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World Order, Series 2 Volume 6 - Issue 4

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World Order

SUMMER 1972

THRALLS OF YEARNING LOVE

—A STORY OF ṬÁHIRIH

Dimitri Marianoff and Marzieh Gail

WOMEN—

ATTAINING THEIR BIRTHRIGHT

Constance Conrader

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 6 NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

GAYLE MORRISON

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription: Regular mail USA, $4.50; Domestic student rate, $3.50; Foreign, $5.00. Single copy, $1.25.

Copyright © 1972, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Summer’s Glory or Summer’s Gloom?

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters to and from the Editor

7 Thralls of Yearning Love

by Dimitri Marianoff and Marzieh Gail

43 Women: Attaining Their Birthright

by Contance Conrader

61 Ecological Consequences of Immoderation

a book review by Arthur Lyon Dahl

62 Crow Country

a poem by Richard C. Raymond

64 Authors and Artists in This Issue

[Page 1]

Summer’s Glory or Summer’s Gloom?

SUMMER is nature’s glory: long hot days and sultry nights, dry spells and thunderstorms, fast growth and slow ripening, a riot of color and sound. On land, in the water, and in the air, myriads of creatures celebrate the fullness of life. For man, too, summer has always been like no other season. He cultivated his crops, herded his animals, worried about blight, weeds, and the weather. Even city dwellers, remote from seasonal rhythms, have felt the irresistible attraction of summer and, answering its magic call, have made their yearly pilgrimage to the prairies, the mountains, and the seashore.

Yet suddenly summer is threatened. Ribbons of concrete, like preternatural snakes, entwine the country in their coils, killing uncounted animals and tens of thousands of human beings. Oil slicks break on the shore, turning the beaches into infernal expanses where millions of birds die for man’s greed and folly. Fish die in poisoned rivers; insects die on poisoned plants and in their turn poison birds who lay eggs that will never hatch. One after another, cities disappear from sight, swallowed by sulfurous smog, and mountains grow invisible behind a yellow curtain. Baffled and frightened, man observes his awful handiwork but seems incapable of reversing the fatal trend his civilization has been following over the last hundred years. He talks of ecology, affirms the need to protect nature, yet continues to pollute and ruin the environment of which he too is part. Overcome with greed, immersed in materialism, hypnotized by technology and its promise of physical omnipotence, man fails to perceive the basic principles that ought to govern his relationship to the world.

Almost seventy years ago ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said that all beings “which inhabit the world, whether man, animal, vegetable, mineral—whatever they may be—” are part of one natural system, obeying one universal law and divine organization:

For all beings are connected together like a chain, and reciprocal help, assistance, and influence belonging to the properties of things, are the causes of the existence, development, and growth of created beings. . . . every being universally acts upon other beings . . .

Of all beings only man is endowed with reason. Only he has the power to interfere with nature: either to enhance its glory or to ravage it, and with it himself. Knowledge and power have made man the custodian of the world and have imposed upon him a heavy burden of universal responsibility. “And the proper exercise of this responsibility is the key to whether his inventive genius produces beneficial results, or creates havoc in the material world.”

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Interchange LETTERS TO AND FROM THE EDITOR

THIS is the century of mankind’s awakening concern about the environment. But even in this century it is only by degrees that we have come to perceive the magnitude of the problem. The United Nations, for example, in 1949 convened its first world scientific conference—the Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources—to discuss such matters as avoiding the depletion of natural resources and gaining expertise in achieving maximum use of them. But few, very few, spoke to the dangers inherent in despoiling the environment which is the very basis of life on this planet.

In 1972 the United Nations has again called a conference—the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, Sweden, June 5-16. It has been four years in the planning, and its title reflects man’s new concern with the totality of his life support system and his role at the center of it. Attending the Stockholm Conference were representatives of member states of the United Nations. Representatives of the Non-Governmental Organizations accredited to the United Nations Public Information Office attended an Environmental Forum running simultaneously with the Conference on the Human Environment.

WORLD ORDER is pleased to note that the International Bahá’í Community was represented at the Environmental Forum by marine biologist Arthur Lyon Dahl and by his alternate, forest biologist Torleif Ingelog. We are also pleased to call attention to our editorial on the interdependence of man’s environment and on man’s responsibility for using it with care, and to Dr. Dahl’s review of Limits to Growth. WORLD ORDER has published in recent years several articles on the subject of man’s environment. Its readers will remember Dr. Dahl’s “The Ocean—Our Last Resource,” published in the Winter 1968-69 issue; Jay and Constance Conrader’s “Flowers and Insects: A Study in Interdependence” in the Spring 1969 issue; and its editorial in the Spring 1972 issue on “The Ecology Within.” WORLD ORDER’S concern with environment is a reflection of Bahá’ís’ belief in the remarkable pronouncement which Bahá’u’lláh made almost a hundred years ago. “The earth,” He said, “is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” All men must become “as one kindred and one family,” and mankind must share one single home, the planet, the preservation of which depends upon man’s capacity to use wisely his material as well as his spiritual resources. At last these principles are becoming widely accepted, if only through sheer necessity—the slogan of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment is “Only One Earth.”

Just as attaining a balance in man’s [Page 3] environment is essential to the peace and harmony of life on this planet, so, Bahá’ís believe, is the equality of men and women. In its Spring 1972 issue WORLD ORDER presented an editorial entitled “Women: Striking the Balance” and two articles bearing on the subject—Mildred R. Mottahedeh’s “Educating Women for Their Rights” and Gary L. Morrison’s “‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Early American Bahá’ís,” many of whom were women. In this issue the reader will find two very different studies of the equality of men and women.

Marzieh Gail in a piece of historical fiction entitled “Thralls of Yearning Love” tells the story of the remarkable Persian woman known as Qurratu’l-‘Ayn (Solace of the Eyes), and as Ṭáhirih (The Pure One). Ṭáhirih was the lone woman among the first eighteen believers of the Báb, the Prophet-Herald of the Bahá’í Faith, and was destined, by the symbolic act of removing her veil, to play an important role in breaking the degrading traditions of the past and in establishing that woman is indeed the equal of man. She has won the hearts of Bahá’ís for all times with her courage in living, and then dying, for the Faith of the new Age. But she also won recognition throughout the world for her skill as a poet and for her role as one of the earliest feminists.

Constance Conrader, in “Women— Attaining Their Birthright” also discusses the beautiful, intelligent, gifted, indomitable Ṭáhirih. In addition she sketches in the centuries-long degradation of women and the worldwide movements of the last hundred years which began to loosen their shackles. The center of her essay, however, is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanations of Bahá’u’lláh’s pronouncement that the equality of men and women is essential for the establishment of the promised era of World Order.

To the Editor

A NOTE ON BUDDHISM

Recently I had the good fortune to receive a gift copy of WORLD ORDER, Winter 1971-72, from a friend who knew I would read with keen interest the article “Buddhism and the Bahá’í Faith.”

I have now read the article several times, each time with great interest, pleasure and much admiration for the author, Daniel Conner. His knowledge of Buddhism is extraordinary and he expounds it with rare insight, even in its doctrinal and sectarian complexities. It may be supposed by some readers that this is an achievement neither exceptional nor notable for an anthropologist; his discipline should enable him to study other cultures and religions with an objective attitude. But what makes Mr. Conner’s article even more remarkable than an erudite essay about Buddhism is the extra measure of self-discipline it takes for [Page 4] a writer to expound the facts about a religion not his own.

It should be self-evident that while writing about another religion, an author should bear in mind the truth that his own religion is only one of many. Otherwise there is the obvious danger of inadvertently or unknowingly (perhaps even intentionally) minimizing values in the other religion which would then impress readers as an inferior faith. There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Conner’s article “Buddhism and the Bahá’í Faith” is free from such bias.

Even though I have offered my opinion, nevertheless I am certain that an impressive number of Tibetan Buddhists including the Dalai Lama, his tutors and other incarnate lamas would politely disagree with several statements in the article, particularly concerning Rebirth often referred to as Reincarnation.

In contrast, it is true that many Japanese Buddhists especially followers of the Zen School are unconcerned if not indifferent about a belief in Rebirth. Mr. Conner’s reference on page 30 to a statement by Alan W. Watts is perfectly valid. A professing Buddhist may or may not believe in the doctrine of Reincarnation; the choice is optional because he is not required to believe anything that he considers unreasonable.

The Buddha Gautama (563 to 483 BC) constantly urged his disciples to think for themselves and to exercise their own judgment. Nowhere in the Buddha’s teachings do we find any evidence of a dogmatic attitude or any beliefs that Buddhists must accept. He asked no one to believe, on his say-so, anything he taught. On the contrary, he made it emphatic and clear to all that no one should believe what is spoken by himself, or by any teacher, or what is written in any sacred book, or transmitted by tradition as authoritative unless it is in accord with reason and experience. He shared his knowledge and wisdom but never urged his opinion on others.

An appropriate final reference is on page 30 where Mr. Conner quotes the Buddha in what is believed to be his last instructions (in small type in a box). If followers of the Buddha use these final instructions as their guide, it seems quite difficult to understand how they as professing Buddhists could accept the authoritarian teachings of other religious traditions. In contrast with the advice of the Buddha, the words of Bahá’u’lláh (in the same box) appear to be dogmatic statements. Just below the box Mr. Conner claims that the instructions of both teachers can be reconciled and for the following reasons:

The Buddha directs his disciples to look within for guidance, while Bahá’u’lláh counsels us to renounce ourselves and cling to the Absolute.

To this uninitiated reader, there was no apparent correlation between the words of Bahá’u’lláh (in the box) and the Absolute, as explained by Mr. Conner. Fortunately a Bahá’í friend explained to me that when personal pronouns are capitalized in statements by Bahá’u’lláh, they indicate that he is speaking as the mouthpiece of God. This fact, while obvious to a Bahá’í, requires a special explanation for others.

WESLEY E. NEEDHAM

Adviser in Tibetan Literature

Yale University Library

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Thralls of Yearning Love

BY DIMITRI MARIANOFF AND MARZIEH GAIL

INTRODUCTION: The early history of the Bahá’í Faith is a continual source of fascination for the poet, the fiction writer, and the artist as well as for the technical historian. While the latter is committed to the gathering of sources, the analysis of documents, the construction of basic narrative, and the provision of an interpretative scheme, the former use historical facts to weave a web of imaginative reconstruction that may be no less true in spirit.

Dimitri Marianoff experienced the spell of Ṭáhirih even before he embraced the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. Her heroic life and martyr’s death evoked in him the desire to retell the story in a form that would affect multitudes whom professional historians might not reach. Sudden death prevented him from carrying out his plans. Marzieh Gail, an historical writer and poet, saved Marianoff’s unfinished work from undeserved oblivion. Her knowledge of Persian history, language, and culture enriched the sketchy manuscript left by Marianoff and brought it to its present form.

Historians may cavil at details: did the Sháh ever confront the Bábí heroine? Was the scarf used by her executioner made of Quddús’ turban? Moreover, the reader will find that many episodes in the story, even many segments of dialogue, are closely based upon the comprehensive history of the period, Nabíl’s The Dawn-Breakers, and upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s account of Ṭáhirih’s life in Memorials of the Faithful. But no one will deny that under Mrs. Gail’s pen the past has come alive. The story is fictionalized yet true in spirit.—EDITOR

The title of this account is taken from a poem attributed to Ṭáhirih by Professor Edward G. Browne in “The Bábís of Persia: Their Literature and Doctrines,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, XXI (1889), p. 934.

[Page 8] IN THE TWO-STORY mansion that was spread widely out to include the men’s and women’s separate apartments, Mullá Ṣáliḥ had three wives and five children. His first wife, Shamsí, who was as lovely to him in soul as in body, was his favorite. After twelve years of marriage, she, the mother by now of two growing sons, fell ill. Months passed. At last she could leave her bed. Mullá Ṣáliḥ, seeing her wasted and unfamiliar, hardly knew her. She was old, extinguished. The one-time perfume of her youthfulness was scattered and gone.

In nineteenth-century Persia a man was proud of his sons. A daughter was nothing. The husband blamed the wife for having a girl; the wife lost favor. But now, seeing Shamsí ruined, Mullá Ṣáliḥ had a strange thought—an idea incongruous for a man of his time and place; if his wife could only become pregnant again and if, this time, she could only have a daughter instead of a son, then perhaps the old, rare loveliness would come back in the girl. This hope, this dream made him as tender and loving to her as he had been long ago in the first year of their marriage.

On a dark January morning in 1817, true to her husband’s unexpressed wish, Shamsí gave birth to the girl. Fearfully, she sent her unhappy news to Mullá Ṣáliḥ. To her surprise he came into the room very gay, with presents in his hands, and leaned joyfully down to look at the baby on the cushion beside her.

Eagerly he looked down—and his smile faded. He saw a discolored little face under limp black hair, a hopelessly ugly little newborn face. The shock was too much, the difference between his dream and this. He hated himself now for having allowed himself the dream. Mullá Ṣáliḥ was a just man. He forced a smile for his wife; Then he turned, wordless, and left; and for the whole first year of the child’s life, whenever he entered the women’s quarters, the andarún, Mullá Ṣáliḥ, refused to look at her. But he was not like other men. In addition to being a famous theologian and doctor of Muslim law, he had—at least for nineteenth-century Qazvín—a rare sense of justice. He knew it was not his wife’s fault that his dream had been spoiled.

Then, one day, when he happened to enter her room, Shamsí was away. The nurse was out in the courtyard. There was Shamsí’s girl-baby, alone in the room. She lay on a brocade cushion. They had put a soft coverlet over her and wrapped her in a light blue cloth which framed her face. Her eyes, unswerving, watched him. Then suddenly, familiarly, she smiled his remembered smile. Suddenly she was a beautiful wife, long ago, born again here in the child. He bent over her as he had a year ago. This time he did not turn away, but kissed the small mouth.

Mullá Ṣáliḥ gave her a name. It was Salmá. Years later, and not from her parents, she received the name Ṭáhirih. This is the name she kept to the end. It means “Immaculate.”

By the time she was three Ṭáhirih was the acknowledged household favorite, even with her father’s other wives. She was always on a visit, from room to room. All day her high, sweet voice echoed in the halls and courtyards.

Half in play, and because he did not know how else to deal with a girl-child, Mullá Ṣáliḥ began to teach her the alphabet of his own work: Arabic theology, Muslim sacred tradition, Qur’ánic commentary.

Mullá Ṣáliḥ asked her to repeat the Arabic words of the morning prayer; he had hardly told her the first two [Page 9] verses when she recited it all to the end.

“How did you learn the prayer?” he asked.

“I heard you read it to Ḥasan,” she said.

“When?”

“Oh, long, long ago,” was the answer. “Shall I tell you another prayer too?”

“Not now, tomorrow.”

“What is tomorrow, Father?”

“Another day.”

“You mean every day is tomorrow, Father?”

Hurriedly, Mullá Ṣáliḥ explained the Persian order of the days: tomorrow, beyond tomorrow, beyond that tomorrow.

Ṭáhirih ran away to the cook house. Here she found Almás, the seven-year-old son of her father’s servant, Yáqút. She led the boy into a smoke-blackened corner and whispered, “Do you know what tomorrow is? Want me to tell you?”

“I don’t care. If you feel like it.”

“It’s those grapes you ate when you got sick. It’s unripe time.”

His big, puzzled eyes followed her as she ran out into the courtyard.

At five she could draw and embroider, and chant Arabic prayers. She had also learned stories about the djinns and the fairy sháh’s daughter. (She had even seen a djinn once; he was two feet high, with triangular eyes and a pointed cap.) Alone in her father’s library, she would open, delicately, the frail volumes and stare at the illuminated pages. Once he came upon her there.

Unabashed, she pulled the Qur’án off a shelf and opened it. “May I read to you, Father?”

Rocking back and forth over the page, she began a singsong chant about the fairy sháh. He shook his head.

“It is wrong, Salmá.”

She could see he was ignorant, like other grownups. Her reading was meant to be true.

“The Qur’án is a sacred book,” he said. “It contains the wisdom of the Prophet. When you are older, you can learn to read it.”

“I am already older. I can learn it now.”

That day her real education began. Tracing from right to left the glossy, black silk letters, she read the opening words of the Qur’án: “In the name of God, the Clement, the Merciful.”

Another time she heard her father say: “There is no God but God.”

“How beautiful it sounds, Father!”

“It’s not just the beautiful sound. There is a secret thought in it.”

“What is thought?”

“It’s what gives life to the body.”

“How, Father?”

“Your feet walk because your thought tells them to. When you speak, it’s the voice of thought. When Alláh gave us our first breath, it was the breath of thought.”

He watched her begin, with all her small strength, to inhale and exhale.

“What on earth are you doing, Child?”

“Thinking, Father.”

One night in the moonlit garden, when she was running to her hideaway in the pomegranate tree that stood over the quicksilver pool, Ṭáhirih stopped in mid-flight; she stood for a moment, straining to hear. Something was all over the garden. It had never come before. Her eyes closed, she turned her face up in the moonlight, to catch the faint sound of a chant which would have been silence to everyone else. She stood, rapt, in the aural vision. When it faded she turned, absently tugging at [Page 10] her house veil and straightening her dress, and walked into the house to find her father.

“What happened, Child?”

“I heard something.”

“A nightingale’s song?”

“No, it wasn’t a bird.”

“A boy, singing outside the walls?”

“It was a voice.”

“Whose?”

She stood before him, helpless. She had no way of sharing this. Still, in her mind, she could hear it—the rise and fall of the Arabic chant in the garden.

The next evening the three wives of Mullá Ṣáliḥ (Shamsí, Batúl, Sakínih) were sitting on the floor around the tablecloth. Duly in front of them were set platters of goat’s cheese with the all-important mint around it—the mint to protect them from Mullá Ṣáliḥ’s taking another wife. Across from the three sat Ṭáhirih and her young sister, Marḍíyyih. Ṭáhirih stared out the long window, her food untouched. Shamsí whispered, “Salmá won’t eat. Look at her eyes. She seems to be away somewhere. Poor child!”

“Poor child, indeed!” said Sakínih. “Learning to read. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is.”

Shamsí replied gently, “Of course it is.”

Ṭáhirih’s big eyes stared out into the night. She whispered to her sister, “Do you hear it, too?”

“Hear what?” said Marḍíyyih, her fist full of saffron rice.

“Oh, then you don’t.”

“I hear you. What do you want?”

“I don’t know.” She was listening again.

When Ṭáhirih was ten, her mother brought her a long black cloak with a white veil for her face. “No man, except for members of your family, must ever see your face again—neither so on the streets nor in the house.”

Ṭáhirih wondered how she would look in the veil.

“Your beauty will all be kept for your husband,” her mother went on.

Ṭáhirih was amused. “Husband” was a funny word. She repeated it to herself. But her mother was obviously serious. Ṭáhirih pinched herself to keep from laughing. The veil was fun. It made her feel grown up. She did not know, as she put it on, that she was also putting on the long humiliation of women, the age-old mourning for them.

“It would be a great disgrace to the family,” Shamsí continued, “if you should ever be careless of your veil.”

