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Many years later, the Persian ambassador, Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán, reflecting on his tour of duty in the Ottoman capital, and complaining about the damage which the greed and untrustworthiness of his countrymen had done to Persia’s reputation in Constantinople, paid a surprisingly candid tribute to the example which Bahá’u’lláh’s conduct had been able briefly to set.
To the beloved of the Lord and the handmaids of the Merciful throughout the United States and Canada. Dearly-beloved friends: With feelings of horror and indignation I communicate to you the tale of yet another tragedy involving the shedding of the blood of a martyr of the Faith on Persia’s sacred soil.
In 1922 Shoghi Effendi called for the formal establishment of Persia’s National Spiritual Assembly, an achievement delayed until 1934 by the demands related to the taking of a reliable census of the community as a basis for the election of delegates.
Elated by her recent successes in the matter of a Russian consul at Meshed, Russia has very forcibly invited Persia to construct more than half of a road which, in connection with the Transcaspian railway, makes Khorassan almost an exclusive Russian market, and opens Persia’s richest province to Russia’s troops and cannon on the prospective march to Herat.
These unanticipated developments convinced the Persian ambassador and his colleagues that it was only a matter of time before the Bahá’í movement, which was continuing to spread in Persia, would have established itself as a major influence in Persia’s neighboring and rival empire.
Under the Master’s guidance, intermittent meetings held by the four Hands of the Cause in Persia had gradually evolved into this institution that served simultaneously as Persia’s “Central Spiritual Assembly” and as the governing body of the local community in the capital. By the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, there were more than thirty Local Spiritual Assemblies established in Persia.
So it was at Bostam, the residence of one of Persia’s most influential hakims, or governors, literally, “pillars of state,” who was also a cousin to the Shah himself. This potentate we visited in company with an English engineer whom we met in transit at Sharoud.
Born into a noble family that could trace its ancestry back to the great dynasties of Persia’s imperial past, He declined the ministerial career open to Him in government, and chose instead to devote His energies to a range of philanthropies which had, by the early 1840s, earned Him widespread renown as “Father of the Poor.” This privileged existence swiftly eroded after 1844, when Bahá’u’lláh became one of the leading advocates of a movement that was to change the course of His country’s history.
The military road now completed between Askabad and Meshed reveals the extreme weakness of Persia’s defense against Russian aggression.
Reforms of a revolutionary character are, without bloodshed and with negligible resistance, gradually transforming the very basis and structure of Persia’s primitive society.
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