Sources for the 1848 Bábí community — contemporary accounts outside the Táríkh-i-Jadíd?

Original Poster yesterday

I'm researching the early Bábí communities and am finding the usual secondary sources thin on contemporary non-Bábí accounts of the events of 1848 — particularly the Conference of Badasht and its immediate aftermath. The Táríkh-i-Jadíd (New History) and the Nabil Narrative are invaluable, of course, but both have the obvious limitation of being internal Bahá'í sources written decades after the events. I'm looking for contemporary Persian, Ottoman, or European diplomatic sources that might corroborate or complicate the picture.

I know Moojan Momen did some work with British diplomatic archives in the 1980s and Denis MacEoin has written on the Bábí period extensively, but I'm not sure how systematically the Iranian state archives (now held in Tehran) have been mined for this period. Has anyone worked with those directly, or know of scholars who have?

7 Replies

David H. 22 hours ago

Momen's work on the British Foreign Office records is still probably the best entry point for European sources — he published extensively on this in World Order magazine in the 80s, and the documentation is quite detailed for the Báb's trial and execution, less so for Badasht specifically. For Iranian state sources, you might try Abbas Amanat's 'Resurrection and Renewal' (1989) — he did extensive archival work in Tehran and his citations are unusually transparent for the period.

Kaveh M. 18 hours ago

There's also some relevant material in the Ottoman archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) regarding the northern Iranian frontier in the late 1840s — though it's mostly administrative rather than theological. I've seen passing references to disturbances in the Mazindaran region. Whether those correspond to the Shaykh Tabarsi episode is hard to confirm without closer reading. If you're not already working with Turkish I'd say find a collaborator — the documents are in Ottoman script and mostly undigitized.