The Baha'i world headquarters are in Haifa, and its U.S. headquarters are in Wilmette, a northern suburb of Chicago. Wilmette is the site of a magnificent Baha'i temple. Six similar houses of worship have been built in other cities around the world. The religion has no clergy or rituals, although members are urged to pray daily, to fast nineteen days during Ala, the last month of the Baha'i year, and to make at least one pilgrimage to Haifa. Women are exempt from the fast period if they repeat "Glorified be God, the Lord of Splendour and Beauty" 5 x 19 = 95 times on each of the nineteen days.
Since their origin, the Baha'is have endured violent persecution by Islamic fanatics. This reached a terrible climax in the early 1980s when Shi'ite leaders under Khomeini tried to destroy Baha'ism in Iran. More than two hundred Baha'is were killed, hundreds more imprisoned. Thousands lost their homes and possessions. Mobs desecrated Baha'i halls, sacked their temples, cemeteries, and shrines. Baha'i schools and corporations were taken over. The House of Bab, a holy shrine, was demolished. The violence subsided after 1985, but Baha'i religious activities in Iran remain forbidden.
Baha'is are entranced by 9 and 19, both numbers having roots in Islamic tradition. Nine stands for the nine manifestations of the transcendent, wholly other, unknowable Allah. They are Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad, Krishna, the Bab, and Baha'u'llah. The Wilmette temple has nine sides, nine doors, nine pillars, nine arches, nine ribs in the dome, and nine fountains. At each entrance are 2 x 9 = 18 steps. Baha'i temples elsewhere have similar structures. A nine-pointed star is the most widely used symbol of Baha'i faith.
Nineteen, Islam's other sacred number, is mentioned in the twenty-fifth verse of the Koran's Sura 74, titled "The Hidden Secret." Anyone who denies that the Koran came from Allah, this chapter says, will suffer forever in hell under the supervision of nineteen angels. "What mystery doth God intend for this number?" another verse asks. The mystery and sacredness of 19 was constantly stressed by early Islamic mystics, from whom it passed into the teachings of the Bab, down to today's Baha'is and to Reverend Farrakhan.
The Bab took great pride in having 2 x 9 = 18 chief disciples who, together with himself, made 19. Babism included a gematria that rivaled the Cabala in its obsession with hidden meanings based on assigning numbers to the twenty-eight Arabic letters. Nineteen was found everywhere, notably as the sum of the numerical values of the Arabic and Persian letters of Wahid, the word for One, one of Allah's chief names.
The product of 19 and 19 is 361, which the Babists called "the number of all things." It is the number of days in the Babist calendar, still used by the Baha'is. Their year consists of nineteen months, each with nineteen days. The extra four days are intercalary, with a fifth day added during leap years. When the Bab made his pilgrimage to Mecca, he sacrificed nineteen lambs.
Wherever possible, the Babists divided things into nineteen parts. The years form nineteen cycles, of which we are now in the eighth. The Bab's followers even tried to base a coinage on nineteen, but had to abandon it as impractical. On the first day of each month, the Baha'is, following the Bab's instructions, assemble for the Feast of the Nineteenth Day. International offices are governed by nine leaders, selected by 3 x 9 = 27 "custodians of the faith."
Farrakhan's initials are L. F. Using the cipher A = 1, B = 2, and so on, his initials add to 18, one short of 19. Maybe he should change his first name to Moses or Muhammad.
My next column will tell the tragic story of Dr. Rashad Khalifa, who tried to convince the world that the prevalence of 19 in the Koran proved it was written by Allah, and who was stabbed to death in 1990 for his heretical opinions.
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My wife is a Baha'i (from Hawaii not Iran). We have met numerous survivors of the Iran violence. Tough, tough people. They put their families back together as best they could in America, pursued chosen professions and remained faithful to their religion.
I had no idea. Thank you for the education.