Alone before the mirror, Ṭáhirih postured in her veil, playing out the first act of her new life. A fine game of hide-and-seek, she thought. What was so different about men? The thick veil was hot and awkward to manage. No wonder they called it a “tent.” She wanted to tear it off, but realized that would make her a child again. Her body was her own, though. Why should she hide it away? Why didn’t the men veil too?

When he saw her in the veil, Mullá Ṣáliḥ nodded approvingly. Another three years, he thought, and he must find a husband for her. He listened to her warm voice, as she sat before him, reading the story of Joseph out of the Qur’án. He sighed. If only those strings of pearls that tie one heart to another did not break so soon.

Ṭáhirih read, “And in the city, the women said, ‘The wife of the Prince hath solicited her servant: he hath fired her with his love . . .’”

What kind of a man should it be? Not a stranger, that was certain. Only yesterday, Mullá Aḥmad, a colleague, a man of about fifty, who already had [Page 11] three wives, had asked for her. Not wishing to alienate the man, Mullá Ṣáliḥ had pleaded her extreme youth— a weak excuse, because everyone knew a girl could marry after she was nine. No, the best man for her would be his brother’s son. They were already one family, and Muḥammad loved her, that was no secret. Besides, he would let her go on with her studies. Best of all, he would not take her too far away.

Sitting behind a handwoven curtain by a door to her father’s library, she listened to tortuous theological debates. Topheavy in their turbans, clicking their rosaries, with seemingly permanent stops from sentence to sentence, the mullás conversed. She joined mentally in the talk, judging and weighing, silently contributing, they unaware of the thirteen-year-old participant. She knew the Qur’án by heart now; she had read the Four Canonical Books, and the Commentaries, and now was deep in the mystic Rúmí, the poet who, six centuries before, created an approach to God through a spinning dance.

The need would come over her to write verse. An aigretted hoopoe bird flitting across a path; the butterfly flicker of light on the white wall, reflected up from the pool; petals drifting in the warm spring air—these would draw her back into a continuous dream that went on in her head. She would write then, carefully weaving her pen name into one of the end lines of the poem.

Ḥasan, her older brother, did not take kindly to Ṭáhirih’s, growing, although clandestine, fame. He resented her long hours with Mullá Ṣáliḥ.

“You live on his brain,” said Ḥasan.

“If you’re so sure I haven’t one of my own, you’ll at least admit it’s better to live on his than on some I might mention.”

“I think you just parrot it all,” he said. This was a brotherly reference to the pen name she had chosen: Ṭúṭí, the parrot. Parrots were precious things; they came from India, and lived on sugar. Persian women, especially those who were loved, were often called Parrot.

One morning, waking early, Ṭáhirih said to her nurse, who was holding a silver mirror in front of her because it is good luck to glance in a mirror when you first waken: “Our cousin was on his way here from Shíráz, but now he won’t come. He slipped from his howdah and I saw the bloody bandage around his forehead and now he is dead.” The nurse began to wail and ran to Shamsí, pulling tighter the cord on her arm that held her amulet. Weeks later, word came of the accident and the death. Shamsí warned Ṭáhirih to keep all such things to herself. “It would spoil your chance of a good marriage,” she said. There was a tenderness between mother and daughter, although it was rather awestruck and frightened on the mother’s side. When Shamsí called her, Ṭáhirih would not answer at first, because she liked to hear the low voice calling, again and again.

Shamsí and Mullá Ṣáliḥ did not tell the girl that her husband was already selected. Shamsí only said, “From now on you must veil from Muḥammad. You cannot play together anymore.” After this there were no more games by the garden pool, or down by the grape vines, where a break in the wall showed the long gold plains beyond the town. Muḥammad did not object; he was somehow pleased to catch sight of her newly-veiled form—she pulled him more this way. He was in on the secret, and anticipated her unbearably sometimes.

[Page 12] One day she heard Taqí, her uncle, more violent than usual, denouncing a “heretic” whom he called Shaykh Aḥmad.

Tell me who that is, she asked Muḥammad.

“Oh, some day. We’ll have plenty of time, some day.”

“No, tell me now.”

“It happened years ago. Father punished the Shaykh for his impertinence. We never speak of it.”

“But what had he done?” she demanded.

Muḥammad could not refuse the urgent young voice. She seemed lovelier than ever, wrapped in the veil that, unknown to her, he hoped soon to draw aside.

“The Shaykh wrote a hundred books on religion. Fatḥ-‘Alí Sháh showered him with honors. Once, on a journey, he stopped in our town and conducted Friday services at the mosque. Father and all the other leaders were there. Afterward he came to our house, and Father happened to speak of the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. The Shaykh said in his view this didn’t mean the resurrection of the body; he said it was a spiritual resurrection, not a rising of dry bones but of the spirit—or the mind, if you prefer. Father was polite at first, but he told the Shaykh this was heresy and that no heretic could stay in our house. And then Father denounced him at the next Friday services, in the mosque—showed him up as a heretic, and right after that the people stoned him out of town. Satisfied?”

“How old was the Shaykh when they stoned him?”

“Oh, about eighty-five, I guess.”

“Did he live very long after that?”

“No. The whole country found out he was a heretic, and all the clergy rose up and drove him out. Everywhere. He was finished. He left for Mecca, but he died on the way.”

Ṭáhirih was silent.

“And it was Father who exposed him,” boasted Muḥammad.

“Was his hair white?” she asked softly.

“As jasmine, the people used to say. All the other preachers dyed their hair but his was white.”

“And they stoned him. I think your father has one of those stones for a heart.”

“He has to be firm when he’s protecting Islám.”

“But the Qur’án says God is the most merciful of those who show mercy. Muḥammad is our pattern, and he forgave everyone.”

“Yes, but an unbeliever is lower than an animal. They should have killed him.”

“They did,” she answered.

That evening, still thinking about the old man who was driven away and died because of an idea, she spoke of him to Mullá Ṣáliḥ.

“Never mention that name again. He tried to destroy our Faith. He garbled the inner meaning: he misled the faithful.” She had never seen him so angry before.

About this time the family learned that an envoy was coming from the capital, to ask for Ṭáhirih in marriage. No less a personage than the Prime Minister’s brother wished her in his household. Mullá Ṣáliḥ was surprised and flattered that the report of his daughter’s beauty had spread so far. Afraid of refusing, but determined not to give her to a stranger, he announced her engagement to her cousin.

When he told her of his choice, Ṭáhirih was unmoved. Every girl had [Page 13] to marry; it was in the pattern, like birth and death. There were no old maids in Persia; however transitorily, there was some kind of a man for every woman. She had never in her life spoken with any other marriageable man than Muḥammad and did not know or care what they were like. Once, through the break in the wall, she had seen a young nobleman riding by; he had checked his horse a moment and smiled, and she had wondered briefly how it would be to fall in love. Persian literature told of women who did this—Laylí and Shírín, for example. But if a girl in nineteenth-century Qazvín fell in love, that would be a shameful thing. So—submissive—she kissed her father’s hand.

At least Muḥammad was a person she had known all her life. For the first time she saw him as someone to think about. He was awkward, she decided, dark, with a large, clumsy body. But at least her new home would be right across the street.

Mullá Ṣáliḥ, knowing she was only resigned to the wedding and the groom, pleaded his cause. “He’s one of the family. He’ll let you stay with us.”

Her father seemed very boyish to her, suddenly.

“I know. We’ll build a tunnel under the street,” she laughed, “and I’ll be back and forth all the time.”

Batúl, the second wife, commented: “What a couple, I must say. It won’t be a marriage but an academy. Her nose in Ḥafiz and his in Sa‘dí.

Trying to forget, Ṭáhirih spent all her days now in the library.

The envoy arrived from Ṭihrán just in time for the engagement banquet. Infuriated at the slur to his prestige, the Prime Minister directed a leading Qazvín merchant to stop the wedding, but the maneuver only hastened it. Mullá Ṣáliḥ prudently despatched two clerics laden with gifts of shawls and jewels to the Sháh and this tipped the scales against the Prime Minister’s brother.

The first few years of Ṭáhirih’s marriage were peaceful and happy. Muḥammad, her husband who had played with her when she was a little girl, continued to spoil her with presents and attentions. He could not realize she was grown up, already a woman. In these few years she bore him two sons and devoted her whole life to her children. Everything was normal at last. Ṭáhirih’s family duties replaced her studies. Her women relatives were pleased; now her books were forgotten, and she was no longer any better than anyone else.

But as her children grew and she had more time, she naturally wished to go back to her studies and her writing. She made the suggestion to Muḥammad that she might help him with his work.

She did not understand that he, creatively impotent, could not allow creativity in another, least of all in a woman. All he had was a good memory, which helped him faithfully to copy his father, Mullá Taqí, in everything. Meanwhile his wife’s mind was a constant affront to him. He sharply rejected her offer to help him with his sermons, quoting the tradition, “Consult your wife and do the opposite of what she counsels.”

She tried to debate with him at first, citing Persia’s classical poets on the excellence of womankind. Reminding him of Fáṭimih—our Lady of Light— and Rábi‘ih, the mystic, and the long line of Spanish court ladies and the poems they wrote.

He cut her short with: “The pilau was soggy last night, and the saffron streaked. You had better talk to your [Page 14] cook.”

Ṭáhirih bided her time after this, and for a while there was quiet in the house. At a party of women, she talked only woman-talk, of cooking, embroidery, servants, children, and the comforting thought spread: “She is now no different from us except for her beauty, and with a few more pregnancies that will be gone as well.”

Muḥammad found her smiling that night, and he thought it was from pleasure at the new necklace he had given her. He could not sense it was because she had written a poem again. He spoke to her in the old, affectionate way: “You are really a good mother and a good wife. I had feared you would want to be at my books—to ruin your beautiful eyes and try to write those foolish verses. Now at last I can see you are content with woman’s work.”

Ṭáhirih rose and looked at him perhaps for the first time in her life.

“I am grateful to my beloved husband that he has so frankly revealed what he has concealed so long; that he has at last forgiven me—my past; that since the paradise of the mind is closed to him, he would shut me out of it too.”

Muḥammad turned away, swelling with quick hate. She left the room.

Back in her own room, she took off the new ruby necklace and threw it in her jewel box. “This is a coffin for my dead desires,” she said to the room.

That night she could not sleep. Early in the morning, before the servants had picked the new jasmine flowers off the bushes or her father had completed his ablutions, she went to Mullá Ṣáliḥ. She waited while he said his prayer. Then she told him all, describing for the first time the long empty years.

He said only, “Come home.”

Now the studies began again: theology, philosophy, natural science. The poems came back. She studied at the theological academy, seated behind a curtain. She helped her father with his sermons, the one she wrote on the grace of God becoming the most famous he ever delivered. What did it mean, he wondered. That part about the crushing of the body in the grave, the first night after death; the walls of the grave crushing against a man—every Muslim knew that—but what did she mean about the grace of God not being enough to forestall it; about deeds being necessary too—a certain kind of deeds? She had included that story about the Muslim saint who, dead after a lifetime of prayers and vigils, returned in a dream and said to his followers: “It all availed me nothing. The only thing that saved me was that once I offered an apple to a non-Muslim.”

The Friday he delivered that sermon her old teacher was in the congregation. “Look out,” he said afterward. “That sermon was heretical. Besides, I know who wrote it.”

Mullá Ṣáliḥ even allowed his daughter to defend her dissertation at the academy, from her curtained alcove, in the presence of the class.

That evening she said, “Did I disgrace you today?”

“You were excellent.”

“And you’re sad because you can’t give me a diploma?”

“Yes.”

“But you could give me one here, at home.”

“What do you need it for?”

“As a symbol. I’ll hide it in my jewel box. No one shall see it, ever.”

The next day in his library he signed and gave her an official diploma.

“This is without precedent in the [Page 15] history of Persia,” he told her. “It is signed only by me, but it is official, nevertheless. If we are found out, you know what could happen.”

She knelt, kissed his hand, and kissed the diploma. Alone in her room, she read it carefully, several times over. Then, slowly, in the charcoal brazier, she burned it.

Mullá Taqí made her come back to his son. Muḥammad studiously insulted her. He brought in a tutor for the boys and told her not to meddle with their education. He took a second wife; before a year had passed, he took a third.

Ṭáhirih’s works were becoming modern classics, and thousands were reading her poems. These poems infuriated Muḥammad; they were addressed to some mysterious Beloved One, beyond the veil. Publicly, he claimed they were for him, but privately he watched for a rival. Surely this wine and this cup she wrote about were real, not conventional Ṣúfí images; neglecting the new wives, he would think about this at night. He began to study the qualities of various poisons. He hated in detail her indifferent pride, her coldness that was like the slopes of Mount Dimávand. He resolved to have no more children by her, and spent his nights with one or the other wife in turn.

One day, walking in the garden, when the air was thick with fragrance from the white acacias, Ṭáhirih looked up through the branches to the drifting white clouds. How wonderful it would be, she thought, to be free of this body; to let your soul go, like a small white boat, sailing across the blue air. She stood on the edge of the pool and looked down at her face. How good to get rid of this beauty, she thought. People only saw your face; only the ripples on the pool, not the depths. A red fish slipped past, in the dark water. It was very black down there, with a blackness more irrevocable than her veil, cool and black and without end. She swayed a little on the edge of the pool. But then some words in her heart said, “Live. Live. It will come, but not now.”

From his study window, Muḥammad watched her. He knew he had lost her, but, for obscure reasons, that night he came to her as a husband once more. When he found her still remote, even in his arms, he threw her from him, and for months after that they did not speak. He was indifferent to the daughter when she was born. As for the other wives, they ignored Ṭáhirih and her child as well. Preferring to split their husband two ways, they were united only in their hostility to her.

Ṭáhirih knew now why her mother wept over Batúl and Sakínih, since she was herself experiencing all the unhappy ramifications of polygamous marriage. She began to hold meetings for her woman acquaintances, and to teach them certain passages in the Qur’án; she told them plural marriage in the Qur’án was conditioned on justice, and that another text of the Book affirmed that justice was impossible in such a case. She also told them they were spiritually equal to the men, and translated for them the Qur’ánic verse beginning: “Verily the true believers of either sex . . .” She showed them their rights, long buried in the Arabic text. Some, frightened, others, having no wish to be stirred up, rattled about these meetings to their husbands.

The baby girl was her one companion, since the two boys had long since been alienated from her and removed to the men’s part of the house. She sighed as she rocked the delicate [Page 16] little body in her arms. Soon Muḥammad took the infant from her, and she was more alone than before.

Long dull days went by in the sun. Then Shamsí, who had faded into the background of Ṭáhirih’s life, fell ill, and she asked Muḥammad to let her go home and care for her mother. He had heard about the women’s meetings, and felt that her presence in the house was a danger. He was glad to see her go.

Ṭáhirih was now twenty-three, and she had read all the books in her father’s library, and had exhausted all the other private libraries—there were no public ones—in Qazvín. Her latest studies focused on the long awaited event—the return of the Twelfth Imám. For, as the Jews expect the Messiah and the Christians Christ’s return, so the Muslims look for the Twelfth Imám. He was the twelfth successor of Muḥammad. Dying when still a child, he was supposed never to have died but to have been caught up into heaven, or some other unknown place, from which the Muslims expect him to return in the “Last Day.” Ṭáhirih found no light anywhere. She only felt that life was going on in a meaningless pattern: Ramaḍán; pilgrimages to Karbilá, to Mashhad with its golden domes; the passion plays showing the martyrdom of Muslim saints; the two months of mourning, when you heard bands of people thumping their breasts and sobbing in the streets—especially that day of days once a year when men shaved the front of their heads and marched, cutting at the shaved part of the scalp with long knives and letting the blood run down their white robes. Men said that when the Twelfth Imám came He would perpetuate all this, spread it all over the globe; whereas even in this corner of the world, it hardly made sense.

Secretly she spoke with her kinsman, ‘Alí. “If the ‘Lord of the Age’ should come again and only spread to other countries the things we have here that masquerade as Islám: the prostitution in the holy cities, the terrible hold of the priests, the Jews with their obligatory badges on them, the Zoroastrians forced to wear yellow robes—what good would He do? Islám has become only a spell that binds millions of people.”

“Why not talk with your cousin Javád? He has something new,” said ‘Alí, looking over his shoulder, watching to see if the curtains moved.

Ṭáhirih put on her veil and went to Javád, walking through the dusty street between mud walls, her maid behind her. Reluctantly, Javád’s wife let her in; he was not home but would come soon for the noon meal and the two-hour siesta. After the compulsory glass of tea, Ṭáhirih asked if she might wait in the study. At the door, she kicked off her shoes, leaving them in the “shoe row.” She walked over the carpet of Káshán silk to the niches piled with books. The sun drifted in through the darkened room, and lemon tree branches scratched at the window pane. Feeling her way through the books, she came upon a fine manuscript of the “Garden of Roses” leaning against the wall. Tucked behind it was a book or manuscript wrapped in a brocaded cloth; her heart unaccountably quickening, her fingers trembling a little as she handled the pearl-embroidered brocade, she unfolded this cloth. Inside was a book. It was written by Shaykh Aḥmad, the old man who had been stoned out of Persia.

Thirsting, she began to read. Within a few lines, she knew this was the new life she had been so long desiring. The [Page 17] Promised One, awaited for thirteen hundred years, was soon to come. He would not perpetuate Islám—He would make the whole world new, as the man of Galilee and the man of Ḥijáz had made the whole world new. Now that the earth is filled with injustice, because men have turned away from God, He is coming again, wrote Shaykh Aḥmad; and the first who should tremble are the Muslim divines, because they have corrupted the Faith and led the people astray.

Ṭáhirih sat dreaming in the shadowy room; she slipped away beyond time, as she had done once or twice when, a child, and suddenly the room resounded with a voice that she had heard, long ago, in her father’s garden . . .

Javád came upon her, pale in the shadows. “I slept,” she said.

She held the book to her breast. “I have found it. May I keep it?”

“Impossible. Your father would curse you and drive you out. He would have them kill me.”

Javád was different from the others; thin and eager, with an inner fire.

“But this is why I have lived all these years; this is my answer, this is why I have studied. Nothing can stop me now.”

She took the volume with her, under her veil.

‘Alí confessed to her that he, too, was a Shakhí. He told her about the “Twin Luminous Lights,” Shaykh Aḥmad, now dead, and his successor, Siyyid Káẓim, still in the world. Secretly, she read their works. What the one prophesied, the other defined. What the clergy did not know, these two revealed.

Secretly, she wrote Siyyid Káẓim. He replied, saying that none had understood his message so well as she; he named her Qurratu’l-‘Ayn—the name by which she afterward became known to the intelligentsia of Europe—which means “Consolation of the Eyes.” He permitted her to come to him in Karbilá, as she had asked, adding, however, that he did not know if they would ever meet.

When she reached Karbilá, he was dead.

While Ṭáhirih was on her journey to Karbilá, to the presence of Siyyid Káẓim, he, knowing his death to be approaching, summoned his disciples, called Shakhís in memory of Shakh Aḥmad, and told them to leave their homes, travel through the world and discover the Promised One. “He is now living in your midst,” the Siyyid told them, “waiting only for the hour of His coming.”

