The spirit which that clerical order had so assiduously striven, during a whole century, to crush; the Faith which it had, with such ferocious brutality, attempted to extirpate; were now, in their turn, through the forces they had engendered in the world, deranging the equilibrium, and sapping the strength, of that same order whose ramifications had extended to every sphere, duty, and act of life in that country. The rock wall of Islám, seemingly impregnable, was now shaken to its foundations, and was tottering to its ruin, before the very eyes of the persecuted followers of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. A sacerdotal hierarchy that had held in thrall for so long the Faith of God, and seemed, at one time, to have mortally struck it down, now found itself the prey of a superior civil authority whose settled policy was to fasten, steadily and relentlessly, its coils around it. The vast system of that hierarchy, with all its elements and appurtenances—its _sh_ay_kh_u’l-isláms (high priests), its mujtahids (doctors of the law), its mullás (priests), its fuqáhás (jurists), its imáms (prayer-leaders), its mu’a_dhdh_íns (criers), its vu’azz (preachers), its qádís (judges), its mutávallís (custodians), its madrasihs (seminaries), its mudárrisíns (professors), its tullábs (pupils), its qurrá’s (intoners), its mu’ábbiríns (soothsayers), its muháddi_th_íns (narrators), its musá_khkh_iríns (spirit-subduers), its _dh_ákiríns (rememberers), its ummal-i-_dh_akát (almsgivers), its muqaddasíns (saints), its munzavís (recluses), its súfís, its dervishes, and what not—was paralyzed and utterly discredited. Its mujtahids, those firebrands, who wielded powers of life and death, and who for generations had been accorded honors almost regal in character, were reduced to a deplorably insignificant number. The beturbaned prelates of the Islamic church who, in the words of Bahá’u’lláh, “decked their heads with green and white, and committed what made the Faithful Spirit to groan,” were ruthlessly swept away, except for a handful who, in order to safeguard themselves against the fury of an impious populace, are now compelled to submit to the humiliation of producing, whenever the occasion demands it, the license granted them by the civil authorities to wear this vanishing emblem of a vanished authority. The rest of this turbaned class, whether siyyids, mullás, or ḥájís, were forced not only to exchange their venerable headdress for the kuláh-i-farangí (European hat), which not long ago they themselves had anathematized, but also to discard their flowing robes and don the tight-fitting garments of European style, the introduction of which into their country they had, a generation ago, so violently disapproved.