Wahid Azal

    Original Persian on his Telegram page.   The Bāb may be approached from many different perspectives: the history of religion, the emergence of the Bābī movement, the rise of the Bahāʾī Faith, the suppression of religious dissent, or the role played by certain Bābīs and Azalīs in the Constitutional Revolution. Yet before all these, perhaps He ought to be considered neither from the standpoint of faith nor that of denial, but as a profoundly Iranian spiritual experience—an experience born of the Shiʿi tradition, the language of mysticism, the expectation of the Promised One, and the enduring historical yearning of the Iranian soul for the opening of a new Gate. Sayyid ʿAlī Muḥammad of Shiraz, the young man who would later be executed at Tabriz, first called Himself the Bāb—the Gate, the Threshold, the Passage. That very title may provide the key to understanding the first layer of His experience. The Bāb understood Himself as a Gate, standing between Occu...