Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1889, mystical, tolerant Iranian religion founded by a Mirza Ali Mohammed ibn Radhik, Shiraz merchant executed for heresy in 1850, and named for his leading disciple, Baha Allah (Persian "splendor of God;" ultimately from Arabic). It also is sometimes called Babism, after the name taken by the founder, Bab-ed-Din, "gate of the faith."
Usage examples of "baha'i".
Barber belonged to the Baha'i faith, a gentle, pantheistic religion which features, as central tenets, equality of gender and race.
And the more I read about Baha'i, it was as if someone had pulled blinkers off my eyes.
One Baha'i belief is that, as a moral sentiment, you should aspire to your highest potential.
Cathy visited some Baha'i friends and then returned to the Scarborough Beach motel where Nick and Peter Fortune were staying.
That evening they met her parents, Cecelia and Bruce, who were staying with an African-American Baha'i family, arranged through the faith's worldwide spiritual assembly.
A pull at the cigarette, one of the clove-scented ones well-to-do Baha'i smoked.
The Baha'i had come later, inventing something both new and false that relegated them to the status of pagans, denying the True Faith, and earning the wrath of their government.
Yes, I come from there, but I am a Christian, or a Baha'i, or a Kurd, or an Armenian, and they persecuted my family cruelly, and so I came to America, the land of opportunity, to experience true freedom.
They're gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha'i Rastafarians, whatever-the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I've traded with everybody.
The Colonists were commercial rivals of the southern continent's city-states, there were frequent military clashes—full-fledged war quite recently, which was how Ndella had ended up on a Sandoral auction-block—and the orthodox Sunni Muslims of the Colony detested the Reformed Baha'i heresy the Zanj practiced.