Baha\'u\'llah\'s Tablet to

Nasiru\'d-Din Shah

By::SayfullahQuddusiyyah

MirzaHusayn Ali Nuri (Baha\'u\'llah) had several of the outspoken prominent Babis who supported Azal murdered in Baghdad, Adrianople and Akka. See the introduction to E.G. Browne\'s translation of The New History of Mirza Ali Muhammad, the Bab (Tarikh-i-Jadid)(Amsterdam: 1975) pp. xxiii-xxiv, for some of the names and particulars as well as the Persian introduction to Nuqtat\'ul-Kaf. In Note W (MirzaYahyaSubh-i-Azal) of his critical edition of A Travellers Narrative 
(Cambridge: 1891), 2 volumes, citing HashtBehesht, Browne says, \"All
prominent supporters of Subh-i-Azal who withstood MirzaHusayn Ali\'s claims were marked out for death, and in Baghdad Mulla Rajab Ali \"Kahir\" and his brother, Hajji Mirza Ahmad, Hajji Mirza Muhammad Reza, and several others fell one by one by the knife or bullet of the assassin\" p.359. \"As to the assassination of the three Ezelis, Aka Jan Bey, Hajji Seyyed Muhammad of Isfahan, and MirzaRiza-Kulli of Tafrish, by some of Beha\'sfollowers at Acre, there can, I fear, be but little doubt...the passage in the Kitab-i-Aqdas alluding 
(apparently) to Hajji Seyyed Muhammad\'s death...proves Beha\'u\'llah
regarded this event with some complaisance\" p.370. On the murder of one Aqa Muhammad Ali of Isfahan in Istanbul (who first bore allegience to Husayn Ali and then went back to Azal) by one MirzaAbu\'l-Qasim the Bakhtiyari, Browne quotes the words of MirzaHusayn Ali Nuri addressed to the latter, \"O phlebotomist of the Divine Unity! Throb like the artery in the body of the Contingent World, and drink of the blood of the Block of Heedlessness for that he turned aside from the aspect of thy Lord the Merciful!\" p.363. Baha\'i sources carefully omit all of these facts but they have been recorded for posterity by scholars like E.G. Browne, William Miller and Vince Salisbury in their European language studies, not to mention the original language, source documentation which has been provided in Azal\'s Notes. Baha\'i sources have even gone through great lengths to twist, hide and obfuscate their crimes and attribute them to Azal and the Babis. For example, Baha\'is make much noise about a poisoning incident in Adrianople whereby Azal is supposed to have attempted to poison his own brother. Baha\'is use the fact that their prophet\'s hand shook for the rest of his life as evidence (I doubt very much if poison had anything to do with it. I think the man was simply a nervous wreck. I am unaware of any kind of poison in existence in the nineteenth century, which without killing its intended victim as meant, would instead cause permanent nervous damage! Besides, it does not occur to me that amongst either the partisans of Husayn Ali or Azal there was anyone who possessed a sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to contrive such a potion. The Baha\'is, typically, are simply attributing their own malefeasance unto others.) When the counter facts, and the accounts of direct eyewitnesses, one by one, are examined it turns out that it was actually the other way around and that MirzaHusayn Ali Nuri and his partisans where the ones attempting to poison and murder Azal (not once, but several times, each time their plans backfiring in some way). There is a first-hand eyewitness report in existence, currently only in manuscript, by a maid who was working on the day in question in Azal\'s household kitchen – an account never published anywhere to my knowledge but whose manuscript I have been shown – which shows that Husayn Ali had put his own agents up in Azal\'s kitchen on the day in question and that she witnessed them pouring something in vials into the food being prepared for Azal. In the aforementioned work, Browne states: \"MirzaHusayn Ali...caused poison to be placed in one side of a dish of food which was to be set before himself and Subh-i-Azal, giving instructions that the poisoned side was to be turned towards his brother. As it happened, however, the food had been flavoured with onions, and Subh-i-Azal, disliking this flavour, refused to partake of the dish. MirzaHusayn Ali fancying that his brother suspected his design, ate some of the food from the side of the plate; but, the poison having diffused itself to some extent through the whole mass, he was presently attacked with vomiting and other symptoms of poisoning. Thereupon he assembled his own followers and intimates, and declared that Subh-i-Azal had attempted to poison him\" p.359. MirzaAqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), a son-in-law of Azal and a major figure of the Iranian secular liberal democratic Constituional movement in the 19th C. (who was executed as a co-conspirator along with his brother-in-law, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, after the assassination of Nasiruddin Shah in 1896), quotes part of the woman\'s account regarding the poisoning incident in the historical section which he wrote of the \'8 Heavens\' (HashtBehesht). It will be translated in full in my forthcoming Materials for the Study of the Bayani Religion. Later \"...[a] plot was arranged against Subh-i-Azal\'s life, and it was arranged that Muhammad Ali the barber should cut his throat while shaving him in the bath. On the approach of the barber, however, Subh-i-Azal divined his design, refused to allow him to come near, and, on leaving the bath, instantly took another lodging in Adrianople and separated himself entirely from MirzaHusayn Ali and his followers\" p.360. This same Muhammad Ali (Salmani) was later in Acre, Palestine, responsible for taking a shovel to the head and thereby killing one of Azal\'s chief Witnesses exiled with the Baha\'is: Siyyid Muhammad Isfahani (source, Juan Cole, discussion on the Zuhur19_at_yahoogroups.com list, November 2000). In the eternal words of Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, \"If this Husayn Ali is the manifestation of the Husayn of Ali, a thousand mercies of God be upon the pure soul of Yazid\" (agar in Husayn Ali mazhar-e Husayn-e Alist, sad rahmat-e haqq bar ravan-e pak-e Yazid) verses quoted by IzziyyehKhanum in her epistle ‘Tanbih\'u-Na\'imin\' (for those who don\'t know, Yazid is the character – and Muslim ruler - responsible for the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad\'s grandson, the 3rd Shi\'ite Imam Husayn [the paragon martyr of all martyrs in Shi\'ism], and his small band on the plains of Karbalah in 680 CE who were on their way to Kufa to raise an army to revolt against the Ummayyad rulers in Damascus – i.e. the progeny of Abu Sufyan: Muhammad\'s kinsman and bitter QurayshiteMeccan enemy in the early days of Islam). This poem conveys a profound antinomy about MirzaHusayn Ali Nuri and his bogus claims, namely, that if this guy is the Return of the paragon martyr of Islam, then perhaps those who killed him were in the right after all.

