The Cairo Community: The Faith Takes Root in Egypt

J. E. Esslemont's classic introduction *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era,* first published in 1923, devotes a section to the spread of the Bahá'í Faith in the Arab world. He records that Egypt — by virtue of its location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and its great Muslim university at Cairo — became one of the earliest centres of the Faith outside Persia.

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The Egyptian community had begun, in modest form, in the 1860s, with the residence in Cairo of a few Persian believers employed in the cotton trade. The community grew slowly. By the 1890s a small but established Bahá'í presence existed in both Cairo and Alexandria.

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The decisive figure in the early development of the Egyptian community was Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl Gulpáygání, the great Bahá'í scholar of his generation. He had been sent by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Cairo in the late 1890s with the dual mandate of teaching the Faith to seekers and of writing systematic expositions of its principles for the educated Egyptian audience.

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Esslemont records that Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl took rooms near al-Azhar — the great Sunni university of the city — and attended lectures there as a private scholar. He published a series of works in Arabic that addressed the Egyptian intellectual public directly. Several of the most distinguished of his works — *al-Faraid* among them — were composed during the Cairo years and remain, a century later, among the foundational texts of Bahá'í scholarship in Arabic.

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The community attracted, slowly but steadily, Egyptian seekers. Several prominent Egyptian families converted in the years between 1900 and 1920. The community held its meetings in private homes, published a small newsletter, and sent representatives, when conditions allowed, to the Holy Land to attain the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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The crisis came in 1925. The Egyptian Muslim religious court of Beba — apparently in response to a divorce case in which the religious affiliation of one party was disputed — issued a formal ruling that the Bahá'ís of Egypt could no longer be considered Muslims. The ruling, drafted in legal Arabic of considerable severity, recited the Bahá'í teachings and declared them incompatible with Islam. The intent of the ruling was to expel the Bahá'ís from the Egyptian Muslim community.

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The Egyptian Bahá'ís received the ruling — Esslemont's later editors record — with a paradoxical satisfaction. The court, in attempting to expel them, had in fact officially recognised the Bahá'í Faith as an independent religion. The ruling became, in subsequent decades, the principal legal precedent for the recognition of the independent religious status of the Bahá'í community in jurisdictions across the Islamic world.

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The Cairo community, in spite of subsequent restrictions on its activity, persisted through the twentieth century. It became one of the principal centres for the development of Bahá'í Arabic literature, for the training of teachers travelling to other parts of the Arab world, and for the preservation of the historical archives of the early Egyptian Bahá'ís.

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