After the Siyyid died, some decided the Promised One was one of their own number; this seemed more familiar and convenient. A few tacitly claimed to be He, and gathered others as disciples. Some felt they could not scatter as the Siyyid had directed—one had a flourishing business; one an aged mother to support; one was newly married and could not leave his bride; life offered various excellent reasons for not going.

But there were some who remembered what the Siyyid had begged them to do. These, under the leadership of Mullá Ḥusayn, retired to the mosque at Kúfih and prayed and fasted forty days, in order to be purified and thus serve as channels for the guidance of the spirit.

They needed guidance badly. The Siyyid had been fairly explicit as to the age and character of the Promised One, but had not mentioned the region where He would appear, or His name or rank, or how to go about finding Him. “Your hearts and minds will tell you,” was his only comment. Pressed for the exact time of the advent, he [Page 18] would only say, “The year sixty.” By this he meant 1260 of the Muslim era, or 1844 as time is reckoned in the West.

These few then, of all the thousands who had once followed Siyyid Káẓim, set out on their fantastic journey. Unaccountably, Mullá Ḥusayn felt drawn to Persia, and the others followed. They traveled on foot, month after month, over the mountains and desert wastes. They slept under the big Persian moon, or on mud platforms in the crowded caravanserais, wrapped in their ‘abás, the muleteers and camel driven beside them. They lived on curds and flaps of unleavened bread. They prayed long hours, and went eastward, following their hearts, much as three kings of Káshán had once turned westward and journeyed out of Persia, after a star.

Persia is a vast country. It looks like a landscape on the moon: naked craggy mountains, naked miles of space. Sometimes a line of trees, or a cloud shadow. Walking by night, sleeping in the heat of the day, bathing in narrow streams along the road, resting in the shade of a poplar tree with tinkling leaves, praying when dawn colored the enormous sky, Mullá Ḥusayn felt drawn to Shíráz. Shíráz became his obsession. The others were for Ṭihrán or Tabríz, Qazvín or Iṣfáhán: “The Sháh, Asylum of the Universe, is in Ṭihrán,” some argued. “Half the world is Iṣfáhán,” others maintained. Another was for the pear-shaped Shrines of Qum, another for the golden domes of Mashhad. But Mullá Ḥusayn could not put Shíráz out of his mind.

One evening, after months of travel, he came to the beloved city. It lay on a wide grassy plain beneath blue hills: a town of minarets and black cypresses and turquoise domes, of a long, dreamlike lake, of thousands of spring flowers —lapped now in the sunset glow. Pausing to breathe the soft spring air, he remembered what Ḥáfiz had written: the paradise itself had nothing to compare with the streams and flower paths of Shíráz; and he understood why Sa‘dí had said that Shíráz will wrench a traveler’s heart away from his own home.

Musing, he walked slowly toward Shíráz. He was alone, for his companions had gone on ahead; they had elected to live in a corner of the principal mosque, and were awaiting him there.

When near the city he glanced at a handsome, slight young man coming toward him. Preoccupied with his thoughts, Mullá Ḥusayn almost passed the youth by. Then the other greeted him, and he responded. This was doubtless, he thought, a fellow-student that he had known before, in Karbilá, in the days of Siyyid Káẓim, a descendant of the Prophet, judging by his green turban. When the youth welcomed him, inviting Mullá Ḥusayn to his home, the latter demurred. He was tired, and wished to go to the mosque, greet his companions, perform his ablutions in the fountain there, pray, and rest. He looked, unseeingly, at the young man, his eyes blinded by months of search, his mind busy with its inward dream. Mullá Ḥusayn was ready to seek, on foot, in rags if need be, all the rest of his life, for the unknown object of his love. He was used to seeking and knew all about it, but he knew nothing about finding. Here was an unwelcome interruption in the search. He would have greeted the young man and passed on.

“They will surely wait for you at the mosque,” the youth was saying, as the Mullá made his excuses. “Commit them to the care of God; He will surely protect and watch over them.” Something [Page 19] in the direct and yet gentle glance of the stranger held him; after all, it would mean only an hour or two, and then he could get to the mosque.

The youth turned and led him into the town, through winding mud walls, with plume-like trees moving above them, and occasional glimpses of tiled pools and flower beds through half-open doorways. Tired and preoccupied as he was, Mullá Ḥusayn was conscious of the May evening; the world’s life, once ebbed, seemed to be flowing at high tide again; the air came delicate and soft as rose petals against his face. How straight and firm, like a prince, his companion walked; no, not like a prince—more like what it said in the holy traditions, about the gait of the Prophet: that He walked as if wrenching His foot from a stone. Well, this youth was His descendant, Mullá Ḥusayn thought—and smiled in the dusk, because the Prophet had so many “descendants” and they were a heavy burden on the people.

An Ethiopian servant answered their knock at a modest wooden door. “Odd,” thought Mullá Ḥusayn. “He seems to be expecting us.” As he was about to pass through, the youth smiled at Mullá Ḥusayn and quoted a verse from the Qur’án: “Enter therein in peace, secure.”

Mullá Ḥusayn found himself in a small courtyard, with a pool in the center and a young orange tree beside it. He was conscious of the warm smell of the blossoms; he could see them glowing whitely through the dusk. Mullá Ḥusayn felt unaccountably as if he were living in a dream; he was not sure where the confines of reality left off and the dream began. Were the orange blossoms there, and was that a real star blinking in the May sky, over the darkened well of the courtyard? It looked real enough, opening and shutting up there like a fist.

His host led him up a steep stairway to a small, whitewashed room. Brass vessels were brought in, and he washed, the young host himself pouring water out of the ewer. The samovar was brought in and set before them; tea was served; later there was lamb and saffron rice.

Mullá Ḥusayn was about to take his leave, when the youthful host began to speak. “Whom do you regard as your leader, now that Siyyid Káẓim is gone?”

“He told us to scatter far and wide, in quest of the promised Beloved.”

“How are you to know Him when you come upon Him?”

“Our leader gave us a number of signs,” Mullá Ḥusayn explained patiently. This youth, although a layman —he kept a draper’s shop, he said— knew something of Shaykhí doctrines; he was obviously intelligent, and there was no harm in being frank: “The Promised One is more than twenty and less than thirty. He is a descendant of Fáṭimih, our Lady of Light, the daughter of our Prophet. He is endowed with innate knowledge. He is of middle height and is free from bodily deficiency. In an age when almost everyone smokes, he abstains from smoking.”

There was a moment of utter silence in the room. The world seemed to have come to a dead Stop. Mullá Ḥusayn wearily rubbed his eyes.

Suddenly, softly, the youth said: “Do you not see these signs in Me?”

Mullá Ḥusayn was horrorstruck. A layman’s uncomprehending blasphemy, he thought. Not wishing to offend, he began politely: “He whose advent we await is a Man of unsurpassed holiness . . .” As he spoke, he found himself drawn into the young man’s gaze; he [Page 20] faltered, stammered. His humanity protested violently against this new thing that he felt in the room; he rejected it with all his strength—struggled like a wild horse fighting the rope—but all the time something quiet in his mind ignored him. Feverish and trembling, he understood that he must listen, must wait.

One by one, the man detailed the signs of the Promised One. It was true, he fulfilled them all. “But you had a special, private sign, of which you never spoke. When the Promised One appeared, He was to reveal, unasked, a commentary on the twelfth chapter of the Qur’án. This was the test you had established in your own mind. Now is the time to reveal the commentary on the Súrih of Joseph.”

Mullá Ḥusayn wished the earth would close over him. He had never told anyone about the private sign. A lacquer pen-case and a pile of thin, glossy paper were brought in by the Ethiopian servant. The Man laid the paper in His hand and wrote on it from right to left with bold, flowing strokes, His voice rising and falling melodiously as He wrote. The smell of orange blossoms floated up from the courtyard, carrying with it a single bird note—the voice of the Ḥaqq bird that cries all night, “God! God!” until, legend says, it splits its throat and dies at dawn.

This was a great shock and agony, Mullá Ḥusayn thought, like loving hopelessly for years and suddenly finding your loved one in the nuptial room. Then he could not think any more, because the house seemed to fall away, and the world was primal chaos, formless, and there was nothing left but light, light upon blinding light— “From a blessed tree . . . the olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would well nigh shine out, even though fire touched it not!” His eyes could see no more, but he saw. Then the paradises of all the prophets were marshaled before him, a sequence of paradises. And Abraham and Moses, Zoroaster and Buddha, Jesus and Muḥammad, were all there as presences before him in the little room.

As the voice rose and fell, and the pen moved, Mullá Ḥusayn forgot all his past life; friends, familiar faces, loved cities—everything was gone. There was only one reality in the world now.

For long hours the Youth wrote, and Mullá Ḥusayn sat unmoving before him, hardly daring to draw breath.

Then his Host smiled at him, and Mullá Ḥusayn smiled back and knew he was a man looking at his Lord—like the first Adam when he stood up from the clay sleep.

“O thou who art the first to believe in Me! . . . I am the Báb, the Gate of God, and thou art the . . . gate of that Gate. Eighteen souls must, unwarned and uninvited, seek independently to find Me.”

The Báb’s voice was a ray of the first morning light. He directed Mullá Ḥusayn to go now to the mosque. Mullá Ḥusayn awakened to his life’s mission. Now he was a man, bowed to the will of God. There was something else on the planet with man now. He rose, and went.

Mullá Ḥusayn did not divulge the secret of the Advent. But he exhibited such an unaccustomed joy and peace that his companions wondered why he seemed to have deserted his life’s mission.

Then they, too, led by dreams or perhaps by the sheer momentum of their longing, one by one came into the Báb’s presence and acknowledged Him as the long-expected Lord of the Age. [Page 21] Eighteen persons were guided to Him, until the number was complete. This mysterious search had been foretold in a holy tradition: “On the last Day, the Men of the Unseen shall, on the wings of the spirit, traverse the immensity of the earth, (and) shall attain the presence of the Promised Qá’im . . .”

The Báb called them the Letters of the Living. He sent them out across Persia, to awaken the East. When He gathered them together, before sending them away, He told them to ponder the words that Jesus had spoken to His disciples, long ago. He promised them the victory. God had succored Abraham against Nimrod, Moses against Pharaoh; He had championed Christ, and Muḥammad in the wilderness. He would not forsake them. They were not to speak His name; they were only to tell the people that the Báb, the Gate to One still undisclosed, had come.

As he went forth, each one knew the meaning of this embassage. They had seen the torture scenes painted, to frighten criminals, on the walls of the bazaars. They knew that, to their compatriots, the wages of apostasy was death by torture.

This much was clear in all the strangeness: the prophecies of the Shaykhís had been fulfilled. Here was the Báb, and He was His own proof, and He was guiding them to some transcendant Personage, to whom He referred only as “Him Whom God Shall Manifest.” Furthermore, to handle this thing at all meant certain death.

It was as they had learned it in the sacred tradition, long since: “Whoso seeketh Me, shall find Me. Whoso findeth Me, shall be drawn towards Me. Whoso draweth nigh unto Me, shall love Me. Whoso loveth Me, him shall I also love. He who is beloved of Me, him shall I slay. He who is slain by Me, I myself shall be his ransom.”

There are still people in the world who think greed is the motivating impulse of human conduct; again and again, man refutes them. The Letters of the Living were such a refutation.

Meanwhile, Ṭáhirih, far away in Karbilá, had a dream. She saw a young man—wearing a green turban, symbol of descent from the Prophet, and golden robes—suspended between earth and sky, hands upraised. He was singing an Arabic song. Waking, she wrote down, before it could slide away, some of the words of that song. Then someone came to Karbilá, bringing a manuscript, “The Best of Stories,” written by the Báb; reading it, she found the very lines she had heard in her dream. At once, she acknowledged the Báb as the Lord of the Age. She wrote, in the form of an ode: “The effulgence of Thy face flashed forth, and the rays of Thy visage arose on high. Then speak the word, ‘Am I not your Lord?’ and ‘Thou art, Thou art!’ we will all reply.” The Báb knew that she meant that primal covenant joined between God and man on the day of “Am I not your Lord,” when God summoned all the souls of men and asked if they would worship Him; and when He asked them, “Am I not your Lord?” they answered Him, “Thou art!” and it then became a covenant between Him and them. He now enrolled her among the eighteen Letters of the Living—the only woman of their company.

When she began to teach through Karbilá, the clergy tried to stop her work, for she affronted them.

At first, she often saw the youth, Quddús, sitting in the room—where she taught, veiled—below her dais, his eyes with strange fire in them, lifted toward her. Then he disappeared from [Page 22] Karbilá. He had gone in quest of the Báb.

Fearlessly she taught and disciples crowded to her, forgetting everything, as she opened their minds to the corruption of the times, the dead hand of past centuries resting on them, the waste of days, the blind filth in which men lived.

She compensated for her failure to attain the presence of Siyyid Káẓim by bringing his widow into the Faith. He had given her the Báb and now she shared that gift.

Nothing is more generous than fire, always sharing, never diminished by sharing. Whoever touched her took the flame, took it and passed it along.

Openly she flouted the clergy. On a Muslim day of mourning she put on a red dress to celebrate the birthday of the Báb, which fell that year in the mourning period. At last the Governor of Karbilá set guards around Ṭáhirih’s house to keep her from mixing with the people and teaching them the new Faith.

She went on to Baghdád; with a constantly growing body of believers, she then traveled back into Persia, in answer to the Báb’s summons to His followers that they proceed to Khurásán. She, a Persian woman, which is to say a chattel, a thing, had become a power throughout the East.

Qazvín lay across her path. She stopped there to see her father. Taking leave of her disciples, she entered the town.

Muḥammad, the husband, was waiting for her. By this time he had decided he was the third greatest mujtahid in Persia, the first two being his father and his uncle. When she reached Qazvín on her journey to Khurásán, he sent various members of his family to invite her back to him.

“Tell him I find him presumptuous and arrogant,” she said. “A faithful companion would have come to me in the city where I was—would have, on foot, guided my howdah as I traveled. I would then have taught him the new Faith. I would have awakened him. Three years have now passed; it is too late. I have cast him off forever.”

Perhaps this was the first time in modern history that a woman reared in Islám had divorced a man.

It may be true that the wrath of a scorned woman is worse than hell fire, but such wrath is nothing to the fury of a cast-off man, particularly when the man is an eminent cleric, ruling souls, so he believes, in both worlds. Humiliated in the presence of his women relatives, and by one whom he had long detested for being his superior, outguessed by his intended prey—he pronounced her a heretic. He and Taqí smeared her name throughout Qazvín. Ṭáhirih vehemently defended herself. Mullá Ṣáliḥ tried helplessly to effect a reconciliation.

Meanwhile she fearlessly taught the Faith. Mullá Taqí, her father-in-law, said: “It is not enough that she ruined my son’s good name; now she wishes to destroy our home. We will clean the Shaykhís out of this town and have done with them.”

Once, when she spoke to him, he struck her in the face. She looked steadily at him, a red welt across her cheek.

“I see your mouth spitting blood,” she said.

The words were remembered against her later on.

One morning at dawn an old woman hobbled into the Qazvín mosque, carrying a rug. She dragged this to a prayer niche and spread it out in the direction [Page 23] of Mecca. The Káshán rug, green and yellow, and itself figured to represent a prayer niche, glimmered in the uncertain light. It was soft under the woman’s fingers. It must be the ninth combing of the wool, she thought. It was worthy of the great cleric who was about to pray on it—not like the rags she had on the mud floor of her hut.

Mullá Taqí entered. He wore a camel’s hair cloak and an enormous turban. His feet were bare, the toenails hennaed; at the door of the mosque he had kicked off his long yellow shoes with their curled points.

The mosque seemed very quiet to him, as he stood at prayer. It seemed full of shadows stretching out and receding. Absently he muttered the prayer. He knelt, bowing his forehead to the ground. He did not interrupt himself when he heard a soft noise behind him; it was only the splash of the fountain, he thought—and never thought coherently again. Cold steel, like fire burning down his spine, poured in at the base of his neck. He cried out and fell. Something pushed him over on his back. As he cried out again, a dagger came hilt-deep into his mouth.

Almost at once the mosque swarmed. Chattering and gesticulating, the crowd put Mullá Taqí on a litter and carried him home. Mass hysteria set in. People struck at one another, accusing each other of the crime. Many were jailed. Finally the murderer, who had hid on the mosque roof and afterward mingled unmolested with the mob, went to the Governor and confessed his crime, so that the innocent would be spared.

Later on at the trial in Ṭihrán the story came out. “I was on my way to investigate the teachings of the Báb,” the prisoner said, “when I passed through Qazvín. I saw a man being tortured in the streets. When I asked why, I was told he was a Shaykhí and that Taqí had pronounced him a heretic. I am a Shaykhí myself. I went to this Mullá Taqí to see if what they had told me was true. It was. He said all Shaykhís were heretics. I wanted to strike him then and there. Instead, I vowed to put my dagger down his throat and gag his blasphemy.”

The Governor did not believe this man at first. Then he was identified by the old woman who had spread down the prayer rug. Still unconvinced, the Governor took him to the bedside of the dying victim. Taqí raised himself up and pointed at the man and died.

Muḥammad now accused Ṭáhirih of the crime. Had she not threatened the dead man, saying blood would pour out of his mouth? That the stranger had confessed and been identified made no difference. (He, incidentally, so favorably impressed the authorities that they arranged his escape from prison, so that he lived to become a Bábí and die a martyr to the new Faith, in the great war, at Ṭabarsí.)

When they buried Taqí in the mosque, Muḥammad had a drawing carved on the stone. It showed a Mullá bowed in prayer, a masked man thrusting a knife into his back and a veiled woman, holding a scroll in one hand, peering out at the crime. Underneath was carved the legend: “Mullá Taqí, stabbed by a Bábí heretic.”

The disastrous results of Ṭáhirih’s visit to her father now appeared in their full horror. She herself was imprisoned in an underground room. Many of those accused by the heirs of Mullá Taqí of complicity in his murder were savagely put to death. Some were executed. Roaming bands in the streets fell upon others with knives, swords, spears, and axes, and stabbed and hacked them [Page 24] to bits.

Ṭáhirih, in her prison, wrote to the man who had been her husband, quoting the Qur’án. “‘Fain would they put out God’s light with their mouths: but God only desireth to perfect His light, albeit the infidels abhor it.’ If my Cause be the Cause of Truth, the Lord whom I worship will deliver me from your tyranny before nine days have passed. Should He not deliver me, you are free to act as you wish, for you will then have established the falsity of my belief.”

Within nine days a young nobleman of Ṭihrán, a fellow-disciple named Bahá’u’lláh, had delivered her.