Another issue the Baha\'is have used to hammer the Bayanis with is the marriage of Azal to the Bab\'s second wife. As far as some of the Bayani sources are concerned this did not happen exactly as the Baha\'is have made it out to be. But even assuming it did occur exactly how the Baha\'is portray it, one only needs to read between the obvious lines to realize the Baha\'is are wishing to have their cake and eat it too and intentionally making mountains out of molehills in order to castigate their enemies with irrelevant strawmen, whilst opportunistically remaining silent on the fact that Husayn Ali himself had two temporary wives (sigheh, muta\') besides his two other official wives. Also, despite what the Baha\'is say, I have yet to see from which letter or work of the Bab he prohibited the re-marrying of his two wives or anyone to marry these two widows, and I have read pretty much everything by the Bab. This statement and the purported letter or epistle it comes from simply does not exist. I will go on record and say that I believe the Baha\'is have made it up. This is the nineteenth century Middle East we\'re talking about, and a widow and unmarried Iranian woman in exile is completely at the mercy of the world around her, totally unprotected and without any means. This is also the Bab\'s second wife we\'re talking about here and a sister of a Letter of the Living and Witness of Azal, the abovementioned murdered Mulla Rajab Ali Qahir who was killed by one Nasir the Arab, a devotee of Husayn Ali Nuri! Besides, the Bab had already maintained that he and Azal were made of the same metaphysical substance (were One, as it were), so what is the big deal if the Bab in his second Return was taking back his own wife? A fair minded, objective person cannot see any blame here. I sure can\'t. Moreover, this woman composed later a treatise in refutation of the claims of MirzaHusayn Ali Nuri to being the Babi messiah, which conclusively shows where her views and sentiments were on the matter, an issue which is quite embarrassing to the Baha\'i historians who keep hammering on this marriage of Azal to the Bab\'s second wife and who in their all too typical dishonest, gratutious and obfuscatory ways carefully gloss over this last detail about the refutation in their accounts that explains the nature of this \'purported\' marriage in some detail. But this refutation exists, I have seen it, and even according to one of my correspondents in Haifa, Israel (who wishes to remain anonymous), the Baha\'is have copies of it sitting in their manuscript archives at their World Center over there in Haifa, Israel, among many other juicy tidbits they won\'t let anyone see. It was due to such incidents, such as the \"poisoning incident\" and the general sectarian strife that had emerged between the followers of Husayn Ali and Azal, who in Edirne due to the circumstances the Ottomans had created for them where outnumbered by the partisans of Husayn Ali Nuri, whereby the Ottoman authorities exiled Azal, his family and followers to Famagusta, Cyprus, and the older brother and his to Acre, Palestine, in the late 1860s.

