The Bab

The Bab, the title means the Gate, was Siyyid Ali-Muhammad Shirazi (1819-1850), a young merchant of Shiraz who, in May 1844, declared to his first disciple that he was the bearer of a new revelation from God. Baha'is date the beginning of their era, and of the Baha'i calendar, from that night. For Baha'is he is not merely a forerunner but an independent Manifestation of God in his own right, whose distinct mission was to prepare the way for one greater to come after him.

His claim resonated powerfully with currents of Shia expectation of the Qa'im or Mahdi, the awaited one of the house of the Prophet, and within a few years the Babi movement had spread across Persia and gathered tens of thousands of followers. His earliest disciples, eighteen in number, are honoured as the Letters of the Living; among them was the poet and reformer Tahirih, who became a celebrated advocate of the new faith and of the emancipation of women.

The rapid growth alarmed both the Shia clergy and the state, and the movement met with mounting and ferocious persecution, culminating in armed sieges of Babi communities and mass killings.

The Bab's teaching developed swiftly and radically. He came to declare himself not only the Gate to the Hidden Imam but the Qa'im himself, and then a Messenger bringing a new revelation that abrogated the law of Islam, a decisive and, to the Shia religious establishment, blasphemous break.

His principal work is the Bayan (the Exposition), an unfinished scripture setting out laws and doctrine for the new dispensation. Its most striking feature is its own provisionality: much of the Bab's writing points forward to a coming figure he called He whom God shall make manifest, for whose sake the whole Babi dispensation existed and to whom his followers were to give their allegiance when he appeared. This built into the movement, from the start, an orientation toward a future fulfilment, the role that Baha'u'llah would claim in 1863.

The Babi teaching combined a mystical and numerological vision, an intense preoccupation with the letters and hidden meanings of scripture, with reformist social impulses. Its abrogation of Islamic law, its new calendar, and its claim of ongoing revelation after the Prophet Muhammad, whom Islam holds to be the seal of the prophets, set it in direct and irreconcilable conflict with the religious authorities of Persia.

The Bab was arrested, examined by the clergy, and held in remote fortresses in the northwest of Persia. In 1850, on the order of the authorities, he was brought to Tabriz and executed by firing squad in the public square, together with a young follower. Baha'i accounts relate that the first volley left him unharmed, cutting only the ropes that bound him, and that he was found afterward completing a conversation with a scribe before a second regiment carried out the sentence, an episode Baha'is hold as miraculous and non-Baha'i observers, including a Western witness, reported in more measured terms. He was thirty years old.

The persecutions that followed cost the lives of many thousands of Babis. The movement, bereft of its founder, eventually found its resolution in the claim of Baha'u'llah, whom the great majority of Babis came to accept as the promised one; from them the Baha'i Faith grew, while a small remnant, the Azalis, followed a rival claimant.

The Bab's remains were, after long concealment, brought at last to Mount Carmel above Haifa, where the golden-domed Shrine of the Bab is today, with the resting place of Baha'u'llah near Akka, one of the two holiest sites of the Baha'i world.