# The Social Protest of the Babis

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-19 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Social Protest of the Babis, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> The Social Protest of the Babis
> 
> Marshall G. S. Hodgson
> published in The Venture of Islam, vol. 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times pp. 304-306, 310
> 
> Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974
> 
> [page 304]
> 
> The social protest of the Babis
> 
> The Iranian and neighbouring lands in the Iraq and the Caucasus, long so central to Islamicate
> culture, were relatively isolated from the earlier impact of the new Europe. European trade,
> indeed, had been vigorous in Safavi times (there had even been Catholic missions), but its
> importance had been reduced in the eighteenth century, with the internal political
> disruption; by the end of that century, European interests were represented largely
> indirectly—by way of the more central parts of the Ottoman empire, or of India, or of the
> Volga region. At the same time, the cultural tradition' of the area, heartland of the Persianate
> literary tradition and given to Shi'i loyalties, was relatively independent of that in the areas
> most immediately affected by the new Europe. The Iraq and Iran maintained well into the
> nineteenth century a high level of philosophical and religious creativity almost unparalleled
> in other Muslim areas. Even early in the. nineteenth century, though the position of the
> commercial classes was being undermined, the 'ulama' were making serious developments in
> jurisprudence, and the Persians honoured a major new philosopher (Mulla Hadi, 1797/8
> 1878) in the school of Mulla Sadra. It is only after the 1830S that, by subsequent
> 
> [page 305]
> 
> Shi'i reckoning, the writers must be relegated to the position of epigones.
> 
> We have taken note of one of the philosophical minds of the late eighteenth century' also
> influenced by Mulla Sadra; that of Shaykh Ahsa'i. He developed a Shar'ism that differed
> strikingly from that of the Wahhabis and Sanusis, his contemporaries, in that it was not only
> deeply 'Alid-loyalist but also highly philosophical, looking to a long-term spiritual
> improvement of mankind. But like theirs, it was reformist, and opposed to the Sufi tariqahs.
> Indeed, it was explicitly chiliastic, and, like theirs, it took on great subsequent significance
> under the impact of the Western Transmutation. It was in an atmosphere still relatively
> uncorrupted by the Western presence, yet keenly aware of it as restricting the power of the
> Islamic community and presenting new and unexamined possibilities of living, that many
> Shi'is of the Shaykhi school in the 1830S were expecting, more insistently than ever, the
> renewed presence of the Bab, the special spokesman of the Hidden Imam, who would order
> society aright again. A young man of great theological and spiritual gifts, 'Ali-Mohammad of
> Shiraz (1819-50), won considerable following among them and in the tradesmen classes of
> the town population generally. 'Ali-Mohammad, as Bab, proclaimed (beginning in 1844) a
> new and quite liberal Shari'ah, a new set of symbolisms to replace those of Shi'i Islam, and
> the expectation of a new prophetic dispensation of social justice soon to be realized among his
> followers.
> 
> The Babis, as his followers were called, were impatient to see the new justice realized. They
> preached vigorously and soon came into open conflict with the Shi'i 'ulama' and then with the
> Qajar government. 'Ali-Mohammad was arrested but in prison he continued to be the
> inspiration of a devoted band of idealists. There were riots and finally extensive revolt; 'Ali-
> Mohammad was executed; the movement was suppressed with much bloodshed in 1852.
> 
> After 'Ali-Mohammad's death, the majority of his followers gradually accepted the lead of
> another young man, Baha'ullah (1817-92), who then, in 1863, proclaimed himself the new
> prophet predicted by 'Ali-Mohammad; those Babis who accepted him were henceforth known
> as Bahá'ís (the others, as Azali Babis). The Bahá'ís retained the social mission of the Babis,
> which had favoured the town merchant and artisan classes and allowed women a much freer
> role than had traditional Islam. (A Babi heroine publicly tore off her veil in 1848.) But
> they abandoned the idea of immediate revolt within Iran, looking rather to a more general
> conversion of the world by the disciples of the new order. Baha'ullah already had a
> cosmopolitan outlook; on his exile from the Qajar realm, the Ottoman government detained
> him, as potentially subversive, settling him finally at Acre in Syria; there he attracted
> converts from beyond Iran itself, though the largest concentration of followers of the new
> faith were always to be found in Iran. He was succeeded (in the Shi'i manner) by his son,
> who won many converts from
> 
> [page 306]
> 
> among Europeans (especially in the United States), whose tastes he pleased with a
> universalist liberalism in religion (he discouraged killing, either of humans for political
> reasons, as in war, or of animals for food). He in turn was succeeded by his grandson,
> trained at Oxford, who organized the faith on a world-wide basis with institutions designed to
> expand, with persistent missionary effort, into a world political order founded on faith.
