A Law Written to Cancel Itself

Most scriptures that found a legal order present their law as settled and durable. The Bayan does the opposite. Across both its Persian and Arabic recensions, composed while the Bab was held first at the fortress of Maku and then at Chihriq in Iranian Azerbaijan, the text repeatedly subordinates its own rulings to the coming of a further Manifestation, a figure it calls He Whom God Shall Make Manifest, whose arrival it treats as so imminent that a believer encountering him should abandon even a Bayanic law still in the process of being implemented.

Practically, this meant the Bayan's legal system, calendar reforms and ritual instructions were never given the decades a scripture usually needs to become custom, because the community the Bab addressed was simultaneously being told to watch for its own supersession. The Bab dated his own dispensation in years from 1844, named months after divine attributes, and set out obligations touching prayer, pilgrimage and the handling of property, but the severity of the persecution that began almost immediately after his declaration meant few of these provisions were tested under ordinary conditions before 1850.