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Updated: June 12, 2025
No one who had seen the pale, clean-shaven clergyman in black silk coat and trousers in Cawnpore would have recognised the Henry Martyn who rode out that night on his pony with an Armenian servant, Zechariah of Isfahan, on his long one hundred and seventy mile journey from Bushire to Shiraz.
O, had thy father graced a kingly throne, Thy mother been for royal virtues known, A different fate the poet then had shared, Honors and wealth had been his just reward; But how remote from thee a glorious line! No high, ennobling ancestry is thine; From a vile stock thy bold career began, A Blacksmith was thy sire of Isfahán. Alas! from vice can goodness ever spring?
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.
I recall on this joyous occasion with pride, emotion, thankfulness, the resplendent record of stewardship of this dearly loved, richly endowed, unflinchingly resolute community, whose administrators have assumed the preponderating share in perfecting the machinery of the Administrative Order, whose elected representatives have raised the edifice and completed the exterior ornamentation of the Mother Temple of the West, whose trail-blazers opened an overwhelming majority of the ninety-one countries now included within the pale of the Faith, whose pioneers established flourishing communities in twenty republics of Latin America, whose benefactors extended in ample measure assistance in various ways to their sorely pressed brethren in distant fields, whose members scattered themselves to thirteen hundred centers in every state of the American Union, every province of the Dominion of Canada, whose firmest champion succeeded in winning royalty’s allegiance to the Message of Bahá’u’lláh, whose heroes and martyrs laid down their lives in its service in fields as remote as Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Sidney, Iṣfáhán, whose vanguard pushed its outposts to the antipodes on the farthest verge of the South American continent, to the vicinity of the Arctic Circle, to the northern, southern, and western fringes of the European continent, whose ambassadors are now convening, on the soil of one of the newly won territories, its historic first conference designed to consolidate the newly won prizes, whose spokesmen are securing recognition of the institutions of Bahá’u’lláh’s rising World Order in the United Nations.
It was probably an outcome of the Babi massacre which had taken place at Isfahan the previous year, and which, owing to the fiercely hostile attitude of the priests, was allowed to pass unnoticed by any strong public condemnation.
The Armenian Archbishop in Persia, who resides at Isfahan, is always a Russian subject from the monastery of Etchmiadzin, near Erivan, the seat of the Catholicus, the primate of the orthodox Armenian Church, and this doubtless has its effect in suggesting protection and security.
The vineyards at Shiraz have been greatly extended of late years, and particular attention is now paid to the cultivation of the Kholar grape, as the best suited for wine. This grape takes its name from the village of Kholar, which is within a few miles of the town. Tabriz, Hamadan, Isfahan, and Shiraz produce the best wine in Persia.
The east comprised Khorassan, Seistan, and Kirman; the north, Armenia, Azer-bijan, Ghilan, Koum, and Isfahan; the south, Fars and Ahwaz; the west, Irak, or Babylonia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia. It was not the intention of the monarch, however, to put a blind trust in his instruments.
By the side of his tent ran a clear stream of running water. All the evening nightingales sang sweetly and mournfully. As he sat there at his work, men came hundreds of miles to talk with this holy man, as they felt him to be. Moslems they yet travelled even from Baghdad and Bosra and Isfahan to hear this "infidel" speak of Jesus Christ, and to argue as to which was the true religion.
This period of captivity, in a remote corner of the realm, far removed from the storm centers of Shíráz, Iṣfáhán, and Ṭihrán, afforded Him the necessary leisure to launch upon His most monumental work, as well as to engage on other subsidiary compositions designed to unfold the whole range, and impart the full force, of His short-lived yet momentous Dispensation.
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