By a trusted messenger, Muḥammad Hádí, He sent a sealed letter to Hádí’s wife. The lady, Khátún-Ján, was to go, disguised as a beggar, to the house where Ṭáhirih was held captive; to cry for help at the gate, and deliver the letter into Ṭáhirih’s hand; then to leave the house and stand at the gate till Ṭáhirih, wearing a worn-out garment, had again joined her there. Bahá’u’lláh sent an attendant with three horses to wait at an appointed spot outside the walls of Qazvín. Feeling her way in the unlit street, Khátún-Ján led Ṭáhirih to that spot. Then, by a lonely road, they rode through the night to Ṭihrán, and at daybreak when the gates of Ṭihrán were opened, they came safely to the house of Bahá’u’lláh. It was as Bahá’u’lláh had written her: “The Almighty will assuredly guide your steps and will surround you with His unfailing protection.”

It was widely known in Islám that when the Twelfth Imám should return, He would stand before the Black Stone, the holiest object in the Muslim world, that is fixed lip-high in the wall of the Cube House at Mecca, and declare His coming. Some maintained the stone would be riven when He spoke.

The Báb now set out for Mecca, that the prophecy should be fulfilled. He did not take Mullá Ḥusayn with Him; instead, He chose Quddús, the eighteenth Letter of the Living, the last one to seek Him out—Quddús and the Ethiopian attendant.

This was bitter news for Mullá Ḥusayn. He, who had first discovered the Báb, was now to be sent away, another chosen in his place.

“Do not grieve,” the Báb told him. “I will give you something better. You shall find it in Ṭihrán. Set your trust in God; His almighty arms will surround you, His unfailing spirit guide your steps.”

Mullá Ḥusayn set out for the capital, teaching as he went. Someone had appeared on earth, revealing a Book, he taught.

“What is revealing?” they said. “Is it speaking out of a trance, as the magicians do? Is it writing, like the mullas?”

“No,” said Mullá Ḥusayn, “the professors write, and the magicians speak from a trance. This is something else. He is like a flute that the breath of the spirit comes through; or like a harp under the fingers of the spirit.”

“Is He good to look upon?” they asked.

“He is the embodiment of all lovely things,” said Mullá Ḥusayn. “He makes the drinker forget his wine, and the lover turn aside from his beloved.”

The clergy muttered among themselves. If the Second Advent had really taken place, what would become of them? Who would listen to them anymore, if the great Imám had come? The Sháh and the people would forsake them for Him. And the holy cities would be ruined: who would visit the old tombs if the Lord of the Age was [Page 25] here? And the women in the shrine cities, who contracted temporary marriages with the pilgrims—who would provide for them? What would the tradespeople do? This was dangerous talk; there were ways of stopping it.

In Iṣfahán no one listened to Mullá Ḥusayn but a sifter of wheat. A few years later, this man ran through the bazaars of Iṣfahán, carrying his sieve. “Where are you going?” they asked him. “To sift men’s souls,” he cried, “and take the believing to die with me at the Fort of Ṭabarsí!”

Arrived at Ṭihrán, Mullá Ḥusayn found that not only the Muslims but the Shaykhís as well were against him. Had he declared himself as the promised Imám, these last would have bowed down to him; but now, they thought, he is mad—he, once a great scholar, now pressing the claim of an untutored merchant, a youth of Shíráz.

“My love has done this,” he told them, and reminded them of the verse of Jalálu’d-Dín’s: “In the book of the mad my name is first, though once I was first on the list of the wise.” They left him, unheeding, and it was as the Qur’án says: in their ears was a deafness, and between him and them there was a veil.

Here in Ṭihrán, Mullá Ḥusayn found the promised gift: he came in touch with that nobleman of Núr who was called Bahá’u’lláh, the Glory of God. People thronged to Bahá’u’lláh, who lived in a palace that stood over a pool. Instead of serving at His Majesty’s Court, this young noble spent His days meditating in the garden, or riding over the hills. No one who was poor or disconsolate was ever turned away from His gate, but the fortunate crowded around Him as well. When Mullá Ḥusayn sent Him a manuscript of the Báb’s, He at once unfolded it and began to read it aloud; far from caviling at it, He said to those present that it was pure truth; that if anyone believed the Holy Scriptures of the past, he must needs believe this as well.

Meanwhile the Báb, with Quddús and the Ethiopian attendant, sailed for Mecca from Búshihr, His sea voyage to Jaddih lasting two months. He spent the time praying on the crowded deck or dictating homilies to Quddús; the brutality, filth, and constant quarreling of the pilgrims added to the hardships of travel, made the journey hideous; for twelve days, even water was cut off, and they lived on the juice of sweet lemons.

Landing at the desert’s edge, the Báb put on the clothing of a pilgrim, and they set out for Mecca. Quddús refused to ride; he crossed the desert on foot, leading the Báb’s camel; by night, following the long march, he could not sleep but watched over the Báb. Before the Black Stone, the Báb declared His mission, as the Gate to the Knowledge of God, and the prophecy was redeemed, and some say a great crack appeared in the meteorite.

From there He went to Medina, City of the Prophet, where was the Grave of His ancestor, Muḥammad, and of many saints, as well as that of Shaykh Aḥmad. As He turned back toward Persia, the holy ones who lay under the dust at Medina seemed to be calling out to Him: “Go not into Thy native land—abide Thou here,” they seemed to be saying; so insistent were their shades that He answered in His mind, “Nay, beseech the Lord to hasten my martyrdom. From my blood will grow the union of all peoples. Rejoice for in this path both I and Quddús will be slain.”

The journey had lasted nine months. Returning to Persia by way of the sea, the Báb took leave to Quddús: “Now it [Page 26] is over. The days of our companionship on earth are spent. My eyes shall see you no more. You shall carry the banner, and lead an army to martyrdom. In the streets of Shíráz, you shall be compassed about and brought low; then you shall come into the presence of Him Whom God Shall Manifest, where every sad thing is forgotten. Afterward, they will kill you, even as they will kill me. The dust will know us no more, but we shall be together in the worlds of light.”

Soon afterward, in Shíráz, at the Governor’s order, they burned the beard of Quddús, pierced his nose, passed a cord through the incision and led him along the streets. Then he and a fellow believer who had received a thousand lashes on his bare body, were threatened with crucifixion and put out of the city. “It will teach the people what heresy means,” the Governor said.

The Báb’s name spread as by magic across Persia. Day and night, in coffee houses and palace gardens, in mosques and caravanserais, baths and bazaars, the talk was of Him. Shíráz remembered her native son. He was twenty-five, and of good family. As a child, the people recalled, He lost His father and was reared by an uncle, Siyyid ‘Alí. He did not care for school, and when, to please His uncle, He went to class, the teacher brought Him home. “He needs no teacher,” the man said.

Siyyid ‘Alí rebuked Him at this time, telling Him to observe silence in the school. He tried but could not restrain the flow of His intuitive knowledge. His uncle then took Him into business, and as the years passed He became successful, earned a reputation for strict honesty and gave away large sums to the poor. Then He married, and had a son, and the son died. When this happened, they remembered, He did not weep; He said the child was a gift which He offered to His Lord, and that soon He would offer up His own self. This made no sense, but they respected Him as a successful businessman, forgot the episode, and the only strange thing they noticed about Him after that was that He would pray for hours on the roof of His house; even in the hot sun, He would do this, and some laughed and said He was in love with the sun.

One other thing they recalled was that a man entrusted some goods to Him, to be sold at a certain price. The Báb sent him considerably more than he had asked. When the man expressed surprise, the Báb told him that for a short period the goods were worth that much, and, although He had failed to sell them at that time, it was only fair that the man should receive the full amount. For hundreds of years, nothing like this had happened in Persia.

Others said they had noticed Him a few years before, in Karbilá, attending a class of Siyyid Káẓim. He sat by the door, very quiet and modest, and all at once a ray of sun fell across Him. Siyyid Káẓim looked at Him and fell silent. Urged to continue, he had turned toward the Báb with: “What more can I say? The truth is clearer than that ray of light!”

Anyhow, all Persia knew Him. High and low crowded to Shíráz; Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians, Platonists, Ṣúfís, free-thinkers, gathered around Him. The clergy, infuriated, stirred up the people. Asked to clarify His position, the Báb, from the pulpit, declared a that He was not, as some had claimed, the representative of the Twelfth Imám, and not the Gate to Him; that He believed in the one God, and the succession of the Prophets.

The Báb was then banished to [Page 27] Iṣfáhán. The Governor of Iṣfáhán, a man of great wealth, received Him in that city, waiting on Him in person. This man offered the Báb his fortune; since he enjoyed the Sháh’s confidence, he would win over the sovereign to the new Faith, and through him address all the world’s rulers and incline their hearts to the Báb.

“May God reward you,” the Báb answered. “But our days are numbered; our time is short. You have only three months and nine days left. No, not by worldly means will the Cause of God achieve its triumph—but through the poor and lowly of this land, by the blood they shall shed in His path.” When the time elapsed and the Governor died, a nephew destroyed his will, which had left all his fortune to the Báb.

The Sháh, although completely under the control of his Rasputin-like Prime Minister, who was the real ruler of Persia and had brought the country to ruin, now sent for the Báb, against the Minister’s will. As they led Him under escort to the capital, the Prime Minister prevailed; if this Youth should ever meet the Sháh, the Minister said to himself, it was finished. He would win over the sovereign and send out His doctrine to the ends of the earth. The Prime Minister therefore exiled the Báb to the rock fortress of Máh-Kú, a frontier outpost in the wilds of Ádhirbáyján.

After the messenger bearing that sentence had gone, the Prime Minister went for a walk in his garden in the cool of the day. A young prince who was with him dared to ask, “Why did you send Him away? What harm had He done?”

The Minister pushed back his peaked, lambskin cap; one crooked ear protruded from under it, a fact which always annoyed the Sháh; his hennaed fingers grasped a crooked stick, his other hand fondled a goat-like beard. He hobbled along in silence for a few moments, and then he snickered, “You are young yet, and there are many things you do not understand. But know that if He had come to Ṭihrán, you and I would not be walking now, at peace in this cool garden.”

When the Báb and His escort neared Tabríz, on the long journey to Máh-Kú, no one was allowed to approach Him. The penalty for seeking out the Báb was life imprisonment, and still the people flocked to glimpse Him. But one boy refused to be kept back. He ran out to meet the cavalcade, stopped the guards, and kissed their stirrups and their robes.

“I love you,” he cried out to them, “because you are the companions of my well-beloved!”

They could only break their ranks and let him through. Kneeling before the Báb’s horse, he sobbed aloud; the Báb dismounted, raised him up, and wiped his eyes.

Even from His mountain prison, the Báb continued to direct His Cause. Eighty-one persons, representatives of all the Báb’s followers, now came together at His order, in the garden village of Badasht. Here the thing happened for which Ṭáhirih will always be remembered—for it is not simply her love for the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, nor her beauty and learning, nor her odes, nor the way she died, that place her in history. Ṭáhirih will live forever because, in symbol, she freed women the world over from their long enslavement. In the West, it is true, meetings were held to liberate women about this time—but the Conference at Badasht preceded them.

The affair came about in a shattering [Page 28] way. Telling it in plain English makes little effect, because the West has never covered the faces of its women; even nuns go unveiled. But the West would be stupefied and sickened at the thought of a naked Madonna, and a naked Madonna was shown to the men of Badasht.

One day as they sat in their parliament, Ṭáhirih strode into their midst. They looked up from their deliberations and were struck dumb; her face was uncovered. It was painted, like a bride’s, and she wore a jewelled diadem set with aigret feathers in her black curling hair, and a white silk dress sewn with pearls.

They covered their own faces in shock, began to sob, were filled with a great revulsion. Ṭáhirih was, to them, all things holy and good. She was like the Prophet’s daughter, our Lady of Light; even to glance at the shadow of her veiled form, as she walked by them, was a sin. And now she had disclosed the terrible unwelcome beauty of her face. It was blasphemy, it was like some diabolical Black Mass. She had come before them like a fallen angel out of the Qur’án, a black-eyed damsel with cheeks fair as the shell of an ostrich egg, who once had lived in the Riḍván, the paradise of the good-pleasure of God, and was now fallen from her home. One man drew the dagger out of his belt, slashed at his throat, and ran from the room shrieking and covered with blood.

As the others sat in a stupor, brows knit and eyes downcast, Ṭáhirih cried out: “Rejoice, for this day the shackles of the past are burst asunder!” Then she stepped forward toward Quddús and seated herself at his right hand.

The Báb had summoned Quddús to this Conference; he had come from Mashhad, in the easternmost province of Persia, where his intense fire had set the hearts of the people ablaze. Likewise, the Báb had summoned Ṭáhirih from Karbilá, beyond the western confines of Persia, where she too had kindled a conflagration. From the east and the west these two had journeyed to meet at Badasht.

Quddús was the leader of the conservatives at Badasht. Ṭáhirih led the left. They had come from the east and the west. They had come with opinions as far apart as the east and the west.

Silently attracted to one another, when they had chanced to meet in Karbilá, the divergence in their natures, and the different paths they had chosen since, had divided them. News of Ṭáhirih’s boldness had reached Quddús and shocked and affronted him. His effective but, on the whole, quiet activities in Khurásán had failed to satisfy her impetuous nature.

Now he had watched her part the curtains and enter the pavilion— watched her fabled beauty as she stood among the men. For an instant that beauty struck home. His heart contracted. Then he averted his eyes from her shamelessness. How dare she expose her lovely face? Now he sat next to her, his head turned aside, his cheeks flushed with anger.

His anger had no effect on Ṭáhirih. The consternation of the other men was as nothing to her. Sitting as though enthroned in their midst, she kept the serenity with which she had stepped into the tent. Then with triumph shining from her eyes she rose.

In words lofty as those of the Qur’án she addressed them all, heralding the New Day and Him Who was the Lord of it and ending with this verse: “Verily, amid gardens and rivers shall the pious dwell . . . in the presence of the potent King.” As she finished, she cast a swift [Page 29] glance toward both Bahá’u’lláh and Quddús, and those who were watching could not tell to which one she alluded when she cried those words: “the potent King.”

She soon made this clear. Turning to Quddús, she rebuked him for having failed to perform in Khurásán that which seemed to her essential to the welfare of the Faith.

“I am free to follow the promptings of my own conscience,” Quddús retorted. “I am not subject to the will and pleasure of my fellow-disciples.”

Ṭáhirih made no reply. Turning her eyes away from him, she invited all those who remained in the tent to celebrate befittingly what she called “this great achievement.” “This day is the day of festivity and rejoicing,” she said, “the day on which the fetters of the past are burst asunder. Let us arise. Let us embrace.”

This day the inner meaning of their parliament was disclosed. Up to now, they had been Muslim followers of the returned Imám, but still under the old laws. Now there were new laws to obey. Now they were forced to live in a new world, because the old one was torn down—leveled before their eyes in this out of the way hamlet of Badasht.

The Báb, from Máh-Kú, watched over the gathering of these eighty-one followers who had abandoned everything and risked everything to come. As He had foreseen, for some the struggle was too great; they were rooted in the barren past; they drifted away and died with it. Others, the people of the future, learned much, however painfully, at Badasht: they saw the new laws born, and glimpsed new horizons for the whole human race; not only Shí‘ah Islám and Persia were to be the issue—but the unknown place, the earth.

They received new names, and from this time on, whatever the evil spread about this woman whose crime was that she unveiled her face, Ṭáhirih was known by the name which means “Immaculate.”

Meanwhile, the quarrel went on between the two disciples. Some ranged themselves on the side of Quddús, others with Ṭáhirih. To those with whom Ṭáhirih spoke, she said: “Quddús is my pupil. I see him in no other light.” And Quddús: “She is a heretic, the victim of her own error.”

But in his tent Quddús knew no peace. Ṭáhirih’s beauty shone always before his eyes. “She is a unit of beauty,” he said to himself. “Her face, her voice, her grace, her mind are all one harmony. She is God’s archetypal form, the perfect one. Why should I revolt against her?” And yet, there it was, this anger in him that would not be appeased.

It was the young noble, Bahá’u’lláh, the Glory of God, who brought them together, reconciled their differences, and welded their disciples into one community. It now became clear that He was the guiding power in their midst. Ṭáhirih seemed to know Him better than all the rest, for she addressed odes to Him, and prophesied that crowds of followers would one day spin around Him like motes in a shaft of light.

The last night came. Sapphire moonlight ran in the stream beside the red tent that was of felt, silk-embroidered, open on the sides. Flowers, pastel in the milky shadows—delicate petunias, called “satin flowers,” and sweet white stock, called “fragrant-at-night”— breathed out their scents. Silken rugs covered the tent floor. On a low table, a candle flickered over the cloth of green Yazd silk; white moths bumped the [Page 30] candlestick. The light moved against the faces of the believers gathered in the tent.

Someone was playing a flute, at the other end of the garden. The notes came, high and sad and somehow final, like the bugle notes over dead warriors. The zircon stars ticked off the time. Then Quddús took Ṭáhirih’s hand in his, and sighed.

At the end of the conference of Badasht, when the Bábí chieftains were dispersing, Bahá’u’lláh had a howdah— tented seats, strapped on the back of a sturdy horse—brought for Quddús and Ṭáhirih and sent them off together, along the road to Níyálá. They left the garden-spot of Badasht and found themselves again in the desert land, clay fields stretching wide to mountains like walls of stone.

Now, in the midst of what Ṭáhirih knew was war—a strange war in which one side was fighting to win paradise, the other to stay a few decades more on earth; in which one side offered eternal life to anyone who would believe, and the other responded by meting out death—these were moments of peace to cherish and remember. As they rode together in the howdah, she composed a new poem for every day of the journey, and their companions sang it as they marched. Fate was hurrying them along, out of the darkness of this world, into the final light.

Quddús, last of the eighteen Letters of the Living, was born in Bárfurúsh, Mázindarán. In his early youth, he had attended the classes of Siyyid Káẓim, who considered him the greatest of his pupils; quiet and modest, he was always the last to arrive, always took the lowliest seat (the one by the shoe row) , and left the first. When he reached Shíráz, looking for the Promised One in 1844, he was only twenty-two. It was in the evening when he first saw the Báb, walking through the streets followed by Mullá Ḥusayn; and the latter, to keep, as bidden, the secret of the Báb’s Declaration, stood between Him and Quddús. “Why do you seek to hide Him from me?” cried Quddús. “I know Him by His walk!”

Now in the howdah he looked away from Ṭáhirih, looked into the far distance. Beyond those stony mountains he saw a fort, and he saw men besieged in it; men become skeletons from hunger; a few starved men fighting armies that numbered thousands, fighting with unearthly power, that out of this country of Persia some might be left to carry on the Faith. He saw them dying. All dying.

He turned to her again and spoke. “What a wilderness it is,” he said.

“But the journey through it will be short.”

“You mean,” said Quddús, “the journey to Níyálá?”

“Yes—oh yes, how short! But I mean too—our lives.”

“They are in the hand of our Beloved,” he told her. “While we still live they are for Him.”

“I know,” said Ṭáhirih. “There is only death for us in this world.”

“But,” said Quddús, looking deep into her eyes, “we have the next.”

After this journey, Ṭáhirih went on to Ṭihrán, and Quddús fell into the hands of the mujtahids and was imprisoned in Mázindarán. From His own prison, the Báb sent His green turban to Mullá Ḥusayn, in Khurásán. “Wear it,” was His message, “and go forth with the Black Standard lifted before you, and hasten to the assistance of Quddús.”

