The willing tools who prostituted their high office for the
accomplishment of the enemy’s designs were no less than the sovereigns of the
Qájár dynasty, first, the bigoted, the sickly, the vacillating Muhammad Sháh,
who at the last moment cancelled the Báb’s imminent visit to the capital, and,
second, the youthful and inexperienced Násiri’d-Dín Sháh, who gave his ready assent
to the sentence of his Captive’s death. The arch villains who joined hands with
the prime movers of so wicked a conspiracy were the two grand vizirs, Hájí
Mírzá Áqásí, the idolized tutor of Muhammad Sháh, a vulgar, false-hearted and
fickle-minded schemer, and the arbitrary, bloodthirsty, reckless Amír-Niẓám,
Mírzá Taqí Khán, the first of whom exiled the Báb to the mountain fastnesses of
Ádhirbáyján, and the latter decreed His death in Tabríz. Their accomplice in
these and other heinous crimes was a government bolstered up by a flock of
idle, parasitical princelings and governors, corrupt, incompetent, tenaciously
holding to their ill-gotten privileges, and utterly subservient to a
notoriously degraded clerical order.
- Shoghi Effendi (Chapter 1 of ‘God Passes
By’)