Bahá'í Faith in the United Kingdom

The Bahá'í Faith in the United Kingdom started in 1898 when Mrs. Mary Thornburgh-Cropper (d. 1938), an American by birth, become the first Bahá'í in England. Through the 1930s, the number of Bahá'ís in the United Kingdom grew, leading to a pioneer movement beginning after the Second World War with sixty percent of the British Bahá'í community eventually relocating. At the 2011 UK Census, there were 5,021 Bahá'ís in England and Wales.

Scholar Moojan Moomen has identified the first account in the West as being January 8, 1845 as an exchange of British diplomatic reports not published in the newspapers. This was an account of the first Letter of the Living to be sent on a mission by the Báb, whom Bahá'ís accept as a precursor of their religion. He was the second Letter of the Living and first Babí martyr, Mullá `Alí-i-Bastámí. These exchanges were between Sir Henry Rawlinson who wrote first to Sir Stratford Canning. Follow-up exchanges continued through to April 1846 where diplomatic records of events end. Ottoman state archives affirm his arrival in Istanbul where he is then sentenced to serve in the naval ship yards at hard labor - the Ottoman ruler refusing to banish him as it would be "difficult to control his activities and prevent him spreading his false ideas."

The first newspaper/public reference to the religious movement began with coverage of the Báb which occurred in The Times on 1 November 1845 which relied on Muslim reactions to the new religion. This newspaper account was echoed many times in local and far distant newspapers into early 1846.

In 1853 there was an event with caused great suffering on Babís. The Babís were blamed for an attempted assassination of the Shah of Persia. Recent scholarship has identified a fringe element distinct from all the major aspects of the religion, its community and leadership at the time. Nevertheless, coverage in newspapers at the time often echoed the Persian government's view blaming the Babís and Babís in large numbers were in fact executed as a result.

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