The Martyrdom of the Bab

On 9 July 1850, the Bab was executed by firing squad in the city of Tabriz, on the order of Iranian civil authorities acting with the concurrence of the religious establishment that had long sought his death as a punishment for what it regarded as heresy. Baha'i accounts of the execution describe the Bab, along with a young follower named Anis who had asked to share his fate, being suspended by ropes against a barracks wall before a regiment of soldiers.

According to these accounts, an initial volley of gunfire severed the ropes suspending the two men without killing either of them, and the Bab was reportedly found afterward in a nearby room, having returned there to finish dictating instructions to a companion, before being brought back for a second attempt, which succeeded. Baha'i sources treat the episode of the first, ineffective volley as a significant and widely reported detail of the martyrdom, while acknowledging it rests on testimony collected after the event rather than on independent contemporary verification.

The execution took place amid the wider wave of violence against the Babi community in this period, and news of the Bab's death, along with the manner of it as later reported by his followers, spread quickly and became a central formative memory for the surviving Babi, and later Baha'i, community.

Following the execution, Baha'i accounts describe the Bab's remains being rescued by followers and kept hidden, moved secretly between locations inside Iran over several decades to protect them from discovery and desecration by hostile authorities, a task Baha'u'llah is said to have directed from exile. The remains were eventually transported out of Iran and, following instructions Baha'u'llah had given before his own death, interred permanently on Mount Carmel in Haifa, in a shrine whose construction Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'u'llah's son and successor, oversaw in the early twentieth century.

The Shrine of the Bab, with its distinctive golden dome completed later in the twentieth century, is today one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Baha'i Faith and, together with the surrounding terraced gardens on Mount Carmel, forms part of a site recognized on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its significance to the Baha'i religious tradition.

The anniversary of the martyrdom is kept as one of the nine Baha'i holy days on which work is suspended, and the event is remembered within Baha'i communities worldwide as one of the central formative sacrifices of their faith's early history, commemorated alongside the Bab's earlier declaration and the later ascension of Baha'u'llah.