Despite the explicit written appointment, a minority within the Baha'i community, led by Baha'u'llah's other son Mirza Muhammad Ali, disputed the scope of Abdu'l-Baha's authority and, in some accounts, the legitimacy of the succession itself, a disagreement that produced a lasting, though numerically small, breakaway faction generally referred to within Baha'i history as Covenant-breakers. This group did not achieve lasting institutional recognition or significant following, and the mainstream Baha'i community, organized around the succession the Kitab-i-Ahd established, continued to regard Abdu'l-Baha, and later his own appointed successor Shoghi Effendi, as legitimate.
Baha'i teaching treats the concept of the Covenant, the idea of an explicit, binding line of succession and interpretive authority established directly by the religion's founder, as a central safeguard against exactly the kind of leadership fragmentation that had affected the earlier Babi movement, whose founder, the Bab, had not left comparably explicit succession instructions before his execution.
The written, unambiguous character of Baha'u'llah's appointment is regularly cited within Baha'i religious history as a significant point of institutional distinction between the Baha'i Faith and many other new religious movements that faced more severe and lasting succession disputes after the death of a founding figure, a contrast Baha'i writers have drawn explicitly.