Babi

The Babi movement arose in Iran in the 19th century out of Shi'a Islam. It caused a major upheaval in the country and was eventually suppressed. Out of it arose the Baha'i Faith. In 1844, the Bab put forward a religious claim. This claim was received enthusiastically, especially by members of the Shaykhi school of Shi'a Islam, whose founders had prepared their followers for just such an announcement. The Babi movement spread rapidly soon, attracting possibly as many as 100,000 people across Iran and Iraq. The Bab's teaching encountered great opposition, however, from Islamic religious leaders, who perceived it to be heretical and considered the Bab's anticlerical stance a challenge to their authority and wealth. During a turbulent period from 1848 to 1850, there were three major upheavals in which the Babis were greatly outnumbered and crushed by government troops. After a failed attempt on the life of the shah by a small number of Babis in 1852, orders were sent for a general massacre of Babis. The heroism of the Babis made a great impression among 19th-century European intellectuals such as Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold and later E. G. Browne of Cambridge University and Leo Tolstoy, while the female disciple of the Bab, Tahirih Qurrat al-‘Ayn (killed in 1852) continues to be a feminist icon in Iran.

In the Bab's writings, he had frequently mentioned a messianic figure that was to follow him, “He whom God shall make manifest” (mentioned more than 80 times in the Bab's major work, the Persian Bayan; for examples in English translation, see Selections From the Writings of the Báb, pp. 80, 83, 85, 86, 93, 95, 97, 98). In 1863 privately and in 1868 publically, Baha'u'llah (q.v.) claimed to be this figure, and the vast majority (probably 95%) of the Babis accepted this claim and became Baha'is. Among those who rejected this claim, most followed Mirza Yahya Azal and are called Azali Babis. While the Baha'is moved in the direction of obedience to the government and creating an alternative society within their community, some of the Azalis played an important role in the Iranian reform movement and the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to 1909. There are still a few thousand Azalis, almost exclusively in Iran (where they conceal their faith) and among ex-patriot Iranians.

The Babi movement was a native Iranian movement that some say could have brought Iran into the modern world by providing a non-European model of modernization. The pattern of suppression established in respect of the Babis was later applied to the Baha'i religion also, thus setting up more than a century of persecution, which had its own negative effects on Iranian society.