Transcript:Filmstrip/Land of Resplendent Glory Part 1
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Who was the prisoner confined in this remote Persian fortress in 1847, whose guards loved him so much, they set him free,
whose calls were destined to change the world.
What happened in a dungeon in 1852, just behind the buildings in the middle of this square of modern Tehran, in Persia?
It was destined to convey hope to every man, woman, and child on earth.
While this nine-sided temple built was the aid of a helicopter in Sydney, Australia, and dedicated to world unity,
what is the secret behind the seemingly unconnected event?
For the answer, let us visit this land of resplendent glory, the Near East, where a personage who possessed the stairs of Moses,
Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad appeared with a new body and a new name, and fulfilled all the great prophecies of old.
In the center, you see a rock, for the first during the mystic events began early last century, to the right life Persia, also called Iran,
where the new face was openly proclaimed in 1844, to the left the Holy Land, where a central figure, the how Allah,
spent his later years as a prisoner of the Turks, and where the permanent Baha'i World Center is now being built in Haifa.
Here in the holy city of Kabbalah, fifty miles south of Baghdad, stands the sacred shrine of the Imam Hussein,
the martyred grandson of Muhammad, a favorite gathering place of modern scholars and tears, and where the yet unborn faith was first taught,
and from where the great seeker, Molah Hussein, named after the Imam, set forth early in 1844 to find the promised new prophet of God.
All from the narrow jumbled street he went past the date time to surround the city and border the Euphrates,
making his way downstream by the calm waters, heading south eastward toward the Persian Gulf, and ultimately to the garden city of Shiraz in Persia.
He undoubtedly saw his buffalo like these, and probably slept some nights in Bedouin tent, and rode or walked through sandstones,
where moving deans and pre-resistents offered a cure in his path. Over mountain passes he walked, mystically guided eastward, among the wild almond shrubs,
then still in spring blossom, past an occasional lonely fort guarding the heights in this land where any way there could be a brigand,
where wild beasts are plentiful, including then a few lions, as these stylized stones dig his in a graveyard suggest.
When writing at Shiraz at sundown, May 22nd, 1844, Molah Hussein came to the closet on gate, which no longer exists,
but may have looked similar to this or on gate on the other side of the city. These big plane trees stood beside it,
with a gnarled trunk, and base is not much different in appearance from what they still are today.
And no doubt, the same forms merchants and peddlers selling vegetables, pots, and clothing there, and children and shoppers bustling all around.
In this setting at the gate, he saw a radiated young man, who approached and greeted him as a friend.
Molah Hussein felt strangely drawn to him, and when the young man invited him to accompany him home, he accepted,
and the two walked into the city through the crowded waves like these, and long alleys that eventually led to a dark tunnel,
near the end of which was the door to a small house, silently the two men entered it.
This was the house of the young merchant, who assumed to be known all over Islam as Bob or Gate.
From this little courtyard, you could see the windows of the sitting room upstairs, and the iron street he had planted with his own hands.
Most of that night, the Bob sat in this northwest corner of the sitting room, conversing with Molah Hussein,
openly proclaiming his cause for the first time, and hinting at the coming of the Ha'al law.
Just above his head could be seen from interesting wall carvings in the plaster, roses and daffodils left,
and the traditional lion attacking a bull. The lion, in ancient Persia, symbolized their actual power,
which, as he has shown, is always able, in the end, to triumph over material power, symbolized by the bull.
The lion and bull were a familiar motif, also in ancient precipilates, both by Sires and the Rires,
from twenty-five hundred years ago. The loins of which still stand on their majestic marble terrace,
only thirty miles from Shiraz. Still higher above the Bob's head at the edge of the ceiling,
were additional carvings of showers, beautifully appropriate to the spiritual springtime.
He was at that moment, throwing. While on the roof terrace outside the window, the top of the iron street was visible,
before part of adjoining buildings. Meeting the Bob's house early next morning,
one of a plain repair to other quarters. Perhaps an old caravan Sarai or Inn, like this one,
beside the Karzuram Gate, with its courtyard and arcaded, sleeping platform.
Then, by pre-arrangement, he met his followers in this room in the small mosque called Masjeda Iluhani,
and urged them to go forth to discover the Bob, each for himself.
They did not realize at the time that the Bob actually mingled with him in this mosque occasionally,
conversed with him, beside the columns of his courtyard, or walked beside the shallow pool that remained there to this day.
