Baháʼí Faith in Uzbekistan

History in the region

A part of the Russian Empire

The earliest relationship between the Baháʼí Faith and Uzbekistan comes under the sphere of the country's history with Russia. During that time, when the region was variously called Asiatic Russia or Russian Turkestan as part of the Russian Empire, the history stretches back to 1847 when the Russian ambassador to Tehran, Prince Dimitri Ivanovich Dolgorukov, requested that the Báb, the herald to the Baháʼí Faith who was imprisoned at Maku, be moved elsewhere; he also condemned the massacres of Iranian religionists, and asked for the release of Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith. Within the lifetime of Baháʼu'lláh the religion was established in Samarkand to which Mirzá Abu'l-Faḍl later traveled. While in Samarkand in 1892 Mirza Abu'l-Faḍl wrote a book, Fassl-ul-Khitab (Conclusive Proof), in response to the questions of Mirza Haydar-Ali of Tabriz. It was in Samarkand, too, that he debated a Protestant preacher. In 1910 the Samarkand Baháʼí community elected its first assembly in addition to having a school, and built a center which held four meetings a week.

One tablet of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá says to the assembly of Samarkand:

Do ye know in what cycle ye are created and in what age ye exist? This is the age of the Blessed Perfection and this is the time of the Greatest Name!… If we are not happy and joyous at this season, for what other season shall we wait and for what other time shall we look? This is the time for growing; the season for joyous gathering! …

Soviet period

In Tashkand, a community of Baháʼís had expanded to about 1900 members, supporting a library, Persian and Russian language schools, and large meetings were being advertised with the permission of government authorities. Baháʼí literature published in Tashkand included several works of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá. By 1938, after numerous arrests and a policy of oppression of religion, Baháʼís across the Soviet Union were being sent to prisons and camps or sent abroad. Baháʼí communities in 38 cities across Soviet territories ceased to exist. In Tashkent Baháʼís were interrogated and imprisoned. Aqa Habibullah Baqiroff of Tashkent was sentenced to ten years imprisonment "in the neighbourhood of the North Sea and the polar forests."

Following the ban on religion, the Baháʼís, strictly adhering to their principle of obedience to legal government, abandoned its administration and its properties were nationalized. By 1946 in all Turkestan only Ashgabat, Samarkand and Tashkand communities continued. Baháʼís had managed to re-enter various countries of the Eastern Bloc through the 1950s, following a plan of the head of the religion at the time, Shoghi Effendi. By 1956 there was only a vague mention of an operating community of Baháʼís in Uzbekistan.

A pair of small communities were listed in 1963 - Tashkand and an isolated Baháʼí in Fergana. The Universal House of Justice, the head of the religion since 1963, then recognized small Baháʼí communities in much of the USSR: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. At this time in the USSR there were 200 Baháʼís.