the Bab

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1819 - 1850

Charismatic leader of an Iranian religious movement that began in 1844.

Sayyid Ali Mohammad Shirazi was born on 20 October 1819 in Shiraz (southwestern Iran). His father, a clothier, had married into a clan of long-distance merchants. His family had adopted the Shaykhi school of Shiʿism, as had his elementary teacher, Shaykh Abid. Sayyid Ali Mohammad had an uneven education and rebelled against dry scholasticism and the minutiae of Arabic grammar. He engaged in the family trade, spending 1835 to 1840 in the Iranian port city of Bushehr on import - export affairs. But his real interests were religious devotions and Shaykhi-style dreams and visions of the imams (the holy figures of Shiʿism). He settled his accounts and left for the shrine cities of Iraq in 1841, in part to meet Sayyid Kazim Rashti, leader of the esoteric and millenarian Shaykhi school of Shiʿism. He spent eleven months there, but appears to have spent little time in seminary study, concentrating on devotions at the shrines. His family put pressure on him to return to Shiraz, which he did in 1842, where they married him off to Khadija Khanom and set him up once again in business. He continued to think and write about esoteric religious subjects and began to have a following as a charismatic figure.

When Rashti died in Karbala, in early 1844, a section of the Shaykhis, convinced that the appearance of the Muslim Mahdi (messiah) was near, set off in search of him. One of these, Molla Hosayn Bushru'i, stopped in Shiraz on his way to Kirman and accidentally met Sayyid Ali Mohammad, who put forward a charismatic claim. When Molla Hosayn became his disciple on 22 May 1844, followed by other Shaykhi seminarians in his circle, he was recognized as al-Bab, "the Gate" - an ambiguous term implying divine inspiration. Belief in his spiritual leadership spread rapidly among urban craftspeople and merchants, as well as some peasants.

The Bab went on pilgrimage later in 1844 to proclaim his mission to the sharif of Mecca but proved unable to get his attention. In the summer of 1845, he returned to Shiraz, but the municipal authorities, alarmed by his claims, put him under house arrest. In 1846 and 1847 he resided in Isfahan, gaining the protection of the Qajar governor there, who attempted to arrange an interview with the shah for him. The chief minister, however, thwarted this meeting, and ordered the Bab to be imprisoned in Maku, in Azerbaijan. There the Bab openly claimed to be the Mahdi and a manifestation of God and wrote his book of laws, the Bayan, intended to supplant the Qurʿan. In July 1848, he was interrogated by a group of clerics and pronounced a heretic. He spent the last two years of his life imprisoned in the even more remote fort of Chihriq.

In 1849 and 1850, several outbreaks of violence occurred between Shiʿites and Babis, and the state began to feel the need to act decisively. On 8 July 1850, the government ordered the Bab executed in Tabriz. He was taken during a conversation with a disciple, then suspended against a wall with ropes. The first firing squad missed him, severing his ropes and allowing him to disappear, which many in the crowd took as a divine sign. He was found completing his words to the disciple. Another firing squad had to be commissioned to complete the execution.

The religion he founded was brutally persecuted in Iran and driven underground. From the late 1860s, most Babis became Bahaʾi, which remains Iran's largest non-Muslim religious community.

Bibliography

Amanat, Abbas. Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844 - 1850. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

— JUAN R. I. COLE

Name given to Mirza Ali Muhammad (1819-1850), who led the movement that was the direct precursor of the Baha'i Faith. Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), the founder of the Baha'i Faith, was a member of the babi religion, which was in turn heavily influenced by the traditions of Shia Islam, the form of Islam dominant in Iran (formerly Persia). The Bab, meaning the "Gate" (of revelation), was martyred for his faith.

Sources:

Balyuzi, H. M. The Bab: The Herald of the Day of Days. Oxford: G. Ronald, 1973.

Selections from the Writings of the Bab. Comp. Habib Taherzadeh. Haifa, Israel: Bahai World Center, 1976.