The Book Two Communities Read Differently

When Baha'u'llah declared in Baghdad in 1863 that he was the one the Bayan had promised, most of the surviving Babi community accepted the claim and became Baha'is, carrying the Bayan forward as a preparatory scripture whose promises Baha'u'llah's own writings were held to fulfil and, in Baha'i understanding, to supersede for ordinary practice.

A minority, the Azalis, followed Mirza Yahya Subh-i-Azal instead and continued to treat the Bayan itself as the standing law rather than as a document pointing beyond itself, a position that left them a far smaller and more scattered community than the Baha'i Faith that grew from the majority reading. The split is therefore not only a dispute over succession but a disagreement about how to read the Bayan's own self-superseding structure, whether its repeated deferrals to a future Manifestation were satisfied once in 1863 or remain, on the Azali view, still open. Modern scholarship on Babism, including the manuscript work of Denis MacEoin, treats the Bayan as the primary source for reconstructing what the Bab actually taught, independent of how either successor community later characterised it.