The Declaration of Baha'u'llah at Ridvan

In April 1863, shortly before his forced departure from Baghdad under continued Ottoman pressure to move him further from the Iranian border, Baha'u'llah spent twelve days in the Najibiyyih Garden on the outskirts of the city, a period Baha'is later renamed the Garden of Ridvan, meaning paradise. During this period, according to Baha'i accounts, Baha'u'llah announced to a small circle of family members and followers gathered with him that he was the promised figure the Bab's own writings had foretold, the one Baha'i teaching identifies as the fulfillment of eschatological expectation across multiple religious traditions.

The declaration came after years in which Baha'u'llah had lived in Baghdad as a leading, though not the sole, figure within the Babi exile community there, working to reunify and stabilize a movement that had been severely weakened by the earlier Iranian persecutions and by internal leadership disputes. His announcement at Ridvan marked a decisive shift, distinguishing the followers who accepted his claim, who would become the Baha'i community proper, from other Babis who did not.

Following the Ridvan declaration, Baha'u'llah and his family and followers were moved onward by Ottoman authorities, first to Constantinople and then to Adrianople, before his final, more settled exile and imprisonment at Akka, in present day Israel, where he would spend the rest of his life.

The twelve days of Ridvan are kept by Baha'is as the holiest festival of their calendar, with the first, ninth and twelfth days observed as full holy days on which work is suspended, and the period as a whole is treated as the effective founding of the Baha'i Faith as a religion distinct from the Babi movement that had preceded it. Baha'i teaching holds that Baha'u'llah's declaration fulfilled not only the Bab's own explicit prophecy but also, in Baha'i understanding, messianic and eschatological expectations found across Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other world religions, a claim central to the Baha'i doctrine of progressive revelation.

The declaration also marked a practical turning point for the movement's organization, since Baha'u'llah's growing following required the Babi community's structures, still oriented around the Bab's own laws and teaching, to reorient themselves around a new, superseding revelation, a transition that was not uniformly accepted and that produced a lasting, though numerically much smaller, community of Babis who did not follow Baha'u'llah.

The Ridvan festival remains the occasion each year on which Baha'i local and national administrative bodies are elected, tying the anniversary of the faith's founding declaration directly to the ongoing life of its elected institutions.