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The Amir-i-Nizam was succeeded as Kaimakam by Haji Mirza Abdul Rahim, who was formerly Persian Minister at St. Petersburg, and as his predecessor had been Minister at Paris for some years, the European experiences of these able Vazirs no doubt aided the further education of the Vali Ahd.
Powerful adversaries, among whom towered the figure of the inordinately ambitious and hypocritical Ḥájí Mírzá Karím Khán, who at the special request of the Sháh had in a treatise viciously attacked the new Faith and its doctrines, had now raised their heads, and, emboldened by the reverses it had sustained, were heaping abuse and calumnies upon it.
A persecution, grimmer, more odious, and more shrewdly calculated than any which Ḥusayn Khán, or even Ḥájí Mírzá Aqásí, had kindled was soon to be unchained, to be accompanied by a corresponding manifestation of heroism unmatched by any of the earliest outbursts of enthusiasm that had greeted the birth of the Faith in either Shíráz or Iṣfáhán.
As to his successor, the bigoted Muḥammad Sháh, one of his earliest acts, definitely condemned by the pen of Bahá’u’lláh, was the order to strangle his first minister, the illustrious Qá’im-Maqám, 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, Ḥájí Mírzá Aqásí, who brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy and revolution.
A certain Haji Saman pointed out at great length that "these tyrannical and ferocious men had delivered themselves to a certain death in any case. They would stand fast on their hill and starve, or they would try to regain their boat and be shot from ambushes across the creek, or they would break and fly into the forest and perish singly there."
Like Omar Khayyam, Haji Abdu loses patience with the "dizzied faiths" and their disputatious exponents; like Omar Khayyam too, Haji Abdu is not averse from Jamshid's bowl, but he is far less vinous than the old Persian.
They have nothing out of the way about them to mark them from their fellows, except that Haji Äli goes lame on his right leg. I have done for ever with all these things, Deeds that were joyous to knights and kings, In the days that with song were cherish'd.
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.
It was now about 3 A.M., but the men were awake and heard him. 'Come quickly! he shouted again, 'Come quickly, and let us finish this little business with no needless delay. At this, ten men rushed out of Haji Mih's house, and began to throw spears at him, but though they struck him more than once they did not succeed in wounding him.
As observed in a previous chapter the mangled bodies of the Báb and His fellow-martyr, Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí, were removed, in the middle of the second night following their execution, through the pious intervention of Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán, from the edge of the moat where they had been cast to a silk factory owned by one of the believers of Milán, and were laid the next day in a wooden casket, and thence carried to a place of safety.
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