The Birth of the Bab

Siyyid Ali Muhammad, who would take the title the Bab twenty five years later, was born on 20 October 1819 in Shiraz, in southern Iran, into a family of cloth merchants with a reputation for piety. He was orphaned of his father at a young age and raised largely by an uncle, also a merchant, and Baha'i biographical accounts describe him from childhood as unusually devout and reflective, drawn to religious study beyond what was typical for a boy being prepared for a career in trade.

As a young man he entered the family cloth business, working for a period in the port city of Bushehr, while continuing to pursue religious and mystical interests, including study within the Shaykhi school of Twelver Shia Islam, a current of thought that anticipated the imminent appearance of a promised, divinely guided figure. This background shaped the environment within which he would, in 1844, declare his own claim to that station.

Baha'i tradition treats his birth itself as a significant and celebrated occasion, one of the nine annual holy days observed by Baha'i communities worldwide, commemorating the arrival of a figure Baha'i teaching regards as an independent Manifestation of God and the direct forerunner of Baha'u'llah.

The Birth of the Bab is dated according to the Islamic lunar calendar, on the first day of Muharram, rather than fixed to a specific date on the Baha'i solar calendar Baha'u'llah later established, a distinction that gives it, along with the Birth of Baha'u'llah observed the following day on the lunar calendar, a different position relative to the Gregorian calendar each year, unlike the majority of Baha'i holy days, which fall on fixed dates within the nineteen month Baha'i solar year.

Because the two births fall on consecutive days of the Islamic lunar calendar, Baha'i communities generally observe them together as a linked pair of holy days, often called the Twin Birthdays, with joint celebrations reflecting the close theological relationship Baha'i teaching holds between the Bab and Baha'u'llah, the former understood as directly preparing the way for the latter's own mission.

The continued use of the lunar calendar for these two specific anniversaries, within a religion that otherwise organizes its ritual year around Baha'u'llah's own solar calendar, reflects their origin within a Perso-Islamic religious environment and preserves a direct calendrical link to that historical context even as the wider Baha'i Faith developed its own independent calendrical system.