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The black-hearted scoundrel who befooled and manipulated this vain and flaccid man with consummate skill and unyielding persistence was a certain Siyyid Muḥammad, a native of Iṣfáhán, notorious for his inordinate ambition, his blind obstinacy and uncontrollable jealousy.
Six miserable months he had spent in Shiraz, and it was time for him to strengthen and enlighten the believers elsewhere. The goal of his present journey was Isfahan, but he was not without hopes of soon reaching Tihran and disabusing the mind of the Shah of the false notions which had become lodged in it.
Such was the rivalry between the last two princes, who vied with each other in courting the favor of their father, that each endeavored, with the support of the leading mujtahids within his jurisdiction, to outshine the other in the meritorious task of hunting, plundering and exterminating the members of a defenseless community, who, at the bidding of Bahá’u’lláh, had ceased to offer armed resistance even in self-defense, and were carrying out His injunction that “it is better to be killed than kill.” Nor were the clerical firebrands, Ḥájí Mullá ‘Alíy-i-Kání and Siyyid Ṣádiq-i-Tabátabá’í, the two leading mujtahids of Ṭihrán, together with Shaykh Muḥammad-Báqir, their colleague in Iṣfáhán, and Mír Muḥammad-Ḥusayn, the Imám-Jum’ih of that city, willing to allow the slightest opportunity to pass without striking, with all the force and authority they wielded, at an adversary whose liberalizing influences they had even more reason to fear than the sovereign himself.
Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung endowments—the landed property of the expected Imám—which in Iṣfáhán 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.
Summoned by the Persian National Spiritual Assembly to interrupt his travels in the vicinity of the town of Mashhad in order to devote immediate attention to a situation that had unexpectedly arisen in Iṣfáhán, our indefatigable teacher and brother was surprised upon his arrival in that province to note in the various towns and villages he visited a ten-fold increase in the number of the adherents of the Faith since his last visit to those regions.
The first forty days of His sojourn in Iṣfáhán were spent as the guest of Mírzá Siyyid Muḥammad, the Sulṭánu’l-‘Ulamá, the Imám-Jum’ih, one of the principal ecclesiastical dignitaries of the realm, in accordance with the instructions of the governor of the city, Manúchihr Khán, the Mu Tamídu’d-Dawlih, who had received from the Báb a letter requesting him to appoint the place where He should dwell.
I have, likewise, instructed him that once every three months he should proceed from Damascus to Akká, and personally watch over them, and submit his report to the Legation.” Such was the isolation imposed upon them that the Bahá’ís of Persia, perturbed by the rumors set afloat by the Azalís of Iṣfáhán that Bahá’u’lláh had been drowned, induced the British Telegraph office in Julfá to ascertain on their behalf the truth of the matter.
Indeed, the tragic and moving story of the transfer of the Báb’s mutilated body from place to place ever since His Martyrdom in Tabríz, its fifty-year concealment in Persia; its perilous and secret journey by way of Ṭihrán, Iṣfáhán, Kirmansháh, Baghdád, Damascus, Beirut and Akká to the Mountain of God, its ultimate resting place; its concealment for a further period of ten years in the Holy Land itself; the vexatious and long-drawn-out negotiations for the purchase of the site chosen by Bahá’u’lláh Himself for its entombment; the threats of ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd, the Turkish tyrant, the accusations levelled against its Trustee, the plots devised, and the inspection made, by the scheming members of the notorious Turkish Commission of Inquiry; the perils to which the bloodthirsty Jamál Páshá exposed it; the machinations of the arch-breaker of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant, of His brother and of His son, respectively, aiming at the frustration of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s design, at the prevention of the sale of land within the precincts of the Shrine itself, and the multiplication of the measures taken for the preservation and consolidation of the properties purchased in its vicinity and dedicated to it—all these are to be regarded as successive stages in the history of the almost hundred year long process destined to culminate in the consummation of Bahá’u’lláh’s irresistible purpose of erecting a lasting and befitting memorial to His Divine Herald and Co-Founder of His Faith.
The Mu’tamíd, in his great embarrassment, and in order to appease the rising tumult, conceived a plan whereby an increasingly restive populace were made to believe that the Báb had left for Ṭihrán, while he succeeded in insuring for Him a brief respite of four months in the privacy of the Imárat-i-Khurshíd, the governor’s private residence in Iṣfáhán.
A certain Muḥammad-Javád was stripped naked in Iṣfáhán, and was severely beaten with a whip of braided wires, while in Káshán the adherents of the Faith of Jewish extraction were fined, beaten and chained at the instigation of both the Muḥammadan clergy and the Jewish doctors.
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