Chapter 11

The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of Islam has already died out. Their fanatical outcries, their clamorous invocations, their noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their fatvas (sentences), pronounced with such shamelessness, and at times embracing the denunciation of kings, are a dead letter. The spectacular sight of congregational prayers, in which thousands of worshipers, lined row upon row, participated, has vanished. The pulpits from whence they discharged the thunder of their anathemas against the powerful and the innocent alike, are deserted and silent. Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung endowments--the landed property of the expected Imam--which in Isfahan alone at one time embraced the whole of the city, have been wrested out of their hands, and brought under the control of a lay administration. Their madrasihs (seminaries), with their medieval learning, are deserted and dilapidated. The innumerable tomes of theological commentaries, super-commentaries, glosses, and notes, unreadable, unprofitable, the product of misdirected ingenuity and toil, and pronounced by one of the most enlightened Islamic thinkers in modern times as works obscuring sound knowledge, breeding maggots, and fit for fire, are now buried away, overspread with cobwebs, and forgotten. Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement controversies, their interminable discussions, are outmoded and abandoned. Their masjids (mosques) and imam-zadihs (tombs of saints), which were privileged to extend the bast (right of sanctuary) to many a criminal, and which had degenerated into a monstrous scandal, whose walls rang with the intonations of a hypocritical and profligate clergy, whose ornaments vied with the treasures of the palaces of kings, are either forsaken or fallen in ruin. Their takyihs, the haunts of the lazy, the passive, and contemplative pietists, are either being sold or closed down. Their ta'ziyihs (religious plays), acted with barbaric zeal, and accentuated by sudden spasms of unbridled religious excitement, are forbidden. Even their rawdih-_kh_anis (lamentations), with their long-drawn-out, plaintive howls, which arose from so many houses, have been curtailed and discouraged. The sacred pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbila, the holiest shrines of the _Sh_i'ih world, are reduced in number and made increasingly difficult, preventing thereby many a greedy mulla from indulging in his time-honored habit of charging double for making those pilgrimages as a substitute for the religious-minded. The disuse of the veil which the mullas fought tooth and nail to prevent; the equality of sexes which their law forbade; the erection of civil tribunals which superseded their ecclesiastical courts; the abolition of the si_gh_ih (concubinage) which, when contracted for short periods, is hardly distinguishable from quasi-prostitution, and which made of the turbulent and fanatical Ma_sh_had, the national center of pilgrimage, one of the most immoral cities in Asia; and finally, the efforts which are being made to disparage the Arabic tongue, the sacred language of Islam and of the Qur'an, and to divorce it from Persian--all these have successively lent their share to the acceleration of that impelling process which has subordinated to the civil authority the position and interests of Muslim clericals to a degree undreamt of by any mulla.

Well might the once lofty-turbaned, long-bearded, grave-looking aqa (mulla), who had so insolently concerned himself with every department of human activity, as he sits, hatless, clean shaven, in the seclusion of his home, and perhaps listening to the strains of western music, blared upon the ethers of his native land, pause to reflect for a while on the vanished splendors of his defunct empire. Well might he muse upon the havoc which the rising tide of nationalism and skepticism has wrought in the adamantine traditions of his country. Well might he recollect the halcyon days when, seated on a donkey, and parading through the bazars and maydans of his native town, an eager but deluded multitude would rush to kiss with fervor not only his hands, but also the tail of the animal on which he rode. Well might he remember the blind zeal with which they acclaimed his acts, and the prodigies and miracles they ascribed to their performance.

He might indeed look back further, and call to mind the reign of those pious Safavi monarchs, who delighted to call themselves "dogs of the threshold of the Immaculate Imams," how one of those kings was induced to go on foot before the mujtahid as he rode through the maydan-i-_Sh_ah, the main square of Isfahan, as a mark of royal subservience to the favorite minister of the Hidden Imam, a minister who, as distinct from the _Sh_ah's title, styled himself "the servant of the Lord of Saintship (Imam 'Ali)."

