Baha'i Faith in the Philippines

The Bahá'í Faith in the Philippines is a community of Filipinos, who like their fellow Bahá'ís living in other parts of the world, view the world's major religions as a part of a single, progressive process through which God reveals His will to humanity. They recognize Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i Faith, as the most recent in a line of Divine Messengers that includes Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad. It is composed of Filipinos from various ethnic and religious background. The religion first reached the country in 1921 with a Bahá'í first visiting the Philippines that year. By 1944 the first Bahá'í Local Spiritual Assembly in the country was established in Solano, Nueva Vizcaya. In the early 1960s, during a period of accelerated growth, the community grew from 200 in 1960 to 1000 by 1962 and 2000 by 1963. In 1964 the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the Philippines was elected and by 1980 there were 64000 Bahá'ís and 45 local assemblies. The Bahá'ís have been active in multi/inter-faith developments. The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia) estimates the Bahá'í population of the Philippines at about 272600.

The first mention of the Philippines in Bahá'í literature, is in a letter from 1911 by `Abdu'l-Bahá, the son of the founder of the religion. Later he wrote a series of letters, or tablets, to the followers of the religion in the United States in 1916-1917 asking the followers of the religion to travel to other countries; these letters were compiled together in the book titled Tablets of the Divine Plan. The seventh of the tablets was the first to mention several island nations in the Pacific Ocean. Written on April 11, 1916, it was delayed in being presented in the United States until 1919 — after the end of World War I and the Spanish flu. The seventh tablet was translated and presented by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab on April 4, 1919, and published in Star of the West magazine on December 12, 1919.

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