Browne produces some discussion in the aforementioned work in the same section (W) about an anonymous letter the Baha\'is apparently manufactured against Azal in Adrianople, pretending to be speaking on his behalf and inciting a revolution against the Ottoman government with Azal taking over as sovereign. This rumour mongering, overtly suggestive of outright political sedition against the Turkish Imperial state, finally forced the hand of the Sublime Porte (i.e. the seat of power in Istanbul) to act against both factions. Knowing the duplicitous ways of the Baha\'i leaders, their track record and proclivity for criminalism, manufacturing of evidence and thuggery all too well, unlike Browne, I personally give one hundred percent credence to this last story. See for example Browne\'s Materials for the Study of the Babi Religion (Cambridge: 1961) pp. 154-69 regarding the murder of an Azali-Bayani in Jedda in 1900 on Abbas Effendi\'s direct, explicit orders: an individual who briefly had become a supporter of Abbas Effendi\'s rival and half-brother, Mirza Muhammad Ali (d. 1930) - who was designated in Husayn Ali\'s own will and testament (Kitab-e Ahdi, Book of My Covenant) as his second succesor. 
(The events of the first generation were repeated again in the second,
third and fourth generations, first, with Abbas Effendi and Muhammad Ali, then with Shoghi Effendi and his family and several other individuals (Ruth White, Farid, Ahmad Sohrab, et al), and finally with the Hands of the Cause and American socialite and self-styled Guardian Charles Mason Remey. Conflict, bids for power and factionalism is an endemic part of the whole Baha\'i experience from day one). Browne translates several important documents in these pages that establishes the guilt and complicity of the Baha\'is and their leader beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. Recent Baha\'i scholarship has attempted to dismiss this particular work of Browne\'s, but to no avail, see for example fundamentalist UK Baha\'i MoojanMomen\'s caustic remarks on Browne\'s Materials in his introduction to Selections from the Writings of E.G. Browne on the Babi and Baha\'i Religions (Oxford: 1987). In a typical attempt to obfuscate the actual issues by casting aspersions on the character of the individual scholar and his work, i.e. ad hominem (a common tactic used amongst Baha\'is in virtually all forums which Frederick Glaysher has most appropriately dubbed The Baha\'i Technique), Momen at no time attempts to even address the substance or content of the matters he criticizes in Browne characterized as \"of dubious value\" p.4. The same can be said across the board from Gulpayagani to Balyuzi\'s tortuous , transparent, vacuously polemical and unsubstantiated attacks on Browne\'s credibility, political agenda and scholarship in his Edward Granville Browne and the Baha\'i Faith 
(Wilmette: 1970).

As far as I am concerned this is a common tactic employed in the pseudo-historiographical scholarship of virtually all cults when dealing with thorny historical facts and those who critically evaluate them. Some years ago Juan Cole showed me an article at his home of a case of a Trotskyist Marxist cult in Britian which, if one subsituted key concepts, would mirror the Baha\'i experience point by point, letter by letter in this regard. Denis MacEoin experienced the exact same thing in the early 80s when his scholarship on Babism began coming out. For example, see the trilogy of articles: \"From Babism to Baha\'ism: Problems of Militancy, Quietism and Conflation in the Construction of a Religion,\" Religion 13, 1983: 93-129, \"Baha\'i Fundamentalism and the Western Academic Study of the Babi Movement,\" Religion 16, 1986: 57-84 and \"Afnan, Hatcher and an Old Bone,\" Religion 16, 1986: 193-95. Unless one possesses a trained eye and much background reading in texts and methodology, not to mention experience, it is quite easy to be misled and fall prey to such uncritical obfuscations by these cultists and their bogus , largely hagiographical and totally one-sided meta-narratives. \"Baha\'i scholarship\" is the perfect examplar of the sort of contrived, Twilight Zone like bizarre ahistoriographical \"cult\" tradition of pseudo-scholarship taken as objective historiography by adherents that I am talking about here. 
the dominant power elite of Baha\'ism today is bent on a wholesale kulturkampf against Iranians, Iranian culture and Iranian identity 
(whether in Iran or outside of it) throughout the Baha\'i community
tout court and its replacement by a sanitized, hyper-conservative 
(nay, outright reactionary) White Anglo-Saxon Anglo-American
Protestant \"Baha\'i\" culture, ethic and pseudo-identity.

