The Epistle Recounts the Questions of Áqá Najafí

The *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf* is the last major Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, composed in the closing year of His earthly life, in 1891. It is addressed to Shaykh Muḥammad-Taqí, son of one of the most prominent of the Bahá'í Cause's clerical persecutors, and is offered as a final summons to recognition.

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Among the substantial body of the Epistle is a long passage in which Bahá'u'lláh recounts the persecutions visited upon the believers of Iṣfáhán by Áqá Najafí — the powerful Iṣfahání cleric whose campaign in the late 1870s and 1880s had brought, among many other sufferings, the martyrdom in March 1879 of the two distinguished Iṣfahání merchants Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥasan and Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥusayn — the brothers known in Bahá'í history as the *King of Martyrs* and the *Beloved of Martyrs.*

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Bahá'u'lláh, in the Epistle, describes the events with particular care. He recounts how the two brothers had been prosperous and well-regarded merchants in the city, how their Bahá'í faith had become known to the clerical authorities, how a series of trumped-up financial and religious charges had been brought against them, how the ecclesiastical court of Áqá Najafí had condemned them without serious examination of the evidence, and how the sentence of death had been carried out in the public square of the city in March 1879 with a brutality that shocked even some of the city's non-Bahá'í population.

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The passage continues with the recounting of further persecutions in Iṣfáhán in the years that followed. Other believers were arrested, fined, beaten, banished. The property of the executed brothers was confiscated. Their families were dispossessed. The widow of the *King of Martyrs* — Sakínih Sulṭán, the *Mother of the Martyrs* — was reduced to severe poverty.

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Bahá'u'lláh's narration of these events is composed in the language of plain testimony. There is no rhetorical escalation. There is no curse on the persecutor. There is, however, the careful preservation of the historical record — the quiet refusal to let the suffering of the believers disappear unwitnessed into the silence that the persecutors would have preferred for it.

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The passage closes with a brief reflection on the responsibility of recognition. The persecutor of the faithful, Bahá'u'lláh observes, will in time be brought to the accounting that even the powerful cannot evade. The faithful, by their patient witness, have already received the imperishable reward. The Iṣfáhání martyrs of 1879 are, in the moment of His writing in 1891, *more alive than those who slew them.*

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The recounting of the Iṣfáhán persecutions in the Epistle serves a double purpose. It honours the dead. And it warns the living — particularly the addressee of the Epistle, the son of one of the great persecutors — that the historical record of such acts is preserved by the Pen of the Most High and will, in due time, bear its proper witness.

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