Our Story Is One. The campaign commemorates the execution of ten Bahá’í women in Shiraz, Iran, in 1983, whose refusal to renounce their faith has become a powerful narrative of steadfastness within Bahá’í history. Drawing on ethnographic observation of the exhibitions organized by the Bahá’í community in Ireland, together with analysis of the campaign’s global digital materials, the paper explores how the story of the Shiraz martyrs circulates across transnational Bahá’í networks and is interpreted in local community contexts. By situating the Shiraz women within the longer tradition of female martyrdom in the Bahá’í Faith, including the nineteenth-century figure Táhirih, the study demonstrates how contemporary commemorative practices reproduce and reinterpret historical narratives that continue to shape Bahá’í collective memory and community identity.
Obligatory prayer (ṣalát) occupies a central place in the devotional life prescribed by Bahá’u’lláh in his central work, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Yet the historical development of this law has received almost no scholarly attention. This paper reconstructs the evolution of the Bahá’í obligatory prayer from its earliest formulation to its final canonical form. Drawing on textual evidence from the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Bahá’u’lláh’s correspondence, it demonstrates that the law passed through three successive stages: an original nine-rakʿah prayer prescribed in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas but later lost, a second prayer composed but never disseminated, and finally the current set of three alternative obligatory prayers. The paper explores the historical circumstances that shaped these developments, including the precarious social context of Bahá’ís in Ottoman Syria and Persia and Bahá’u’lláh’s gradualist approach to religious legislation. By situating the Bahá’í law of obligatory prayer within the broader history of ritual prayer in Abrahamic traditions, the study highlights how Bahá’u’lláh reshaped inherited patterns of devotional practice while emphasizing flexibility, individual devotion, and progressive revelation.
This paper examines how the Bahá’í community of Iran has pursued social change despite systematic persecution since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Challenging the common assumption that the Bahá’í principle of non-involvement in partisan politics leads to social passivity, it argues that the community has developed a distinctive model of principled engagement rooted in constructive resilience. Drawing on historical analysis, Bahá’í texts and institutional documents, and relevant social theory, the paper explores how this approach integrates individual transformation, community building, social action, and participation in public discourse. It highlights initiatives such as grassroots educational efforts and the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) as examples of non-adversarial responses to exclusion. The paper argues that the experience of the Iranian Bahá’ís offers an alternative framework for understanding religion and social transformation—one grounded in non-violence, ethical coherence between means and ends, and the gradual cultivation of more just social relations.