Babism
Babism was founded in 1844 by Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi (1819 –1850) in Shiraz, Iran. The religion grew out of the Shaykhi school of Twelver Shiʿite Islam, which emphasized Gnostic ideas. Many Shiʿites expected that the Twelfth Imam, a supernatural messiah, would return in 1844 CE. In May of that year, Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad declared to a young Shaykhi leader, Mulla Husayn Bushru'i (c.1814–1849), that he (Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad) had a special relationship to the hidden Twelfth Imam, and so was a "Bab" (Arabic for "door"). He wrote a commentary on the sura of Joseph from the Qu'ran that alluded to these assertions. Mulla Husayn and other young Shaykhi leaders accepted his claims.
The Bab went on pilgrimage to Mecca. On his return to Shiraz he was questioned by the Shiʿite religious authorities about his claims, and found ways to appear to recant them. He was placed under house arrest by the governor of Shiraz, and in 1846, when plague struck Shiraz, he was able to relocate to Isfahan. There he gained the patronage of the governor, Manuchehr Khan. He was summoned by Muhammad Shah (reigned 1834–1848) to Tehran . But the prime minister, fearful that the Bab might gain the royal ear, had him imprisoned in a fortress in Azerbaijan instead.
In 1848 the Bab wrote Bayan (Utterance), a book of homilies and laws intended to supersede the Qu'ran, and so made a claim to be a prophet in his own right. He taught that one should try to see God in the faces of others; that interest should be allowed on loans; that unrelated men and women might converse, and that European carpetbaggers should be excluded from some Iranian provinces. By 1849 he was said to have attracted 100,000 Iranians, mostly artisans, merchants, and lower-level clergy, to his religion. Fighting broke out between his partisans and conservative Shiʿites. The state executed the Bab in Tabriz in 1850, and the Babi disturbances were brutally suppressed. In revenge, a cabal of Babis in Tehran attempted unsuccessfully to have Muhammad Shah's successor, Nasir al-Din Shah (1831–1896), assassinated in 1852. In response, Nasir al-Din launched a pogrom against Babis. Altogether, some 5,000 persons perished in Iran during these events. In 1863 one of the Bab's disciples founded the new Bahaʾi religion, which most Babis accepted.
Further Reading
Abbas, Amanat. (1989) Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement, 1844–1850. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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