Babism

Siyyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi was a young Persian merchant with a reputation for piety when, on the night of 22 May 1844, he told a Shaykhi student named Mulla Husayn that he was the Bab, the Gate to the Hidden Twelfth Imam whose return Twelver Shia Islam had awaited for a thousand years. Mulla Husayn became the first of eighteen disciples the Bab called Letters of the Living, who carried his message across Persia and into Iraq.

Over the following years the Bab's claims grew more radical, moving from Gate of the Imam toward an independent prophetic status, a Manifestation of God in his own right whose revelation superseded the Quran as Muhammad's had superseded earlier scripture. His central work, the Bayan, laid out new laws, including a calendar of nineteen months of nineteen days, and predicted the imminent appearance of a still greater figure, He Whom God Shall Make Manifest. The claims scandalised the Shia clergy, who regarded them as heresy, and the Qajar state, which saw a rapidly growing movement of restless followers. The Bab spent most of his final years imprisoned in remote fortresses, continuing to write and direct followers by letter, while sporadic Babi uprisings hardened both sides. He was tried in Tabriz and executed by firing squad on 9 July 1850, still in his early thirties.

The Bab's execution did not end the movement. Babi communities rose against Qajar forces at Shaykh Tabarsi, Zanjan and Nayriz between 1848 and 1850, each uprising crushed with heavy loss of life. In 1852 two Babis, acting alone in revenge for the executions, attempted to assassinate Nasir al Din Shah; the failed attack unleashed a wave of mass executions and torture across the country, and drove much of the remaining leadership into exile in Ottoman Iraq.

Among the exiles in Baghdad was Mirza Husayn Ali, later known as Baha'u'llah, and his younger half brother Subh i Azal, whom the Bab had nominally named as head of the community. In the Garden of Ridvan outside Baghdad in 1863, Baha'u'llah declared to a small circle of followers that he was He Whom God Shall Make Manifest, the figure the Bab's Bayan had foretold.

Most Babis in Persia and the diaspora accepted this claim over the following years and became Baha'is, while a much smaller group, the Azalis, remained loyal to Subh i Azal and continued to identify as Babis in a narrower sense. Babism as an independent religious community effectively dissolved into the Baha'i Faith after 1863, though a small Azali community persisted in Iran into the twentieth century, and the Bab himself remains venerated within Baha'i teaching as the herald of Baha'u'llah's later revelation.