Episode II: Opulence and Oppression

In 1835, in an upper chamber of the royal pavilion, Muhammad Shah had his Grand Vazir strangled.

The man’s name was Mirza Abu’l-Qasim, the Qa’im-Maqam, the highest minister in the Persian state. He had helped raise Muhammad Shah to the throne. That did not save him. Muhammad Shah’s predecessor, Fath-‘Ali Shah, had strangled his own Grand Vazir before him. Muhammad Shah’s son and successor, Nasiri’d-Din Shah, would do the same. Three consecutive kings. Three chief ministers, elevated to the highest office in the realm, then murdered by the sovereign they served. It is rare in history to find three successive monarchs who killed the very men who had raised them to power or were filling the supreme office when they fell.

That is not an aberration. That is the system.

To understand why the Bab’s message met such violence, you have to see the machinery that produced it. Not its philosophy. Its daily operation. Who held power, how they used it, what it cost the people underneath, and what spiritual expectation was building beneath all of it like pressure in a sealed chamber.

Start with the throne. The Shah of Persia ruled without limit. No written check existed on the royal prerogative. No parliament. No synod. No civil tribunal. His word was law. He appointed and dismissed all ministers, officers, officials, and judges. Over his own household and court, civil or military, he held power of life and death without appeal. His subjects addressed him as the Shahinshah, King of Kings, the Zillu’llah, Shadow of God, the Qibliy-i-‘Alam, Centre of the Universe. When a man of the highest rank wished to speak to his sovereign, he began with a phrase that tells you everything about the distance between throne and ground: May I be your sacrifice, Asylum of the Universe.

And Fath-‘Ali Shah, who reigned from 1798 to 1834, fathered so many children that no one could agree on the count. Colonel Drouville, visiting in 1813, credited him with seven hundred wives, sixty-four sons, and a hundred and twenty-five daughters. Colonel Stuart, arriving the year after his death, gave him a thousand wives and a hundred and five children. By mid-century his descendants numbered in the thousands. They filled every governorship, every post of profit, every district office, until Persians coined a proverb: Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere. James Fraser, travelling through Adharbayjan in 1834, saw the result and called them a race of royal drones. He recorded something worse: a thorough and universal detestation of the Qajar race, a feeling in every heart and the theme of every tongue.

The old poet Sa’di had written that the vice approved by the king becomes a virtue, and that to seek opposite counsel is to imbrue one’s hands in his own blood. In Qajar Persia, that was not a proverb. It was a description of daily life.

Beneath the dynasty, everything ran on bribery. Every post was purchased with gifts. Every official extracted payment from the one below him. Every favor had a price. The Persian word was madakhil, a term with no clean English equivalent, though the word bribe comes close. Lord Curzon called it what it was: an arithmetical progression of plunder from the sovereign to the subject, each unit remunerating himself from the unit next in rank below him, and the hapless peasant being the ultimate victim.

The system fed on itself. Around every minister, every governor, every official of any standing, there swarmed a retinue of unpaid attendants, fifty, a hundred, five hundred. The Prime Minister kept three thousand. They were not paid. They attached themselves to power because of the opportunities for extortion, and they thrived and fattened on plunder. Curzon called them blood-suckers upon the resources of the country, absorbing but never creating wealth.

Half the money the Shah approved for projects never reached its destination. Half the plans he authorized were never carried out. His ministers told him what he wanted to hear, then pocketed what they could. Make what you can while you can. That was the rule men set before themselves in entering public life. And popular opinion did not resent it. The man who had the chance to line his pockets and failed to do so was not admired. He was considered a fool.

Even when a Shah wished to make a just decision, critical facts were withheld or distorted by interested witnesses and venal officials. Sir John Malcolm wrote of the ministers around the throne that their lives were wasted in attending to forms, their means of subsistence derived from the most corrupt sources, their occupation consumed in intrigues that had always the same object, to preserve themselves or ruin others. They could not speak any language but flattery and deceit. They were, he wrote, condemned by their condition to be venal, artful, and false.

The only real check on the Shah’s behavior came not from his own people but from the fear of foreign opinion, European newspapers that might report what was happening inside his borders.

And Nasiri’d-Din Shah, who reigned through the period that concerns us most, illustrated the paralysis at the top. He picked up novelties during his European travels the way another man collects souvenirs: one week it was gas, another electric lights, then a staff college, then a military hospital, then a Russian uniform, then a German man-of-war for the Persian Gulf. A new army warrant this year, a new code of law promised for the next. Nothing came of any of it. The palace lumber-rooms filled with broken machinery and discarded bric-a-brac, and the government bureaux filled with abortive reforms and dead fiascoes.

That was the political order. Now set it beside something far more powerful.

Persia was not a kingdom that happened to be religious. It was what Curzon called a church-state. Islam did not merely advise. It undergirded law, authority, custom, and social order. The clerical hierarchy defined what was legitimate. It shaped the courts, the schools, the public conscience. A claim that touched religion did not stay in the mosque. It shook the state.

And the moral rot inside the religious establishment matched the corruption outside it.