Their 18 persons, including a woman, recognized him in this dawning period of the new faith and were appointed as his letters of the living.
This made 18 letters of the living who gathered spiritually around the bar, who called himself the 19th letter,
the whole creating a symbolic snowflake-like crystalline structure of unfathomable strength.
Of course, with his proclamation, the Bob's life as a merchant was over.
But sometimes he may well have remembered his days on the road, perhaps leading a small caravan such as this typical one,
with three packed camels followed by a baby camel.
Sometimes, baby camels are born during the journey, and like the little one in the right center of this picture,
may be wrapped in a bundle upon the mother's back until strong enough to keep the pace on foot.
Following a familiar route, he had often headed southwest toward his shop and warehouses,
in the port of Boucher on the Persian Gulf, on the way, passing some deeply eroded hills,
from very rugged mountains, where the roads zigzag in terminively.
Then flattered country, meeting other caravans now and then, as one still does today.
In Boucher, he would proceed directly to a street near the waterfront, where his shop still stands,
almost as he left it.
And there he would find his big door opening upon a passage to an inner courtyard for unloading the camels and donkeys.
Above the door was the number 90, in Persian, nine, with a small diamond.
Carvings and wood of lions and flowers, again symbolizing the dawning era of enlightenment for all mankind.
In the courtyard is a saltwater well for washing and a raised watering trough of rainwater for the animals,
with white jasmine and red booginvillea growing nearby.
A joining the passage is above small dark office, with two old lamps on the table and daylights showing through the sliding lattice windows.
Outside which children play and peek through tiny holes in the ancient panels.
There are warehouses nearby, where the bar could store precious fabrics from India and other distant lands.
And there are flat roofs above the shop that overlook the pale green waters of the gulf, and upon which he used to pray every Friday noon, even in the extreme heat of summer.
All time wooden sailing vessels are still common here, and it was in some such ship that he sailed from Mecca that October of 1844, taking a young letter of the living named Auduz,
and an Ethiopian attendant with a large basket of sweet lemon to make up for the absence of fresh water aboard.
In a voyage of about two months, they sailed 3,000 miles around Arabia to the Red Sea and to Jet Day, which is the port of Mecca.
They saw several Arab cities, the most important being Mecca, the holiest place in Islam, where the bar boldly proclaimed the new revelation as he stood before the black stone.
He must have seen lots of sheep, goats, and camels as he traveled by land in Arabia, including a journey to Medina before returning to Jet Day, where he took another ship back home to Persia.
By this time the growing numbers of his followers, exemplified by this group of believers in a Persian village near Shiraz,
along with the governor of Shiraz so much, that in due course he set out a troop of cavalry to arrest the bobs.
Under the ash tree in the right center of this picture near the town of Barals-John, the bobs saw the governor's horsemen approaching and with positive insight into their purpose.
He offered himself to their captain as a prisoner.
The captain was so touched by the bobs' friendliness that he dismounted and kissed the bobs' spirit and urged him to escape.
But the bobs declined and they went on over this road seen in the foreground.
He as their captain for more than 100 miles to Shiraz, crossing passes 7,000 feet high.
Sometimes riding among gooseflowers such as these and wilds, violets, great hyacinths, poppies, and camomiles growing between the stones.
At rare intervals camping at an oasis with its dense grove of potted willows and finally arriving in its home city.
When he was treated harshly as a heretic and for a time held in his old fort in the middle of town.
On the latest occasion the bobs directed to enter the great mosque in Shiraz known as Masjadeh Akil, which opens on a vast courtyard surrounded by elegantly tiled arcades and a pool in the center.
Here he addressed the largest emelage of mostly hostile people from part way up these marble steps.
Speaking a few brief minutes he affirmed his beliefs in the unity of God denied he was the representative of the awaited 12th Imam.
And in reply to those who still regarded him a heretic endorsed the prophethood of Muhammad, accepting Ali and all the among after him.
The bobs reef were rained through the great vaulted hall of forty-eight spiral columns, and they go from the tiled walls with their flower design and script in red, blue, green, and yellow.
By 1846 the bobs rapidly growing number of flowers made him very much besought by both friend and foe.
Released from custody on condition he leave Shiraz, he journeyed northward to the great city of Asfahan, crossing this famous 300 year old bridge near Patrapalot
and passing ridges shaped like the spines of giant reptile to dwell a few months in this beautiful city of turquoise domes and avenues of trees and passing veiled women.
