Martyrdom of the Bab

The Martyrdom of the Bab commemorates the execution of the Bab by firing squad in the public square of Tabriz in 1850, when he was about thirty years old, put to death by the Persian authorities amid the violent suppression of the Babi movement. Baha'i accounts recount the event with a detail the tradition holds dear: that a first volley left the Bab unharmed and his interrogator gone from the spot, and that only a second regiment carried out the sentence, a story Baha'is regard as attesting the significance of his life and death. His remains were eventually brought, decades later, to Mount Carmel in Haifa, where the golden-domed Shrine of the Bab is now one of the holiest places of the faith.

The day is one of the nine Baha'i holy days on which work is suspended, and, following the tradition that the execution took place around noon, its commemoration is held at midday. It is a solemn observance, kept with prayers and readings recalling the Bab's sacrifice, in contrast to the joy of the Twin Birthdays and the Declaration. For Baha'is the martyrdom seals the Bab's role as the herald who gave his life to prepare the way, and it holds a central place in their memory of the heroic and persecuted early age of their religion.

The Bab's execution in 1850 did not end the Persian state's campaign against his followers; after an attempted assassination of the Shah in 1852 by a small group of Babis acting, by most accounts, without any centrally sanctioned plan, Persian authorities launched a much broader wave of executions and mob violence against Babis across the country, killing large numbers of ordinary followers who had no connection to the assassination attempt, a persecution documented by foreign diplomats and travellers present in Persia at the time and remembered within Baha'i history as one of the formative traumas of the religion's earliest decades.

Baha'u'llah himself was imprisoned in Tehran during this same wave of persecution, an episode during which Baha'is believe he received his first intimations of his own prophetic mission, so that the violent aftermath of the Bab's martyrdom this entry describes is, in the Baha'i historical narrative, directly and causally connected to the beginning of Baha'u'llah's own religious calling, tying the solemn commemoration of the Bab's death to the very origin of the larger faith that grew out of the movement he had founded.

The golden dome that now crowns the Shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel was not part of the original mausoleum built to receive his remains; it was added in stages under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi, the faith's appointed Guardian, with the distinctive gilded dome completed in 1953, decades after the Bab's remains were first interred there, so the building's now-iconic silhouette is a mid-twentieth-century addition to a much earlier structure.