Mullá Ḥusayn accordingly marched out of Khurásán. All along the way, new believers rallied to his Black Standard, [Page 31] guided by the words spoken thirteen hundred years before by the Arabian Prophet: “Should your eyes behold the Black Standards proceeding from Khurásán, hasten ye towards them, even though ye should have to crawl over the snow, inasmuch as they proclaim the advent of the promised [One] . . .”

Word of the peace march filled the countryside. Aroused to murderous hatred by the clergy, the townspeople of Bárfurúsh came out against the marchers and blocked the road. Mullá Ḥusayn had already directed his men to throw away all their possessions, keeping only their horses and their swords: “Far from plundering the belongings of others, we must discard our own,” he told them. Instantly, they had obeyed. The richest of them flung down a satchel of turquoises by the side of the road.

The townspeople were fully armed. They had guns and ammunition, knives, cleavers, rocks. Muttering curses, they stood in the road.

“Let them fire on us,” Mullá Ḥusayn commanded.

Shots rang. Six disciples fell. “Let us defend our lives!” they cried.

“Not yet,” he ordered. “The number is not yet complete.”

As he spoke a bullet felled Riḍá, one of his best-loved men. At this, Mullá Ḥusayn unsheathed his sword and led the charge. The townspeople fell back. Terrified, Riḍá’s killer hid behind a young tree, and held up his musket for a shield. Mullá Ḥusayn rode him down, and, with a single blow of his sword, cut through the tree, the musket, and the body of the man. At this, the townspeople broke and fled.

The news of Mullá Ḥusayn’s prowess spread through Persia; poets wrote of it, and thousands of new disciples rallied to the new Faith. They knew that Mullá Ḥusayn was not a soldier, but a scholar, a man of the pen, and that his right hand trembled. From this moment till the end, however, he seemed possessed of a strange new power; he led every charge in the long war that was to come, and those who rode after him complained that they met only such as were already disabled by his blows.

Now he galloped after the retreating enemy, straight into the heart of the town, and rode three times around the house of the High Priest. “Let him come out,” he cried, “who preaches a holy war and then hides in his house!”

At the sound of his voice, the townspeople ran to him, crying for peace.

Mullá Ḥusayn and his companions now proceeded to a caravanserai and dismounted. When they sent out for bread and water, the townspeople refused. Mullá Ḥusayn closed the caravanserai gates. At sunset he addressed his men: “Which of you is ready to renounce his life? Let him who will climb to the roof, and chant the call to evening prayer.”

A boy volunteered. He went up and called out, high and sweet, the opening words: “God is Most Great!” There was the crack of a bullet, and he fell.

“Let another go on with the prayer,” said Mullá Ḥusayn.

A second youth climbed to the roof. He stood rosy and straight in the evening light. “I bear witness that Muḥammad is the Apostle of God,” he chanted, continuing the prayer. A bullet halted the young voice forever.

A third young boy climbed on the roof. Below, within and without the caravanserai, they listened motionless; his voice rose, firm and true, out over the town in the gathering dusk. He [Page 32] almost reached the end of the chant. As he sang the long echoing line, “There is no God but God,” they fired.

Mullá Ḥusayn and his men mounted their horses, unsheathed their swords and galloped out into the great square, where the whole town waited. Again the people fled before them, sobbing for peace. Soon the square was empty except for the dead.

That night the townspeople arbitrated. “The High Priest stirred this mischief up,” they said. They promised Mullá Ḥusayn and his men a military escort of a hundred horses, to guide them on their journey through the forest. “If these let any harm come near you,” they said, “may the curse of God and His Prophets be on us, hereafter and here.”

At dawn the believers rode away through the forest, surrounded by a hundred armed men. In the depths of the woods these men turned on them and opened fire. Many fell; the others had the choice of dying, their mission unaccomplished, or of fighting back. They fought back. As an enemy survivor fled along the path to Bárfurúsh, Mullá Ḥusayn cried after him, “Tell your people that my sword and my horse have not yet finished their work.”

He then addressed the disciples. “We are nearing the place of our martyrdom,” he said. Some were carrying along the possessions of the slain. “Leave everything,” he told them, “except your horses and your swords.” Then he led them through the forest to a place of local pilgrimage, the tomb of a holy man named Shaykh Ṭabarsí.

Here they set about building a fort, with a moat around it; and here there ensued one of the strangest military episodes in all history—a siege sustained by three hundred and thirteen civilians, scholars, men of the cloth, who held the Government’s armies at bay for eleven months and never suffered defeat.

The Báb’s followers, all over the Near East, were drawn irresistibly to the Fort in the forest of Mázindarán. Had all succeeded in reaching it, the work of the Báb might have passed from history and been forgotten, because here the flower of His disciples, and half the Letters of the Living, perished.

Bahá’u’lláh, the youthful nobleman of Núr, Himself inspected the Fort and guided the campaign, but was imprisoned and thus prevented from rejoining the besieged. Released from his own prison, Quddús made his way to the Fort through the forests and became the Bábís’ chief.

As the Sháh’s armies closed in around the Fort, charge after charge was led by Mullá Ḥusayn against the besiegers. His name alone made them fall back. One morning he rode out by the light of the dawn star; at the head of his men, he had galloped through three of the enemy’s barricades when his horse got entangled in the tent ropes and a sniper shot him from a tree. The Bábís carried Mullá Ḥusayn back to Quddús; in the Fort, he seemed to revive, and they could hear the two conversing—the first of the Letters of the Living with the last. When he died, Quddús called them in and they found the dead lips smiling. Quddús prepared the body for burial, clothing it in his own garment.

There is a man who appears suddenly in history, rising above the wall of the Fort. It was in the days when the besieged were boiling the grass and eating it; when they had made a flour from grinding up bones; when they ate saddle leather and the scabbards of their swords; when they had dug up [Page 33] Mullá Ḥusayn’s horse, dead of its battle wounds, and shared it. The man on the wall embodies all this. His sword was strapped on over his long white garment, around his head he had a white band, and the Muslim who had come with a safe-conduct to take him home was frightened of his face; it was as flaming and unyielding as his sword. The Muslim tried to move this man: “Come back to your child,” he said, “your little Raḥmán, who longs to see you.”

“Tell him,” said the man on the wall, “that love of the true Raḥmán, the All-Merciful God, has filled my heart; it has left no place for any love but His.” When the Muslim saw that nothing could take this man from his post, he wept. “May God assist you,” he cried. “He has indeed assisted me,” said the man on the wall. “How else could I have come to this exalted stronghold?” And he sank from the wall.

The Government never prevailed— not, at least, by the force of arms. But the enemy general, a prince of the blood, weary of the long siege, and the ridicule it had brought to his armies, bethought himself what to do. Declaring a truce, he took up the Qur’án, and swore to the starving men by all he held holy that he would let them go in peace. When the survivors came forth, like apparitions from another world, he butchered them. Then he bombarded the Fort and leveled off the earth where it had stood, thinking thus to rub out history.

The leader, Quddús, in rags and wearing the green turban sent him by the Báb, was led away to a special death. They took him back to his home city of Bárfurúsh, and paraded him through the town. In the streets the mob tore off his worn clothing; they stripped off the turban, emblem of his descent from Muḥammad, and fouled it; when they had chained him, the women from the brothels came out into the light and spat on him and slashed him with their knives. As he walked among them, bleeding from hideous wounds, he prayed for them: “Forgive them their trespasses, O God! Show them the truth!” Just before he fell, he cried out, “Would that my mother were with me, and could see with her own eyes the splendour of my nuptials!”

In an agony of hate and pleasure, the populace built a bonfire in the public square and danced around it; then they tore his body apart and threw the members into the flames.

When word of this martyrdom came to the Báb, undergoing His final imprisonment in the castle at Chihríq, He was unable to write for six months.

That night, the believers stole out, and took up the ashes to bury them. Someone found the green turban, unwound and lying by the roadside; he cleansed it, and being a man of understanding, he set out for Ṭihrán, and gave it as a gift to Ṭáhirih.

Then Ṭáhirih knew that Quddús was dead. A long time, she sat with the turban scarf across her hands, looking down into the courtyard. Clouds hung down there in the pool; a leaf drifted on the water. A crow flew out of the sky and settled clumsily on the rim of the pool. The jasmine fragrance rose up to her window. Ṭáhirih folded the green cloth carefully, smoothing it many times with her small hands. After that she hid it away, against a day or a night that would come.

It was about this time that the seven were killed in Ṭihrán. The Báb’s uncle, who had been a second father to Him, publicly declared that he longed to die for the Faith, and that he would not leave Ṭihrán no matter what the danger, [Page 34] but would go to martyrdom as a guest to a banquet. Not long after this, some among the leading merchants of Ṭihrán begged their prosperous colleague to recant his faith, and offered to ransom him. He answered that whatever he knew of Moses and Jesus and Muḥammad, and all the Prophets of the past, he had seen in the Báb; and that he therefore craved to be the first to die for his well-loved Kinsman.

This man became the first of that special group, the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. As he went to his death, he called out and reminded the populace that they had longed for a thousand years to see the Qá’im, and that now He was come they had imprisoned Him on a mountain in Ádhirbáyján and were killing His people. Then he prayed for their forgiveness, and the last thing he said was a verse from Rúmí:

How long from the wound

of his going I’ve bled:

Love will restore me,

to sever my head!

And then the lips closed and were silent.

Fourteen of the believers had been imprisoned in the mayor’s house— where all the time Ṭáhirih was a captive on the upper floor—and flogged and tortured for information. None of them spoke out. One of them, Muḥammad Ḥusayn, would not utter even a syllable. His torturers questioned the man who had converted him to the Faith: “Is he dumb?”

“He is mute, but not dumb,” was the answer. “He is fluent of speech.”

And, indeed, he was eloquent the day they killed him—running forward and pleading so vehemently to die before the rest that he, the seventh of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán, was beheaded at the same moment with the fifth and sixth.

For three days, these seven lay unburied in the streets. Thousands of devout Muslims during these days circled around their bodies, kicked them, spat on the dead faces, cursed them, stoned them, threw refuse on them, multilated them in shameful ways. No one protested. At last what was left was gathered up and buried in one grave, out by the moat.

The Báb, in prison at Máh-Kú, had won the loyalty of His jailers and all the countryside. He had, therefore, been transferred to stricter confinement in the castle on the lonely rock of Chihríq; but here, too, the people, although Sunnite Muslims and bitter enemies of the Shí‘ahs, the party of the Twelve Imáms, crowded about Him. Seekers came, even from India. The divines watched from afar; clearly, there was only one thing to do: silence Him forever.

They interrupted briefly His imprisonment to put on a mock trial for Him at Tabríz, in the presence of the Crown Prince and the leading clergy. When He entered, there was only one seat left: one place, reserved for the Crown Prince. The Báb took this place. He greeted the assemblage, and His power was such that no one spoke.

Finally the High Priest asked brusquely, “Who do you claim to be?”

“I am the Promised One,” the Báb answered, “Whose name you have for a thousand years invoked.”

They were silent, They had never seen a prisoner like this. “He is burning like white fire,” one of them whispered. “If He wished, He could destroy us all.”

Then one of the Shaykhí clergy cried out: “You miserable boy of Shíráz! You have already subverted ‘Iráq. Do you now subvert Ádhirbáyján?”

“Your Honor, I did not come here of [Page 35] My own choice. I was summoned to this place.”

“Follower of Satan!” cried the Shaykhí.

“I stand by what I have declared,” rejoined the Báb.

Then the High Priest said: “If you are the Twelfth Imám, produce your proof.”

“My words are My proof. In two days and nights, I can reveal knowledge equal to the whole Qur’án, which was brought down over a span of twenty-three years.”

“Then describe this conclave of ours, in the Arabic tongue, with the phraseology of the Holy Book.”

The Báb began to speak. It had long puzzled Persia that He, a merchant, not a scholar, nor a divine, could express Himself in the most complex and abstruse forms of the highly difficult Arabic tongue—a language which, although the Persians used its script and much of its vocabulary, was otherwise completely foreign to them. The Qur’án, for example, was as incomprehensible to average Persian Muslims as the Latin Bible was to Western Christians. Many a mujtahid, after years of study in Karbilá, could hardly write a page of Arabic, certainly not one free from error. The erudite, deeply versed in Arabic, were first attracted to the Báb by the sheer power of His language, so that they eventually abandoned rank and fame and even life for Him. However, He broke, when He chose, the Arabic rules, or introduced new forms, handling the language as a master, not a slave. Grammar was nothing —convention was nothing—all the literature of the past was nothing—the world must be wiped clean of it all and prepared for the advent of Him Whom God Would Manifest.

Now, as He spoke, the Shaykhí priest interrupted with, “This self-appointed Promised One of ours has broken a grammar rule!”

“The Qur’án itself breaks about three hundred,” said the Báb. “The Word of God is free from rules.” He then repeated His interrupted words.

The Shaykhí cried out again, the conclave buzzed, a man flung a trivial question at the Báb, asking Him to name the tense of a certain Arabic form. The Báb rose. “Far be the Lord your God from what they impute to Him,” He said. And then He left the hall.

Soon afterward, He was seized, and when the guards refused to inflict on Him the torture of the bastinado, the High Priest himself struck the blows. Blind power used blind force, trying to kill what man’s strength can never even reach, because it lies in another dimension, not of our world. They returned him, then, to Chihríq.

One night, a believer, jailed and waiting for death, had a dream. In the palm of his hand was a candle, burning slowly down to the flesh; as it gutted out, a new candle sprang up from his palm with a fresh, new flame. The next morning, word came that the old Sháh was dead and the new one, Náṣiri’d-Dín had ascended the throne. The prisoner, for the time being, was allowed to live.

It was the new Sháh and the new Prime Minister who martyred the Báb.

Like the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Meccans before them, the Muslims pitted their strength against a power, aloof and unfamiliar, that always eluded them. They tried to shoot the sun down with their bows and arrows. The Muslim clergy signed the Báb’s death warrant, thinking physical death would stop Him, forgetting that it had not stopped the Man of Ḥijáz, or the [Page 36] One they crucified on Calvary.

It was a leader of the Shaykhís, those that had first proclaimed His advent, who wrote out the document condemning Him to death.

On the day of His martyrdom, the Báb was in His cell at Tabríz, giving final instructions to a disciple, when the guards broke in, interrupted Him, and led Him away.

“I shall not die,” He told them, “till I finish what I have to say.”

In answer, they led Him out and bound Him with cords.

Sám Khán, the Christian officer in charge of the execution, then spoke to the Báb. “I feel no ill will against you. If your Cause be truth, spare me from killing you.”

“Obey your orders,” the Báb said, “and put your faith in God. He answers the prayers of the sincere.”

Then they drove a great nail into the wall. A disciple who had begged to die with the Báb was now bound to Him, in such a way that his head shielded his master’s breast. The two were suspended with ropes from that nail.

It was high noon, in the barracks square at Tabríz. Ten thousand people watched from the rooftops. They saw two men, tied together and swinging from a nail. They saw seven hundred and fifty men in three ranks lined up against them. They heard an officer give the signal; they heard three blasts, as each rank opened fire; they saw the blood-red flame spurt out, saw the black smoke rise and cover the square.

When the smoke cleared, a shout went up from the rooftops. The Báb had vanished. His companion stood before them unhurt. Only the ropes which bound the two had been severed, shot to rags.

They saw what had never happened in history before, will never happen again.

Running crazedly here and there, the guards looked for the Báb. They soon found Him in His cell, quietly completing His interrupted conversation with the disciple.

“I have finished. Now I am ready,” He said.

They led Him forth again. But this time Sám Khán refused to fire, and he marched his regiment out of the square. A new regiment volunteered and was lined up. Master and disciple were suspended again. Through the smoky air, under the blazing July sun, the Báb cried out His last words: “The day will come when you will have recognized Me; that day I shall have ceased to be with you.” The men opened fire. This time death was instantaneous: the two bodies were shattered into a single mass of flesh and bone.

The Báb’s short ministry was essentially the story of His love for a Being, contemporary with Him but Whom He never saw; He was constantly close to, and exchanging letters and gifts with, the mysterious Personage Whom He called “The One Whom God Shall Manifest.” Almost every page of His book, the Persian Bayán, tells His followers to hasten to this Personage: “I am but as a ring on the finger of Him Whom God Shall Manifest . . . When He appears, all my works will be cancelled out, except such as He may deign to accept. My life is only a gift from Him Whom God Shall Manifest. Hasten, then, indeed hasten, indeed hasten, to attain His presence . . . In the Year Nine, and in the Year Nineteen, His cause shall be proclaimed.”

Whatever He suffered, He regarded as a sacrifice for this Personage, and the cause He would reveal to mankind. The Báb’s own Teachings were designedly difficult and obscure, and their [Page 37] chief purpose was to awaken His followers to the new day which had dawned, to abrogate the laws of the past, and to announce an era without precedent in the life of man.

The old Prime Minister with the crooked ears had been, of course, disgraced upon the death of his master, the previous Sháh. He had wandered away to Karbilá, where he died in poverty, too old and vague to remember much about the country he had helped to ruin.

His brother, the one who years before had desired to marry the child from Qazvín—Ṭáhirih—chanced to mention her at court one day in the presence of the new King of Kings.

“Consider, O Asylum of the Universe, what fate has withheld from this servant. She is learned, beautiful, and a poet too. But then, she is a Bábí. It is like the marriage broker that offered his client a girl who had every charm— and was also pregnant.”

The Sháh laughed. A poet, he thought to himself. So was he a poet; a good one, the courtiers told him. Only yesterday the Chief of Poets had written an ode to him about it.

“Write me an ode,” the Sháh had commanded.

“On what subject, Your Majesty?” the fellow asked.

“On the King,” said he.

“The King is not a subject,” the man answered.

Clever, even if he had read it somewhere. In one of those books of the Franks, probably. The poet got busy right away, sliding open his pen case, moistening his powdered ink at the fountain, writing on shiny paper laid across his left palm. Then he knelt before the throne to recite his new-minted ghazal. The courtiers gathered at either side, ready to acclaim or damn it according to the King’s nod. Men were all such fools when you had power of life and death over them. Always shivering, like mongrel dogs.

Just last week, he, the Sháh, had been out walking in the orchard with his Master of Ceremonies.

“The apricots are wonderful this year,” he had said.

“Truly wonderful, Your Majesty.”

“The cherries have never been so perfect.”

“Indeed perfect, Your Majesty.”

“And the sweet lemons . . .”

“Luscious, Your Majesty.”

“Dog!” he had cried, clouting the man over the head. “I was going to say the sweet lemons are terrible!”

He had let him off with fifty lashes. He should remember not to be so lenient; it would bring the country to ruin. But then, the country was already in ruin, so there was nothing to worry about. If he should happen to grieve over it, he could always write an ode.