Baha\'ism today is very much in toe with the international menace of the Neo-Conservative coup d\'etat and its Anti-Non-White Anglo-American agenda, which is why Iranians have generally been turned into the \'Other\' in the popular perception of the Baha\'i community and scape-goated by the powers that be for virtually everything. This, in my view, is clearly a systematic and orchestrated attempt at undermining their ethnic self-confidence and cultural integrity by this dominant clique bent on cultural colonization, who as far as I am personally concerned, are one of the countless tentacles of the neo-Fascist \"Beast\" and \"Antichrist.\" The same case as Taheri\'s also involved another, and Sufi oriented, Iranian Baha\'i, Ahmad Karimpour. But he has yet to be sanctioned and excommunicated, although he is continually being harrassed locally by the Iranian Baha\'i Continental Board of Counsellor member and her Auxilliary Board Member, all based out of Perth, WA. Iranian members of the Baha\'i administration are generally of the Uncle Tom, ethnic traitor and system-collaborator types (i.e. such as those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the SS, the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps). They are what Franz Fanon appropriately characterized as those baring black faces but donning white masks. The history of Baha\'ism, from the very outset, is underscored by a long and protracted attempt by White Anglo European elites at cultural colonization of Iranians, together with those elite Iranian cultural lackies who collaborated with them, and as such the late Jalal Al-e Ahmad\'s neologism \"Westoxication\" (gharbzadegi) very much applies to many Iranian Baha\'i elites of the upper classes who look down their noses at their middle, petty bourgeois and working class Iranian compatriots whom they see as culturally \"too Iranian,\" \"backward peasants\" and thus not Western, White and \'modernized\'-sanitized enough. Interestingly, it is those very same upper class Iranian Baha\'i elites who are the most vociferous in their defense of the cult system and a Baha\'i theocracy, and thus the most anti-democratic, fascist, Westoxicated, comprador-lackey and reactionary of all – a profoundly dogged anti-intellectualism is also a pronounced characteristic of this sub-culture, not to mention their highest value and that which they hold the dearest to their hearts is \'money\' (their true god)! I know, because I came from out of this sub-culture and have spent pretty much my whole adolescent and adult life rebelling against its skewed and mind-boggling shallow value system of callous materialism, hypocrisy and double-standards. Juan Cole believes this to be a vestige of the Pahlavi era mindset. I think he is generally right about this but believe that the matter requires further problematization beyond even that era. Note that much of Husayn Ali\'s economic enterprises (such as publications of works in Cairo and Bombay, etc) in the 1870s-90s was bankrolled by a successful mercantile elite, the Afnans, who had their fingers in numerous pies of the late 19th C. international trade in the East from Hong Kong to Beirut, particularly in opium, whom the Afnans held a monopoly on at one point inside Iran. It is quite ironic that the publication of Husayn Ali\'s \'Most Holy Book\' (Kitab-i-Aqdas) was quite possibly produced by profits coming from the coffers of the Afnans lucrative opium monopoly. When Abbas Effendi decided he was no longer going to support the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Iranian parliament\'s fight against Qajar royalist reaction and its Russian patrons from 1909 onwards, or when he accepted the knighthood offered him by the British towards the end of World War I, there was no Pahlavi regime in existence. And what about Habib Sabet\'s central role in the events of the 1953 CIA-spearheaded coup d\'etat against Premier Mohammad Mossadeq: the same Habib Sabet who was soon designated a \'knight of Baha\'u\'llah\' by Shoghi Effendi and who sat on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha\'is of Iran until the eve of the Islamic 
(Counter-)Revolution? As such Juan Cole and others who see evidence of
a liberal progressivism in the thought of Husayn Ali and his son, I believe, are overlooking many other things, romantizing and thus reading too much into works like Effendi\'s Secret of Divine Civilization and Treatise on Politics, etc., see his Modernity and the Millenium: The Genesis of the Baha\'i faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (Columbia: 1998) Husayn Ali\'s own \'Most Holy Book\' is already several dozen steps back in retreat from the Bayan. Words are cheap and when the evidence is looked at closely, time and again, when push has come to shove, the Baha\'i leaders and their successors have always sided with the forces of reaction and the powers that be, ergo the principle of \"obedience to government,\" never on the side of the fighting underdog or the masses and progressive forces. Therefore the liberal and progresssive sounding works of Husayn Ali and his son should be taken as so many PR, window-dressings, and not serious positions maintained by either. Unlike the liberals, I no longer maintain \"something went wrong after `Abdu\'-Baha.\" I believe the fascism of Baha\'i culture to be a reflection of the earliest period and the mind of Husayn Ali and Abbas Effendi. And I will say that this is very much a reflection of the mentality of a 19th century Iranian aristocrat in exile seeking reconciliation with the powers that be after the initial failure and bloody debacle of the Babi revolution (I say \'initial\' because the Babi revolution is not over yet by a long shot). The ambivalence of the American Baha\'i leadership in its support of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s is certainly evidence of this, not to mention the aborted \"Southern Teaching\" campaign in South Carolina in the early 1970s that was explicitly aborted by the Baha\'i leaders in the US because a large southern African-American Baha\'i constituency was seemingly threatening the very elite \"White\" foundation and make-up of the American Baha\'i leadership of the time.