Bahá'u'lláh

Born into wealth in 1817, Ḥusayn-ʻAlí refused a government post at twenty-two and spent his early years managing estates and funding charities. At twenty-seven he joined the Bábí movement - a sect advocating the overthrow of Islamic law - and became one of its loudest voices. The backlash was swift: at thirty-three, during a crackdown meant to kill the movement, he lost his properties and was thrown into the Síyáh-Chál dungeon, where he said God first spoke to him. Banished from Iran, he landed in Ottoman Iraq, but his growing influence spooked Iranian authorities enough that they lobbied to have him moved farther west. The Ottomans shuffled him from Constantinople to four years of house arrest in Edirne, then two years of brutal confinement in the prison-city of Acre. His constraints slowly loosened, and in those final decades he produced at least 1,500 letters and books - mystical tracts on the soul, legal codes for his followers, blueprints for religious institutions - translated into more than eight hundred languages. He died near Acre in 1892; his tomb is now a pilgrimage site for the five to eight million Bahá'ís who regard him as the latest in a line of d