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.