O yes, the ode. The Chief of Poets had knelt before the throne and recited it—and it proved that all the books of Sa‘dí and Ḥáfiz had been blotted out, eclipsed forever by the King’s own poems. Sometimes his courtiers were prone to exaggerate, but here for once was sober truth. He had rewarded the fellow handsomely, too. He was toying with a rosary of turquoises at the time, and, as the man recited, he had broken the string, and at the end of each couplet tossed a turquoise down into the poet’s mouth.

There was the old Prime Minister’s brother, still standing in front of him.

“About the Bábí woman poet,” His Majesty said. “Bring her to me. We shall match verses together.”

They soon found Ṭáhirih—she was imprisoned by now in the mayor’s house —and conducted her to the palace. [Page 38] Although, even after Badasht, she consistently veiled, Ṭáhirih now uncovered her face, for no woman veiled from the Sháh.

He was taken aback, for the first time in his life. There was her astonishing beauty, but that was a commodity which abounded in his harem. The really strange thing was that she observed no court etiquette; she neither bowed nor lowered her gaze. The creature actually seemed to think she was as good as he was. His Majesty would soon change that. He unfurled a sheaf of his poems.

“We have heard of your writings,” he said. “We now wish to read you some of ours.”

The indoor fountain, striped with sunlight, made a licking sound in the tiled pool. A life-sized wooden page, dressed in red and with a white wooden feather in his cap, was posted near its rim. The Sháh, wearing an aigret set with diamonds in his tall lambskin hat, and a brocade cloak, sat on a chair inlaid with ivory and gold. Ṭáhirih stood before him in her black robes. The walls of the room were made of bits of mirrors in patterns of flowers; they flashed and sparkled, echoing the diamonds of the Sháh. The courtiers stood, far off, across the tiled floor, at the arched doorway.

When he had finished reading, His Majesty looked up. He waited for the usual exclamations of praise. She said nothing. He scanned her lovely face. It was illegible. There was indeed some emotion there; it looked almost like pity.

His mood was still gay. “We cannot understand,” he told her, “how a woman such as you—beautiful, learned, of good family—could belong to this miserable new sect.”

“Not a sect,” she replied calmly. “The world’s new Faith.”

He suddenly understood that, while he could snuff out the life of this woman standing before him, he could not even bend her will. Angered, he called his courtiers and sent her away.

He found himself unable, however, to put her out of his mind. She has something that is lacking in my wives, he thought. How could that be? He had eight hundred beautiful young wives.

He clapped his hands and summoned the Chief Eunuch, Ḥájí Mubárik Khán, an Abyssinian prince who had been destined from childhood for his palace career.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” the Sháh whispered, “I wish all my wives to receive me. Each one in her own room.”

“All?” asked the eunuch, in horror.

“All.”

“You mean, in one day?”

“Yes. Tell each one separately that I shall come to her. And I want each one dressed in her best, as on her bridal night.”

Never had Ḥájí Mubárik Khán received an order like this. But it was not for him to reason why. He left the presence, not daring to shake his head for fear of losing it.

He at once got busy with the enormous task. Never had the palace seen such a day. Normally whatever woman happened to be the Sháh’s choice merely received a whispered invitation from his favorite page; she at once became the envy of all the rest, and they would set about trying to spoil her dress, or her mood, or even sometimes to poison her rice, if they were more bored than usual. This time each was too busy to gossip with or about the rest; maids ran here and there, seamstresses knelt, turning up hems, their mouths full of pins; [Page 39] there were steaming baths, henna, depilatories, the fragrance of pomades, red paint, white paint, damp curls, hand-blown bottles of rosewater dropped and spilling out on the floor.

Meanwhile His Majesty conferred in secret with his two assistant eunuchs, planning his itinerary for the following day. These two kept the harem register; as each name was read, they reminded the Sháh of that wife’s special beauty, the reason for which she had been married. There were the ones with eyebrows like drawn swords, the ones with gazelle eyes or flower-like lips or cypress-slender waists; other things being equal, one had been chosen for her dimple, one for her smile, one for her nimble fingers on the zither. So many items had tempted the Sháh; he remembered each wife for some one feature, never as a total personality.

When a spaniel dreams, he pictures bits of food, never a whole meal; in the haze of the dream, he sees a splinter of bone, a crust, a shred of meat. That night the Sháh’s troubled dreams were much the same—a vague succession of dreamy eyes, red lips, or hennaed finger tips.

The next evening when His Majesty went through the gate that led to the women’s palaces, he walked as purposively as a general about to review his troops. As for the wives, each waited, trembling like a bride—which indeed many of them still were—palpitating at the thought of being raised above the rest, and also of receiving some costly gift. None was disappointed, so far as presents went; a favorite page walked close on His Majesty’s heels, holding a silver casket of jewels from which he distributed everything from diamonds to cat’s eyes, the latter for the least of the peasants. However, nothing else happened to add to anyone’s prestige or embitter anyone’s rivals. It came out afterward that in each room His Majesty had behaved in the same unprecedented way; he had stared fixedly at each wife as if scanning her face for something, and maybe fingered a curl or pinched a shoulder; then he had said brusquely, “Not today,” turned sharply away and left.

The eight hundred pouted for hours. What was the harem coming to, they asked one another, temporarily unified in a joint complaint. He had not even bothered to visit them all; soon tiring, he sent his page on to the rest and left the harem, only remarking to the Chief Eunuch: “It’s no use. They simply don’t have it.” What did they lack, the eight hundred asked themselves, when the words were repeated along the palace grapevine. They were all physically perfect, chosen from all over the Middle East; besides, they all had “salt,” that quality indispensable to a Persian beauty, so he couldn’t mean that. They were neither pockmarked nor noticeably scarred with the sálak the skin sore which might appear anywhere on one’s face, lasted a whole year and had ruined many of their less fortunate sisters. Finally they shrugged their shoulders and went back to the tár strings and the pearl embroidery. They lived and died without ever finding out what it was they did not have: that mysterious quality the Sháh had seen in Ṭáhirih—that look of freedom from the world, that detachment.

Back in his own palace, he strolled a while in the garden; then, without troubling to glance behind, he sat down, secure in the knowledge that an attendant would have placed a chair beneath him. He dreamed a while by the palace pool. So far as beauty went, he was sure his wives had as much as or more than that other did. What was it then that made her face so blindingly [Page 40] bright?

In spite of himself he thought: the Bábí woman is the stronger of us two. There was nothing to do but decree a month of pleasure and forget. He would go hunting in the mountains, and take half the harem along. There would be trout, and game, red silk tents, musicians under the big moon, mounds of saffron rice stuffed with orange peel, breast of chicken and almonds—and a new rosary of turquoises to throw, jewel by jewel, into the poet laureate’s mouth.

By this time, the Báb had been martyred in Tabríz. Bahá’u’lláh had left Ṭihrán for Karbilá and had returned. Then two believers, one demented, both ignorant, confused, in despair at all the blood they had seen, stood waiting one morning along the Sháh’s line of march. When he rode past, they stopped his horse and shot at the king. The pearl tassel around the horse’s neck was severed; the Sháh, slightly wounded in the arm and side, was carried into a garden; for an hour Persia was in chaos; trumpets, drums, fifes called up troops; officers shouted conflicting commands; couriers galloped here and there; nobles crowded into the garden.

After that torrents of blood flowed in Persia. An irresponsible youth and his accomplice had attempted a crime; therefore, every real or imagined follower of the Báb in Persia must be rooted out. The clergy saw their chance, and the Sháh’s mother cried out for revenge; life after life was cut down, in exchange for her son’s slight wound, and still it was not enough and still she wanted more. Of the great massacre at Ṭihrán, Renan was to write that it was a day perhaps without parallel in the history of the world. Clergy, nobles, high officials killed the believers with their own hands.

Then all Persia shook, and for those who had loved the Báb there was death, dungeons, the whip, the sword, the candles burning in jagged wounds, the red-hot screws, the cannon’s mouth. One of the two youths who attacked the Sháh was murdered on the spot; they tore his body in two halves, and suspended them at the city gates. The other was obscenely tortured, and at last died. Bahá’u’lláh’s palace in Ṭihrán was despoiled; His lovely house at Tákur was stripped and ruined, the village itself sacked and burned, the villagers shot down. Bahá’u’lláh was chained four months underground in the dark—criminals beside Him, on the earth filth and vermin. And still the mother of the Sháh was not appeased, because the prize life, the One she wanted to destroy, the One for whom all the rest were only substitutes—still lived; and at last, preserved from death, that One was to be taken from the dungeon, exonerated from all blame, and banished forever.

Sitting by the jasmine bushes in the palace garden, the Sháh one evening had partaken freely of Shíráz wine. One of the court ministers, finding the moment favorable, suggested that he decree the death not only of all male believers in the Báb, but of the women and children as well. “Women are breeders of the evil,” he whispered, “and snake eggs hatch into snakes.”

“Kill all the women and children too,” His Majesty answered, lifting his garnet wine at a crazy angle in some unholy toast to the Unseen.

“Your word is law; to hear is to obey,” said the minister, bowing himself out. He had work to do, before it should be morning and His Majesty had slept off the wine.

In a world where one man can have his will over another, no man is safe. [Page 41] The peril is more continuously present in a despotism, more subtle in a democracy. Where human power is, wrong is. A man is only intermittently just—in fits and starts, for a whim, or not for long. He is not a safe ruler for other men. Even collective man is not a safe custodian of human fate; analyzed, collective man is schizoid—a two-personality being, one strong, one weak.

What is the answer, then, if man would live out his days in peace? It is that he should defer to the beyond-man; the beyond time and human fate; he should subject his life to the will of God—a will expressed, not in some forgotten book, some confused and ancient verse—but by the Prophet, that always recurring phenomenon in history; that point where infinite and finite meet; that lawbreaker and lawmaker, who replaces the old order with the new; that embodiment of all things that man holds dear. For this Belief, a woman was about to die.

On the following night, Ṭáhirih summoned her hostess to the long upper room in the Kalántar’s house that was her cell. She was wearing a white dress of shining silk; her hair gleamed, her cheeks were delicately enameled; the room was scented with her attar of rose.

“I am preparing to meet my Beloved,” she said. “The hour draws near. I can do more now by dying than living. My death will speak to the Future. In life my voice is stilled.”

After that she locked her door and paced the room, chanting her prayers. Weeping, the Kalántar’s wife stood outside the door and listened to the song as it rose and fell. “Lord, Lord,” she cried, “turn from her this cup which her lips desire.”

Ṭáhirih was waiting, veiled and ready, when the guards came to take her away. “Remember me,” she said to the Kalántar’s wife, “and rejoice in my gladness.” She mounted a horse and rode off with the guards, into the night. The starlight was heavy on the trees, and nightingales rustled. Camel-bells tinkled somewhere. The horses’ hooves thudded in the dust of the road.

They led her into a garden and she could hear bursts of drunken laughter under the trees. Then she was standing at a little distance from a general and his officers who had banqueted and were dazed with food and wine; candles shone on their heavy faces, on the disordered cloth and spilled drink. As she watched, their chief hardly raised his hand. “Leave us!” he shouted. “Take her and strangle her!”

Wordless, she took the scarf of Quddús, which was folded at her breast, and held it out. She had saved it for this night, from long ago. The killer pushed her to one side into deep shadows. Quickly he twisted the scarf around her throat; wrenched it till the blood spurted; waited till the head drooped on the slender neck, and the body quieted. Then he threw her down and went his way.

And Persia thought it was all over. Persia had given birth to a Prophet, and she had killed Him. She could return now to her age-long sleep. Many a morning, the sun would come up over Dimávand, and the crowned hoopoes waken, carrying their ancient message from Solomon to Sheba, and the green-coated birds tilt on the flowery branches, and the white mountain streams leap over the rocks, under the inscrutable turquoise sky; all this in peace.

Persia could sleep. The rest of the world could go its old way, digging out [Page 42] gold, burying it in the ground, hating, killing, burying the bodies in the ground, hurrying so that there would be more gold to dig out and bury, a new supply of bodies to kill and bury, hurrying after false gods because the one true God was gone.

The Báb—Ṭáhirih—Quddús—these might never have been. Except for one man. One man, chained underground; three flights below the earth, in an abandoned reservoir, now used as a jail. Except for one man: the Glory of God.

[Page 43]

Women—Attaining Their Birthright

BY CONSTANCE CONRADER

ONE of the most puzzling aspects of the human condition is the unnatural relationship that has existed between men and women throughout recorded history. The human species, like all higher forms of life, was created with a differentiation of reproductive function. But alone of all creation mankind has distorted reality by constructing a vast body of myth which has made the natural sex difference a cause of frustration, confusion, dissension, and, far too often, incredible cruelty and injustice. Moreover, the division by sex into clearly defined dichotomous roles and statuses has been a persistent feature in nearly every human society, whether primitive or civilized, ancient or modern, and has been a major factor in the spiritual retardation of humanity.

The unnaturalness of man’s attitude toward woman was emphasized again and again by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, in His talks in America. He told a Chicago audience in 1912 that equality is the rule in the animal and vegetable kingdoms and that when inequality exists the female may in fact be superior. He continued:

Inasmuch as we find no ground for distinction or superiority according to the creative wisdom in the lower kingdoms, is it logical or becoming of man to make such distinction in regard to himself? The male of the animal kingdom does not glory in its being male and superior to the female. In fact equality exists and is recognized. Why should man, a higher and more intelligent creature, deny and deprive himself of this equality the animals enjoy? His surest index and guide as to the creative intention concerning himself are the conditions and analogies of the kingdoms below him where equality of the sexes is fundamental.

The truth is that all mankind are the creatures and servants of one God, and in his estimate all are human. “Man” is a generic term applying to all humanity. The biblical statement “Let us make man in our image; after our likeness” does not mean that woman was not created. The “image” and “likeness” of God applies to her as well. In Persian and Arahic there are two distinct words translated “man” into English; one meaning man and woman collectively, the other distinguishing man as male from woman the female. The first word and its pronoun are generic, collective; the other is restricted to the male. This it the same in Hebrew.

To accept and observe a distinction which God has not intended in creation, is ignorance and superstition. . . . Until the reality of equality between man and woman is fully established and attained, the highest social development of mankind is not possible. . . .

In the earliest human groups men and women probably lived in biological ignorance, as innocent as animals in their sexual relations; only the mother-offspring [Page 44] relationship was clear and mother-right was the rule. The discovery of man’s role in the fathering of children gave a new kind of authority to men beyond their superior physical strength. In the transition from the hunting to the agricultural stage, it became advantageous to men for the control of family property to be centered in the patriarchal line. Then the double standard of sexual morality was born, and mankind turned down the gloomy trail of female subjugation on which it has continued to this day. No matter where one looks in history, with but a few exceptions, the same sad drama of suppression of women appears.

In ancient times woman was an object of superstitious tabu, feared for supposed magical powers, and blamed as the source of dark and evil forces in the world. Similar attitudes were carried into more enlightened cultures. According to the Code of Manu (a system of laws composed by Hindu Brahmans in India), people were taught that “‘The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman . . .’” In Judaic and Christian traditions woman was held accountable for man’s descent into sin. For this reason, among others, the birth of a son was greeted with rejoicing, while the birth of a daughter was looked upon as a calamity, and in unnumbered instances the unfortunate girl-child was allowed no more than a few moments or days of life. A Chinese poet, lamenting the female condition, wrote, “How sad it is to be a woman! / Nothing on earth is held so cheap. . .”

In nearly all societies before the Christian era, and in many post-Christian cultures up to the present day, women have been regarded as the property of men, to be bought and sold or stolen as part of the spoils of war. Because women were negotiable property, often men were permitted and indeed encouraged to have as many wives as they could afford. But a wife was bound to remain faithful to a single husband, even after his demise; and her fidelity was often enforced on pain of death. In ancient China and in India until recent times the widow was expected to sacrifice herself in the barbaric practice of self-immolation.

The obligatory seclusion of women and children in a harem can be traced back to Ur of the Chaldees and may have been an outgrowth of certain primitive cruelties designed to insure the premarital virginity of women. Later the custom spread to China after Confucius and to Persia after the reign of Darius. Thence it was adopted by the Arabs; and, through human perversion of the social laws of Muḥammad, became firmly established in the culture of all Islám, together with its concomitant veiling and restrictions that amounted to virtual imprisonment. Regarding this oppressive system ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said:

All women in Persia are enveloped in veils in public. So completely covered are they that even the hand is not visible. This rigid veiling is unspeakable. . . . So excessive and compulsory is the requirement for veiling in the east that the people in the west have no idea of the excitement and indignation produced by the appearance of an unveiled woman.

[Page 45] Even though woman apparently first advanced humanity in the arts of agriculture, building, textiles, weaving, and pottery and gave grace and beauty to life, both in the home and in public places (through her skill in the arts of dress and interior design, and in the producrion of delicate fabrics and elaborate tapestries), nevertheless she was not honored for any qualities of mind or spirit which such talents manifested. She was honored only for her fecundity, her obedience to her men, and her industriousness on their behalf. Only in the higher classes of some societies were women permitted any kind of education save in the skills of the home and family.

It would be a serious error, however, to assume that men laid all these oppressions upon women wholly against their will, or that the systems which evolved around their relationships had no value in maintaining an ordered society and in advancing humanity along the road of civilization. In the beginning, women undoubtedly welcomed and fostered those tabus that freed them from unwanted male attention. Polygamy and the institution of the harem relieved them of incessant pregnancy and gave them protection and security for the rearing of their children. Even those practices that now seem to us most cruel and unjust evolved gradually as a matter of convenience or necessity; and, when they had become firmly established in the culture, they were accepted with equanimity, very often with pride and preference, by the women involved. Such attitudes are echoed today by some women who object to present movements toward liberation, preferring the comfort of accustomed ways and the security of subordination to a protecting male.

Human beings, among the most adaptable of all creatures, are skillful at building societies with defective blocks, and woman has been remarkably pliant in adjusting to her social condition. Yet the adaptations have not always been in the best interests of humanity, nor the social structures harmonious and lasting.

If left to its own devices, mankind would sink to a level lower than animal. But “God has ever dealt with men in mercy and kindness” and has sent His Divine Messengers from age to age as Educators “to dispel the darkness of the animal or physical nature of man, to purify him from his imperfections in order that his heavenly and spiritual nature may become quickened.” In the course of his education, “Man must walk in many paths and be subjected to various processes in his evolution upward.”

With the appearance of revealed religion, the infant human spirit passed from the innocence of spiritual ignorance and developed the capacity to recognize and choose between good and evil—between love and hate, selflessness and egotism, generosity and greed, trust and jealousy, compassion and cruelty, justice and tyranny. The conflict between opposing traits has been the cause of both humanity’s advancement and its retrogression.

Cyclic motion is a law of the universe. Stars move in their orbits, planets turn on their axes, seasons wax and wane. The evolution of mankind’s spiritual nature is also cyclic. Civilizations rise and fall on a wheel of spiritual progress that carries mankind ever forward toward its destiny. Within the great cycle of human development from spiritual infancy to maturity, many civilizations have risen on the foundation of the [Page 46] Revelation of a divine Educator and have fallen when society turned away from the light of guidance and allowed the truths of pure religion to become clouded or distorted by faulty human interpretation. But God has been patient with His children. Because “mortal man is prone to err, and is ignorant of the mysteries that lie enfolded within him,” God’s Messengers have come successively to lead humanity back from error and to help the human spirit to probe ever more deeply into its potentialities. Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, said, “Know of a certainty that in every Dispensation the light of Divine Revelation hath been vouchsafed unto men in direct proportion to their spiritual capacity.”

