Let us first consider the visitations that have marked the falling
fortunes of _Sh_i'ih Islam. The iniquities summarized in the beginning of
these pages, and for which the _Sh_i'ih ecclesiastical order in Persia is
to be held primarily answerable; iniquities which, in the words of
Baha'u'llah, had caused "the Apostle [Muhammad] to lament, and the Chaste
One [Fatimih] to cry out," and "all created things to groan, and the limbs
of the holy ones to quake"; iniquities which had riddled the breast of the
Bab with bullets, and bowed down Baha'u'llah, and turned His hair white,
and caused Him to groan aloud in anguish, and made Muhammad to weep over
Him, and Jesus to beat Himself upon the head, and the Bab to bewail His
plight--such iniquities indeed could not, and were not to, remain
unpunished. God, the Fiercest of Avengers, was lying in wait, pledged "not
to forgive any man's injustice." The scourge of His chastisement, swift,
sudden and terrible, was, at long last, let loose upon the perpetrators of
these iniquities.
A revolution, formidable in its proportions, far-reaching in its
repercussions, amazing in the absence of bloodshed and even of violence
which marked its progress, challenged that ecclesiastical ascendency
which, for centuries, had been of the essence of Islam in that country,
and virtually overthrew a hierarchy with which the machinery of the state
and the life of the people had been inextricably interwoven. Such a
revolution did not signalize the disestablishment of a state-church. It
indeed was tantamount to the disruption of what may be called a
church-state--a state that had been hopefully awaiting, even up till the
moment of its expiry, the gladsome advent of the Hidden Imam, who would
not only seize the reins of authority from the _sh_ah, the chief
magistrate who was merely representing him, but would also assume dominion
over the whole earth.
The spirit which that clerical order had so assiduously striven, during a
whole century, to crush; the Faith which it had, with such ferocious
brutality, attempted to extirpate; were now, in their turn, through the
forces they had engendered in the world, deranging the equilibrium, and
sapping the strength, of that same order whose ramifications had extended
to every sphere, duty, and act of life in that country. The rock wall of
Islam, seemingly impregnable, was now shaken to its foundations, and was
tottering to its ruin, before the very eyes of the persecuted followers of
the Faith of Baha'u'llah. A sacerdotal hierarchy that had held in thrall
for so long the Faith of God, and seemed, at one time, to have mortally
struck it down, now found itself the prey of a superior civil authority
whose settled policy was to fasten, steadily and relentlessly, its coils
around it.
The vast system of that hierarchy, with all its elements and
appurtenances--its _sh_ay_kh_u'l-islams (high priests), its mujtahids
(doctors of the law), its mullas (priests), its fuqahas (jurists), its
imams (prayer-leaders), its mu'a_dhdh_ins (criers), its vu'azz
(preachers), its qadis (judges), its mutavallis (custodians), its
madrasihs (seminaries), its mudarrisins (professors), its tullabs
(pupils), its qurra's (intoners), its mu'abbirins (soothsayers), its
muhaddi_th_ins (narrators), its musa_khkh_irins (spirit-subduers), its
_dh_akirins (rememberers), its ummal-i-_dh_akat (almsgivers), its
muqaddasins (saints), its munzavis (recluses), its sufis, its dervishes,
and what not--was paralyzed and utterly discredited. Its mujtahids, those
firebrands, who wielded powers of life and death, and who for generations
had been accorded honors almost regal in character, were reduced to a
deplorably insignificant number. The beturbaned prelates of the Islamic
church who, in the words of Baha'u'llah, "decked their heads with green
and white, and committed what made the Faithful Spirit to groan," were
ruthlessly swept away, except for a handful who, in order to safeguard
themselves against the fury of an impious populace, are now compelled to
submit to the humiliation of producing, whenever the occasion demands it,
the license granted them by the civil authorities to wear this vanishing
emblem of a vanished authority. The rest of this turbaned class, whether
siyyids, mullas, or hajis, were forced not only to exchange their
venerable headdress for the kulah-i-farangi (European hat), which not long
ago they themselves had anathematized, but also to discard their flowing
robes and don the tight-fitting garments of European style, the
introduction of which into their country they had, a generation ago, so
violently disapproved.
"The dark blue and white domes"--an allusion by 'Abdu'l-Baha to the rotund
and massive headgears of the priests of Persia--had indeed been "inverted."
Those whose heads had borne them, the arrogant, fanatical, perfidious, and
retrograde clericals, "in the grasp of whose authority," as testified by
Baha'u'llah, "were held the reins of the people," whose "words are the
pride of the world," and whose "deeds are the shame of the nations,"
recognizing the wretchedness of their state, betook themselves,
crestfallen and destitute of hope, to their homes, there to drag out a
miserable existence. Impotent and sullen, they are watching the operations
of a process which, having reversed their policy and ruined their
handiwork, is irresistibly moving towards a climax.
