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The Bab's return to His native land (Safar 1261) (February- March, 1845) was the signal for a commotion that rocked the entire country. The fire which the declaration of His mission had lit was being fanned into flame through the dispersal and activities of His appointed disciples. Already within the space of less than two years it had kindled the passions of friend and foe alike. The outbreak of the conflagration did not even await the return to His native city of the One Who had generated it. The implications of a Revelation, thrust so dramatically upon a race so degenerate, so inflammable in temper, could indeed have had no other consequence than to excite within men's bosoms the fiercest passions of fear, of hate, of rage and envy. A Faith Whose Founder did not content Himself with the claim to be the Gate of the Hidden Imam, Who assumed a rank that excelled even that of the Sahibu'z- Zaman, Who regarded Himself as the precursor of one incomparably greater than Himself, Who peremptorily commanded not only the subjects of the Shah, but the monarch himself, and even the kings and princes of the earth, to forsake their all and follow Him, Who claimed to be the inheritor of the earth and all that is therein-- a Faith Whose religious doctrines, Whose ethical standards, social principles and religious laws challenged the whole structure of the society in which it was born, soon ranged, with startling unanimity, the mass of the people behind their priests, and behind their chief magistrate, with his ministers and his government, and welded them into an opposition sworn to destroy, root and branch, the movement initiated by One Whom they regarded as an impious and presumptuous pretender. (10:1) With the Bab's return to Shiraz the initial collision of irreconcilable forces may be said to have commenced. Already the energetic and audacious Mulla Aliy- i- Bastami, one of the Letters of the Living, "the first to leave the House of God (Shiraz) and the first to suffer for His sake," who, in the presence of one of the leading exponents of Shi'ah Islam, the far- famed Shaykh Muhammad Hasan, had audaciously asserted that from the pen of his new- found Master within the space of forty- eight hours, verses had streamed that equalled in number those of the Qur'an, which it took its Author twenty- three years to reveal, had been excommunicated, chained, disgraced, imprisoned, and, in all probability, done to death. Mulla Sadiq- i- Khurasani, impelled by the injunction of the Bab in the Khasa'il- i- Sab'ih to alter the sacrosanct formula of the adhan, sounded it in its amended form before a scandalized congregation in Shiraz, and was instantly arrested, reviled, stripped of his garments, and scourged with a thousand lashes. The villainous Husayn Khan, the Nizamu'd- Dawlih, the governor of Fars, who had read the challenge thrown out in the Qayyumu'l- Asma', having ordered that Mulla Sadiq together with Quddus and another believer be summarily and publicly punished, caused their beards to be burned, their noses pierced, and threaded with halters; then, having been led through the streets in this disgraceful condition, they were expelled from the city.
(10:2)
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