CHAPTER VII
Baha'u'llah's Banishment to Iraq
The attempt on the life of Nasiri'd- Din Shah, as stated in a previous chapter, was made on the 28th of the month of Shavval, 1268 A.H., corresponding to the 15th of August, 1852. Immediately after, Baha'u'llah was arrested in Niyavaran, was conducted with the greatest ignominy to Tihran and cast into the Siyah- Chal. His imprisonment lasted for a period of no less than four months, in the middle of which the "year nine" (1269), anticipated in such glowing terms by the Bab, and alluded to as the year "after Hin" by Shaykh Ahmad- i- Ahsa'i, was ushered in, endowing with undreamt- of potentialities the whole world. Two months after that year was born, Baha'u'llah, the purpose of His imprisonment now accomplished, was released from His confinement, and set out, a month later, for Baghdad, on the first stage of a memorable and life- long exile which was to carry Him, in the course of years, as far as Adrianople in European Turkey, and which was to end with His twenty- four years' incarceration in Akka. (104:1)

Now that He had been invested, in consequence of that potent dream, with the power and sovereign authority associated with His Divine mission, His deliverance from a confinement that had achieved its purpose, and which if prolonged would have completely fettered Him in the exercise of His newly- bestowed functions, became not only inevitable, but imperative and urgent. Nor were the means and instruments lacking whereby his emancipation from the shackles that restrained Him could be effected. The persistent and decisive intervention of the Russian Minister, Prince Dolgorouki, who left no stone unturned to establish the innocence of Baha'u'llah; the public confession of Mulla Shaykh Aliy- i- Turshizi, surnamed Azim, who, in the Siyah- Chal, in the presence of the Hajibu'd- Dawlih and the Russian Minister's interpreter and of the government's representative, emphatically exonerated Him, and acknowledged his own complicity; the indisputable testimony established by competent tribunals; the unrelaxing efforts exerted by His own brothers, sisters and kindred,-- all these combined to effect His ultimate deliverance from the hands of His rapacious enemies. Another potent if less evident influence which must be acknowledged as having had a share in His liberation was the fate suffered by so large a number of His self- sacrificing fellow- disciples who languished with Him in that same prison. For, as Nabil truly remarks, "the blood, shed in the course of that fateful year in Tihran by that heroic band with whom Baha'u'llah had been imprisoned, was the ransom paid for His deliverance from the hand of a foe that sought to prevent Him from achieving the purpose for which God had destined Him." (104:2)

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