Azalī Bābīs

views updated

Azalī Bābīs. Followers of Mīrzā Yaḥyā Nūrī, called Ṣubḥ-i Azal (Morn of Eternity) (1830/1–1912), the appointed successor of the Bāb (see BĀBĪS). After the Bāb's execution (1850), Babism ceased to be a united movement. Ṣubḥ-i Azal was involved with the militant faction which unsuccessfully plotted the assassination of the Shah (1852). In the consequent purge he went into hiding, later joining his older half-brother Bahāʾuʾllāh in Baghdād. Increasingly overshadowed by Bahāʾuʾllāh, he maintained the leadership of a small radical faction of Bābīs. He was exiled to Ottoman Cyprus in 1868 and died in Famagusta on 29 Apr. 1912. Some of his younger disciples became free thinkers and were prominently involved in the political opposition to the Qajar regime which culminated in the Iranian constitutional movement of the early 1900s.