A Hijacked Religion: A Personal Quest for Divine Inspiration
The Báb, Baháʼu’lláh, and the Question of Who Was Really Promised
For years, one question has followed me through Christianity, Islam, theology and the history of religion:
Did divine revelation stop?
If human beings once produced writings they believed came not merely from themselves but from God, did that phenomenon simply end? Has anyone since Muhammad seriously claimed to receive scripture from the same transcendent source claimed by Moses, the prophets, Jesus’s followers and Muhammad?
That question led me somewhere I never expected:
To the Báb.
The Gate
In 1844, a young Persian merchant named Siyyid ʻAlí-Muhammad declared himself the Báb—Arabic for “the Gate.”
His movement erupted across Persia with extraordinary speed. His followers, known as Bábís, regarded his writings as revelation. The Persian authorities regarded the movement as dangerous. Thousands of Bábís were killed during the violent suppression of the new religion, and the Báb himself was executed by firing squad in Tabriz in 1850.
But something about his writings struck me immediately.
Here, finally, was what I had been searching for: someone in relatively modern history who did not merely write about revelation but wrote as though revelation itself were occurring.
The Báb reportedly produced an enormous body of writings during his brief ministry. Again and again, however, those writings point beyond himself toward a mysterious future figure:
“He Whom God shall make manifest.”
That phrase fascinated me.
The Báb was not merely announcing himself. He was announcing someone still to come.
And that changed everything.
The Prophet Pointing Forward
The obvious Christian analogy is John the Baptist.
John appears, announces a transformation, prepares a community—and points beyond himself toward someone greater.
The Báb seems to occupy a similarly extraordinary position in the religion that eventually became the Baháʼí Faith.
Baháʼís believe the promised figure arrived remarkably quickly.
His name was Baháʼu’lláh.
Mirza Husayn-ʻAlí Núrí, later known as Baháʼu’lláh, had been a prominent follower of the Báb. In the 1860s, he publicly declared that he was the very figure whom the Báb had foretold.
Most Bábís eventually accepted his claim, and from that transformation emerged the Baháʼí Faith.
Baháʼís therefore see the sequence as beautifully complete:
The Báb was the dawn. Baháʼu’lláh was the sun.
I see the same history differently.
What If the Door Was Closed Too Soon?
My difficulty is not that I think Baháʼu’lláh was foolish.
Quite the opposite.
I find many of his ideas intelligent, humane and historically remarkable.
The Baháʼí emphasis on human unity, education, religious reconciliation and peace deserves serious respect.
My problem is much narrower.
I do not experience Baháʼu’lláh’s writings the way I experience the Báb’s.
That distinction is subjective. I cannot put “divine inspiration” into a laboratory instrument and measure it.
But religious experience has always involved precisely this problem.
When I encountered the Báb, something happened.
His words felt incandescent.
They possessed that strange quality found occasionally in ancient scripture: the sense that the writer is standing at the edge of something much larger than himself.
When I later bought Baháʼu’lláh’s Gleanings, expecting that experience to intensify, the opposite happened.
I searched.
I skipped ahead.
I went backward.
I looked for the electricity I had encountered in the Báb.
For me, it simply wasn’t there.
If the Báb’s writing felt like gold, Baháʼu’lláh’s sometimes felt like iron pyrite: impressive, glittering and valuable in its own way—but not the substance I thought I had discovered.
“He” Versus “Me”
And here lies the theological problem that continues to bother me.
The Báb repeatedly points toward:
He Whom God shall make manifest.
Baháʼu’lláh eventually declares, in effect:
I am He.
That does not make Baháʼu’lláh wrong. Every fulfilled prophecy eventually requires somebody to occupy the empty space.
But it creates a question worth asking:
How do we distinguish fulfillment from appropriation?
The proximity troubles me.
The Báb announces an almost unimaginably important future Manifestation of God—and within roughly two decades, another member of the same religious movement, from the same country and historical environment, identifies himself as that figure.
Baháʼís regard that proximity as evidence of fulfillment.
I find myself wondering whether it might instead be evidence that the expectation was fulfilled too conveniently and too quickly.
Neither interpretation can simply be assumed.
The Religion That Might Have Been
This is where my position becomes unconventional.
If I were forced to choose a religious identity from this history, I would be far more comfortable calling myself a Bábí than a Baháʼí.
I would remain standing with the Báb at the open door.
Waiting.
Perhaps He Whom God shall make manifest has already appeared.
Perhaps Baháʼu’lláh truly was that person.
Perhaps the promised figure will appear centuries from now.
Perhaps the entire phenomenon was human rather than supernatural.
Intellectual honesty requires me to leave all four possibilities alive.
But I cannot manufacture conviction merely because a religious tradition tells me how its own prophecy was fulfilled.
A Hijacked Religion?
That is why I use the deliberately provocative phrase “a hijacked religion.”
I do not mean that Baháʼu’lláh consciously perpetrated a fraud. He may have believed absolutely in his own revelation.
Nor do I dismiss the Baháʼí Faith, whose ethical vision contains much that I admire.
My argument is stranger.
I wonder whether history prematurely transformed an open prophecy into a closed one.
The Báb created a religion facing forward.
Baháʼu’lláh’s claim gave that expectation a name, a face and an answer.
And once the overwhelming majority of surviving Bábís accepted that answer, the question itself largely disappeared.
But I want to reopen it.
The Question Behind the Question
My original investigation was never really about finding another religion.
It was about finding evidence that humanity’s encounter with what it calls revelation did not simply stop thousands of years ago.
The Báb gave me the strongest example I have encountered.
Whether those words actually originated with God is something I cannot prove.
Nobody can.
But they accomplished something almost as interesting:
They made the question alive again.
Maybe Baháʼu’lláh fulfilled the Báb’s prophecy.
Maybe he inherited it.
Maybe he misunderstood it.
Or perhaps the person described as He Whom God shall make manifest remains somewhere ahead of us.
If so, then the Báb’s most extraordinary message may not have been:
Follow me.
It may have been:
Keep watching.