> 
> The Shaykhi religious vision continued to be the starting-point for that of the Bahá'ís, whose
> demand for a universalist moral outlook and a liberal social order reflects a Sufi-type
> emphasis on the imponderables of the spiritual life as combined, by such movements as the
> Shaykhi, with the 'Alid-loyalist concern for a spiritual organization of just social order. But
> by the later part of the century the movement had become deeply tinged with the liberalism
> of nineteenth-century Europe and came to form, in some measure, an instrument for
> introducing the moral sides of technicalistic Modernity into western Iran. Eventually Bahá'í
> schools, partly staffed with American converts, shared with those of the Western
> missionaries (and of Zoroastrians, staffed from India) the education of a new liberal
> generation, attracting many non-Bahá'í students.
> 
> Jamaluddin Afghani and the concessions to Europeans
> 
> For the period in which insurrectionary Babism was being superseded by education-minded
> Bahá'ísm was that in which accommodation with the West was becoming fashionable even in
> the Qajar realm. In 1848, Nasiruddin, the new shah (1848-96), launched an effort at
> ministerial responsibility and generally tried to Europeanize the forms of his regime. In
> 1852 was founded what was intended to be a government institute of higher education on
> Western lines; from 1840 on, the various Western-sponsored schools began to multiply,
> and, from 1858, local students were sent to Europe in far greater numbers than in the
> Napoleonic period. Already after 1823, printing had become widespread and after 1851
> there were rudimentary newspapers; by and large, the Westernization of the surface of
> urban life proceeded in Tehran rather as in Istanbul or Cairo, if somewhat less intensely.
> The shah himself made extensive tours through Europe and wrote with amusement, respect,
> and a certain amount of admiration of what he had seen, using a simple literary style which
> the reading of French was commending to fashionable circles.
> 
> Yet not only had the Islamicate cultural tradition retained greater vitality in the Qajar state
> than elsewhere. Those Persians and Azeris who were not under direct Russian rule did, even
> late in the century, remain more nearly untouched by the new international forces than
> either the inhabitants of the Ottoman empire or those of India. Meanwhile, older forms of
> land tenure remained more nearly in the condition they had reached after the end of Safavi
> times...
> 
> [page 310]
> 
> ...To get out of the tobacco concession without destroying his credit in the European capital
> market, the shah had to pay compensation to the tobacco monopoly. To this end he felt it
> necessary to take out a British loan secured on the southern customs—an expedient less
> evidently obnoxious, but in fact perhaps even more dangerous, as the Egyptians had
> discovered in the time of Khediv Isma'il. But the alliance endured, of the 'ulama' with the new
> intellectuals; the shah's continued policy of mortgaging the realm became increasingly
> unendurable. Afghani had been invited to Istanbul and there found himself almost silenced as
> an involuntary guest of 'Abdulhamid. But a close disciple of Afgham, after a trip to Istanbul
> where he consulted with the master, assassinated the shah in 1896 and, after some initial
> shock, was acclaimed as a tyrannicide by the Bazar, whose viewpoint the 'ulama' did not
> discourage. The Qajar government requested extradition from the Ottomans of certain others
> of Afghani's followers, who happened to be (Azali) Babis (though Afghani was presumably
> hostile to the Babi faith as such, as disrupting Islam); they were executed. Afghani himself
> was not yielded up, but died the next year in circumstances which led the Iranians to believe
> Sultan 'Abdulhamid had had him done away with...
> 
> METADATA
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> Views9684 views since posted 2001; last edit 2025-01-20 16:21 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../hodgson_venture_islam_three;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Citation: ris/561
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> — *The Social Protest of the Babis (Used by permission of the curator)*