On the evening of 22 May 1844, in a house in Shiraz, a young merchant named Sayyid Ali Muhammad told a visiting seminarian that he was the one the man had been searching for. The seminarian, Mulla Husayn, belonged to a school of Shia thought that expected the imminent appearance of a figure connected with the hidden imam, and he had come to Shiraz testing candidates. He accepted the claim, and Babis and Bahais count that evening as the beginning of a new religious dispensation.
The title Bab means gate, and the claim it originally implied, access to the hidden imam, escalated over the following years into a claim to be a manifestation of God in his own right, bringing a new book, the Bayan, and abrogating Islamic law. That was intolerable to both the clergy and the state. The movement spread quickly and was suppressed with great violence; the Bab was executed by firing squad at Tabriz in 1850, and thousands of his followers were killed in the years around it.
The house where the declaration took place was preserved as the holiest Bahai site in Iran and was destroyed after the revolution of 1979, with a road and buildings put over the site. The anniversary of the declaration is one of the nine Bahai holy days on which work is suspended, and the Bahai calendar counts its years from 1844, so a date set in this city organises the religious year of a community now spread across most of the world.