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No less arresting has been the extinction of the all- pervasive influence exerted by the Muslim ecclesiastical leaders, both Sunni and Shi'ah, in the two countries in which the mightiest institutions of Islam had been reared, and which have been directly associated with the tribulations heaped upon the Bab and Baha'u'llah. (228:1) The Caliph, the self- styled vicar of the Prophet of Islam, known also as the "Commander of the Faithful," the protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, whose spiritual jurisdiction extended over more than two hundred million Muhammadans, was by the abolition of the Sultanate in Turkey, divested of his temporal authority, hitherto regarded as inseparable from his high office. The Caliph himself, after having occupied for a brief period, an anomalous and precarious position, fled to Europe; the Caliphate, the most august and powerful institution of Islam, was, without consultation with any community in the Sunni world, summarily abolished; the unity of the most powerful branch of the Islamic Faith was thereby shattered; a formal, a complete and permanent separation of the Turkish state from the Sunni faith was proclaimed; the Shari'ah canonical Law was annulled; ecclesiastical institutions were disendowed; a civil code was promulgated; religious orders were suppressed; the Sunni hierarchy was dissolved; the Arabic tongue, the language of the Prophet of Islam, fell into disuse, and its script was superseded by the Latin alphabet; the Qur'an itself was translated into Turkish; Constantinople, the "Dome of Islam," sank to the level of a provincial city, and its peerless jewel, the Mosque of St. Sophia, was converted into a museum-- a series of degradations recalling the fate which, in the first century of the Christian Era, befell the Jewish people, the city of Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, the Holy of Holies, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy, whose members were the avowed persecutors of the religion of Jesus Christ. (228:2) A similar convulsion shook the foundations of the entire sacerdotal order in Persia, though its formal divorce from the Persian state is as yet unproclaimed. 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 Shi'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.
(228:3)
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