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| One of Tehran's gates, circa 1920s |
This fierce, nation-wide controversy had assumed alarming
proportions when Muhammad Sháh finally succumbed to his illness, precipitating
by his death the downfall of his favorite and all-powerful minister, Ḥájí Mírzá
Aqásí, who, soon stripped of the treasures he had amassed, fell into disgrace,
was expelled from the capital, and sought refuge in Karbilá. The seventeen year
old Náṣiri’d-Dín Mírzá ascended the throne, leaving the direction of affairs to
the obdurate, the iron-hearted Amír-Nizám, Mírzá Taqí Khán, who, without
consulting his fellow-ministers, decreed that immediate and condign punishment
be inflicted on the hapless Bábís. Governors, magistrates and civil servants,
throughout the provinces, instigated by the monstrous campaign of vilification
conducted by the clergy, and prompted by their lust for pecuniary rewards, vied
in their respective spheres with each other in hounding and heaping indignities
on the adherents of an outlawed Faith. For the first time in the Faith’s
history a systematic campaign in which the civil and ecclesiastical powers were
banded together was being launched against it, a campaign that was to culminate
in the horrors experienced by Bahá’u’lláh in the Síyáh-Chál of Ṭihrán and His
subsequent banishment to ‘Iráq. Government, clergy and people arose, as one
man, to assault and exterminate their common enemy. In remote and isolated
centers the scattered disciples of a persecuted community were pitilessly
struck down by the sword of their foes, while in centers where large numbers
had congregated measures were taken in self-defense, which, misconstrued by a
cunning and deceitful adversary, served in their turn to inflame still further
the hostility of the authorities, and multiply the outrages perpetrated by the
oppressor. In the East at Shaykh Tabarsí, in the south in Nayríz, in the west
in Zanján, and in the capital itself, massacres, upheavals, demonstrations,
engagements, sieges, acts of treachery proclaimed, in rapid succession, the
violence of the storm which had broken out, and exposed the bankruptcy, and
blackened the annals, of a proud yet degenerate people.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘God
Passes By’)
