ABSTRACT
The Arab world has played a crucial role in the development of the Bahá’í Faith and provides a unique window into the Faith’s vitality in the face of serious challenges. The Báb lived there for a time, Bahá’u’lláh was exiled there and lived more than half His life there, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá lived nearly His entire life in Arab lands. All three of them wrote fluently and extensively in Arabic. It is difficult to condense the history of such an extended period and extensive region into a few pages, but since other chapters in the book cover the lives of the Faith’s leading figures and include many major events that took place in the region, this chapter will focus on issues that are directly associated with the Arab world and some of the major events and cases that impacted the Faith’s presence in the region. Because of limitations of space, only four national Bahá’í communities will be discussed: Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Bahrain. Their historical and legal developments are indications of the diversity of the experiences of the Bahá’ís in the Arab world.
