THE FIRST FRUITS OF VICTORY
BY KEITH RANSOM-KEHLER
IMPARTIAL Europeans, acquainted with the history of Persia, or writing it, as in the case of Compte de Gobineau, Lord Curzon, Professor Browne, are agreed that a most challenging aspect of her modern development has been the army of glorious martyrs who have laid down their lives for a great religious principle. Lord Curzon says that Europe’s faith in the power of Persia to revive and advance from her decadence, derives from the spiritual vitality shown in Bábí and Bahá’í martyrdoms.
The conclusion of the morbid peasantry who went out to witness the burning of John Huss was that martyrdoms make poor spectacles. Certainly from the viewpoint of agony and writhings they do, for it is evident, from the testimony of eye-witnesses throughout the course of history, that the psychology of martyrdom lifts the victim “above all earthly conditions”; but from the viewpoint of the convincing superiority of a dedicated human spirit to that remorseless and indifferent fate, which urges a tragic incident to its inevitable conclusion, the martyrs of history have, by an irresistible contagion, convinced those about them of the reality of their faith, impervious to human corruption.
A subject, so fascinating to psychologists that its bibliography is constantly increasing, is an inquiry into that state, discontinuous from normal mental activity, called by the misleading name of mysticism. It is misleading because in ordinary parlance the mystical is the remote, the impractical, the detached: whereas the self-evident condition of those historical figures who have mounted to this preéminence is their enormously enhanced ability, the notable increase of their human powers of co-ordination and accomplishment. When we look at such examples as Paul, Kabir, Francis, Al-Ghazálí, Catherine of Sienna, Jalálu’d-Dín, we realize not only that their practical accomplishments were superhuman, but that while performing actions, requiring such careful attention and intelligent procedure, they were simultaneously living in a world above the dictates of the sensory and the empirical.
Bahá’u’lláh says, “But one step separateth thee from the glorious heights above and from the celestial tree of love. Take thou one step and with the next advance toward the immortal realm and enter the tabernacle of eternity.” That the great martyrs in His Cause have taken that step is attested by the confirming power which their death has exerted over the lives of others. For every martyr thousands have sprung to take that place, advancing to the ultimate outposts of humanity, those mighty standards, flung from dying hands. Their lives were a triumphant sacrifice to nothing more nor less than their unswerving belief in the power of Báb and of Bahá’u’lláh to establish justice, peace and love in the world.
It is a provocative fact that the Founders of all of the great religions have appeared not in advanced and enlightened communities, but in backward and benighted places: Jesus did not proclaim Himself in Rome, but in an obscure and fanatical portion of the Roman Empire; the Buddha came to the unimportant city of Benares, and Bahá’u’lláh to the dark and intolerant land of Persia. As we read in the first chapter of Saint John, “amid the darkness the light shone but the darkness did not master it.” Had the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh appeared in Paris, London or New York, their followers would have been quite unmolested, since they had no political program. But it is always in the fertile soil of opposition that loyalty and sacrifice take root. That is one of the reasons, perhaps, why ‘Abdu’l-Bahá teaches that our Cause must be established by proof and argument; any effort to detach us violently from our opinions and beliefs roots them the more firmly.
Human beings want to determine of themselves how God’s promises shall be
The Bahá’ís of Poona, India
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fulfilled
and how He shall reveal Himself to
men. The Jews held relentlessly certain
literal preconceptions of their Messiah, of the
way in which He was to come and of the
human station that He was to occupy. They
failed, because of their blind adherence to
presuppositions, to recognize the Promised
One when He appeared. So the Muḥammadans
had a perfectly definite plan by which
God must manifest Himself: The Imám,
the promised Qá’im, was living down a well
and as He returned the vapor of His Coming
would fill the whole earth and apprise
men of His advent. The Christians insist
that the physical body of Jesus must drop
from the clouds, so that all men may behold
him; this in spite of the fact that
Jesus likens this coming to lightning, which
flashes so quickly that few could say whence
it came.
In other words the Manifestation of God has to come man’s way or man will have nothing to do with Him—at least not until time has established His reality. So when ‘Alí-Muḥammad, a devout and beautiful young cloth-merchant of Shiráz, announced that He was the long-expected Qá’im horrified Muslims raised the old objections that the coming of the Promised One would be dramatic, spectacular and startling. The glorious personality of the Báb not only bore its own conviction, but He fulfilled as well all of those predictions by which He was to be known. The result was the agitation that always seizes men whenever the power of God is released in this world. The coming of His Mighty Messenger is like the coming of the sun; not only is the new order of verdure and growth re-established, but the old order of sterility and death is swept away. The inevitable confusion of the passing of the old and the coming of the new is characteristic of those great epochs in which a Manifestation of God appears among men.
No existing nation has yet reached that point of maturity where it opposes ideas with counter-ideas. Small wonder then that in a backward country the ideas advanced by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh were opposed by physical violence. When will humanity learn that though it can imprison, martyr and crucify men, it cannot imprison martyrs and crucify ideas? The Báb’s speedy imprisonment after His claim of Bábhood and His Declaration that the Promised One was in the world and would reveal Himself, was a triumphal progress from prison to prison, necessitated by the fact that wherever He went men believed on Him and became His followers. At last realizing the alarming outcome to their power and authority in case His Cause prevailed, the ‘Ulamá, or priestly caste, encompassed His destruction. “Riddled by a thousand bullets,” as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said, the Báb’s stupendous ministry of arousing an ignorant and fanatical nation to a great spiritual adventure, was finished at the age when our Lord Jesus was beginning His.