Was it not, he might well ponder, this same _Sh_ah Abbas the Great who had been arrogantly addressed by another mujtahid as "the founder of a borrowed empire," implying that the kingdom of the "king of kings" really belonged to the expected Imam, and was held by the _Sh_ah solely in the capacity of a temporary trustee? Was it not this same _Sh_ah who walked the entire distance of eight hundred miles from Isfahan to Ma_sh_had, the "special glory of the _Sh_i'ih world," to offer his prayers, in the only way that befitted the _sh_ahan_sh_ah, at the shrine of the Imam Rida, and who trimmed the thousand candles which adorned its courts? Had not _Sh_ah Tahmasp, on receiving an epistle, penned by yet another mujtahid, sprung to his feet, placed it on his eyes, kissed it with rapture, and, because he had been addressed as "brother," ordered it to be placed within his winding-sheet and buried with him?

Might not that same mulla ponder the torrents of blood which, during the long years when he enjoyed impunity of conduct, flowed at his behest, the flamboyant anathemas he pronounced, and the great army of orphans and widows, of the disinherited, the dishonored, the destitute, and the homeless which, on the Day of Reckoning, were, with one accord, to cry out for vengeance, and invoke the malediction of God upon him?

That infamous crew had indeed merited the degradation in which it had sunk. Persistently ignoring the sentence of doom which the finger of Baha'u'llah had traced upon the wall, it pursued, for well nigh a hundred years, its fatal course, until, at the appointed hour, its death knell was sounded by those spiritual, revolutionary forces which, synchronizing with the first dawnings of the World Order of His Faith, are upsetting the equilibrium, and throwing into such confusion, the ancient institutions of mankind.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE CALIPHATE

These same forces, operating in a collateral field, have effected a still more remarkable, and a more radical, revolution, culminating in the collapse and fall of the Muslim Caliphate, the most powerful institution of the whole Islamic world. This event of portentous significance has, moreover, been followed by a formal and definite separation of what was left of the Sunni faith in Turkey from the state, and by the complete secularization of the Republic that has arisen on the ruins of the Ottoman theocratic empire. This catastrophic fall, that stunned the Islamic world, and the avowed, the unqualified, and formal divorce between the spiritual and temporal powers, which distinguished the revolution in Turkey from that which occurred in Persia, I now proceed to consider.

Sunni Islam has sustained, not through the action of a foreign and invading Power, but at the hands of a dictator, avowedly professing the Faith of Muhammad, a blow more grievous than that which fell, almost simultaneously, upon its sister-sect in Persia. This retributive act, directed against the archenemy of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, recalls a similar disaster precipitated through the action of a Roman emperor, during the latter part of the first century of the Christian era--a disaster that razed to its foundations the Temple of Solomon, destroyed the Holy of Holies, laid waste the city of David, uprooted the Jewish hierarchy in Jerusalem, massacred thousands of the Jewish people--the persecutors of the religion of Jesus Christ--dispersed the remainder over the surface of the earth, and reared a pagan colony on Zion.

The Caliph, the self-styled vicar of the Prophet of Islam, exercised a spiritual sovereignty, and was invested with a sacred character, which the _Sh_ah of Persia neither claimed nor possessed. Nor should it be forgotten that the sphere of his spiritual jurisdiction extended to countries far beyond the confines of his own empire, and embraced the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world. He was, moreover, in his capacity as the Prophet's representative on earth, regarded as the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the defender and propagator of Islam, and the commander of its followers in any holy war they might be called upon to wage.

