The French Emperor had, it was reported, flung away Baha'u'llah's Tablet,
and directed his minister, as Baha'u'llah Himself asserts, to address to
its Author an irreverent reply. The Grand Vizir of 'Abdu'l-'Aziz, it is
reliably stated, blanched while reading the communication addressed to his
Imperial master and his ministers, and made the following comment: "It is
as if the king of kings were issuing his behest to his humblest vassal
king, and regulating his conduct!" Queen Victoria, it is said, upon
reading the Tablet revealed for her remarked: "If this is of God, it will
endure; if not, it can do no harm." It was reserved for Nasiri'd-Din
_Sh_ah, however, to wreak, at the instigation of the divines, his
vengeance on One Whom he could no longer personally chastise by arresting
His messenger, a lad of about seventeen, by freighting him with chains, by
torturing him on the rack, and finally slaying him.
To this despotic sovereign Baha'u'llah, Who denounced him as the "Prince
of Oppressors," and as one who would soon be made "an object-lesson for
the world," had written: "Look upon this Youth, O king, with the eyes of
justice; judge thou, then, with truth concerning what hath befallen Him.
Of a verity, God hath made thee His shadow amongst men, and the sign of
His power unto all that dwell on earth." And again: "O king! Wert thou to
incline thine ears unto the shrill of the Pen of Glory and the cooing of
the Dove of Eternity ... thou wouldst attain unto a station from which
thou wouldst behold in the world of being naught save the effulgence of
the Adored One, and wouldst regard thy sovereignty as the most
contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning it to whosoever might desire
it, and setting thy face toward the horizon aglow with the light of His
countenance." And again: "We fain would hope, however, that His Majesty
the _Sh_ah will himself examine these matters, and bring hope to the
hearts. That which We have submitted to thee is indeed for thine highest
good."
This hope, however, was to remain unfulfilled. It was indeed shattered by
a reign which had been inaugurated by the execution of the Bab, and the
imprisonment of Baha'u'llah in the Siyah-_Ch_al of Tihran, by a sovereign
who had repeatedly instigated Baha'u'llah's successive banishments, and by
a dynasty that had been sullied by the slaughter of no less than twenty
thousand of His followers. The _Sh_ah's dramatic assassination, the
ignoble rule of the last sovereigns of the House of Qajar, and the
extinction of that dynasty, were signal instances of the Divine
retribution which these horrid atrocities had provoked.
The Qajars, members of the alien Turkoman tribe, had, indeed, usurped the
Persian throne. Aqa Muhammad _Kh_an, the eunuch _Sh_ah and founder of the
dynasty, was such an atrocious, avaricious, bloodthirsty tyrant that the
memory of no Persian is so detested and universally execrated as his
memory. The record of his reign and that of his immediate successors is
one of vandalism, of internal warfare, of recalcitrant and rebellious
chieftains, of brigandage, and medieval oppression, whilst the annals of
the reigns of the later Qajars are marked by the stagnation of the nation,
the illiteracy of the people, the corruption and incompetence of the
government, the scandalous intrigues of the court, the decadence of the
princes, the irresponsibility and extravagance of the sovereign, and his
abject subservience to a notoriously degraded clerical order.
The successor of Aqa Muhammad _Kh_an, the uxorious, philoprogenetive
Fath-'Ali _Sh_ah, the so-called "Darius of the Age," was a vain, an
arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous number of his
wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his incalculable
progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon his country. He it
was who commanded that his vizir, to whom he owed his throne, be cast into
a caldron of boiling oil. As to his successor, the bigoted Muhammad
_Sh_ah, one of his earliest acts, definitely condemned by the pen of
Baha'u'llah, was the order to strangle his first minister, the illustrious
Qa'im-Maqam, immortalized by that same pen as the "Prince of the City of
Statesmanship and Literary Accomplishment," and to have him replaced by
that lowbred, consummate scoundrel, Haji Mirza Aqasi, who brought the
country to the verge of bankruptcy and revolution. It was this same _Sh_ah
who refused to interview the Bab and imprisoned Him in A_dh_irbayjan, and
who, at the age of forty, was afflicted by a complication of maladies to
which he succumbed, hastening the doom forecast in these words of the
Qayyum-i-Asma: "I swear by God, O _Sh_ah! If thou showest enmity unto Him
Who is His Remembrance, God will, on the Day of Resurrection, condemn
thee, before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very truth,
find on that day any helper except God, the Exalted."
Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, a selfish, capricious, imperious monarch, succeeded
to the throne, and, for half a century, was destined to remain the sole
arbiter of the fortunes of his hapless country. A disastrous obscurantism,
a chaotic administration in the provinces, the disorganization of the
finances of the realm, the intrigues, the vindictiveness, and profligacy
of the pampered and greedy courtiers, who buzzed and swarmed round his
throne, his own despotism which, but for the restraining fear of European
public opinion and the desire to be thought well of in the capitals of the
West, would have been more cruel and savage, were the distinguishing
features of the bloody reign of one who styled himself "Footpath of
Heaven," and "Asylum of the Universe." A triple darkness of chaos,
bankruptcy and oppression enveloped the country. His own assassination was
the first portent of the revolution which was to restrict the prerogatives
of his son and successor, depose the last two monarchs of the House of
Qajar, and extinguish their dynasty. On the eve of his jubilee, which was
to inaugurate a new era, and the celebration of which had been elaborately
prepared, he fell, in the shrine of _Sh_ah 'Abdu'l-'Azim, a victim to an
assassin's pistol, his dead body driven back to his capitol, propped up in
the royal carriage in front of his Grand Vizir, in order to defer the news
of his murder.
