This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On the night of May 22 to 23, 1844, in his home in Shiraz, then part of Persia and in present day Iran, a young merchant named Siyyid Ali Muhammad declared himself the Bab, the bearer of a new divine revelation. His declaration was made to a visiting cleric, Mulla Husayn, who became his first follower that same night.
The new movement spread with striking speed. Within five months, seventeen more disciples recognized the Bab's claim the same way Mulla Husayn had, and the eighteen together became known as the Letters of the Living. They carried the young faith, the Babi Faith, out from Shiraz across Iran and into Iraq.
The Babi Faith did not remain a self contained movement. It stands as the direct forerunner of the Baha'i Faith, whose own founder, Baha'u'llah, proclaimed his own mission in Baghdad nineteen years later, in 1863, building on the religious ground the Bab and his first followers had broken.
What the Bab's 1844 declaration in Shiraz changed was the beginning of an entirely new line of religious movements in Persia. A single nighttime conversation between a merchant and a visiting cleric grew, within five months, into eighteen missionaries carrying the new faith across two countries, and within a generation into the founding claim of a second, larger religion.