The Siyyids, those who claimed descent from the Prophet and wore the green turban, used their lineage to claim an independence and insolence of bearing from which their countrymen suffered constantly. In Mashhad, the holiest shrine-city in Persia, a system of temporary marriage operated under clerical sanction. Women were contracted to visiting pilgrims for a fortnight or a month, the union blessed by a mulla, a fee paid, and the whole arrangement dissolved when the pilgrim departed. Curzon called it what it was: a gigantic system of prostitution under the sanction of the Church. In Isfahan, where some thirty-seven hundred Jews lived, they were not permitted to wear the Persian headdress, could not have shops in the bazaar, and were forced to build the walls of their houses lower than any Muslim neighbor’s. When bigotry flared, they were the first victims. Every man’s hand was against them.

And the cruelty this system produced was not incidental. It was structural. Well within living memory, condemned men had been crucified, blown from guns, buried alive, impaled, shod like horses, torn apart by trees bent together and released, converted into human torches, flayed while living. These were the methods of the state into which the Bab was born, the methods that would be turned against His followers.

Curzon’s verdict on the whole apparatus is devastating. Under a system in which every actor is both the briber and the bribed, and a judicial procedure without either a law or a law court, there is no personal sense of duty or pride of honor. No mutual trust. No cooperation except in the service of ill-doing. No disgrace in exposure. No credit in virtue. Above all, no national spirit or patriotism. Moral reform, he wrote, must precede material reform. It is useless to graft new shoots on a stem whose own sap is exhausted or poisoned.

‘Abdu’l-Baha, who despite the cruelties heaped on Baha’u’llah, on the Bab, and on Himself, still loved His country, called it the tragedy of a people. He remembered what Persia had been. “In former times,” He wrote, “Persia was verily the heart of the world and shone among the nations like a lighted taper. Her glory and prosperity broke from the horizon of humanity like the true dawn. The majesty of her king of kings humbled the monarchs of Greece and Rome.” And then: “How is it that this excellent country now, by reason of our sloth, vanity, and indifference, from the lack of knowledge and organization, from the poverty of the zeal and ambition of her people, has suffered the rays of her prosperity to be darkened and well-nigh extinguished?”

That was the darkness. But inside it burned an expectation that would not die.

The Shi’ah faithful believed that after the Prophet Muhammad, a line of twelve Imams had succeeded Him, each divinely appointed, each endowed with spiritual authority, each owed the obedience of the faithful. The twelfth and last of these, Muhammad, had assumed the office of Imam in the year 260 of the Hegira and then vanished from sight. For a time he communicated with his followers through four successive Gates, each appointed by his predecessor with the approval of the hidden Imam. But when the fourth Gate, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali, was urged by the faithful to name a successor before he died, he refused. God, he said, had another purpose. On his death, all communication between the Imam and his church ceased.

That was centuries ago. But the promise endured. The Shi’ah faithful believed that the Imam still lived, surrounded by a chosen band, in a mysterious hidden place. And that when the fullness of time arrived, when the earth was filled with injustice and the faithful plunged in despair, he would come forth and establish justice throughout the world. They called him the Qa’im, He Who Shall Arise.

Authentic traditions taught that the Qa’im, when He appeared, would bring new laws and abrogate the old dispensation. He would not merely confirm what already existed. He would transform it.

But that was not what the established hierarchy expected. The priests, the mujtahids, the entire clerical order had built their authority on the assumption that fulfillment would confirm their system, extend their prestige, and win for them the reluctant homage of mankind. They did not expect to be overturned. They expected to be vindicated.

When the Bab appeared and announced Himself as the Qa’im, when He revealed a new book of laws, proclaimed a new code of religious life, and by precept and example instituted a profound moral and spiritual reform, the priests immediately scented mortal danger. They saw their monopoly undermined, their ambitions threatened, their own lives and conduct put to shame. They rose against Him in sanctimonious indignation. They declared before the Shah and all the people that this man was an enemy of sound learning, a subverter of Islam, a traitor to Muhammad, and a peril to the holy church, the social order, and the state itself.

The cause of that rejection was in its essence the same as the cause of the rejection and persecution of Christ. If Jesus had not brought a new Book, if He had only reiterated the spiritual principles taught by Moses but continued Moses’ rules unchanged, He might have escaped the vengeance of the Scribes and Pharisees. But to claim that the law itself could be altered, and altered by an unordained figure from an obscure place, was to threaten the interests of those who believed themselves the representatives of God. As soon as that position was understood, the persecution began. As He refused to desist, He was put to death.

For reasons exactly parallel, the Bab was opposed from the beginning as an uprooter of the Faith.

So this is the world the canonical story enters. A dynasty that murdered its own ministers and bred princes like a plague. A government that ran on bribery from the throne to the village gate. A clergy that held spiritual and legal power in the same fist and used it to sanction prostitution in the holiest city in the land. Punishments designed not merely to kill but to terrify. A people whose ancient glory had decayed into what their own prophetic tradition recognized as the darkness that precedes the dawn. And threaded through all of it, unextinguished, the promise that God would act, that the Qa’im would come forth when the earth was filled with injustice and the faithful had been plunged in despair.

Into that world stepped a young man from Shiraz, mild and serene, yet eager, resolute, and dominant, who said the promise was fulfilled. And everything He represented was a threat to everything they had built.

The story of what happened next does not begin with His declaration. It begins with preparation, with a man who spent his life teaching others to expect the dawn before it came.