claimed. A "church-state," that had been firmly rooted in the life of
the nation and had extended its ramifications to every sphere of life in
that country, was virtually disrupted. A sacerdotal order, the rock wall
of _Sh_i'ah Islam in that land, was paralyzed and discredited; its
mujtahids, the favorite ministers of the hidden Imam, were reduced to an
insignificant number; all its beturbaned officers, except for a handful,
were ruthlessly forced to exchange their traditional head-dress and robes
for the European clothes they themselves anathematized; the pomp and
pageantry that marked their ceremonials vanished; their fatvas (sentences)
were nullified; their endowments were handed over to a civil
administration; their mosques and seminaries were deserted; the right of
sanctuary accorded to their shrines ceased to be recognized; their
religious plays were banned; their takyihs were closed and even their
pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbila were discouraged and curtailed. The
disuse of the veil; the recognition of the equality of sexes; the
establishment of civil tribunals; the abolition of concubinage; the
disparagement of the use of the Arabic tongue, the language of Islam and
of the Qur'an, and the efforts exerted to divorce it from Persian--all
these further proclaim the degradation, and foreshadow the final
extinction, of that infamous crew, whose leaders had dared style
themselves "servants of the Lord of Saintship" (Imam 'Ali), who had so
often received the homage of the pious kings of the Safavi dynasty, and
whose anathemas, ever since the birth of the Faith of the Bab, had been
chiefly responsible for the torrents of blood which had been shed, and
whose acts have blackened the annals of both their religion and nation.

A crisis, not indeed as severe as that which shook the Islamic sacerdotal
orders--the inveterate adversaries of the Faith--has, moreover, afflicted
the ecclesiastical institutions of Christendom, whose influence, ever
since Baha'u'llah's summons was issued and His warning was sounded, has
visibly deteriorated, whose prestige has been gravely damaged, whose
authority has steadily declined, and whose power, rights and prerogatives
have been increasingly circumscribed. The virtual extinction of the
temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff, to which reference has already
been made; the wave of anti-clericalism that brought in its wake the
separation of the Catholic Church from the French Republic; the org