When one reads the Middle Eastern accounts of the early days of the Faith, the protagonists are divided into heroes and villains. This division is almost cartoonish, as was the wearing of black and white hats in old TV Westerns. This does not satisfy me, as I have a novelist’s fascination with the complexities, unpredictabilities, the paradoxes of character. When I read history, I want to be there, immersed in the myriad entangled forces directing their fangs at each other’s jugulars. So I sometimes feel like howling with laughter, when studying Ruhi Book 4, at the dismissal in a couple of words of the characters who opposed the Faith. On page 31, Governor Husayn Khán of Fars is encapsulated as “a cruel and wicked man”; then on page 37, Hájí Mírzá Aqási, Persian Prime Minister in the time of The Báb is deemed and doomed as “a selfish, incompetent man.” His successor, Mírzá Taqi, is stigmatized as “as bloodthirsty as the previous one” on page 41. And in this context this is all we perhaps need to know, just as Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus and his subsequent suicide is sufficient unto us, and we need neither to know his life story and character, but only his most infamous betrayal to sum up his role in history. But some of us thirst to know more.
In 1848, the aging Muhammad Sháh died after only fourteen years on the Peacock Throne. Mírzá Taqi Khán had been a trusted adviser and perhaps even father figure to the crown prince cum teenage king Nasiri’d-din Sháh (pictured above), in juxtaposition to the latter’s domineering mother, and the boyking promptly made him Prime Minister and virtually gave him the reins of government. The process of modernization and westernization sorely needed after the disaster of the Russo-Persian War was largely Taqi’s initiative. At that time, Persia was nearly bankrupt, so he initiated sweeping reforms in both governmental and social spheres: expenditure was slashed, and central administration overhauled; foreign interference was curtailed, though foreign trade was encouraged. He established the first modern university in the Middle East with European instructors to train a new generation of administrators in Western techniques. The ornate and formal writing that sometimes seems archaic and impenetrable to many readers of the Bahá’í writings, even in Shoghi Effendi’s pyrotechnical English, was abolished by Taqi’s decree, replaced by a modern Persian prose style. Nevertheless, he will forever figure in the chronicles of the Bahá’í Faith as an archvillain for ordering the execution of The Báb and viciously attempting to eradicate the “Bábi problem,” which was a domestic thorn in the side of Nasir’id-din Sháh, who needed to focus on more pressing foreign policy concerns, like the encroachment and invasions of the Russians and British.
As it so often happens, from Oedipus to Ashoka, his greatest strength was also his Achilles’ heel. The Sháh’s mother convinced him that Taqi’s efficient and visionary statesmanship and gift for social reform was a master plan to usurp the throne. In 1851 the Sháh dismissed him and not only sent him into exile, but had him murdered there to boot. His meteoric career as Prime Minister had lasted less than four years.
Násiri’d-Dín Sháh himself, (literally and ironically “defender of religion” -- the younger generation may know this name only as a Bollywood film star, much as Mark Antony is only known as a popular singer) Ruhi 4 tells us on page 91, “was far more ruthless than his father.” He danced with Western Europe, making a famous trip to England and publishing his diaries from that journey, and was not only the first Persian monarch to be photographed (dozens, if not hundreds of times), but set up the first photography studio in the land. He established the first real Persian newspaper, telegraph, and postal service; he was a patron of the arts and also dabbled in painting, drawing, and languages, reportedly doing rather poorly at all of them. But ultimately his Westernization and modern reforms had the taint of insincerity, as his personality remained deeply conservative and despotic. His concessions to the West were motivated chiefly by economic and not visionary impulses, at times making him look ridiculous, as with a tobacco patronage scandal than ran him afoul with the clergy, his subjects (tobacco boycott), ending with his own eighty-four wives forbidding him to smoke. In 1852, some Bábis, contrary to the explicit wishes of Bahá’u’lláh, made an inept attempt at the life of the Sháh, causing an inhuman backlash against the Bábis all over the country.
An almost equally botched attempt, forty-four years later, by Mírzá Reza Kermani, (a member of a movement that has in the present day become known as the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt), this time in the shrine of Sháh ‘Abdu'l-'Azím just barely achieved its objective. And this on the very eve of magnificent celebrations that had been long planned to mark his 50 years (by the lunar calendar) on the throne -- apparently to pre-empt Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee planned for one year later. What to do? To give them time to think, his dead body was propped up in the carriage to make it look like he was still alive as they took him back to the palace. His death was no more dignified than his life, and the whole country burned with shame. His successors did even worse, finally bringing to an end the Qajar Dynasty.
Mírzá Yahyá (“Mister John”), the much younger half-brother of Bahá’u’lláh, lived only as a foil to test the true adherents of the Faith, and would otherwise best be forgotten; nevertheless he makes as much a fascinating (and disgusting) study in villainy as Iago or Richard III, rating more than simply “ambitious and cowardly” (Ruhi 4, pg. 109), as does his evil genius/sidekick Siyyid Muhammad, who was “more shameless than himself.” The former’s evil deeds, as attested in God Passes By, include: ordering the murder of several eminent persons; perverting the text of God; poisoning Bahá’u’lláh and His family; marrying the Báb’s widow, divorcing her, and passing her on to another man; making lying and indecent accusations about Bahá’u’lláh to the Sultán (resulting ultimately in the further exile of the entire Bábi – by now Bahá’í – community in Adrianople); and even claiming himself to be a manifestation of God – yikes! The juxtaposition of Bahá’u’lláh’s über-Job forbearance of him -- resulting at times in the indignity and deprivation of His own family -- with Mírzá Yahyá’s cloak-and-dagger disguises, chicanery, and aliases until the final “Most Great Separation” in Adrianople, is the stuff of drama of Shakespearean proportions. Yahyá ended his rather long days in exile in Cyprus, nowhere to swim or paddle to, his application for British citizenship refused, and now dust blows over his weedy resting-place without a marker.
