This premeditated campaign was heralded by violent and repeated public
denunciations of the Faith over the air, from the pulpit, and through the
press, defaming its holy Founders, distorting its distinctive features,
ridiculing its aims and purposes, and perverting its history. It was
formally launched by the government's official pronouncement in the Majlis
outlawing the Faith and banning its activities throughout the land. It was
soon followed by the senseless and uncivilized demolition of the imposing
dome of the Baha'i Central Administrative Headquarters in the capital. It
assumed serious proportions through the seizure and occupation of all
Baha'i administrative headquarters throughout the provinces.
This drastic action taken by the representatives of the central
authorities in cities, towns and villages was the signal for the loosing
of a flood of abuse, accompanied by a series of atrocities simultaneously
and shamelessly perpetrated in most of the provinces, bringing in its wake
desolation to Baha'i homes, economic ruin to Baha'i families, and staining
still further the records of _Sh_i'ah Islam in that troubled land.
In _Sh_iraz, in the province of Fars, the cradle of the Faith, the House
of the Bab, ordained by Baha'u'llah in His Most Holy Book as the foremost
place of pilgrimage in the land of His birth, was twice desecrated, its
walls severely damaged, its windows broken and its furniture partly
destroyed and carried away. The neighboring house of the Bab's maternal
uncle was razed to the ground. Baha'u'llah's ancestral home in Takur, in
the province of Mazindaran, the scene of 'Abdu'l-Baha's early childhood,
was occupied. Shops and farms, constituting, in most cases, the sole
source of livelihood to peaceful Baha'i families, were plundered. Crops
and livestock, assets patiently acquired by often poor, but always
peace-loving, law-abiding farmers, were wantonly destroyed. Bodies in
various cemeteries were first disinterred and then viciously mutilated.
The homes of rich and poor alike were forcibly entered and ruthlessly
looted. Both adults and children were publicly set upon, reviled, beaten
and ridiculed. Young women were abducted, and compelled, against their
parents' wishes and their own, to marry Muslims. Boys and girls were
mobbed at school, mocked and expelled. A boycott, in many cases, was
imposed by butchers and bakers, who refused to sell to the adherents of
the Faith the barest necessities of life. A girl in her teens was
shamelessly raped, whilst an eleven-month-old baby was heartlessly
trampled underfoot. Pressure was brought to bear upon the believers to
recant their faith and to renounce allegiance to the Cause they had
espoused.
Nor was this all. Emboldened by the general applause accorded by the
populace to the savage perpetrators of these crimes, a mob of many
hundreds marched upon the hamlet of Hurmuzak, to the beating of drums and
the sounding of trumpets, and, armed with spades and axes, fell upon a
family of seven, the oldest eighty, the youngest nineteen, and, in an orgy
of unrestrained fanaticism, literally hacked them to pieces.
Following closely upon this heinous crime, the like of which has not been
witnessed since the close of the Heroic Age of the Faith, an official
order has been issued by the Prime Minister's office in Tihran, placing an
interdiction against the employment of any Baha'is in government service,
and ordering the instant dismissal of all who insist on adhering to their
faith.