The Báb : The Herald of the Day of Days
- 1st ed.
- Oxford George Ronald 1973
- xiv, 256 p. illus.
A comprehensive biography of the Forerunner of the Bahá'í Faith by one of its foremost scholars. In the middle of the nineteenth century Iran, then remote from the West, was convulsed by the appearance of the Báb, whose brief ministry of six years (1844-50) ended in His own martyrdom and that of many thousands of His followers. The Báb was a young merchant who announced that ‘He Whom God shall make manifest’ would soon arise to guide humanity into a new epoch of civilization. The Báb and His religion were observed firsthand by Western diplomats whose official reports and other accounts provide unparalleled data for the study of the rise of a Faith which, in the words of Edward Granville Browne, ‘may not impossibly win a place amidst the great religions of the world’. Wide use has been made of many official documents and material gathered from family archives, accessible to the author as a relative of the Báb.
The first full-length biography in English of the Prophet of Shiraz, whose mission as founder of the Bábí religion and as forerunner of Bahá'u'lláh caused a social and political upheaval in mid-nineteenth-century Iran. The author consulted official documents of government archives and material gathered from records of the family of the Báb, accessible to the author by dint of his kinship to the Báb.