Birthday I

The Birth of the Bab, Part I

By John Taylor; 2007 October 16, 01 Ilm, 164 BE

This is one of the most joyous times of the Baha'i year. Every year on the 20th of October -- the 5th day of Ilm, or Knowledge, the twelfth month in the Badi' calendar, a calendar that the Bab Himself invented -- Baha'is around the world stop our daily routine, take a day off work, and celebrate the birthday of the Bab.

This holy day celebrates one of the most momentous events in the spiritual history of the human race, the birth of Manifestation of God, specifically, the One Who would break the dawn, give His life to usher in our collective spiritual maturity. The Bab, at his birth in Shiraz, Iran, was named Siyyid Ali Muhammad. His family, now called Afnan, were direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, known as Siyyids, or "chiefs." In spite of this high religious heritage, they had no official place in the religious hierarchy of their country. They made their living as merchants, what we might call today a combination of importer and shopkeeper. The Bab's birth took place early in the morning, reportedly before dawn, on this day in 1919. A dawn prayer prescribed in the Qu'ran seems to foreshadow this early morning event because it mentions Ali Muhammad's title, the "Bab," or gate. The Qu'ran asks that all Muslims say this invocation "in the small watches of the morning" so that soon the Lord will raise them "to a station of Praise and Glory,"

"Say: `O my Lord! Let my entry be by the Gate of Truth and Honour, and likewise my exit by the Gate of Truth and Honour; and grant me from Thy Presence an authority to aid (me).' And say: `Truth has (now) arrived, and Falsehood perished: for Falsehood is (by its nature) bound to perish.'" (Q17:80-81, tr: Yusuf Ali)

Later in His life the Bab even adopted another dawn prayer, written by one of the twelve Imams, focusing on over nineteen attributes of God, as the framework for His calendar, which is known today as the Badi' or Baha'i calendar. In spite of this strong association with pre-dawn events, Baha'is are mercifully left free to pick a convenient time celebrate the happy occasion, as long as it takes place at some time during the twenty four hour period beginning at sunset of the 19th and ending on sunset the next day.

A recurrent theme in the Writings of the Bab is -- appropriately enough, in view of when His birth took place -- the image of a rising sun at dawn. He says, for example,

"Verily, the sun is but a token from My presence so that the true believers among My servants may discern in its rising the dawning of every Dispensation." (The Bab, Selections, 159)

In this insight we discern glimmerings of the new idea that divine revelation is progressive, that the sun dawns at diverse points on the horizon but always remains one sun. This is the essence of monotheism. The sun's dawning points vary, they progress through different points of the horizon as the seasons progress, and in different constellations through the millennia, but there is ever only One God. This God is not defined by where His light originates, but stands Independent. This idea later became central to Baha'u'llah's teaching in the Iqan, and Abdu'l-Baha gave it tremendous emphasis in His own expositions of Baha'i belief.

It is perhaps for this reason that Baha'u'llah spoke of the Bab in His Ishraqat as the Point from where all knowledge grows,

"Praise be to God who manifested the Point [the Bab] and caused to proceed therefrom the knowledge of all that was and shall be.... He is that Point which God hath made to be an Ocean of light unto the faithful among His servants, and a Ball of Fire unto the deniers among His creatures and the impious among His people. (Tablets, 102)

We are fortunate to have the story of His birth and childhood in the Bab's own words, albeit tersely described. In a prayer the Bab wrote:

"Thou art aware, O My God, that since the day Thou didst call Me into being out of the water of Thy love till I reached fifteen years of age I lived in the land which witnessed My birth [Shiraz]. (Selections, 180-181)

We cannot know whether His peculiar expression, "called into being out of the water of God's love," refers to His conception or His birth, but the idea that God's love is life giving water is echoed in all scriptures, and especially the Qu'ran. It says, for instance,

"And God has created every animal from water: of them there are some that creep on their bellies; some that walk on two legs; and some that walk on four. God creates what He wills for verily God has power over all things." (Q24:45, Yusuf Ali)

Just as our physical bodies consist mostly of water, so the soul depends upon pure waters flowing to and from the love of the Creator. Jesus’ story of Lazarus, a beggar callously left by the rich master of the house to starve at his door, speaks of this. Even the dogs try to help Lazarus by licking his sores, but the rich man, though pious, cares nothing, does nothing. Christ depicts the plight after death of this heartless member of the elite; he is stricken by unquenchable thirst and cries, "Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire." Some passages of the Qu'ran, like the following, stress this same lesson about our need for watery love in the next world:

"The Companions of the Fire will call to the Companions of the Garden: "Pour down to us water or anything that God doth provide for your sustenance." They will say: "Both these things hath God forbidden to those who rejected Him." (Q7:50, Yusuf Ali)

The idea that life and love are born of water extends back into the ancient mists of mythology. For example, Sandro Botticelli's famous painting, The Birth of Venus, depicts the birth of Venus, the goddess of love, which has just taken place in the midst of the sea. Similarly, the life and Revelation of the Bab are depicted in His own Writings as a mountain stream that gushes out, disappears, but in doing so invisibly irrigates the "delight of His eyes," that is, Baha'u'llah and His Cause:

"O Qurratu'l-'Ayn! Say: Verily I am the `Gate of God' and I give you to drink, by the leave of God, the sovereign Truth, of the crystal-pure waters of His Revelation which are gushing out from the incorruptible Fountain situate upon the Holy Mount. And those who earnestly strive after the One True God, let them then strive to attain this Gate. (Q83:25-6) Verily God is potent over all things..." (Qayyumu'l-Asma', Selections from the Writings of the Bab, 50)

So, we know by the Bab's own testimony that He was born out of the pure waters of God's love. However, that only tells us whence He came. The question remains: who was He? We will take that up in the second part of this series.