What were the true meaning of the claims of the Bab?
This is the question that His followers were debating when they decided to gather at the village of Badasht in 1848.
Was he announcing a new Revelation or was he the promised reformer of Islam? If this was a new Revelation, what were its teachings and who were its leaders?
There had been extensive correspondence between the Bab and Mirza Husayn Ali (Baha’u’llah) regarding preparations for this gathering.
The Bab had revealed His holy book, the Bayan (the ‘Exposition’), that previous winter of 1847-48 from His prison cell in the fortress of Mahku but it took time for it to disseminate.
Tahirih arrived with her personal escort after having traveled across the main east-west highway near the foothills of the Alborz Mountains.
To avoid suspicion, Mirza Husayn Ali followed a few days later. He rode with several other Babis and the supplies needed for the gathering.
Mirza Husayn Ali rented three gardens in Badasht, a rural village that had been a resort for the nobility. There were several small gardens with a large open area in the middle where the Babis could gather to meet.
One was for himself, another for Quddus, and a third for Tahirih; other believers pitched their tents near them. Each garden had a large tent with mats and carpets. There was a stream which ran through the great open field.
Eighty-one Babis eventually gathered at Badasht in the beginning of the summer of 1848. Quddus, the 18th Letter of the Living of the Bab and among his most respecetd, arrived after hearing about the location of the gathering from Babis whom he had met on the road.
In the intense discussions that were about to take place.
Quddus was seen as the exponent of the more conservative view that the Bab was the renewal of Islam, while Tahirih expressed a more iconoclastic view—that He was the bringer of a new Revelation.
Click the video below for an overview of Baha’i origins; the Conference of Badasht is at 6:42.