So potent, so august, so sacred a personage was at first by virtue of the abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of that temporal authority which the exponents of the Sunni school have regarded as a necessary concomitant to his high office. The sword, emblem of temporal sovereignty, was thus wrested out of the hands of the commander who, for a brief period, was permitted to occupy such an anomalous and precarious position. It was soon, however, trumpeted to the Sunni world, which had not previously been in the least consulted, that the Caliphate itself had been extinguished, and that the country which had accepted it as an appanage to its Sultanate, for more than four hundred years, had now permanently disowned it. The Turks who had been the militant leaders of the Muhammadan world, since the Arab decline, and who had carried the standard of Islam as far as the gates of Vienna, the seat of government of Europe's premier Power, had resigned their leadership. The ex-caliph, shorn of his royal pomp, stripped of the symbols of his vicarship, and deserted by friend and foe alike, was forced to flee from Constantinople, the proud seat of a dual sovereignty, to the land of the infidels, resigning himself to that same life of exile to which a number of his fellow-sovereigns had been and were still condemned.

Nor has the Sunni world, despite determined efforts, succeeded in designating anyone in his stead who, though deprived of the sword of a commander, would still act as the custodian of the cloak and standard of the Apostle of God--the twin holy symbols of the Caliphate. Conferences were held, discussions ensued, a Congress of the Caliphate was convened in the Egyptian capital, the City of the Fatimites, only to result in the widely advertised and public confession of its failure: "They have agreed to disagree!"

Strange, incredibly strange, must appear the position of this most powerful branch of the Islamic Faith, with no outward and visible head to voice its sentiments and convictions, its unity irretrievably shattered, its radiance obscured, its law undermined, its institutions thrown into hopeless confusion. This institution that had challenged the inalienable, divinely appointed rights of the Imams of the Faith of Muhammad, had, after the revolution of thirteen centuries, vanished like a smoke, an institution which had dealt such merciless blows to a Faith Whose Herald was Himself a descendant of the Imams, the lawful successors of the Apostle of God.

To what else could this remarkable prophecy, enshrined in the Lawh-i-Burhan, allude if not to the downfall of this crowned overlord of Sunni Muslims? "O concourse of Muslim Divines! Because of you the people were abased, and the banner of Islam was hauled down, and its mighty throne subverted." What of the indubitably clear and amazing prophecy recorded in the Qayyum-i-Asma? "Erelong We will, in very truth, torment such as waged war against Husayn [Imam Husayn], in the Land of the Euphrates, with the most afflictive torment, and the direst and most exemplary punishment." What other interpretation can this Muhammadan tradition be given? "In the latter days a grievous calamity shall befall My people at the hands of their ruler, a calamity such as no man ever heard to surpass it."

This was not all, however. The disappearance of the Caliph, the spiritual head of above two hundred million Muhammadans, brought in its wake, in the land that had dealt Islam such a heavy blow, the annulment of the _sh_ari'ah canonical Law, the disendowment of Sunni institutions, the promulgation of a civil Code, the suppression of religious orders, the abrogation of ceremonials and traditions inculcated by the religion of Muhammad. The _Sh_ay_kh_u'l-Islam and his satellites, including muftis, qadis, hujahs, _sh_ay_kh_s, sufis, hajis, mawlavis, dervishes, and others, vanished at a stroke more determined, more open, and drastic than the one dealt the _Sh_i'ihs by the _Sh_ah and his government. The mosques of the capital, the pride and glory of the Islamic world, were deserted, and the fairest and most famous of them all, the peerless St. Sophia, "the Second Firmament," "the Vehicle of the Cherubim," converted by the blatant creators of a secular regime into a museum. The Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet of God, was banished from the land, its alphabet was superseded by Latin characters, and the Qur'an itself translated into Turkish for the few who still cared to read it. The constitution of the new Turkey not only proclaimed formally the disestablishment and disendowment of Islam, with all its attendant and, in the view of some, atheistic enactments, but also heralded various measures that aimed at its further humiliation and weakening. Even the city of Constantinople, "the Dome of Islam," apostrophized in such condemnatory terms by Baha'u'llah, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been hailed by the great Constantine as "the New Rome," and exalted to the rank of the metropolis of both the Roman Empire and of Christendom, and subsequently revered as the seat of the Caliphs, was relegated to the position of a provincial city and stripped of all its pomp and glory, its soaring and slender minarets standing sentinel at the grave of so much vanished splendor and power.

