The Bab and the Babi Movement

The Bab (“the Gate”) was the title taken by Sayyed Ali Mohammad Shirazi (1819–1850), a merchant from Shiraz who in May 1844 announced that he was the gateway to the Hidden Imam of Shi’i Islam and later claimed to be the promised Qa’em himself. His followers, the Babis, spread quickly across Iran; after armed clashes with state troops between 1848 and 1850, the Bab was executed by firing squad in Tabriz in July 1850, and the movement later gave rise to the Bahá’í Faith.

This page describes the movement as a historical event of the Qajar period. It draws on the work of historians of religion and on contemporary Persian and European accounts, and notes where Babi, Bahá’í, Muslim and government sources tell the story differently.

Shiraz and the expectation of the Imam

Ali Mohammad was born into a family of sayyeds, descendants of the Prophet, and merchants in Shiraz. Orphaned young, he was raised by a maternal uncle and worked in the family trade, including several years in the port of Bushehr. He had a reputation for piety and wrote religious works, and he spent time in the Shi’i shrine cities of Iraq.

His ideas grew out of the Shaykhi school, a current in Twelver Shi’ism founded by Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i (d. 1826) and continued by Sayyed Kazem Rashti (d. 1843). The Shaykhis taught that there must always be a perfect intermediary between the faithful and the Hidden Imam, and many expected great events around the year 1260 of the Islamic calendar, a thousand years after the Imam’s disappearance in 260 AH. That year began in January 1844.

The declaration of 1844

When Rashti died without naming a successor, some of his students went looking for one. On the evening of 22 May 1844, in his house in Shiraz, Ali Mohammad told one of them, Molla Hosayn Boshru’i, that he was the bab, the gate to the Hidden Imam. In the following weeks he gathered eighteen disciples, known as the Letters of the Living, who were sent out to spread his claim. Among them was the poet and scholar from Qazvin known as Tahirih or Qurrat al-Ayn, whose life is told on its own page, Tahirih (Qurrat al-Ayn).

The Bab went on pilgrimage to Mecca in late 1844 and returned to Bushehr in May 1845. On his return he was arrested on the orders of the governor of Fars and held in Shiraz. In 1846, during an outbreak of cholera, he left for Isfahan, where the governor, Manuchehr Khan Mo’tamed al-Dowleh, gave him protection until the governor’s death in 1847.

Prison in Azerbaijan and new claims

The government of Mohammad Shah and his minister Hajji Mirza Aqasi then sent the Bab to the far north-west, to the fortress of Maku near the Ottoman and Russian borders, in 1847, and in 1848 to Chehriq. In prison he wrote at length. His central book, the Bayan, set out a new religious law, and in it and in letters of this period he made claims far beyond his first one: that he was the Qa’em, the awaited Imam, and the bearer of a new revelation that replaced the law of Islam.

In the summer of 1848 a meeting of Babi leaders at Badasht in Mazandaran announced the break with Islamic law. Tahirih is said to have appeared there without a veil, an act that shocked even some of the faithful. In July 1848 the Bab was brought before a tribunal of clerics in Tabriz in the presence of the young crown prince, Naser al-Din. Accounts of the session differ. He was punished with the bastinado, and according to one report he afterwards signed a recantation; Babi and Bahá’í writers dispute the meaning of this text.

The uprisings of 1848–1851

Mohammad Shah died in September 1848, and in the uncertain months that followed Babis and government forces clashed in three places. Historians still debate whether the Babis were defending themselves or preparing for a holy struggle at the end of time; the sources, written mostly by participants on each side, support different readings.

• Shaykh Tabarsi, Mazandaran (1848–1849). Several hundred Babis, led by Molla Hosayn and Mohammad Ali Barforushi (Qoddus), fortified a shrine and held off royal troops for months. Most were killed, including the leaders, when the siege ended in May 1849.
• Nayriz, Fars (1850). Babis led by Sayyed Yahya Darabi (Vahid) fought local forces; many were killed.
• Zanjan (1850–1851). The longest struggle, in which a large part of the town’s population followed the cleric Molla Mohammad Ali Zanjani (Hojjat) and resisted government troops for months.

The number of Babis killed in these years is uncertain. Bahá’í sources have often spoken of as many as 20,000 dead; Denis MacEoin and other historians consider a figure in the low thousands more likely. Soldiers and townspeople also died in large numbers.

The execution in Tabriz

The new chief minister, Amir Kabir, decided that the movement would not end while its leader lived. The Bab was brought from Chehriq to Tabriz and, at noon in July 1850, was suspended by ropes in a barracks square with a young follower, Mohammad Ali Zonuzi, and shot by a firing squad. Several accounts, including those used by MacEoin, report that the first volley only cut the ropes; a second regiment then carried out the execution. Babi and Bahá’í tradition gives this event great significance.

After the Bab

In August 1852 a small group of Babis attempted to kill Naser al-Din Shah. The attack failed and was followed by mass arrests and executions in Tehran, in which Tahirih was among those killed. Many surviving Babis went into exile in Ottoman Baghdad.

There the movement divided. Most Babis eventually followed Mirza Hosayn Ali Nuri, known as Baha’u’llah, who from 1863 announced that he was the figure foretold by the Bab; his followers became the Bahá’ís. A minority followed his half-brother Mirza Yahya, Sobh-e Azal, and were called Azalis; some of them later played a part in Iran’s reform movements and the Constitutional Revolution.

How historians approach the movement

Western scholarship began with the Comte de Gobineau and the Cambridge orientalist E. G. Browne in the nineteenth century, and was developed by Abbas Amanat, whose Resurrection and Renewal (1989) treats Babism as a messianic movement rooted in Shi’i thought and Qajar social tensions, and by Denis MacEoin, who studied its texts and early sources. Muslim writers have generally viewed the movement as heresy; Bahá’í authors see the Bab as a prophet and forerunner. Historians agree that it was the most important religious movement in nineteenth-century Iran and a sharp challenge to both the clergy and the Qajar state, at a time when Naser al-Din Shah was beginning his long reign.