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The successor of Aqa Muhammad Khan, the uxorious, philo-progenetive Fath-'Ali Shah, the so-called "Darius of the Age," was a vain, an arrogant, and unscrupulous miser, notorious for the enormous number of his wives and concubines, numbering above a thousand, his incalculable progeny, and the disasters which his rule brought upon his country. He it was who commanded that his vizir, to whom he owed his throne, be cast into a caldron of boiling oil. As to his successor, the bigoted Muhammad Shah, one of his earliest acts, definitely condemned by the pen of Baha'u'llah, was the order to strangle his first minister, the illustrious Qa'im-Maqam, immortalized by that same pen as the "Prince of the City of Statesmanship and Literary Accomplishment," and to have him replaced by that lowbred, consummate scoundrel, Haji Mirza Aqasi, who brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy and revolution. It was this same Shah who refused to interview the Bab and imprisoned Him in Adhirbayjan, and who, at the age of forty, was afflicted by a complication of maladies to which he succumbed, hastening the doom forecast in these words of the Qayyum-i-Asma: "I swear by God, O Shah! If thou showest enmity unto Him Who is His Remembrance, God will, on the Day of Resurrection, condemn thee, before the kings, unto hellfire, and thou shalt not, in very truth, find on that day any helper except God, the Exalted."
(68:1)
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