The Babi-State Conflict at Shaykh Tabarsi

Abstract

In May 1844 a young merchant from Shiraz, Sayyid ᶜAli Muhammad, made the claim that he was the Bāb (Gate). To his contemporaries the term referred to an intermediary between the community of believers and the messianic figure of Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi. By 1848 the religious movement that formed around him had attracted tens of thousands of adherents. The September of that year saw the beginning of the Shaykh Tabarsi episode in Mazandaran, which became the first of four major clashes between the Babis and the Qajar state.The purpose of this article is to investigate the background, immediate circumstances, and events of the Shaykh Tabarsi conflict. It examines those developments, both in the political sphere and within the Babi community, that led to the outbreak of open warfare in 1848, and focuses on the question of the objectives of the Babi participants in the conflict.