Declaration of the Bab

The Declaration of the Bab commemorates the evening of 22 May 1844, in Shiraz, when a young merchant, Siyyid Ali-Muhammad, declared to his first disciple, Mulla Husayn, that he was the Bab, "the Gate", the bearer of a new revelation from God and the herald of one greater yet to come. Baha'is reckon this the beginning of their religious era and the start of the Baha'i calendar; the Babi movement it opened spread rapidly across Persia and provoked fierce persecution.

The Bab's teaching prepared the way for "Him whom God shall make manifest", whom Baha'is identify with Baha'u'llah, so that the declaration of the Bab is understood as the dawn that announced the coming day. The event is one of the nine Baha'i holy days on which work is suspended, and, following the Bab's own reckoning, its commemoration begins about two hours after sunset, the hour of the declaration itself, an unusual timing that Baha'i communities keep with a gathering, prayers and readings recalling the night. It celebrates a beginning: the opening of what Baha'is regard as a new cycle in the religious history of humanity.

The Bab's declaration in 1844 is not only commemorated annually but functions as the epoch date of the Baha'i calendar itself, the Badi calendar, a system entirely independent of the Gregorian or Islamic calendars, dividing the year into nineteen months of nineteen days each, plus a small number of intercalary days, with each month and day within the month named after a divine attribute, so that the whole structure of Baha'i time-reckoning takes 1844 as its starting point in much the same way the Christian calendar counts years from the birth of Christ or the Islamic calendar from the Hijra.

The Badi calendar was originally established by the Bab himself as part of his own revealed teachings, and Baha'u'llah and later Baha'i institutions further elaborated its rules, including the precise method for determining the calendar's new year, Naw-Ruz, at the spring equinox, so that the Declaration of the Bab functions in Baha'i religious life simultaneously as a specific annual holy day commemorating a historical evening in Shiraz and as the fixed zero point from which the entire distinct Baha'i calendar system counts forward, a dual role few single festival days in other traditions combine so directly.