"O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas!" Baha'u'llah has thus apostrophized the Imperial City, in terms that call to mind the prophetic words addressed by Jesus Christ to Jerusalem, "The throne of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the flame of hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom, in such wise that the Concourse on high, and they who circle around the Exalted Throne, have wailed and lamented. We behold in thee the foolish ruling over the wise, and darkness vaunting itself against the light. Thou art indeed filled with manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious? By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy daughters, and thy widows, and all the kindreds that dwell within thee shall lament. Thus informeth thee the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."

Such was the fate that overtook both _Sh_i'ih and Sunni Islam, in the two countries where they had planted their banners and reared their most powerful and far-famed institutions. Such was their fate in these two countries, in one of which Baha'u'llah died an exile, and in the other the Bab suffered a martyr's death. Such was the fate of the self-styled Vicar of the Prophet of God, and of the favorite ministers of the still awaited Imam. "The people of the Qur'an," Baha'u'llah testifies, "have risen against Us, and tormented Us with such a torment that the Holy Spirit lamented, and the thunder roared out, and the clouds wept over Us.... Muhammad, the Apostle of God, bewaileth, in the all-highest Paradise, their acts." "A day shall be witnessed by My people," their own traditions condemn them, "whereon there will have remained of Islam naught but a name, and of the Qur'an naught but a mere appearance. The doctors of that age shall be the most evil the world hath ever seen. Mischief hath proceeded from them, and on them it will recoil." And again: "Most of His enemies will be the divines. His bidding they will not obey, but will protest saying: 'This is contrary to that which hath been handed down unto us by the Imams of the Faith.'" And still again: "At that hour His malediction shall descend upon you, and your curse shall afflict you, and your religion shall remain an empty word on your tongues. And when these signs appear amongst you, anticipate the day when the red-hot wind will have swept over you, or the day when ye will have been disfigured, or when stones will have rained upon you."

A WARNING UNTO ALL NATIONS

This horde of degraded priests, stigmatized by Baha'u'llah as "doctors of doubt," as the "abject manifestations of the Prince of Darkness," as "wolves" and "pharaohs," as "focal centers of hellish fire," as "voracious beasts preying upon the carrion of the souls of men," and, as testified by their own traditions, as both the sources and victims of mischief, have joined the various swarms of _sh_ah-zadihs, of emirs, and princelings of fallen dynasties--a witness and a warning unto all nations of what must, sooner or later, befall those wielders of earthly dominion, be it royal or ecclesiastic, who might dare to challenge or persecute the appointed Channels and Embodiments of Divine authority and power.

Islam, at once the progenitor and persecutor of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, is, if we read aright the signs of the times, only beginning to sustain the impact of this invincible and triumphant Faith. We need only recall the nineteen hundred years of abject misery and dispersion which they, who only for the short space of three years persecuted the Son of God, have had to endure, and are still enduring. We may well ask ourselves, with mingled feelings of dread and awe, how severe must be the tribulations of those who, during no less than fifty years, have, "at every moment tormented with a fresh torment" Him Who is the Father, and who have, in addition, made His Herald--Himself a Manifestation of God--to quaff, in such tragic circumstances, the cup of martyrdom.

I have, in the pages immediately preceding, quoted certain passages addressed collectively to the members of the ecclesiastical order, both Islamic and Christian, and have then recorded a number of specific addresses and references to Muslim divines, both _Sh_i'ih and Sunni, after which I proceeded to describe the calamities that afflicted these Muhammadan hierarchies, their heads, their members, their properties, their ceremonials, and institutions. Let us now consider the addresses specifically made to the members of the Christian clerical order who, for the most part, have ignored the Faith of Baha'u'llah, whilst a few among them have, as its Administrative Order gained in stature and spread its ramifications over Christian countries, arisen to check its progress, to belittle its influence, and obscure its purpose.

