Struck Down in the Marketplace: Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá of Iṣfahán

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.*

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In the closing years of the nineteenth century a community of Bahá'ís had grown up far from the heartland of Persia, in the city of ʻIshqábád — Ashkhabad, in the Russian dominions of Central Asia. Many of them had gone there to escape the relentless persecution of their homeland, where to be known as a Bahá'í was to be at the mercy of any mob and any official.

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In ʻIshqábád they found, for the first time, something close to safety: they lived under Russian rather than Persian authority, they prospered in trade, and they began to build the open, confident community life that had been impossible under the shadow of the Persian clergy. It was here, in time, that the believers would raise the first House of Worship of the entire Bahá'í world.

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But the enemies of the Faith did not stop at the border. The same fanaticism that had hunted the believers across Persia followed them into exile, and there were those among the Shíʻih population of ʻIshqábád who could not endure the sight of the Bahá'ís living unmolested and respected.

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To them, the very calm of the community was a provocation; that a people they regarded as heretics should walk the streets in safety, prosper in the market, and answer to no one for their beliefs was an affront that demanded an answer. They resolved to do what had so often been done at home: to strike down a prominent believer in public, and so to terrorize the whole community back into fear and silence.

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The lesson of the Persian persecutions, they reasoned, would carry across the border as easily as they themselves had — that the followers of Bahá'u'lláh could be cut down at will, and that no one, anywhere, would lift a hand to defend them.

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The man they chose was Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍáy-i-Iṣfahání — a Bahá'í of standing, known and esteemed in the city. The plan was carried out with deliberate, public cruelty. In the open marketplace, in broad daylight, two assassins fell upon him with knives and cut him down before the eyes of the crowd. The wounds were many and savage; he died of them. It was not a secret killing meant to escape notice.

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It was the opposite: a murder staged in the most public place the city had, so that every Bahá'í in ʻIshqábád should see what awaited them and take the lesson to heart.

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Had the murder happened in Persia, that is exactly the lesson it would have taught. There, the killing of a Bahá'í was scarcely a crime at all in the eyes of the authorities; the murderers of believers had again and again gone not merely unpunished but rewarded, and the community had no recourse anywhere — no court would hear it, no official would protect it, no power on earth stood between the believers and those who wished them dead.

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That impunity was itself a kind of overwhelming power: the certainty of the strong that they could do as they pleased with the defenceless, and never answer for it.

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In ʻIshqábád, for the first time, that certainty failed.

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The murder had taken place not under the Persian clergy but under the Russian administration, and the Russian authorities did what no Persian authority had ever done: they took the killing of a Bahá'í seriously as a crime, arrested the assassins, and brought them to trial. A military court was convened. The deed was examined in the open.

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And in the course of that proceeding something happened which Shoghi Effendi singles out as an event of real significance in the history of the Faith — for the first time, a government had publicly investigated an attack upon the Bahá'ís, weighed their case fairly, and openly distinguished the peaceful, law-abiding believers from the fanatics who had set upon them. The assassins were found guilty and condemned.

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The innocence and the good character of the Bahá'í community were affirmed not in a private letter or a believer's memoir, but in a public court of a great power, before the eyes of the world.

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The believers themselves, with a magnanimity that gave the moment its full meaning, are remembered for having interceded on behalf of the condemned men, asking that their lives be spared. The community that had been marked for terror answered the murder of one of its own not with a cry for vengeance but with a plea for mercy — and in doing so showed, more eloquently than any verdict could, the spirit that had so alarmed its enemies in the first place.

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The whole affair turned out to be the exact reverse of what its authors had intended. They had meant to make the Bahá'ís of ʻIshqábád shrink into fearful silence; instead, the community emerged from the trial recognized, vindicated, and more firmly established than before. They had meant to demonstrate that a Bahá'í could be cut down with impunity; instead, the world saw that the day of impunity was beginning to end, and that the despised followers of Bahá'u'lláh could at last stand in a court of law and be declared what they had always been — innocent.

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This is the particular face that the Feast of ʻIzzat, the Feast of Might, shows in this story. The might here is not the courage of a single soul in the moment of death, though Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá met his death faithfully.

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It is something quieter and, in its way, just as remarkable: the might of a community that would not be terrorized, and the slow, sure might of justice finally laying its hand on a power that had thought itself untouchable. For half a century the enemies of the Faith had operated on the unspoken assumption that no consequence would ever follow the shedding of a believer's blood.

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In a marketplace in Central Asia, that assumption was tested in open court and overturned. The strong had struck, as they had always struck; and this time, for the first time, the strong were called to account.

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Shoghi Effendi sets this episode within the unfolding fortunes of the Faith under 'Abdu'l-Bahá, as one of the signs that the long night of unanswered persecution was beginning, here and there, to give way. The community that the assassins had hoped to scatter went on to flourish in ʻIshqábád, and it was these same believers who, a few years afterward, would build upon that soil the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár — the first House of Worship raised anywhere in the Bahá'í world. The murder intended to silence them stands now as the prelude to one of the proudest achievements of their history.

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It is a hard truth, and the keepers of the Faith's memory do not hide it, that the might which prevailed in this story prevailed only after a faithful man had been struck down in the street. But the meaning the Faith draws from it is not despair.

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It is that a single act of violence, meant to crush a people, became instead the occasion of their vindication; that the power which had reckoned itself absolute discovered a limit; and that the despised and the hunted, simply by being seen at last for what they truly were, possessed a might their persecutors had never imagined they could have.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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