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Updated: June 19, 2025
The Shah's anger was great on hearing of this shameful treachery, but as the Governor pleaded powerlessness from want of troops, and helplessness before the fanaticism of the frenzied mob led by Moullas, the matter was allowed to drop.
Its golden grapes have a wide reputation, and these, with the white species, also grown there, are in steady demand for wine manufacture, which is carried on in the town, notwithstanding the greatly disproportionate number of Moullas among the inhabitants. Large quantities of the grapes are also sent to Tehran for wine purposes there.
The Shah passed his hand lightly over his shaven chin, and said, with a touch of humour and royal assurance: 'See, I shave; let them talk; they can do nothing. It is wrong to suppose that the people of Persia are dead to all desire for progress, and that their religion is a bar to such desire. It is not so. Many of the Moullas, it is true, are opposed to education and progress.
Islam was then most actively aggressive, extending by the argument of smooth speech or sharp sword, as occasion demanded, and the Moullas must have regarded with enthusiastic pride the glorious reinforcement they had brought to its armies by the consecration of such a splendid warrior host to the service of their Church.
But the explanation of monopoly, a word which was then unknown in Persia, raised the fears of the people, and those who had the money to spare laid in a supply of tobacco before the concession came into force. This was regarded by the poor as proof of the coming rise in price, and they therefore hailed the Moullas as their deliverers from the threatened calamity of dear tobacco.
And it had another although more distant companionship, in the shape of several thousand hostile tribesmen and ghazees, whose fanaticism their moullas had been assiduously inciting, and who marched day by day parallel with the British right flank along the foothills at a distance of about eight miles.
After disposing of the Tobacco Régie, the triumphant Moullas desired to extend their prohibition to all foreign enterprise in Persia, and they pronounced against the English Bank, which was doing its work quietly, and without detriment to the business of others.
Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia, who wrote about eight hundred years ago, gave open expression to the same liberal-minded views, urging tolerance and freedom for all religious creeds and classes. The last murderous mob attack led by Moullas against the Babis occurred at Yezd in April, 1891.
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