The Act That Announced a Separation

The gathering at Badasht in the summer of 1848 assembled roughly eighty leading Babis, and its ostensible purpose was practical: what to do about the Bab, who was imprisoned. What it is remembered for is a single act. Tahirih, a poet and theologian who was among the Bab's earliest and most learned followers, appeared before the assembled men without her veil.

Peter Smith's account records the shock this produced, including one man who cut his own throat and fled. The act was read, and was intended to be read, as a declaration rather than a personal liberty: if the law of Islam no longer bound the community, then the Bab's revelation was not a reform within Shia Islam but a new dispensation with its own law. Everything that had been ambiguous about the movement's status was made explicit in a moment that required no theological argument to understand. The atlas records the episode as it is reported in Babi and Baha'i historical writing and in the scholarship that draws on it. Tahirih was later executed, in 1852, in the general suppression that followed the attempt on the Shah's life, and she is remembered in Baha'i tradition as the first woman to give her life for the cause. Her unveiling at Badasht remains the single most cited episode of the whole Babi period, and it is cited for the same reason it shocked the men who witnessed it: it settled a doctrinal question by making it visible.