HIS MESSAGES TO CHRISTIAN LEADERS

A glance at the writings of the Author of the Baha'i Revelation will reveal the important and significant fact that He Who addressed collectively an immortal message to all the kings of the earth, Who revealed a Tablet to each of the outstanding crowned heads of Europe and Asia, Who issued His call to the sacerdotal leaders of Islam, both Sunni and _Sh_i'ih, Who did not exclude from His purview the Jews and the Zoroastrians, has, apart from His numerous and repeated exhortations and warnings to the entire Christian world, directed particular messages, some general, others precise and challenging, to the heads, as well as to the rank and file, of the ecclesiastical orders of Christendom--its pope, its kings, its patriarchs, its archbishops, its bishops, its priests, and its monks. We have already, in connection with the messages of Baha'u'llah to the crowned heads of the world, considered certain features of the Tablet to the Roman Pontiff, as well as the words written to the kings of Christendom. Let us now turn our attention to those passages in which the aristocracy of the church and its ordained servants are singled out for exhortation and admonition by the Pen of Baha'u'llah:

"Say: O concourse of patriarchs! He Whom ye were promised in the Tablets is come. Fear God, and follow not the vain imaginings of the superstitious. Lay aside the things ye possess, and take fast hold of the Tablet of God by His sovereign power. Better is this for you than all your possessions. Unto this testifieth every understanding heart, and every man of insight. Pride ye yourselves on My Name, and yet shut yourselves out as by a veil from Me? This indeed is a strange thing!"

"Say: O concourse of archbishops! He Who is the Lord of all men hath appeared. In the plain of guidance He calleth mankind, whilst ye are numbered with the dead! Great is the blessedness of him who is stirred by the Breeze of God, and hath arisen from amongst the dead in this perspicuous Name."

"Say: O concourse of bishops! Trembling hath seized all the kindreds of the earth, and He Who is the Everlasting Father calleth aloud between earth and heaven. Blessed the ear that hath heard, and the eye that hath seen, and the heart that hath turned unto Him Who is the Point of Adoration of all who are in the heavens and all who are on earth." "O concourse of bishops! Ye are the stars of the heaven of My knowledge. My mercy desireth not that ye should fall upon the earth. My justice, however, declareth: 'This is that which the Son [Jesus] hath decreed.' And whatsoever hath proceeded out of His blameless, His truthspeaking, trustworthy mouth, can never be altered. The bells, verily, peal out My Name, and lament over Me, but My spirit rejoiceth with evident gladness. The body of the Loved One yearneth for the cross, and His head is eager for the spear, in the path of the All-Merciful. The ascendancy of the oppressor can in no wise deter Him from His purpose." And again: "The stars of the heaven of knowledge have fallen, they that adduce the proofs they possess in order to demonstrate the truth of My Cause, and who make mention of God in My Name. When I came unto them, in My majesty, however, they turned aside from Me. They, verily, are of the fallen. This is what the Spirit [Jesus] prophesied when He came with the truth, and the Jewish doctors caviled at Him, until they committed what made the Holy Spirit to lament, and the eyes of such as enjoy near access to God to weep."

"Say: O concourse of priests! Leave the bells, and come forth, then, from your churches. It behooveth you, in this day, to proclaim aloud the Most Great Name among the nations. Prefer ye to be silent, whilst every stone and every tree shouteth aloud: 'The Lord is come in His great glory!'?... He that summoneth men in My name is, verily, of Me, and he will show forth that which is beyond the power of all that are on earth. ...Let the Breeze of God awaken you. Verily, it hath wafted over the world. Well is it with him that hath discovered the fragrance thereof and been accounted among the well-assured." And again: "O concourse of priests! The Day of Reckoning hath appeared, the Day whereon He Who was in heaven hath come. He, verily, is the One Whom ye were promised in the Books of God, the Holy, the Almighty, the All-Praised. How long will ye wander in the wilderness of heedlessness and superstition? Turn with your hearts in the direction of your Lord, the Forgiving, the Generous."