ill make manifest," awaited by the followers of all religions.(5)

The claim had evoked violent hostility from the Muslim clergy, who taught
that the process of Divine Revelation had ended with Muhammad; and that
any assertion to the contrary represented apostasy, punishable by death.
Their denunciation of the Bab had soon enlisted the support of the Persian
authorities. Thousands of followers of the new faith had perished in a
horrific series of massacres throughout the country, and the Bab had been
publicly executed on July 9, 1850.(6) In an age of growing Western
involvement in the Orient, these events had aroused interest and
compassion in influential European circles. The nobility of the Bab's life
and teachings, the heroism of His followers, and the hope for fundamental
reform that they had kindled in a darkened land had exerted a powerful
attraction for personalities ranging from Ernest Renan and Leo Tolstoy to
Sarah Bernhardt and the Comte de Gobineau.(7)

Because of His prominence in the defense of the Bab's cause, Baha'u'llah
was arrested and brought, in chains and on foot, to Teheran. Protected in
some measure by an impressive personal reputation and the social position
of His family, as well as by protests which the Babi pogroms had evoked
from Western embassies, He was not sentenced to death, as influential
figures at the royal court were urging. Instead, He was cast into the
notorious Siyah-_Ch_al, the "Black Pit", a deep, vermin-infested dungeon
which had been created in one of the city's abandoned reservoirs. No
charges were laid but He and some thirty companions were, without appeal,
kept immured in the darkness and filth of this pit, surrounded by hardened
criminals, many of them under sentence of death. Around Baha'u'llah's neck
was clamped a heavy chain, so notorious in penal circles as to have been
given its own name. When He did not quickly perish, as had been expected,
an attempt was made to poison Him. The marks of the chain were to remain
on His body for the rest of His life.

Central to Baha'u'llah's writings is an exposition of the great themes
which have preoccupied religious thinkers throughout the ages: God, the
role of Revelation in history, the relationship of the world's religious
systems to one another, the meaning of faith, and the basis of moral
authority in the organization of human society. Passages in these texts
speak intimately of His own spiritual experience, of His response to