Shiraz

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.

Shiraz holds the graves of the two poets most Iranians can quote, and visiting them is not quite a literary activity. Hafez, who died in 1390, wrote lyrics saturated with wine, the beloved, the hypocrite preacher and the tavern of ruin, and Iranians have used the collected Divan as an oracle for centuries: the book is opened at random, at Nowruz or on the longest night of the year, and the poem found there is read as an answer. People do this at his tomb, where a reader will perform the opening for a small fee. Saadi, buried in the same city, wrote the Gulistan, a book of moral tales in prose and verse that was the standard schoolbook of the Persian speaking world.

Shiraz also has a serious philosophical genealogy. A succession of teachers there from the fifteenth century onward worked on the relation between revelation, demonstration and mystical insight, and the tradition culminated in Mulla Sadra, born in the city around 1571, who argued that existence rather than essence is fundamental, that being admits of degrees, and that substance itself is in motion, and whose synthesis has dominated Shia philosophical teaching ever since.

The city's principal Shia shrine is Shah Cheragh, over the grave of a brother of the eighth imam, with a mirrored interior of great brilliance. It is a busy pilgrimage site and was the target of an armed attack in 2022 in which worshippers were killed.