A comprehensive biography of the Forerunner of the Bahá'í Faith by one of its foremost scholars. In the middle of the nineteenth century Iran, then remote from the West, was convulsed by the appearance of the Báb, whose brief ministry of six years (1844-50) ended in His own martyrdom and that of many thousands of His followers. The Báb was a young merchant who announced that ‘He Whom God shall make manifest’ would soon arise to guide humanity into a new epoch of civilization. The Báb and His religion were observed firsthand by Western diplomats whose official reports and other accounts provide unparalleled data for the study of the rise of a Faith which, in the words of Edward Granville Browne, ‘may not impossibly win a place amidst the great religions of the world’. Wide use has been made of many official documents and material gathered from family archives, accessible to the author as a relative of the Báb.

HM Balyuzi graduated from the American University of Beirut and later took his M.Sc. (Econ.) at London. At the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the Persian service of the BBC He was for many years chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the British Isles and was appointed a Hand of the Cause in 1957. The author of a number of books, Mr Balyuzi passed away in London in 1980.

The is the first book in Mary Perkins' trilogy on the lives of the Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith. The other books in the series are Day of Glory about the life of Bahá'u'lláh and Servant of the Glory about 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Shoghi Effendi described the period of the Báb as 'unique in the whole range of man's religious experience.' Here is a book that makes this gripping and extraordinary story accessible to people of all ages. It can also be used as a first step to reading the Báb's own Writings, The Dawn-Breakers, and works of Shoghi Effendi, such as God Passes By and The Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh.

Millennial fervor gripped many people around the world during the first half of the nineteenth century. While Christians expected the return of Christ, a wave of expectation swept through Islam that the "Lord of the Age" would appear. Both Christians and Muslims believed that a new spiritual age was about to begin.

In Persia, this messianic expectation reached a dramatic climax on May 23, 1844, when a twenty-five-year-old merchant from Shiraz, the Báb, announced that He was the bearer of a long-promised Divine Revelation destined to transform the spiritual life of the human race. Against a backdrop of wide-scale moral decay in Persian society, the Báb’s declaration aroused hope and excitement among all classes. He quickly attracted thousands of followers. Why he did so, and why the events of over 150 years ago "including the Báb’s execution and the massacre of some 20,000 of His followers "have relevance today, is one of the great and dramatic untold stories of our time.