The willing tools who prostituted their high office for the
accomplishment of the enemy’s designs [against the Báb] were no less than the
sovereigns of the Qájár dynasty, first, the bigoted, the sickly, the
vacillating Muhammad Sháh, who at the last moment cancelled the Báb’s
imminent visit to the capital, and, second, the youthful and inexperienced Násiri’d-Dín
Sháh, who gave his ready assent to the sentence of his Captive’s death.
The arch villains who joined hands with the prime movers of so wicked a conspiracy
were the two grand vizirs, Hájí Mírzá Aqásí, the idolized tutor of Muhammad Sháh,
a vulgar, false-hearted and fickle-minded schemer, and the arbitrary,
bloodthirsty, reckless Amír-Nizám, Mírzá Taqí Khán, the first of whom
exiled the Báb to the mountain fastnesses of Ádhirbayján, and the latter
decreed His death in Tabríz. Their accomplice in these and other heinous crimes
was a government bolstered up by a flock of idle, parasitical princelings and
governors, corrupt, incompetent, tenaciously holding to their ill-gotten
privileges, and utterly subservient to a notoriously degraded clerical order.
(Shoghi Effendi, ‘God Passes By’)
