A Conference That Divided Those Who Attended It

Badasht did not produce agreement. The gathering split over how far the break with Islamic law should be carried, with Quddus, one of the Bab's eighteen Letters of the Living, and Tahirih taking positions that the accounts present as opposed, and a number of those present leaving. The man who had organised and partly financed the gathering, and who later took the name Baha'u'llah, is described in Baha'i sources as having worked to hold the two sides together and as having given each of the participants a new name during the conference.

Historians of the movement treat Badasht as one of the points, alongside the Bab's own escalating claims made from prison in the same period, after which Babism could no longer be understood as a current within Twelver Shia Islam. The atlas records the conference under the Babi movement rather than under the Baha'i Faith, which did not yet exist, and notes that the Baha'i and Azali branches that later divided the Babi community each read the events of 1848 in their own way. What is not disputed is that the gathering happened, roughly who was there, and that the question it raised was settled by an act rather than by a text. The atlas therefore records the conference as attested and the detailed accounts of what was said at it as coming from partisan sources written afterwards.