“To Israel He was neither more nor less than the incarnation of the 'Everlasting Father'; … to Christendom Christ returned 'in the glory of the Father,' to Shí'ah Islám the return of the Imám Ḥusayn; to Sunní Islám the descent of the 'Spirit of God'; to the Zoroastrians the promised Sháh-Bahrám; to the Hindus the reincarnation of Krishna; to the Buddhists the fifth Buddha.”
Two calendars, one year
A Christian solar count and an Islamic lunar count, run independently, arrive at the same year — the year the Báb declared His mission.
Christianity — Daniel's 2,300 daysDaniel 8:14
“Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (Daniel 8:14). Applying the day-year principle (Numbers 14:34) from the 457 BC decree of Artaxerxes to rebuild Jerusalem, 2,300 years land on 1844 — the same arithmetic that led William Miller's tens of thousands of Adventists to await Christ that very year, ending in the “Great Disappointment” of October 1844.
“…the fulfillment of the vision of Daniel took place in the year A.D. 1844, and this is the year of the Báb's manifestation according to the actual text of the Book of Daniel.”
The classic popular treatment is William Sears, Thief in the Night (1961). Honest footnote: the coincidence of dates is established history; its significance is the contested interpretive step — Adventists resolved 1844 differently.
Islam — the Qá'im and the year sixty1260 AH
Shí'ah Islam awaited the Qá'im (the Mahdi), to be followed by the return of the Imám Ḥusayn. A tradition cited in Bahá'í literature has Imám Ja'far-i-Ṣádiq asked when the Qá'im would appear: “Verily, in the year sixty His Cause shall be revealed, and His name shall be noised abroad.” The year sixty — 1260 AH — is 1844 AD. Bahá'ís identify the Báb as the Qá'im and Bahá'u'lláh as the return of Ḥusayn.
Nabíl, The Dawn-Breakers, ch. III (provenance of the hadith is contested by Muslim critics)Judaism — Carmel, and an exile no one choosesIsaiah 35:2
“…the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD” (Isaiah 35:1–2). Bahá'u'lláh — whose title means the Glory of God — was banished by two Muslim empires, through four successive exiles He did not choose, to arrive on 31 August 1868 at the prison-city of 'Akká, on the plain below Mount Carmel. He Himself applied the verses: “Carmel, in the Book of God, hath been designated as the Hill of God, and His Vineyard… The Strong City is 'Akká.” The world centre of His Faith now stands on Carmel.
Bahá'u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf · God Passes By, ch. XIZoroastrianism, Hinduism, BuddhismSháh-Bahrám · Kalki · Maitreya
Zoroastrianism awaits Sháh-Bahrám, the world-renewer; Bahá'u'lláh descended from Persia's pre-Islamic nobility, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the identification explicit in tablets to Zoroastrian believers. Hinduism awaits Kalki, the tenth avatar, at the close of the Kali Yuga; Shoghi Effendi records the Bhagavad-Gita's “Most Great Spirit, the Tenth Avatar, the Immaculate Manifestation of Krishna.” Buddhism awaits Maitreya: “a Buddha named Maitreye, the Buddha of universal fellowship” who would “reveal His boundless glory” — read by Bahá'ís as matching a Faith whose entire object is universal fellowship.
Each parent tradition's own scholars place these figures elsewhere in time; Bahá'í authors argue the chronologies are symbolic. Fuller treatments: Momen, Buddhism and the Bahá'í Faith; Fozdar, Buddha Maitrya-Amitabha Has Appeared.
Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, ch. VIAnd the Báb's own promise1844 → 1863
The Báb's entire revelation revolves around One still to come — “Him Whom God shall make manifest”:
“I swear by the sanctified Essence of God that every true praise and deed offered unto God is naught but praise and deed offered unto Him Whom God shall make manifest.”
Nineteen years later Bahá'u'lláh claimed that station, and the overwhelming majority of the Báb's followers recognized Him — the one case where the promise and its claimed fulfillment sit a single generation apart, in the full light of documented history.