Whenever a Messenger came, the knowledge He brought helped for a while to elevate the station of woman, for He reestablished the eternal human virtues of love and mercy toward all mankind. Unfortunately, the benefit to women was never total or lasting, because men could not overcome the old prejudice that for so long had labeled woman as an inferior being. After a respite following a new Revelation, women’s position in society tended to fall back to the customary subjugation.

Still, there was a leaven working in the human spirit with a transforming power that was preparing mankind for a metamorphosis of its collective life. A century ago, Bahá’u’lláh wrote, “A new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth; and yet none hath discovered its cause or perceived its motive.” Long before Bahá’u’lláh uttered those words many women had begun to strain at their bonds; and a few were even making overt claim to recognition as free, rational, autonomous human beings.

Early stirrings of a worldwide movement destined to revolutionize the traditional concept of woman’s status were felt on the American continent during the seventeenth century. Emboldened perhaps by the breeze of freedom blowing from a new and as-yet-uncorrupted land, an occasional daring colonial woman managed a partial escape from her subservience to men. But there was little to gain and much to lose for those brave women—women like Ann Hutchinson who suffered excommunication and banishment in 1638 for daring to challenge the loveless oligarchy of the Massachusetts Bay leaders and assert her right to think and speak for herself. No matter how just the cause which those women proclaimed or how courageously they upheld it, theirs were lonely voices calling toward a day that was still far off.

As the nineteenth century neared, the dissent grew louder and more frequent and at last found a voice in England’s Mary Wollstonecraft. Her book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1790, shouted a message that reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic. Thereafter the winds of change gathered strength. A sense of freedom was expanding the human heart, and a scent of spring was in the air. The history of the nineteenth century is brightened with the names of the many women who, with great hardship and danger to themselves, championed the right of their sex to be educated, to be permitted to put their minds to use, and to enter public affairs. Like spring showers that help to thaw the frozen earth, these women were helping to prepare the body of society, frozen by centuries of tradition, to receive new seeds of truth.

But the time for sowing had not yet come, for Bahá’u’lláh explains:

[Page 47]

How manifold are the truths which must remain unuttered until the appointed time is come! Even as it hath been said: “Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who hear it.”

The sun that was about to break above the horizon could not have risen in an earlier age because humanity had needed to be trained, tested, and tempered until it had acquired the spiritual capacity to receive the light of a new Day.

BY THE YEAR 1844 the “appointed time” had come. In that year, on the night of May 22 when the Báb declared His Prophethood to His first disciple in Shíráz, Persia, the old cycles of limitation ended and the new cycle of fulfillment began. His brief six-year ministry released the “creative energies which . . . were to instill into the entire human race the capacity to achieve its organic unification, attain maturity and thereby reach the final stage in its age-long evolution.” The Báb turned the human spirit away from the darkness of the past toward that Light destined to appear a few years later in the Person of Bahá’u’lláh. From the moment of the Báb’s announcement, the forces for the metamorphosis of mankind were set in motion. The long winter of woman’s enslavement was about to end.

The first momentous events took place in Persia and ‘Iráq. There the Báb’s zealous and vocal disciples clashed with the influential and hostile ecclesiastical leaders of Islám. As increasing numbers of people responded to the call of the new voices, there began one of the bloodiest and most vicious persecutions ever recorded.

Events moved with great speed, demonstrating by their transmuting effects the assertion of Bahá’u’lláh that “The world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind’s ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System—the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.” And mankind began to witness the fulfillment of Bahá’u’lláh’s promise, “The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that is therein, and spread out a new order in its stead.”

Of the first eighteen people to recognize the truth of the Báb’s Cause and joyously embrace His Faith, one was a woman. Her role as a disciple of the new Manifestation was played with such brilliance, dedication, and effectiveness that her name will be forever glorified in the record of human progress. Her accomplishments were to prove of vital consequence to all women. To have done what she did in any society would have been remarkable enough, but to have done it in Persia during its darkest and most degenerate period makes her achievement well nigh unbelievable.

This woman—born into a family whose men were renowned for scholarship and high position in the Muslim ecclesiastical heirarchy—is known to history, not by the names given her by her kindred, but rather by the simple, beautiful name Ṭáhirih, “the Pure One,” bestowed upon her by Bahá’u’lláh at the most dramatic point in her career.

Ṭáhirih was in her late twenties, long since married and the mother of three [Page 48] children, when she ranged herself with the Bábís. She had been allowed an education of a depth that was unusual for women of her day; and ever since childhood she had distinguished herself by her knowledge of poetry and other literary arts as well as of Muslim traditions. Her father is said to have lamented, “‘Would that she had been a boy, for he would have shed illumination upon my household, and would have succeeded me!’” She had ample opportunity to learn theology and become familiar with the complexities of the ecclesiastical thought of her day; for her father was a doctor of Muslim law, her husband was a theologian, her uncle (who was also her father-in-law) was the chief priest who led the prayers in the mosque, and their home was in Qazvín, a city noted for its great number of high-ranking ecclesiastics. So keen were her understanding and insight that she confounded the most learned doctors and theologians with her lucid arguments and expositions on abstruse subjects.

Ṭáhirih’s thirst for truth led her to the city of Karbilá, on the banks of the Euphrates, in ‘Iráq. There she met with the spirit of the Báb in a dream. A little later, when she came upon the first of His Writings, she recognized Him as the truth she was seeking and sent a message to Him saying, “‘The effulgence of Thy face flashed forth, and the rays of Thy visage arose on high. Then speak the word, “Am I not your Lord?” and “Thou art, Thou art!” we will all reply.’” She pledged devotion to a Lord whose Word she recognized as superseding all man-made laws, rituals, and traditions. And immediately she turned her extraordinary talents to serving her newfound Faith with a fervor and eloquence that swept her into the vortex of the tumultuous events which marked the birth of the Bahá’í Era.

With a freedom that astonished even her admirers, Ṭáhirih moved among the people, teaching and guiding them to a new awareness. The beauty and grace of her person, which even the black chádur could not obscure, charmed their eyes; the purity of her character attracted their love; the eloquence of her words drew many to accept the truth of the Báb’s message.

After three years of relative freedom in Karbilá, while the ranks of believers grew, Ṭáhirih’s fortune changed. Her fearless denunciation of the outmoded and restrictive customs of Muslim society and her audacious challenge to religious orthodoxy, together with the evidences of her influence among the people, evoked such anger among the theologians that they denounced her as a heretic and issued a judgment which led to her vilification, physical abuse, imprisonment, and ultimate expulsion from the city. From Karbilá to Baghdád—and thence in a series of journeys back to her home in Qazvín—wherever she went, like a design of repeated motifs, a similar pattern of events ensued.

In Qazvín, during a period of particularly vicious persecution of the Bábís, Ṭáhirih found herself imprisoned under close guard and in peril of her life. Nevertheless, she was so confident of her safety that she sent a message to her captors, saying,

“Fain would they put out God’s light with their mouths: but God only desireth to perfect His light, albeit the infidels abhor it.” If my Cause be the Cause of Truth, if the Lord whom I worship be none other than the one true God, He will, ere [Page 49] nine days have elapsed, deliver me from the yoke of your tyranny. Should He fail to achieve my deliverance, you are free to act as you desire. You will have irrevocably established the falsity of my belief.

To the consternation of her enemies and the bewilderment of her friends, before the specified nine days had elapsed, her delivery had indeed been accomplished, through a plan carefully laid by a fellow Bábí, Bahá’u’lláh. While her enemies searched for her, Ṭáhirih was sheltered in His house in Ṭihrán.

The confidence that had emboldened her to send such a daring message to her captors while she was helpless in their hands came from her awareness of the divine power which Bahá’u’lláh possessed and her faith in His ability to effect her release. The Bahá’í historian, Nabíl, writes:

She knew full well into whose presence she had been admitted; she was profoundly aware of the sacredness of the hospitality she had been so graciously accorded. As it was with her acceptance of the Faith proclaimed by the Báb when she, unwarned and unsummoned, had hailed His Message and recognised its truth, so did she perceive through her own intuitive knowledge the future glory of Bahá’u’lláh. It was in the year ’60, while in Karbilá, that she alluded in her odes to her recognition of the Truth He was to reveal. I have myself been shown in Ṭihrán . . . the verses which she, in her own handwriting, had penned, every letter of which bore eloquent testimony to her faith in the exalted Missions of both the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. In that ode the following verse occurs: ‘The effulgence of the Abhá Beauty hath pierced the veil of night; behold the souls of His lovers dancing, moth-like, in the light that has flashed from His face!”

While under Bahá’u’lláh’s roof, through the ardor of her love for truth, she continued to move the hearts of those who came to visit her. One day, while she spoke to a prominent guest, her voice rang out from behind the curtain which shielded her from the eyes of her male visitor:

O Yaḥyá! Let deeds, not words, testify to thy faith, if thou art a man of true learning. Cease idly repeating the traditions of the past, for the day of service, of steadfast action, is come. Now is the time to show forth the true signs of God, to rend asunder the veils of idle fancy, to promote the Word of God, and to sacrifice ourselves in His path. Let deeds, not words, be our adorning!

Soon after Ṭáhirih’s rescue from Qazvín, at the beginning of summer in 1848, Bahá’u’lláh made arrangements for a conference of the Báb’s followers. Since the spring of 1847, as a result of the intrigue of ecclesiastical and civil enemies of His Cause, the Báb had been imprisoned in mountain fortresses in Ádhirbáyján, in northwestern Persia. There He had revealed the laws of His Dispensation, and from there He had maintained continuous correspondence with Bahá’u’lláh about the Cause. It was Bahá’u’lláh, in complete unity with the Báb, Who guided the activities of the disciples in the Báb’s absence. Now His primary purpose in gathering the believers from all parts of Persia was to make a complete and dramatic break with the past and to proclaim publicly the laws of the new Dispensation.

[Page 50] The scene of the twenty-two-day conference was the small hamlet of Badasht on the border of Mázindarán, where the tents of the eighty-one assembled believers were pitched in a large field bordered on three sides by gardens. In one garden, the pavilion of Bahá’u’lláh was raised; the other two gardens were reserved for Quddús (the eighteenth disciple of the Báb) and Ṭáhirih, who were to play prominent parts in the proceedings and who met with Bahá’u’lláh to consult on their roles.

Already highly charged with drama by its very nature, the conference moved to its spectacular climax. On one of the last days, Ṭáhirih stepped from her garden and walked with serene dignity toward the gathering, her radiant face unveiled. In an exultant tone she called, “‘The Trumpet is sounding! The great Trump is blown! The universal Advent is now proclaimed!’”

The effect was instantaneous. The meeting was thrown into upheaval. None of the proceedings of the past days had prepared the gathering for this. No man, uttering the same resounding words in an equally convincing voice, could have had so powerful an impact as their revered Ṭáhirih appearing before them unveiled. That this woman, the very essence of virtue, the embodiment of all that was beautiful and pure, should have shown her face in the presence of men outside of her immediate family was inconceivable, scandalous, blasphemous. Some of the men found Ṭáhirih’s action so repugnant that they left the assembly; and a few of them, disillusioned, disclaimed the Faith. All the rest stood amazed, in varying degrees of wonder or consternation.

By contrast, Ṭáhirih remained poised, confident, and joyous, as with ringing words she tore through the veils of tradition and announced, “‘This day is the day of festivity and universal rejoicing, the day on which the fetters of the past are burst asunder.’”

From that moment a new dynamic entered the world. All that had gone before was a prelude. By casting off the veil which symbolized not only women’s age-old subservience to men but all of humanity’s subjection to debilitating traditions, Ṭáhirih manifested the liberation of mankind from the bondage of the past. She announced that the new Faith was not merely a purification of the old, as most had believed, but that its purpose was to set the entire human race on a luminous new path.

Although her own path led her to captivity and martyrdom, she never wavered in her faith in the ultimate victory of the truths she upheld. At her martyrdom, in August 1852, she told her executioners, “‘You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emanicipation of women.’”

And indeed they could not, for the power to accomplish the liberation of womankind had been released into the world on the plain of Badasht in the early summer of 1848. It only remained for women themselves to arise to the challenge.

THE DUST from the hoofbeats of the horses that carried Ṭáhirih away from Badasht and toward renewed captivity had scarcely settled before the call which she had [Page 51] raised there echoed back from the American continent. In the state of New York, on July 14, 1848, a notice placed in the Seneca County Courier by five nervous but determined women announced a “Woman’s Rights Convention . . . to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of woman . . .” Five days later, on July 19, in a small chapel at Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton arose before an audience of three hundred men and women to say:

I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty, did I not feel that the time had come for the question of woman’s wrongs to be laid before the public, did I not believe that woman herself must do this work; for woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length and the breadth of her degradation.

From that two-day meeting came a Declaration of Principles which would guide American women for decades in their struggle for freedom and equality.

Meanwhile on the other side of the earth, the same ferment of change was working to free China from the stagnation of its ancient traditionalism. Even while Ṭáhirih at her death was declaring her conviction in the inevitable emancipation of her sex, the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion were instituting reforms which greatly improved the condition of Chinese women. Although the Taiping government collapsed in 1864, and the old Manchu dynasty regained a temporary hold, the course of history had been altered. One of the principal issues in the revolutionary changes in China since 1850 has been the liberation of women from the yoke of patriarchal tyranny.

However, it was eighty-seven years before Ṭáhirih’s own countrywomen, and women in other countries bound by the principle of female seclusion, could enjoy the victory she had foreshadowed. Even through the first quarter of this century, among all but the most privileged classes, a girl in Persia was obliged to envelop herself in the black chádur from the age of five or six, was segregated from all but her own sex and virtually imprisoned within the women’s quarters of the house, was entirely secluded from the eyes of men after the age of eight or nine, was married before her teens, and was forbidden to walk or ride with a man, even her own husband.

Like a cleansing wind driving across the face of the earth, the movement for civil and political recognition of women has swept around the world. As early as 1848 the ancient prejudices against the property rights of married women, carried to America from old cultures, began their slow disintegration. By 1870 free secondary education was available to American young women and would soon become the norm in other nations; by 1890 a number of institutions of higher learning were open to women, and all the states had granted them the right to practice law.

With education and greater freedom of movement, women were able to agitate successfully for their enfranchisement. New Zealand was the first to extend the franchise in 1893. By 1920 women had won the right to vote in national elections in fifteen countries. Women in America were enfranchised in 1920 and women in [Page 52] Sweden and in all of Great Britain later in the same decade. In Thailand, Turkey, and Burma women gained a similar victory in the thirties, and in France, China, Japan, and India in the forties. By the late sixties most of the Arab States had granted women either limited or full suffrage. Only a handful of nations continues to deny women the right to vote.

With the franchise, women, in principle, gained the right to hold public office. Though, in fact, they are infrequently found in such positions, they are permitted to serve as legislators, cabinet members, and as ministerial and executive officers. These achievements, moreover, have extended to the international level. The United Nations, in its Charter, dedicated itself to “promoting . . . respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,” and in 1946 it established a permanent Commission on the Status of Women.

In a letter to a Bahá’í woman, written in 1913, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá foretold all the accomplishments of recent years and pictured beyond them a future of stirring challenge and fulfillment for women. He said:

In no movement will they be left behind. Their rights with men are equal in degree. They will enter all the administrative branches of politics. They will attain in all such a degree as will he considered the very highest station of the world of humanity and will take part in all affairs. Rest ye assured. Do ye not look upon the present conditions; in the not far distant future the world of women will become all-refulgent and all-glorious, For His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh Hath Willed It so! At the time of elections the right to vote is the inalienable right of women, and the entrance of women into all human departments is an irrefutable and incontrovertible question. No soul can retard or prevent it. . . .

. . . When the women attain to the ultimate degree of progress, then, according to the exigency of the time and place and their great capacity, they shall obtain extraordinary privileges. Be ye confident on these accounts. His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh has greatly strengthened the cause of women, and the rights and privileges of women is one of the greatest principles of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Rest ye assured! Ere long the days shall come when the men addressing the women, shall say: “Blessed are ye! Blessed are ye! Verily ye are worthy of every gift. Verily ye deserve to adorn your heads with the crown of everlasting glory, because in sciences and arts, in virtues and perfections ye shall become equal to man, and as regards tenderness of heart and the abundance of mercy and sympathy ye are superior.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s dedication to the cause of “the rights and privileges of women” was clearly displayed both by His own treatment of women and in His talks and Tablets. In 1912, in American cities from coast to coast, to audiences of all descriptions, He expounded this theme, so that no one could be left in doubt that the equality of men and women was one of the foundation stones of the new World Order.

To an audience in Washington, D. C., He said:

The teachings of Bahá’u’lláh embody many principles; I am giving you a synopsis only. One of these principles concerns the equality between men and [Page 53] women. He declared that as all are created in the image and likeness of the one God, there is no distinction as to sex in the estimation of God. He who is purest in heart, whose knowledge exceeds and who excels in kindness to the servants of God, is nearest and dearest to the Lord our creator, irrespective of sex.

In New York:

Today, questions of the utmost importance are facing humanity; questions peculiar to this radiant century. In former centuries there was not even mention of them. Inasmuch as this is the century of illumination, the century of humanity, the century of divine bestowals, these questions are being presented for the expression of public opinion and in all the countries of the world, discussion is taking place looking to their solution.

One of these questions concerns the rights of woman and her equality with man. In past ages it was held that woman and man were not equal; that is to say, woman was considered inferior to man from the standpoint of her anatomy and creation. She was considered especially inferior in intelligence and the idea prevailed universally that it was not allowable for her to step into the arena of important affairs. In some countries man went so far as to believe and teach that woman belonged to a sphere lower than human. But in this century which is the century of light and the revelation of mysteries God is proving to the satisfaction of humanity that all this is ignorance and error; nay, rather, it is well established that mankind and womankind as factors of composite humanity are coequal and that no difference in estimate is allowable; for all are human. . . .

Again, it is well established in history that where woman has not participated in human affairs the outcomes have never attained a state of completion and perfection. On the other hand, every influential undertaking of the human world wherein woman has been a participant has attained importance. This is historically true and beyond disproof even in religion. His Holiness Jesus Christ had twelve disciples and among his followers a woman known as Mary Magdalene. Judas Iscariot had become a traitor and hypocrite, and after the crucifixion the remaining eleven disciples were wavering and undecided. It is certain from the evidence of the Gospels that the one who comforted them and re-established their faith was Mary Magdalene.

The world of humanity consists of two factors, male and female. Each is the complement of the other. Therefore if one is defective the other will necessarily be incomplete and perfection cannot he attained. . . . It is not natural that either should remain undeveloped; and until both are perfected the happiness of the human world will not he realized. . . .

