Cf. The Dawn-Breakers, p. 276. The murderer was not a Bábí, but a fervent admirer of the Shaykhí leaders, the Twin Luminous Lights.
Cf. The Dawn-Breakers, p. 278.
This refers to the doctrine that there are three ways to God: the Law (sharí’at), the Path (taríqat), and the Truth (haqíqat). That is, the law of the orthodox, the path of the dervish, and the truth. Cf. R. A. Nicholson, Commentary on the Mathnaví of Rúmí, s.v.
The eighteenth Letter of the Living, martyred with unspeakable cruelty in the market place at Barfurúsh, when he was twenty-seven. Bahá’u’lláh conferred on him a station second only to that of the Báb Himself. Cf. The Dawn-Breakers, pp. 408–415.
Cf. Qur’án 74:8 and 6:73. Also Isaiah 27:13 and Zechariah 9:14.
Qur’án, Súrih 56.
A systematic campaign against the new Faith had been launched in Persia by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities combined. The believers, cut down wherever they were isolated, banded together when they could, for protection against the Government, the clergy, and the people. Betrayed and surrounded as they passed through the forest of Mázindarán, some 300 believers, mostly students and recluses, built the Fort of Shaykh Tabarsí and held out against the armies of Persia for eleven months. Cf. The Dawn-Breakers, chapters XIX and XX; God Passes By, p. 37 et seq.
On August 15, 1852, a half-crazed Bábí youth wounded the Sháh with shot from a pistol. The assailant was instantly killed, and the authorities carried out a wholesale massacre of the believers, its climax described by Renan as “a day perhaps unparalleled in the history of the world.” Cf. Lord Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, pp. 501–2, and God Passes By, p. 62 et seq.