The Claims (or Claim?) of Siyyid ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi - the Bab

Among the more controversial and challenging questions that surround the figure known as the ‎Bab is that of his claim (or claims). What was in fact the mission of the Bab? The Bab’s ‎detractors suggest that he suffered from an identity crisis. The claims he advanced later in his ‎short ministry (1844 – 1850), his critics and opponents allege, openly contradict those he made in ‎‎1844–5, especially on the question of his relationship to the Hidden Imam. In his later works, the ‎Bab himself has directly addressed the issue of why his at times cryptic declarations about ‎himself, found in his earlier writings, appear to contradict the clear and evident pronouncements ‎he advanced in the last two years of his life. There are clues in Bab’s earliest writings that suggest ‎that, even from the beginning of his ministry, rather than claiming to be the ‎vicegerent to the ‎Hidden Imam, the Bab declared his station to be that of the promised Qa’im, a new divine ‎emissary, and the gate (bab) to the figure identified explicitly in his later writings as “him whom ‎God shall make manifest.” While some of the writings of the Bab and his detractors that address ‎this issue have been studied, others have not. A related and thus far unanswered question ‎remains: How did the Bab’s closest followers understand his station? Recently two treatises, one ‎in Arabic, written circa 1845 by the Bab’s most eminent disciple, Tahirih Qurrat al-‘Ayn (d. ‎‎1850), and the other in Persian written by the young man who would be executed alongside the ‎Bab, Muhammad-‘Ali Zunuzi, surnamed Anís (d. 1850), have been unearthed that shed light on ‎the issue. This paper will introduce these treatises and explore still other works written by the ‎Bab and by his contemporaries in Iran and Iraq that address the question.‎