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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Isfahan, Iran
8 stories took place here — most often featuring Bahá'u'lláh, King of Martyrs and the Báb.
Iṣfáhán (today: Isfahan, Iran)
The Báb spent four months in Iṣfáhán in 1846 as the guest, first of the Imám-Jum'ih and then of the Governor Manúchihr Khán. The Imám-Jum'ih had asked, as a test, for a commentary on a Súrih of the Qur'án; the Báb produced one in two hours of writing — a quantity of verse that the host afterwards estimated at a third of the Qur'án itself.
In a city famous for the learning of its clergy, the first to recognise the Báb was an unlettered man who sifted wheat for his bread. In a single moment the Call remade him — and he took up his sieve and ran toward martyrdom, declaring he would sift whole cities for souls. A story of the power of God to raise the humblest heart to greatness.
In the *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*, Bahá'u'lláh recounts the persecutions launched against the believers of Iṣfáhán by Áqá Najafí, the powerful Iṣfahání cleric who instigated the martyrdoms of the *King of Martyrs* and the *Beloved of Martyrs* in 1879.
Fáṭimih Begum, widow of the King of Martyrs of Iṣfáhán, lost her father at Badasht in childhood, married a husband whose faith would cost him his life, was stripped of every possession by the government, and ended her years in 'Akká, where the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh proved more than her heart could bear.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Sakínih Sulṭán — the mother of the Iṣfahán martyrs, whose life of steady faith carried her through the deaths of her sons and into the long quiet years of teaching that followed.
In the bazaars of Iṣfáhán two brothers built one of the most prosperous trading houses in the city — yet they were renowned not for their wealth but for their character: trustworthy, honest, compassionate, and so generous that they fed the starving in famine and quietly sustained Bahá'u'lláh's exiled company. They came to be called the King and the Beloved of Martyrs, "shining embodiments of all Bahá'í ideals."
Keith Ransom-Kehler was a gifted American lecturer who could have spent her later years in comfort. When the Guardian asked her to undertake a long, hard teaching journey to Persia on behalf of her persecuted fellow believers, she accepted at once — with no Persian, no pioneering experience, and not in robust health. She gave the rest of her life to it, dying in Iṣfáhán in 1933, and Shoghi Effendi named her the first American Bahá'í martyr.
*World Order* magazine carried, in a historical profile, the story of Keith Ransom-Kehler — the American Bahá'í pioneer who died in Iṣfáhán in 1933 of smallpox contracted during her teaching tour of Persia, and who was named by Shoghi Effendi the first American Bahá'í martyr.