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In Dawlat-Ábád, a prince of the royal blood, Habíbu’lláh Mírzá by name, a convert to the Faith who had consecrated his life to its service, was slain with a hatchet and his corpse set on fire. In Mashhad the learned and pious Shaykh ‘Alí-Akbar-i-Quchání was shot to death. In Sulṭán-Ábád, Mírzá ‘Alí-Akbar and seven members of his family including a forty day old infant were barbarously massacred.
A military court dispatched by the Czar to Ishqábád established, after prolonged investigation, the guilt of the Shí’ahs, sentencing two to death and banishing six others—a sentence which neither Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, nor the ‘ulamás of Ṭihrán, of Mashhad and of Tabríz, who were appealed to, could mitigate, but which the representatives of the aggrieved community, through their magnanimous intercession which greatly surprised the Russian authorities, succeeded in having commuted to a lighter punishment.
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.
Three years previously a youth, named Muḥammad-Riḍáy-i-Yazdí, was shot in Yazd, on the night of his wedding while proceeding from the public bath to his home, the first to suffer martyrdom during ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ministry. In Mashhad a well-known merchant, Ḥájí Muḥammad-i-Tabrízí, was murdered and his corpse set on fire.
In the city of Mashhad, notorious for its unbridled fanaticism, Ḥájí ‘Abdu’l-Majíd, who was the eighty-five year old father of the afore-mentioned Badí and a survivor of the struggle of Tabarsí, and who, after the martyrdom of his son, had visited Bahá’u’lláh and returned afire with zeal to Khurásán, was ripped open from waist to throat, and his head exposed on a marble slab to the gaze of a multitude of insulting onlookers, who, after dragging his body ignominiously through the bazaars, left it at the morgue to be claimed by his relatives.
Was it not this same Sháh who walked the entire distance of eight hundred miles from Iṣfáhán to Mashhad, the “special glory of the Shí’ih world,” to offer his prayers, in the only way that befitted the sháhansháh, at the shrine of the Imám Riḍá, and who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts?
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