Birth of the Bab

The Birth of the Bab commemorates the birth in 1819, at Shiraz in Persia, of Siyyid Ali-Muhammad, who in 1844 declared himself the Bab and founded the Babi religion, understood by Baha'is as the herald of their own faith. It is one of the two most joyful anniversaries of the Baha'i year, the Twin Birthdays (or Twin Holy Days), the other being the birth of Baha'u'llah. By the Islamic lunar dates on which the two were born, their birthdays fell on consecutive days, and Baha'is keep them together on two successive days, set each year by a lunar reckoning tied to the new moon of an appointed month, so that in the Gregorian calendar they usually fall in October or November.

The day is one of the nine holy days on which work is suspended, and is observed with prayers, readings and joyful gathering. The keeping of the two births together, rather than on separate fixed dates, is itself significant to Baha'is, expressing the intimate link between the Bab and Baha'u'llah, the herald and the one he heralded, whose missions the faith regards as two aspects of a single divine purpose. The Twin Birthdays are among the happiest occasions of the Baha'i calendar.

Until a formal ruling by the Universal House of Justice, the Baha'i Faith's supreme governing institution, took effect starting in 2015, the Twin Birthdays were set by a specifically lunar calculation tied to the Islamic calendar, causing the pair of holy days to shift by roughly eleven days earlier against the Gregorian calendar each year in the way lunar Islamic dates generally do; the 2014 ruling fixed the Twin Birthdays instead to specific, non-moving positions within the Baha'i Badi calendar itself, stabilising their placement relative to the Baha'i year and ending the year-on-year lunar drift that had applied under the older reckoning.

The change was part of a broader administrative clarification of the Badi calendar's practical application that the Universal House of Justice undertook in the early twenty-first century, addressing a number of open questions about how the calendar the Bab had originally established should actually be applied in Baha'i communities worldwide, and it illustrates a distinctive feature of Baha'i religious governance generally, that a single living administrative institution can issue a binding ruling settling a calendar question directly, a form of centralised doctrinal and practical authority that few of the other traditions covered in this atlas possess in comparable form.