History is often sad as well:
The Babis do not appear initially to have planned out anything like
a national revolt or rebellion, though once the uprising was in full
swing in Zanjan the Babis seem to have become dedicated
revolutionaries, and they minted coins in the name of the Lord of the
Age. The Bab himself did acknowledge holy war as a principle in his
religion, but he never appears to have proclaimed it. Babi violence
is more usefully seen as local and as part of a larger tendency to
faction fighting in Qajar urban quarters than as millennialist
uprising. The possible exception here is the band of 400 seminarians
and artisans who set out from Mashhad in 1848. If, this small force
had revolutionary aspirations, they were wholly unrealistic. Still,
that the Babi movement spread so quickly throughout the Qajar empire,
and the simultaneous outbreak of violence in several parts of the
country, allowed the first Iran-wide urban revolts of the modern era.
Something closer to a planned revolt occurred in 1852. It was
planned jointly by Shaykh `Ali `Azim Turshizi, then the most widely
recognized successor to the Bab in Tehran and Mirza Yahya Nuri (Subh-i
Azal), a fiery young nobleman from Mazandaran and son of Mirza Buzurg
Nuri, the former governor of Burujird and Luristan, The plot involved
the assassination of Nasiru'd-Din Shah and a coordinated uprising in
the Nur district near the capital, in which the Babis of Takur took up
arms. The assassination plot went awry when the assassins hit with
grapeshot but failed to kill their royal target, and the Qajar army
crushed the uprising in Takur, nearly razing it and putting it under
martial law and surveillance for the rest of the century.[36]
Although the revolt in Nur was if anything strategically more
important than the ones in Shaykh Tabarsi, Nayriz, and Zanjan, it has
been suppressed in subsequent Babi-Baha'i historiography in part
because its goal of regicide and perhaps its utter failure reflected
badly on the Nuri family, which produced the two major successors to
the Bab, Azal (who led the revolt) and his older brother Mirza Husayn
`Ali "Baha'u'llah" Nuri (who opposed the revolt but was ignored).
Once the Bab was executed, many Babis appear to have become
radicalized and the 1852 revolt suggests that some even contemplated
attempting to take over the government and establishing a theocratic
republic, since they attempted to assassinate the shah and to stage an
uprising in Mazandaran without having any obvious successor to the
throne in mind. Adas insists that millennialist revolts are not
centrally about social class, being mass movements and involving all
sorts of people from various walks of life, and Walbridge has also
noted that he could not find clear evidence of specifically class
conflict during the Babi revolt in Zanjan. Still, it seems to me also
the case that many Babis of the urban middle and lower middle strata
detested the Qajar high administrators, governors, big landlords, and
high clergy, in part on class grounds. In return the Qajars viewed
the Babis as rabble. The assassination plot and the Nur uprising were
the Babis' undoing, since the slightly wounded but extremely outraged
Nasiru'd-Din Shah instituted a vast nation-wide pogrom against Babis
and suspected Babis. MacEoin estimated that between 1848 and 1855 or
so some 5,000 Babis perished. The rest mostly went underground or
forsook the new religion to return to a safer Shi`ism. Later on, in
the early twentieth century the few remaining Babis were among the
most vociferous proponents of the Constitutional Revolution.
>From the book:
Imagining the End : Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East
to Modern America (Hardcover)
by Abbas Amanat (Editor), Magnus Bernhardsson (Editor)
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