Bahai murder of Bayanis

In their effort to escape this dilemma [Husayn Ali’s claim to being Him whom God will Manifest], Baha and his partisans did two things:
first, they got rid of the most leading Babis who sided with Subh-e Azal; and, second, they rewrote the history of the Babi movement, largely ignoring Subh-e Azal, greatly magnifying the person and position of Baha, and degrading the Bab from the position of a Major Manifestation to that of a “forerunner” of Baha, who was the real Manifestation for the age….[therefore] those Babis who remained faithful to Subh-e Azal, later known as Azalis or Babis, about twenty were murdered in Baghdad, Edirne and Akka by followers of Baha. Two of those killed were brothers of Fatima the widow of the Bab, and was her husband Siyyid Muhammad Isfahani, and two were Letters [of the Living] appointed by the Bab.

It has been said that these assassinations were the work of the too-zealous followers of Baha, and that he was not himself responsible. However this may be, could one who possessed the divine knowledge and power to influence men which Baha claimed to have, been able to prevent such acts on the part of his intimate disciples?

William McElwee Miller, THE BAHA’I FAITH: ITS HISTORY AND TEACHINGS, 1974,pp.100-01.

At first not a few prominent Babis, including even several “Letters of the Living” and personal friends of the Bab, adhered faithfully to Subh-e Azal. One by one these disappeared, most of them, as I fear cannot be doubted, by the foul play on the part of too zealous Baha’is. “Companions” (as-hab), Mirza Riza Kulli and Mirza Nasr’ullah of Tafrish, were stabbed or poisoned in Adrianople and Acre.

Two of the “Letters of the Living,” Aka Siyyid `Ali the Arab, and Mulla Rajab `Ali Kahir, were assassinated, the one at Tabriz, the other at Kerbela. The brother of the latter, Aka Ali Muhammad, was also murdered in Baghdad [by a Baha’i]….

E.G. Browne in his introduction to his translation of the Tarikh-e Jadid (New History of Mirza `Ali Muhammad, the Bab), 1975, pp.xxiii-xxiv.

See also p.42 of E.G. Browne’s Persian introduction to his edition of the Kitab-e Nuqtat’ul-Kaf.

It would seem the murders of Daniel Jordan and Hedi Ma’ani (and possibly others) have clear precedents in the assassinations carried out during the lifetime of Husayn Ali himself.

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