The Bab's declaration is observed by Baha'is today as one of the nine holy days of their religious calendar, and Baha'i teaching regards the Bab not as a minor precursor figure but as an independent Manifestation of God in his own right, comparable in station to Muhammad, Jesus or Moses, whose primary historical function was to prepare the way for a still greater figure who would follow. The Bab's own writings explicitly point forward to this coming figure, whom Baha'u'llah, a prominent early Babi, would declare himself to be nineteen years later, in 1863.
This relationship gives the Declaration of the Bab an unusual double significance: it is treated by Baha'is as the founding moment of an independent religion, Babism, and simultaneously as the opening act of a longer unfolding revelation that the Baha'i Faith considers its own true beginning. The Bab's writings and laws, largely superseded in practice by Baha'u'llah's later revelation, are nonetheless preserved and studied within the Baha'i tradition as scripture in their own right, and the Bab himself is venerated as a central, though not final, figure in Baha'i sacred history.
Outside the Baha'i community, the Babi movement is also studied by historians of nineteenth century Iran as a significant religious and social movement in its own right, notable for the scale of persecution it provoked and for the number of educated Iranians it drew into open conflict with both clerical and state authority within a few short years of its founding.