. . . if woman he fully educated and granted her rights, she will attain the capacity for wonderful accomplishments and prove herself the equal of man. She is the coadjutor of man; his complement and helpmeet. Both are human, both are endowed with potentialities of intelligence and embody the virtues of humanity. In all human powers and functions they are partners and co-equals. At present in spheres of human activity woman does not manifest her natal prerogatives [Page 54] owing to lack of education and opportunity. . . .

In Boston:

In ancient times and mediaeval ages woman was completely subordinated to man. The cause of this estimate of her inferiority was her lack of education. A woman’s life and intellect were limited to the household. Glimpses of this may be found even in the epistles of St. Paul. In later centuries the scope and opportunities of a woman’s life broadened and increased. Her mind unfolded and developed, her perceptions awakened and deepened. The question concerning her was “Why should a woman be left mentally undeveloped?” Science is praiseworthy whether investigated by the intellect of man or woman. So, little by little, woman advanced, giving increasing evidence of equal capabilities with man whether in scientific research, political ability or any other sphere of human activity. The conclusion is evident that woman has heen outdistanced through lack of education and intellectual facilities. If given the same educational opportunities or course of study, she would develop the same capacity and abilities. . . .

The realities of things have been revealed in this radiant century and that which is true must come to the surface. Among these realities is the principle of the equality of man and woman; equal rights and prerogatives in all things appertaining to humanity. His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh declared this reality . . . But while this principle of equality is true, it is likewise true that woman must prove her capacity and aptitude, must show forth the evidences of equality. She must become proficient in the arts and sciences and prove by her accomplishments that her abilities and powers have merely been latent. Demonstrations of force . . . are neither becoming nor effective in the cause of womanhood and equality. Woman must especially devote her energies and abilities toward the industrial and agricultural sciences, seeking to assist mankind in that which is most needful. By this means she will demonstrate capability and insure recognition of equality in the social and economic equation. Undoubtedly God will confirm her in her efforts and endeavors, for in this century of radiance His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh has proclaimed the reality of the oneness of the world of humanity and announced that all nations, peoples and races are one. He has shown that although individuals may differ in development and capacity, they are essentially and intrinsically equal as human beings, just as the waves of the sea are innumerable and different but the reality of the sea is one. The plurality of humanity may be likened to the waves but the reality of humankind is like the sea itself. All the waves are of the same water; all are waves of one ocean.

Therefore strive to show in the human world that women are most capable and efficient; that their hearts are more tender and susceptible than the hearts of men; that they are more philanthropic and responsive toward the needy and suffering; that they are inflexibly opposed to war and lovers of peace. Strive that the ideal of international peace may become realized through the efforts of womankind, for man is more inclined to war than woman, and a real evidence of woman’s superiority will be her service and efficiency in the establishment of Universal Peace.

[Page 55] In Pittsburgh:

Why should a man who is endowed with the sense of justice and sensibilities of conscience be willing that one of the members of the human family should be rated and considered as subordinate? Such differentiation is neither intelligent nor conscientious; therefore the principle of religion has been revealed by Bahá’u’lláh that woman must be given the privilege of equal education with man and full right to his prerogatives. That is to say, there must be no difference in the education of male and female, in order that womankind may develop equal capacity and importance with man in the social and economic equation. Then the world will attain unity and harmony. In past ages humanity has been defective and inefficient because incomplete. War and its ravages have blighted the world. The education of woman will be a mighty step toward its abolition and ending for she will use her whole influence against war. Woman rears the child and educates the youth to maturity. She will refuse to give her sons for sacrifice upon the field of battle. In truth she will be the greatest factor in establishing Universal Peace and international arbitration. Assuredly woman will abolish warfare among mankind.

In Philadelphia:

In this day there are women among the Bahá’ís who far outshine men. They are wise, talented, well-informed, progressive, most intelligent and the light of men. They surpass men in courage. When they speak in meetings, the men listen with great respect. Furthermore, the education of woman is of greater importance than the education of men, for they are the mothers of the race and mothers rear the children. The first teachers of children are the mothers. Therefore they must be capably trained in order to educate both sons and daughters. There are many provisions in the words of Bahá’u’lláh in regard to this.

He promulgated the adoption of the same course of education for man and woman. Daughters and sons must follow the same curriculum of study, thereby promoting unity of the sexes. When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife. . . .

In Sacramento:

The world of humanity is possessed of two wings—the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength the bird will not fly. Until womankind reaches the same degree as man, until she enjoys the same arena of activity, extraordinary attainment for humanity will not be realized; humanity cannot wing its way to heights of real attainment. When the two wings or factors become equivalent in strength, enjoying the same prerogatives, the flight of man will be exceedingly lofty and extraordinary. Therefore woman must receive the same education as man and all inequality be adjusted. Thus imbued with the same virtues as man, rising through all the degrees of human attainment, women will [Page 56] become the peers of men and until this equality is established, true progress and attainment for the human race will not be facilitated.

WOMEN have now achieved many of the social and political freedoms that appeared dimly on the horizon when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke these encouraging words. In most parts of the world, women are prevented from enjoying full freedom and fulfillment less by legal restrictions than by the residuum of prejudices which still affects both men and women, the failure of women themselves to take strong initiative on their own behalf, and the absence of the kind of education that takes into account the spiritual as well as the physical and intellectual nature of the human reality. All these hindrances will vanish when people everywhere recognize the message of God for this day. In His Tablet of the World, Bahá’u’lláh wrote:

In this day every knowing one testifies that the utterances, which are revealed from the Pen of this oppressed One, are the greatest cause for the elevation of the world and the development of nations. Say: O people! Arise to assist yourselves through the heavenly power, that perchance the earth may be purified and purged from the idols of superstitions and imaginations which are, forsooth, the cause of the failure and humiliation of the helpless people. These idols intervene and withhold the people from progress and loftiness. It is hoped that the hand of power will assist, and will deliver the creatures from the great baseness.

Among the many idols still hindering humanity’s progress are the old stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. In this day of unity proclaimed by God’s Messenger, the old patterns of sexual dichotomization are, for the most part, no longer useful or valid. If men and women alike have been endowed with the same human attributes, then virtues and faults apply equally to either sex. The virtues of gentleness, chastity, and compassion are as essential for men as for women, while the qualities of strength, courage, and enterprise are as much to be cultivated by women as by men. And deceit, lust, vanity, apathy, and cowardice are unworthy of men and women alike.

For centuries women have accepted the double standard of morality and behavior as normal and have been taught that weakness, passivity, and compliance were feminine attributes; now they must learn a whole new set of values. Not until a woman shatters the traditional mold and steps free into her own reality can she begin to discover all the strengths that are latent within her. And not until men as well as women approve this new freedom can women’s latent strengths be fully developed.

People respond—as flowers to sunshine—to the warmth of approval. Modern psychology affirms the truth of this principle. Recent carefully controlled experiments have demonstrated that the expectation of one person with respect to another can noticeably affeCt the performance of the other; and so subtle is this effeCt that reaction occurs even in the absence of any verbal communication or outward evidence of bias. What is true between individuals is profoundly true in the larger [Page 57] social context; therefore society in this new age bears a great responsibility for creating a psychological atmosphere that will foster the development of woman’s potential. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasized the importance of attitude and expectation when He said:

. . . the assumption of superiority by man will continue to he depressing to the ambition of woman, as if her attainment to equality was creationally impossible; woman’s aspiration toward advancement will he checked by it and she will gradually become hopeless. On the contrary, we must declare that her capacity is equal, even greater than man’s. This will inspire her with hope and ambition and her susceptibilities for advancement will continually increase.

Women must not only be encouraged by society in general, but they must expect achievement and nobility of one another; and each woman must be confident of her own individual potentialities. A firm base for confidence has been laid in the assurances which have flowed from the Pen of Bahá’u’lláh. Among countless promises, He has written:

O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of My munificence and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth, rid yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a true knowledge of your own selves—a knowledge which is the same as the comprehension of Mine own Being. Ye would find yourselves independent of all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner and outer eye, and as manifest as the revelation of My effulgent Name, the seas of My loving-kindness and bounty moving within you.

With the promise also goes a challenge, for He has written:

Upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing He [God] hath shed the light of One of His names and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self. Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty.

These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. . . .

The qualification which is coupled with this assurance places a responsibility on the human soul to be aware and active on its own behalf. Through His Manifestation, God has revealed the means by which these latent energies can be released. Bahá’u’lláh says:

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

Knowledge is like unto wings for the being, and is as a ladder for ascending. . . .

[Page 58]

Indeed, the real treasury of man is his knowledge. Knowledge is the means of honor, prosperity, joy, gladness, happiness and exultation. . . .

The importance of universal education has been stressed repeatedly by both Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It is a law of the new Age, and is no longer optional or the special privilege of a class or sex. In one of His Tablets ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote:

. . . in this New Cycle, education and training are recorded in the Book of God as obligatory and not voluntary. That is, it is enjoined upon the father and mother, as a duty, to strive with all effort to train the daughter and the son, to nurse them from the breast of knowledge and to rear them in the bosom of sciences and arts. Should they neglect this matter, they shall he held responsible and worthy of reproach in the presence of the stern Lord.

This is a sin unpardonable, for they have made that poor babe a wanderer in the Sahara of ignorance, unfortunate and tormented; to remain during a lifetime a captive of ignorance and pride, negligent and without discernment. . . .

‘Abdu’l-Bahá placed special emphasis on the education of women saying, “. . . the education of woman is more necessary and important than that of man . . . The mothers are the first educators of mankind; if they be imperfect, alas for the condition and future of the race.

In one of His Tablets, He wrote:

O maid-servants of the Merciful! It is incumbent upon you to train the children from their earliest babyhood! It is incumbent upon you to beautify their morals! It is incumbent upon you to attend to them under all aspects and circumstances, inasmuch as God—glorified and exalted is He!—hath ordained mothers to be the primary trainers of children and infants. This is a great and important affair and a high and exalted position, and it is not allowable to slacken therein at all!

Unfortunately, the kind of education we give our children today tends to develop the reasoning powers but repress sensitivity and intuition, to teach science without faith, to encourage an individualistic sharpening of the intellect without relating the learning to the whole fabric of reality, to urge discipline without spontaneity and joy. Such education can produce only a defective, materialistic humanity.

To an American audience, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said:

No matter how far the material world advances it cannot establish the happiness of mankind. Only when material and spiritual civilization are linked and coordinated will happiness be assured. Then material civilization will not contribute its energies to the forces of evil in destroying the oneness of humanity, for in material civilization good and evil advance together and maintain the same pace. . . .

. . . If the moral precepts and foundations of divine civilization become united [Page 59] with the material advancement of man . . . humankind will achieve extraordinary progress, the sphere of human intelligence will he immeasurably enlarged, wonderful inventions will appear and the spirit of God will reveal itself . . . Then will the power of the divine make itself effective and the breath of the Holy Spirit penetrate the essence of all things. Therefore the material and the divine or merciful civilizations must progress together until the highest aspirations and desires of humanity shall become realized.

The role of women in this undertaking is awesome in its implications. In His talks and Tablets to women, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá endeavored to instill an awareness of the supreme role they must play in the new human drama. If, as He declared, women possess the full range of human capabilities, with an added measure of tenderness, sympathy, and susceptibility to the needs of others, then their activity in lifting society above its present materialistic plane is cardinal.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá has made it clear that all women have the capacity to become spiritual mothers to humanity, whether or not they ever bear children of their own. He has also polished the tarnished station of motherhood, causing it to shine with new luster. In this day, the bearing of children cannot be regarded as merely a physical female funCtion imposed as a necessity of sex. It has been elevated to the level of a spiritual act, shared by both wife and husband, yielding the fruit of love to the end that another soul may live to praise God and mirror His attributes. But the importance of women’s role beyond physical motherhood should by no means be diminished. For, as active participants in every walk of life, they share the vital task of helping to nurture humanity toward higher intellectual and spiritual development, furthering that divine civilization in which the full potential of the human mind and spirit can be manifested.

Only when women become totally involved in its processes and committed to its noble ends can civilization advance to maturity. And only then can humanity as a whole reach the Garden which Bahá’u’lláh invites each soul to enter:

Hear Me ye mortal birds! In the Rose Garden of changeless splendor a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither. Arise, therefore, and, with the whole enthusiasm of your hearts, with all the eagerness of your souls, the full fervor of your will, and the concentrated efforts of your entire being, strive to attain the paradise of His presence, and endeavor to inhale the fragrance of the incorruptible Flower, to breathe the sweet savors of holiness, and to obtain a portion of this perfume of celestial glory. Whoso followeth this counsel will break his chains asunder, will taste the abandonment of enraptured love, will attain unto his heart’s desire, and will surrender his soul into the hands of his Beloved. . . .

[Page 60]

[Page 61]

Ecological Consequences of Immoderation

A REVIEW OF The Limits of Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, BY DONELLA H. MEADOWS, DENNIS L. MEADOWS, JØRGEN RANDERS, AND WILLIAM W. BEHRENS III. A POTOMAC ASSOCIATES BOOK (NEW YORK: UNIVERSE BOOKS, 1972), 205 PAGES.

BY ARTHUR LYON DAHL

AS THE PROBLEMS of the world grow steadily more complex and severe, many of those who dare think at all about the future are asking where our civilization is going. One recent attempt to answer that question is the Project on the Predicament of Mankind, sponsored by the Club of Rome, a distinguished international group concerned with the state of modern society. The project, headed by Professor Dennis L. Meadows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a computerized systems model of the major elements of world society: population, industrial output, food, nonrenewable resources, and pollution. Based on the best available knowledge of the current world levels of these components, their interactions, and their rates of change, the model was able to predict what would happen to society in the future if present trends continued, or if certain changes were made. The Limits to Growth is the first report of the results.

The book demonstrates that the essential problem facing material civilization is one of exponential growth in a finite system. Even with very optimistic assumptions about technological breakthroughs, new resources, and increased food supplies, there seemed to be no way to avoid a catastrophic collapse in the world system within the next hundred years, short of a total redirection of society. We are now reaching the limits of our planet and must either drastically change the direction of our civilization or suffer economic collapse and widespread death and destruction. This conclusion is of particular interest to those aware of the Bahá’í Teachings because it corroborates Bahá’u’lláh’s statement that, “If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had heen of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation.”

It is easy enough to find fault with The Limits of Growth or the study on which it is based, and indeed many of the weaknesses have been carefully pointed out by the authors. The world model is greatly oversimplified, based on average world figures and an inadequate knowledge of many features of the world system. Also, man has shown an amazing capacity to adapt to changing conditions, although not necessarily at the pace of today’s society. It is difficult, however, to argue with the report’s basic conclusions: that there are indeed limits to the world we live in, and that we seem to be very close to reaching some of them.

The thought that our present materialistic society now threatens us with destruction is difficult for many people to accept. Indeed, this book has been frequently misunderstood as advocating a total end to growth, leading to stagnation and a perpetuation of current inequalities. On the contrary, it demonstrates the kinds of adjustment that will be necessary to prevent a world collapse, and depicts in general terms the kinds of life and the social justice that might be possible if we successfully surmount our present difficulties.

While the world model can make general predictions about the possible equilibrium world of the future, it cannot tell us how to get there, and indeed the authors wrote their book in the hope of stimulating discussion of the means of transforming world society. They are aware that underlying the more [Page 62] easily computerized aspects of material civilization is a foundation of human values that is presently unable to meet the needs of world society. Choices will have to be made involving great demands on the moral resources of society, requiring a radical transformation in values and goals at the individual, national, and world levels. An entirely new approach is required, and it must be adopted in this generation. The Club of Rome Project has not been able to go farther than this. It concludes: “the two missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the human will to achieve that goal.”

Many will recognize in The Limits to Growth another call to the kind of society envisioned by Bahá’u’lláh a hundred years ago, and will see the many ways in which the principles of the Bahá’í Faith provide the mechanisms and the motivation through which the goal can be achieved. Indeed, the needs of an equilibrium world have been anticipated and its goals defined in many Bahá’í teachings such as the oneness of mankind, the need for economy and moderation in material things, and the importance of agriculture. Is there a more appropriate long-term goal than achieving an ever-advancing civilization with an emphasis on the enrichment of life through education, the arts and sciences, and new levels of social interaction? Is there a better source of motivation than that derived from a basic spiritual transformation? The problem now, as the authors of The Limits to Growth have foreseen, is to awaken mankind to the urgency of the hour and to transform the society of man before a more dreadful transformation is imposed upon us.

Crow Country

An ostracized crow, driven off whenever it tries

To rejoin the flock, at last has accepted sentence

And perches apart a good way down the fence.

There, ruffled and crumpled, it croaks to itself.

A renegade? Repeated infractions of Crowdom?

A runt, perhaps? The Elders preen and pose

Who cawed it to exile, to feed on itself until

It starve by the sin of the sinned against.

—Richard C. Raymond

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[Page 64]

Authors & Artists

CONSTANCE CONRADER is a librarian, a writer, and an artist specializing in biological illustration and naturalistic portrayals of plants and animals. She has collaborated with her husband in writing and illustrating many magazine articles on natural history; one of them—“Flowers and Insects”—appeared in the Spring 1969 issue of World Order. Mrs. Conrader is also the author of Blue Wampum, an historical novel for young people.

ARTHUR LYON DAHL makes a second appearance in World Order in this issue, his “The Ocean—Our Last Resource” having appeared in the Winter 1968-69 issue. Mr. Dahl holds a doctorate degree in marine biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is an Associate Curator of Marine Botany and Ecology in the Department of Botany of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution.

MARZIEH GAIL is well known to Bahá’ís for her translations of Bahá’í Writings—Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys (with her father) and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s The Secret of Divine Civilization and Memorials of the Faithful. She has become, over the years, a familiar name in the pages of World Order, having contributed a series of articles and poems—“Bright Day of the Soul” (Spring 1967); “The Voice from Inner Space” (with Winston Evans, Summer 1967); “Notes on Persian Love Poems” (Spring 1968); “The Decade” (Winter 1968-69); “Episodes” (Spring 1971); and “‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Portrayals from East and West” (Fall 1971). Mrs. Gail is also known for her books Persia and the Victorians, The Sheltering Branch, Avignon in Flower, and The Three Popes.

DIMITRI MARIANOFF, who died in 1950, was a Russian writer who left his country after the Revolution of 1917 and lived in Western Europe before coming to the United States where he became a Bahá’í. Among his works is a biography of Albert Einstein.

RICHARD C. RAYMOND, whose poems have appeared in such publications as Nation, Carleton Miscellany, Arizona Quarterly, and The New York Times, makes his second contribution to World Order in this issue; his first appeared in the Fall 1970 issue. He has held an administrative position at Yale University for many years and is active in civil rights and ecological movements.

ART CREDITS: Pages 5 and 6, photographs by David L. Trautmann; p. 42, pen and ink drawing by Mark Fennessy; pp. 60, 63, and back cover, photographs by David L. Trautmann.

MARK FENNESSY has recently returned to the vicinity of Yale University from which he graduated with honors. His pen and ink drawings have been a source of pleasure to World Order readers for several years.

DAVID L. TRAUTMANN, a young professional photographer, makes his first contributions to World Order in this issue. He resides in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin.