What disciple of the Báb would say: 'The intercourse of the sexes is very nearly promiscuous—There is no form of marriage; a man and woman live together as long as they please and no longer, and if another man desires to have possession of that woman, it rests with her, not with the man who has been her husband, if he can be so termed:—A man may have wives without limit; a woman has a similar licence.' This Bábí, unless his account was garnished, was either a nihilist of sorts, or totally ignorant of what the teaching of the Báb was.
Equally extraordinary, confused and contrary to the Writings of the Báb in the Persian and Arabic Bayán are the following lines in that account by a Bábí: 'There is no hell or heaven, therefore there is no hereafter—annihilation is man's doom in fact—he with every living and vegetable thing, in short everything whatever, will be absorbed in the Divinity—Everything is God, and therefore absorbed, which is the phrase of the Soofees, who consider every thing is a reflection of God—Hell is suffered and heaven is enjoyed in this world; but there is no such thing as crime, nor of course virtue, only as they concern the relations of man and man in this world. A man's will is his Law in all things....
'The most absolute materialism seems to form the essence of their belief—God is one—Every individual substance and particle, living or not, is God, and the whole is God—and every individual thing, always was, always is, and always will be.'[4]
The account by the Chief Priest of Yazd, which was a vitriolic attack on the Báb and Vaḥíd, and which Sheil had ruled out in his letter to the Foreign Secretary as 'cannot be trusted', was not dissimilar, in some respects, to the account by 'a disciple of Bab'.
These extracts make it clear how misinformed was Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, by the reports of his representative in Ṭihrán.
APPENDIX 7
MYTH-MAKING
The volume of writing in the West about the Bábí and Bahá'í Faiths is not insignificant. There are copious scholarly works on the subject in Russian, French and English. We have the works of Alexander Toumansky, Baron Rosen, Mírzá Kazem-Beg, Count Gobineau, A.-L.-M. Nicolas, and Edward Granville Browne. We also have attacks and refutations, but these latter categories belong to more recent years, when the Bahá'í Faith has been making considerable headway in the Western world.
There is another genre of writing which merits attention, if only for a negative reason. These writings do not enlighten; they create myths. Generally speaking, remarks by travellers and casual visitors to Írán fall within this category, but are by no means confined to such writers.