The Birth of a New World

DAVID BOWERS





Few would have believed, when the Bab was born 185 years ago, that the son of an Iranian merchant would herald the first world religion that would proclaim the equality of gender, the abolishment of slavery and the oneness of the human race. He took on the title `The Bab' -`gate' in Arabic -to symbolise his acting as a gateway leading people from the old era to the new, and as the herald of another messenger of God, Baha'u'llah.While the teachings of the Bab and Baha'u'llah recognise that we now live in the darkest times the world has ever seen, they are optimistic about the future of the human race. As people everywhere become aware of the inadequacies of fanaticism, materialism and extreme nationalism to solve the problems of a changing world, the Baha'i teachings point to a new way , “We stand on the threshold of an age whose convulsions proclaim alike the death pangs of the old order and the birth pangs of the new.“
Each time a messianic figure comes to a society greatly in need of spiritual rebirth, his message stirs society to the core. His early believers experience great turmoil, followed by obscurity and weakness, and only later emerge in the form of a developed civilisation that can bring undreamt of glory to the human race.
One religious civilisation becomes the mother of the next, and although all religions exist for the same purpose, with the same essence of the faiths that have preceded them, each one represents a unique link in the family of human civilisations.