He was a secret guest in magnificent private mansions, but they may hurt the mulets calling the faithful to prayer from the miderets of the great mosques with their tiered archer opening on courtyard with trees, their high windows and domes tiled in blue tracery inside and out
their walls of marble and onyx, grained like wood.
All around him were marvellous, such a big shopkeeper in the bazaar, with a traditional picture of Eddie, some of them talent, some of them not.
Some of the mulets or priests of Asfahan suggested the shop do away with him before it was too late.
As a result the bobs were arrested again and placed on the heavy guard north-westward through Qashan, Asveen and Van Zhang to the semi-turquoise city of Cabris.
In a village called Kenai Ged, not far from Tehran, he spent one of many nights on a route.
Further on he stopped in Van Zhang, which looks like this today, staying in an old inn which has since fallen into disrepair and is now used as a source of depot for trucks.
He slept in a room on the second floor, here marked with an "X".
Next day he continued up into corner country where it frequently snows, fordings rushing rivers and winding among rotted mountains, which must have felt very chilly to one, who had always lived in the semi-tropical region of the Persian Gulf.
He would have breathed the third largest city of Persia.
The tallest and biggest building by far is the 800-year-old fortress in the background, known as the Ark.
In the bobs day it looked about like this photograph, taken in 1862, and the bobs were imprisoned in the room at the upper right with seven windows more than 100 feet above the ground,
and guarded by a regiment of 750 soldiers.
Today the bricks are crumbling and the battlements serve only as nesting places for hundreds of rockers closed.
However, the ancient stairways of which the barbed walked can still be seen.
In the same old 19th century gardens, still spread out below and to the north of the Ark, patiently awaiting, and in the bobs time, the outcome of unsettled issues between quieting humans.
In 1847 the Shah, thoroughly alarmed by the growing cause of the bar, had incensed still further off to the extreme northwest corner of the country, to be confined in the grimace, coldest, and most remote fortress in its possession, Māku.
On the way the expeditions start briefly in the town of Hui by Lake Urmiyi, where a solitary minaret stands tall above the shaft, crowns by a large dorks nest.
The people were friendly to the barbed there, men in eating houses wearing fur caps and heavy coats, and some who smoked the Hubble bubble pipe.
Hundreds of them followed him in the street, cheering.
Even the rocks in poplar trees along the road seemed excited when he passed by, but the country grew more desolate as he continued north, until scarcely a living plant was to be seen on the bare slopes.
It was just one bleak mountain range after another.
Then at last he beheld Māku.
The stone fortress perched like a cliff dwelling in a hollow of a precipice in the center background of this picture, perhaps 800 feet above the town called Māku.
He spent nine months of 1847 and 48 in this fortress, which is about 200 yards long and made of unmoored stones, and which looks like this today.
Having crumbled and tumbled half the pieces in the more than a century since.
Some of the vaulted lower rooms are still nearly intact, however, and a book trickles by which presumably once formed the fortress's water supply.
This is the view the Bob had, looking north-westward into Turkey from his high prison.
With ancient sea beds visible like pages of history, and 35 miles away, snowy Mount Ararat of Noah's Ark fame, spending 17,000 feet high in the haze.
From the showers learned that the Bob's guards at Māku had come to love and worship him, he had insisted to steal another, and even more terrible place, the dismal castle of Chesapeake.
This stood on a rocky prominent just west of Lake Orumi here, and in the same desolate mountain country as Māku, but it seems to have crumbled away almost completely by now.
He needs no limit as left of his castle where the Bob remained a prisoner for two years, but it appears to be nothing but jumbo rock, well becoming the name he gave it, the Grievous Mountain.
Finally brought back to Tabriz in 1850, the Bob was arraigned, probably in this police building, which is said to be little changed into time, including a stone lion on either side of the entrance,
and on July 9th, 1850, at noon, he was executed.
At the Shav's command in this barracks square in the heart of the city, by the same regiment that had guided him in 1847 when he was in the Ark.
The first rolling from the 750 rifles astonished the assembled crowd, and well the soldiers themselves, because not one bullet hit the bomb.
Many bullets, however, struck the rope that had suspended him and his disciples by the armpits in front of these old banks, so he was free and unharmed.
After such a miracle, the soldiers, understandably, refused to fire again.
Another regiment had to be called in, and this time he died instantly.
A few hours later, his little body and that of his disciple, were dumped beside a dry moat, left outside the east gate of the city.
In a spot that is now the grain warehouse in the background of this street scene of modern Tabriz.
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