The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of Islam has already
died out. Their fanatical outcries, their clamorous invocations, their
noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their fatvas (sentences), pronounced
with such shamelessness, and at times embracing the denunciation of kings,
are a dead letter. The spectacular sight of congregational prayers, in
which thousands of worshipers, lined row upon row, participated, has
vanished. The pulpits from whence they discharged the thunder of their
anathemas against the powerful and the innocent alike, are deserted and
silent. Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung endowments--the landed
property of the expected Imam--which in Isfahan alone at one time embraced
the whole of the city, have been wrested out of their hands, and brought
under the control of a lay administration. Their madrasihs (seminaries),
with their medieval learning, are deserted and dilapidated. The
innumerable tomes of theological commentaries, super-commentaries,
glosses, and notes, unreadable, unprofitable, the product of misdirected
ingenuity and toil, and pronounced by one of the most enlightened Islamic
thinkers in modern times as works obscuring sound knowledge, breeding
maggots, and fit for fire, are now buried away, overspread with cobwebs,
and forgotten. Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement controversies,
their interminable discussions, are outmoded and abandoned. Their masjids
(mosques) and imam-zadihs (tombs of saints), which were privileged to
extend the bast (right of sanctuary) to many a criminal, and which had
degenerated into a monstrous scandal, whose walls rang with the
intonations of a hypocritical and profligate clergy, whose ornaments vied
with the treasures of the palaces of kings, are either forsaken or fallen
in ruin. Their takyihs, the haunts of the lazy, the passive, and
contemplative pietists, are either being sold or closed down. Their
ta'ziyihs (religious plays), acted with barbaric zeal, and accentuated by
sudden spasms of unbridled religious excitement, are forbidden. Even their
rawdih-_kh_anis (lamentations), with their long-drawn-out, plaintive
howls, which arose from so many houses, have been curtailed and
discouraged. The sacred pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbila, the holiest
shrines of the _Sh_i'ih world, are reduced in number and made increasingly
difficult, preventing thereby many a greedy mulla from indulging in his
time-honored habit of charging double for making those pilgrimages as a
substitute for the religious-minded. The disuse of the veil which the
mullas fought tooth and nail to prevent; the equality of sexes which their
law forbade; the erection of civil tribunals which superseded their
ecclesiastical courts; the abolition of the si_gh_ih (concubinage) which,
when contracted for short periods, is hardly distinguishable from
quasi-prostitution, and which made of the turbulent and fanatical
Ma_sh_had, the national center of pilgrimage, one of the most immoral
cities in Asia; and finally, the efforts which are being made to disparage
the Arabic tongue, the sacred language of Islam and of the Qur'an, and to
divorce it from Persian--all these have successively lent their share to
the acceleration of that impelling process which has subordinated to the
civil authority the position and interests of Muslim clericals to a degree
undreamt of by any mulla.
Well might the once lofty-turbaned, long-bearded, grave-looking aqa
(mulla), who had so insolently concerned himself with every department of
human activity, as he sits, hatless, clean shaven, in the seclusion of his
home, and perhaps listening to the strains of western music, blared upon
the ethers of his native land, pause to reflect for a while on the
vanished splendors of his defunct empire. Well might he muse upon the
havoc which the rising tide of nationalism and skepticism has wrought in
the adamantine traditions of his country. Well might he recollect the
halcyon days when, seated on a donkey, and parading through the bazars and
maydans of his native town, an eager but deluded multitude would rush to
kiss with fervor not only his hands, but also the tail of the animal on
which he rode. Well might he remember the blind zeal with which they
acclaimed his acts, and the prodigies and miracles they ascribed to their
performance.
He might indeed look back further, and call to mind the reign of those
pious Safavi monarchs, who delighted to call themselves "dogs of the
threshold of the Immaculate Imams," how one of those kings was induced to
go on foot before the mujtahid as he rode through the maydan-i-_Sh_ah, the
main square of Isfahan, as a mark of royal subservience to the favorite
minister of the Hidden Imam, a minister who, as distinct from the _Sh_ah's
title, styled himself "the servant of the Lord of Saintship (Imam 'Ali)."
Was it not, he might well ponder, this same _Sh_ah Abbas the Great who had
been arrogantly addressed by another mujtahid as "the founder of a
borrowed empire," implying that the kingdom of the "king of kings" really
belonged to the expected Imam, and was held by the _Sh_ah solely in the
capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same _Sh_ah who walked
the entire distance of eight hundred miles from Isfahan to Ma_sh_had, the
"special glory of the _Sh_i'ih world," to offer his prayers, in the only
way that befitted the _sh_ahan_sh_ah, at the shrine of the Imam Rida, and
who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts? Had not _Sh_ah
Tahmasp, on receiving an epistle, penned by yet another mujtahid, sprung
to his feet, placed it on his eyes, kissed it with rapture, and, because
he had been addressed as "brother," ordered it to be placed within his
winding-sheet and buried with him?
Might not that same mulla ponder the torrents of blood which, during the
long years when he enjoyed impunity of conduct, flowed at his behest, the
flamboyant anathemas he pronounced, and the great army of orphans and
widows, of the disinherited, the dishonored, the destitute, and the
homeless which, on the Day of Reckoning, were, with one accord, to cry out
for vengeance, and invoke the malediction of God upon him?
That infamous crew had indeed merited the degradation in which it had
sunk. Persistently ignoring the sentence of doom which the finger of
Baha'u'llah had traced upon the wall, it pursued, for well nigh a hundred
years, its fatal course, until, at the appointed hour, its death knell was
sounded by those spiritual, revolutionary forces which, synchronizing with
the first dawnings of the World Order of His Faith, are upsetting the
equilibrium, and throwing into such confusion, the ancient institutions of
mankind.