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Mention should, moreover, be made of the devastating famine which, about a year after the illustrious Badi' had been tortured to death, ravaged Persia and reduced the population to such extremities that even the rich went hungry, and hundreds of mothers ghoulishly devoured their own children. (233:1) Nor can this subject be dismissed without special reference being made to the Arch- Breaker of the Covenant of the Bab, Mirza Yahya, who lived long enough to witness, while eking out a miserable existence in Cyprus, termed by the Turks "the Island of Satan," every hope he had so maliciously conceived reduced to naught. A pensioner first of the Turkish and later of the British Government, he was subjected to the further humiliation of having his application for British citizenship refused. Eleven of the eighteen "Witnesses" he had appointed forsook him and turned in repentance to Baha'u'llah. He himself became involved in a scandal which besmirched his reputation and that of his eldest son, deprived that son and his descendants of the successorship with which he had previously invested him, and appointed, in his stead, the perfidious Mirza Hadiy- i- Dawlat- Abadi, a notorious Azali, who, on the occasion of the martyrdom of the aforementioned Mirza Ashraf, was seized with such fear that during four consecutive days he proclaimed from the pulpit- top, and in a most vituperative language, his complete repudiation of the Babi Faith, as well as of Mirza Yahya, his benefactor, who had reposed in him such implicit confidence. It was this same eldest son who, through the workings of a strange destiny, sought years after, together with his nephew and niece, the presence of Abdu'l- Baha, the appointed Successor of Baha'u'llah and Center of His Covenant, expressed repentance, prayed for forgiveness, was graciously accepted by Him, and remained, till the hour of his death, a loyal follower of the Faith which his father had so foolishly, so shamelessly and so pitifully striven to extinguish.
(233:2)
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