Justice and Mercy in 'Ishqábád

*A retelling for children of the account of Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá Iṣfahání in **Bahá'í Chronicles** (from Moojan Momen's article "Turkmenistan"), with details from Shoghi Effendi's **God Passes By** and Adib Taherzadeh's **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh**, volume 4.*

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Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá was a merchant who lived in Iṣfahán and taught the Bahá'í Faith there. He was put in prison for it. After he was released he went to 'Akká and came into the presence of Bahá'u'lláh. He asked Bahá'u'lláh to name a city for him to live in, and he was sent to 'Ishqábád (Ashkhabad), a new town in the part of Central Asia then ruled by Russia. There he taught the Faith for several years.

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By 1889 about four hundred Bahá'ís lived in 'Ishqábád, and Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá, then about seventy years old, was one of the best known of them. Some people in the town were jealous of the growing Bahá'í community. On the morning of 8 September 1889, two men attacked him in the middle of the bazaar and killed him. They claimed that their religious law gave them the right to do it.

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In Persia, people who harmed Bahá'ís were almost never punished. This time was different. The Russian police arrested the two men, and a military court sent by the Czar tried the case. The court found them guilty. The two were sentenced to death, and six others were sentenced to be banished. It was the first time in the history of the Faith that those responsible for killing a Bahá'í had been brought to justice. Bahá'u'lláh praised the Russian government for what it had done.

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During the trial, the judges asked the people of each religion to sit separately. Many who had kept their faith secret now sat openly with the Bahá'ís. It was also the first time that any government had recognized the Bahá'í Faith as a religion of its own, separate from Islam.

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Then relatives of the prisoners came to the Bahá'ís and begged them to ask for the prisoners' lives. The Bahá'ís consulted together and decided to help. Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl and another believer went to the Governor and asked him to pardon the men, or at least to lighten their punishment. The request went to the Czar, and he agreed. On the day set for the execution, an official announced before a large crowd that, because the Bahá'ís had asked for mercy, the two men would go to prison in Siberia for life instead, and the others' sentences were cut in half.

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Bahá'u'lláh wrote of this in one of His Tablets, the Lawḥ-i-Dunyá: "This is affirmed by virtue of the event which hath truly cheered the eye of the world, and is none other than the intercession of the friends with the high authorities in favour of their enemies."

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In the years that followed, the Bahá'ís of 'Ishqábád built a hospice for travellers, a hospital and schools for boys and girls. In 1902 they began to build the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, or House of Worship, of the Bahá'í world.

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*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["Haji Muhammad Rida Isfahani"](/stories/bc-haji-muhammad-rida-isfahani).*

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