fully and gloriously
accomplished. Only four years earlier the Author of the Babi Revelation
had declared His mission to Mulla Husayn in the privacy of His home in
_Sh_iraz. Three years after that Declaration, within the walls of the
prison-fortress of Mah-Ku, He was dictating to His amanuensis the
fundamental and distinguishing precepts of His Dispensation. A year later,
His followers, under the actual leadership of Baha'u'llah, their
fellow-disciple, were themselves, in the hamlet of Bada_sh_t, abrogating
the Qur'anic Law, repudiating both the divinely-ordained and man-made
precepts of the Faith of Muhammad, and shaking off the shackles of its
antiquated system. Almost immediately after, the Bab Himself, still a
prisoner, was vindicating the acts of His disciples by asserting, formally
and unreservedly, His claim to be the promised Qa'im, in the presence of
the Heir to the Throne, the leading exponents of the _Sh_ay_kh_i
community, and the most illustrious ecclesiastical dignitaries assembled
in the capital of A_dh_irbayjan.

A little over four years had elapsed since the birth of the Bab's
Revelation when the trumpet-blast announcing the formal extinction of the
old, and the inauguration of the new Dispensation was sounded. No pomp, no
pageantry marked so great a turning-point in the world's religious
history. Nor was its modest setting commensurate with such a sudden,
startling, complete emancipation from the dark and embattled forces of
fanaticism, of priestcraft, of religious orthodoxy and superstition. The
assembled host consisted of no more than a single woman and a handful of
men, mostly recruited from the very ranks they were attacking, and devoid,
with few exceptions, of wealth, prestige and power. The Captain of the
host was Himself an absentee, a captive in the grip of His foes. The arena
was a tiny hamlet in the plain of Bada_sh_t on the border of Mazindaran.
The trumpeter was a lone woman, the noblest of her sex in that
Dispensation, whom even some of her co-religionists pronounced a heretic.
The call she sounded was the death-knell of the twelve hundred year old
law of Islam.

Accelerated, twenty years later, by another trumpet-blast, announcing the
formulation of the laws of yet another Dispensation, this process of
disintegration, associated with the declining fortunes of a superannuated,
though divinely revealed Law, gathered further momentum, precipitated, in
a later age, the annulment of the _Sh_a