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This hope, however, was to remain unfulfilled. It was indeed shattered by a reign which had been inaugurated by the execution of the Bab, and the imprisonment of Baha'u'llah in the Siyah-Chal of Tihran, by a sovereign who had repeatedly instigated Baha'u'llah's successive banishments, and by a dynasty that had been sullied by the slaughter of no less than twenty thousand of His followers. The Shah's dramatic assassination, the ignoble rule of the last sovereigns of the House of Qajar, and the retribution which these horrid atrocities had provoked. (67:2) The Qajars, members of the alien Turkoman tribe, had, indeed, usurped the Persian throne. Aqa Muhammad Khan, the eunuch Shah and founder of the dynasty, was such an atrocious, avaricious, bloodthirsty tyrant that the memory of no Persian is so detested and universally execrated as his memory. The record of his reign and that of his immediate successors is one of vandalism, of internal warfare, of recalcitrant and rebellious chieftains, of brigandage, and medieval oppression, whilst the annals of the reigns of the later Qajars are marked by the stagnation of the nation, the illiteracy of the people, the corruption and incompetence of the government, the scandalous intrigues of the court, the decadence of the princes, the irresponsibility and extravagance of the sovereign, and his abject subservience to a notoriously degraded clerical order.
(67:3)
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