Baha'i Assassinations
6. Baha's Change of Heart on Assassinations
Says Baha in the tablet of the Ishraqat, Tarazat, Tajaliat, P.1; P. 12; PP.14-15.
“O party of god! Know for evidence surely that sedition, strife, slaying and plunder are the state of the wild beasts of the earth. The station of man and his state are through knowledge and work. In most of the tablets we forbade [god's] servants that which will hurt them, and enjoined on them that which will advantage them. O party of god! Associate with all sects of the world in love and friendship. Sedition and its states are, one and all, forbidden in the Book of god, the lord of worlds, with a stringent prohibition. Though in the early days there had been revealed from the Supreme Pen what is obviously repugnant to the new Cause, for instance passages such as these ‘the necks have stretched out in discord, where are the swords of thy power O Dominant of the worlds!' but for the object thereof was not strife and sedition; rather the object was to show forth circumstances of oppression of oppressors and of villainy of those who associate partners with god, so that all may know that the oppression of the earth has reached such a pitch that the likes of this verse had been revealed from the Supreme Pen. And now, we exhort god's servants not to adhere to some of the utterances and not to become a cause of hurt to [their fellow] servants of god.”
The Ishraqat, Tarazat, Tajaliyyat were printed in a book form. It also contains a great number of tablets addressed to Baha by a number of his partisans. The book runs into 298 pages. The first tablet in the book consists of 32 pages. The burden of Baha's discourse in the tablet is the extract supra in the first page of the tablet. In page 12 Baha says that through exhortations and counsels extending over a period of “fourty years” he forbade god's servants to engage in quarrels, seditions and disputes. On p.44 in another tablet combined in the same book Baha says that for “about forty years” he forbade god's servant to engage in sedition, quarrels and murder; in the same tablet, P.45 Baha says that upon his arrival in Baghdad from Teheran he forbade all to engage in sedition and quarrels. These passages clearly show that the tablet referred to in Enclosure I was composed by Baha about a few years before his death in 1892.
It was on the strength of the passages or the verse and the like thereof (see previous sections) “revealed from the Supreme Pen in the early days” and quoted in the tablet that most of the BÁBis, including the two brothers of the BÁB's second-wife, who withstood Baha's pretensions, were sought out and slain wherever they chanced to be by members of the (Hezb'u'llah) paryt of god”.
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