On the evening of the very day of the Báb’s execution, which fell on the
ninth of July 1850 (28th of _Sh_a’bán 1266 A.H.), during the thirty-first
year of His age and the seventh of His ministry, the mangled bodies were
transferred from the courtyard of the barracks to the edge of the moat
outside the gate of the city. Four companies, each consisting of ten
sentinels, were ordered to keep watch in turn over them. On the following
morning the Russian Consul in Tabríz visited the spot, and ordered the
artist who had accompanied him to make a drawing of the remains as they
lay beside the moat. In the middle of the following night a follower of
the Báb, Ḥájí Sulaymán _Kh_án, succeeded, through the instrumentality of a
certain Ḥájí Alláh-Yár, in removing the bodies to the silk factory owned
by one of the believers of Milán, and laid them, the next day, in a
specially made wooden casket, which he later transferred to a place of
safety. Meanwhile the mullás were boastfully proclaiming from the pulpits
that, whereas the holy body of the Immaculate Imám would be preserved from
beasts of prey and from all creeping things, this man’s body had been
devoured by wild animals. No sooner had the news of the transfer of the
remains of the Báb and of His fellow-sufferer been communicated to
Bahá’u’lláh than He ordered that same Sulaymán _Kh_án to bring them to
Ṭihrán, where they were taken to the Imám-Zádih-Ḥasan, from whence they
were removed to different places, until the time when, in pursuance of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s instructions, they were transferred to the Holy Land, and
were permanently and ceremoniously laid to rest by Him in a specially
erected mausoleum on the slopes of Mt. Carmel.
Thus ended a life which posterity will recognize as standing at the
confluence of two universal prophetic cycles, the Adamic Cycle stretching
back as far as the first dawnings of the world’s recorded religious
history and the Bahá’í Cycle destined to propel itself across the unborn
reaches of time for a period of no less than five thousand centuries. The
apotheosis in which such a life attained its consummation marks, as
already observed, the culmination of the most heroic phase of the Heroic
Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation. It can, moreover, be regarded in no other
light except as the most dramatic, the most tragic event transpiring
within the entire range of the first Bahá’í century. Indeed it can be
rightly acclaimed as unparalleled in the annals of the lives of all the
Founders of the world’s existing religious systems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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