The Declaration of the Bab

On the evening of 22 May 1844, in the Iranian city of Shiraz, a young merchant named Siyyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi declared to a visiting Shaykhi scholar, Mulla Husayn, that he was the Bab, the Gate, a title carrying messianic significance within the Shaykhi school of Twelver Shia Islam from which both men came. Mulla Husayn had traveled to Shiraz seeking a figure many Shaykhis expected to appear, and accounts of the meeting describe him testing Ali Muhammad's claim with detailed theological questions before accepting it, becoming the Bab's first follower.

Over the following months and years, the Bab gathered eighteen initial followers, known as the Letters of the Living, who fanned out to spread word of his claim across Iran and beyond, and he began producing an extensive body of writings elaborating his teaching, including a new book of laws intended to supersede portions of Islamic religious law. His movement attracted increasing numbers of followers, and increasing hostility from both the Iranian clergy, who regarded his claims as heretical, and the state, which came to view the growing Babi movement as a political threat.

The Bab was arrested and confined under increasingly severe conditions in the years following his declaration, moved between several fortresses in remote parts of Iran, while his followers continued to spread his teaching despite mounting persecution that would culminate in his execution in 1850.

The Bab's declaration is observed by Baha'is today as one of the nine holy days of their religious calendar, and Baha'i teaching regards the Bab not as a minor precursor figure but as an independent Manifestation of God in his own right, comparable in station to Muhammad, Jesus or Moses, whose primary historical function was to prepare the way for a still greater figure who would follow. The Bab's own writings explicitly point forward to this coming figure, whom Baha'u'llah, a prominent early Babi, would declare himself to be nineteen years later, in 1863.

This relationship gives the Declaration of the Bab an unusual double significance: it is treated by Baha'is as the founding moment of an independent religion, Babism, and simultaneously as the opening act of a longer unfolding revelation that the Baha'i Faith considers its own true beginning. The Bab's writings and laws, largely superseded in practice by Baha'u'llah's later revelation, are nonetheless preserved and studied within the Baha'i tradition as scripture in their own right, and the Bab himself is venerated as a central, though not final, figure in Baha'i sacred history.

Outside the Baha'i community, the Babi movement is also studied by historians of nineteenth century Iran as a significant religious and social movement in its own right, notable for the scale of persecution it provoked and for the number of educated Iranians it drew into open conflict with both clerical and state authority within a few short years of its founding.