Section Four: Genocide of the Bábís
What followed the assassination attempt of the Sháh was a genocide of the Bábís unprecedented in its cruelty and inhumaneness. It lasted for many months and in its wake many thousands of Bábís throughout the land were martyred.
Many illustrious Bábís were killed during this period, including Táhirih. Alongside these events, Bahá’u’lláh was imprisoned in the Síyáh-Chál and then banished to Iráq. The Sections that follow will describe the last days of Táhirih and Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment. In this Section will briefly describe some aspects of the barbaric genocide of the Bábís.
Massacres in Tihrán
To please the Sháh and under the guise of getting rid of dissidents, arrests and killing of whoever was thought of as a Bábí was begun. Nabíl recounts:
Confusion, unprecedented in its range, reigned in the capital. A word of denunciation, a sign, or a whisper was sufficient to subject the innocent to a persecution which no pen dare try to describe. Security of life and property had completely vanished. The highest ecclesiastical authorities in the capital joined hands with the most influential members of the government to deal what they hoped would be the fatal blow to a foe who, for eight years, had so gravely shaken the peace of the land, and whom no cunning or violence had yet been able to silence. … Those arrested were distributed among the various classes of people, … Day after day fresh victims were forced to expiate with their blood a crime which they had never committed, and of the circumstances of which they were wholly ignorant. Every ingenious device that the torture-mongers of Tihrán could employ was applied with merciless severity to the bodies of these unfortunate ones who were neither brought to trial nor questioned, and whose right to plead and prove their innocence was entirely ignored.43_ACT15
An Austrian officer who had been sent by his government to be at the Sháh’s service at that time in Tihrán, described the horrors he witnessed in a letter to a friend]:44_ACT15
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