The martyrdom of the Báb was the signal for that merciless and savage policy of extermination practised by the government toward His followers and later toward those of Bahá’u’lláh, who in 1863 declared His Mission as promised by the Báb. European historians are agreed that no more gallant or lustrous page has been written in history than the defense of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, where a few hundred Bábís, without modern arms, repulsed attack after attack of regular troops equipped with cannon and muskets. Under a flag of truce sent by the enemy, they laid aside their weapons, and, sitting down to a banquet spread before them— having had no food after the horses and dead animals had been consumed—though under promise of protection, were slaughtered in cold blood as they ate.
Following the direction of Bahá’u’lláh
the martyrdoms assumed that purely
spiritual character that carries with
it such exalting conviction. Instructing
His followers
that it was better to be slain than to slay
in the path of God the annals of Persia
became bright with the story of those
glorious beings who exchanged all that they
had for the hope of what God has. The
exquisite cruelties practised during these
martyrdoms seem incredible in the nineteenth
century. The Holy Inquisition pales
by comparison. The victims were turned
over to the various crafts or guilds for
suitable punishment and death; sometimes they
were assigned to different regiments. They
were cut to pieces with pen-knives by
the[Page 403]
guild
of penmen, hacked with cleavers by
the butchers and blown from the mouth of
cannon by the soldiers. Lighted candles were
stuck in lacerated flesh and the victims
marched through jeering rows of spectators.
One eye-witness records how a troop of
martyrs on their way to the block marched
to a rhythmic chant, victoriously raised:
“From God we come, to God we are returning;
from God we come, to God we are
returning!”
In every instance the victim was given the opportunity to apostasise; but no such instance has ever been recorded by those all too eager to expose such a success, had it been attained. The prophetic words of Ḥafiẓ were fulfilled in the Bahá’í martyrs. In the symbolism of Persian poetry, wine is spiritual ardor; the Beloved, the Manifestation of God with Whom the soul is seeking union.
“Holding in one hand the wine-cup, With the other caressing the tresses of the Beloved, Gaily I dance to the scaffold in the square.”
Here was an ecstasy unknown to ordinary human beings, experienced by those, exalted before they had left this world to the glories which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard”: men and women, already translated to the joys of eternal reunion with God, met bodily death as an incident so trivial as to pass unnoticed.
One of the most stirring accounts is that of a venerable and previously honored Shaykh, who approached his executioner with such rapturous delight that the brutal man was shaken and appalled: thereby missing his aim, he merely struck off the old man’s turban. Calmly lifting his head from the block, he said, addressing those about him: “Happy is he who in the pathway of the Beloved, knoweth not whether it is his head or his turban that is cast.”
A gutter-snipe, a young gangster stood one day, watching the appalling martyrdoms in a northern city. He knew nothing of the Bahá’í teachings nor of the station of Bahá’u’lláh, but as one by one these joyous beings were dispatched to the divine Beloved, into the mind of that careless, ignorant boy there penetrated a great revelation and a greater beauty: that this whole wide earth holds nothing comparable to the integrity of the heart and that there is no redemption save the quickening of the spirit. Following an impulse greater than his own meager comprehension, he rushed forward as the last head was severed, announcing that he was a Bahá’í, although he had scarcely heard the name, and offering his life for an ideal too glorious to resist.
The story of that matchless being, the lovely Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, has been told too often to need repetition; her ardor, courage and superlative gifts have elevated her to the station of a world-figure, often called the first feminist. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, writing of her, says: “In oratory she was the calamity of the age and in ratiocination the trouble of the world.” In spite of the indubitable dangers that constantly surrounded her, knowing in advance that martyrdom was inescapable, she carried her great message even to the Sháh, and taught in prison to the very eve of her murder. The natural end of one so rare and astonishingly endowed would have seemed deplorable: to have brought to an untimely conclusion such a life is a source of ceaseless mourning. Incomparable in her service, in her loyalty and in her attainments, she, too, suffered that violence that freed her enraptured soul for its eternal rendezvous with God; and there her radiant spirit blooms “entwined forever in the tresses of the rose of paradise.”
The Bábí and Bahá’í martyrs are numbered at no less than twenty thousand, probably more. Starting with the execution of the Báb in 1850 they have continued to the present, although they have received no official sanction, since a Tablet on the subject was carried from Bahá’u’lláh to the Sháh by Badí, who by that act became one of the most exalted and outstanding of the martyrs.
The Bahá’ís have no philosophy of pain
or suffering. On the contrary, believing as
we do, that Bahá’u’lláh has come to fulfill
the hope of the ages and to establish the
Kingdom of God on earth, our faith is one
of exultant joy. To investigate Bahá’í
Martyrdoms is to behold in the face of life’s
terrors a bliss that only the fire of the love
of God could enkindle in the human breast;
a rapture incomparably greater than
any[Page 404]
earthly
happiness. To have engendered in
man and woman this supreme devotion is
one of the great proofs of the station of
Bahá’u’lláh, for we do not idly toss away
our lives for base and ignoble purposes, and
none save God can awaken in us this mighty
love that counts life itself a very little thing
to bestow in proof of it.
In paying His tribute to these magnificent souls, specialized by God for the unique service of watering with the essence of their hearts those seeds for the unprecedented harvest of peace and good-will on earth, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says: “they hastened, wrapt in holy ecstasy, to the glorious field of martyrdom and writ with their life-blood upon the Tablet of the world the verses of God’s divine unity.”
