“The dark blue and white domes”—an allusion by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the rotund and massive headgears of the priests of Persia—had indeed been “inverted.” Those whose heads had borne them, the arrogant, fanatical, perfidious, and retrograde clericals, “in the grasp of whose authority,” as testified by Bahá’u’lláh, “were held the reins of the people,” whose “words are the pride of the world,” and whose “deeds are the shame of the nations,” recognizing the wretchedness of their state, betook themselves, crestfallen and destitute of hope, to their homes, there to drag out a miserable existence. Impotent and sullen, they are watching the operations of a process which, having reversed their policy and ruined their handiwork, is irresistibly moving towards a climax. The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of Islám has already died out. Their fanatical outcries, their clamorous invocations, their noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their fatvás (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 Imám—which in Iṣfáhán 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 imám-zádihs (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’zíyihs (religious plays), acted with barbaric zeal, and accentuated by sudden spasms of unbridled religious excitement, are forbidden. Even their rawdih-_kh_ánís (lamentations), with their long-drawn-out, plaintive howls, which arose from so many houses, have been curtailed and discouraged.