The next extract is by another diplomat, General Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, who had once been the Military Attaché and Oriental Secretary of Queen Victoria's Legation in Ṭihrán, and wrote his book after a second visit to Írán:

'The Babi sect of Mohammedans, regarded as seceders from Islam, but who assert their claim to be only the advocates for Mohammedan Church reform, are at last better understood and more leniently treated—certainly at Tehran. They have long been persecuted and punished in the cruellest fashion, even to torture and death, under the belief that they were a dangerous body which aimed at the subversion of the State as well as the Church. But better counsels now prevail, to show that the time has come to cease from persecuting these sectarians, who, at all events in the present day, show no hostility to the Government; and the Government has probably discovered the truth of the Babi saying, that one martyr makes many proselytes....

'An acknowledged authority on the Bab, the founder of this creed, has written that he "directed the thoughts and hopes of his disciples to this world, not to an unseen world." From this it was inferred he did not believe in a future state, nor in anything beyond this life. Of course, among the followers of a new faith, liberal and broad in its views, continued fresh developments of belief must be expected; and with reference to the idea that the Babis think not of a hereafter, I was told that they believe in the reincarnation of the soul, the good after death returning to life and happiness, the bad to unhappiness. A Babi, in speaking of individual pre-existence, said to me, "You believe in a future state; why, then, should you not believe in a pre-existent state? Eternity is without beginning and without end." This idea of re-incarnation, generally affecting all Babis, is, of course, an extension of the original belief regarding the re-incarnation of the Bab, and the eighteen disciple-prophets who compose the sacred college of the sect....

'The Babi reform manifests an important advance upon all previous modern Oriental systems in its treatment of woman. Polygamy and concubinage are forbidden, the use of the veil is discouraged, and the equality of the sexes is so thoroughly recognised that one, at least, of the nineteen sovereign prophets must always be a female. This is a return to the position of woman in early Persia, of which Malcolm speaks when he says that Quintus Curtius told of Alexander not seating himself in the presence of Sisygambis till told to do so by that matron, because it was not the custom in Persia for sons to sit in presence of their mother.'[4]

It must be said that Sir Thomas Gordon's long account of the Bábís (from which only a few passages are taken) is good in many respects; nevertheless, it perpetuates myths.

Finally, here are two extracts from a book[GD] so highly rated that, when it was published in 1915, it was put on the 'Secret List' of the British Foreign Office, and kept there for more than a decade:

'A religious heresy which was destined to produce serious political consequences in Persia made its appearance during the later years of Muhammad Shāh: this was Bābism, the creed of the Bābis or followers of the Bāb. The founder was Saiyid `Ali Muhammad, the son of a grocer of Shīrāz, who, being sent as a youth to represent his father at Būshehr, soon left that place on pilgrimage to Makkah and afterwards sat as a student at the feet of Hāji Saiyid Kāzim, the greatest Mujtahid of the day at Karbala. On the death of his teacher he returned to Būshehr, where he proclaimed himself a prophet, the 23rd May 1844 being accounted the date of his manifestation in that character.

'"He now assumed the title of the Bāb, or gate, through whom knowledge of the Twelfth Imam Mahdi could alone be attained. His pretensions undoubtedly became more extravagant as time proceeded, and he successfully announced himself as the Mahdi, as a re-incarnation of the prophet, and as a Revelation or Incarnation of God himself."[GE] The Bābi faith was ecclesiastically proscribed throughout Persia; and massacres of its adherents, with counter-assassinations of leading persecutors, became the order of the day.'