"It was whispered," writes an eyewitness of both the ceremony and the
assassination, "that the day of the _Sh_ah's celebration was to be the
greatest in the history of Persia.... Prisoners were to be released
without condition, and a general amnesty was to be proclaimed; peasants
were promised exemption from taxes for at least two years. ...the poor
were to be fed for months. Ministers and officials were already intriguing
for honors and pension from the _Sh_ah. Shrines and sacred places were to
open their gates to all wayfarers and pilgrims, and the siyyids and mullas
were taking cough medicine to clear their throats to sing and chant the
praises of the _Sh_ah in all the pulpits. The mosques were swept and
prepared for general meetings and public prayers in behalf of the
Sovereign.... Sacred fountains were enlarged to hold more holy water, and
the rightful authorities had foreseen that many miracles might take place
on the day of the jubilee, with the aid of these fountains.... The _Sh_ah
had declared ... that he would renounce his prerogatives as despot, and
proclaim himself 'The Majestic Father of all the Persians.' The city
authority was to relax its vigilant watch. No record was to be kept of the
strangers who flocked to the caravanserais, and the population was to be
left free to wander the streets during the whole night." Even the great
mujtahids had, according to what had been reported to that same
eyewitness, "decided, for the time being, to discontinue persecuting the
Babis and other infidels."
Thus fell the one whose reign will remain forever associated with the most
heinous crime in history--the martyrdom of that One Whom the Supreme
Manifestation of God proclaimed to be the "Point round Whom the realities
of the Prophets and Messengers revolve." In a Tablet in which the pen of
Baha'u'llah condemns him, we read: "Among them [kings of the earth] is the
King of Persia, who suspended Him Who is the Temple of the Cause [the Bab]
in the air, and put Him to death with such cruelty that all created
things, and the inmates of Paradise, and the Concourse on high wept for
Him. He slew, moreover, some of Our kindred, and plundered Our property,
and made Our family captives in the hands of the oppressors. Once and
again he imprisoned Me. By God, the True One! None can reckon the things
which befell Me in prison, save God, the Reckoner, the Omniscient, the
Almighty. Subsequently he banished Me and My family from My country,
whereupon We arrived in 'Iraq in evident sorrow. We tarried there until
the time when the King of Rum [Sultan of Turkey] arose against Us, and
summoned Us unto the seat of his sovereignty. When We reached it there
flowed over Us that whereat the King of Persia rejoiced. Later We entered
this Prison, wherein the hands of Our loved ones were torn from the hem of
Our robe. In such a manner hath he dealt with Us!"
The days of the Qajar dynasty were now numbered. The torpor of the
national consciousness had vanished. The reign of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah's
successor, Muzaffari'd-Din _Sh_ah, a weak and timid creature, extravagant
and lavish to his courtiers, led the country down the broad road to ruin.
The movement in favor of a constitution, limiting the sovereign's
prerogatives, gathered force, and culminated in the signature of the
constitution by the dying _Sh_ah, who expired a few days later.
Muhammad-'Ali _Sh_ah, a despot of the worst type, unprincipled and
avaricious, succeeded to the throne. Hostile to the constitution, he, by
his summary action, involving the bombardment of the Baharistan, where the
Assembly met, precipitated a revolution which led to his deposition by the
nationalists. Accepting, after much bargaining, a large pension, he
ignominiously withdrew to Russia. The boy-king, Ahmad _Sh_ah, who
succeeded him, was a mere cipher and careless of his duties. The crying
needs of his country continued to be ignored. Increasing anarchy, the
impotence of the central government, the state of the national finances,
the progressive deterioration of the general condition of the country,
practically abandoned by a sovereign who preferred the gaieties and
frivolities of society life in the European capitals to the discharge of
the stern and urgent responsibilities which the plight of his nation
demanded, sounded the death knell of a dynasty which, it was generally
felt, had forfeited the crown. Whilst abroad, on one of his periodic
visits, Parliament deposed him, and proclaimed the extinction of his
dynasty, which had occupied the throne of Persia for a hundred and thirty
years, whose rulers proudly claimed no less a descent than from Japhet,
son of Noah, and whose successive monarchs, with only one exception, were
either assassinated, deposed, or struck down by mortal disease.
Their myriad progeny, a veritable "beehive of princelings," a "race of
royal drones," were both a disgrace and a menace to their countrymen. Now,
however, these luckless descendants of a fallen house, shorn of all power,
and some of them reduced even to beggary, proclaim, in their distress, the
consequences of the abominations which their progenitors have perpetrated.
Swelling the ranks of the ill-fated scions of the House of U_th_man, and
of the rulers of the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg, and the
Napoleonic dynasties, they roam the face of the earth, scarcely aware of
the character of those forces which have operated such tragic revolutions
in their lives, and so powerfully contributed to their present plight.
Already grandsons of both Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah and of Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz
have, in their powerlessness and destitution, turned to the World Center
of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, and sought respectively political aid and
pecuniary assistance. In the case of the former, the request was promptly
and firmly refused, whilst in the case of the latter it was unhesitatingly
offered.