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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) Nasiri'd-Din Shah, a selfish, capricious, imperious monarch, succeeded to the throne, and, for half a century, was destined to remain the sole arbiter of the fortunes of his hapless country. A disastrous obscurantism, a chaotic administration in the provinces, the disorganization of the finances of the realm, the intrigues, the vindictiveness, and profligacy of the pampered and greedy courtiers, who buzzed and swarmed round his throne, his own despotism which, but for the restraining fear of European public opinion and the desire to be thought well of in the capitals of the West, would have been more cruel and savage, were the distinguishing features of the bloody reign of one who styled himself "Footpath of Heaven," and "Asylum of the Universe." A triple darkness of chaos, bankruptcy and oppression enveloped the country. His own assassination was the first portent of the revolution which was to restrict the prerogatives of his son and successor, depose the last two monarchs of the House of Qajar, and extinguish their dynasty. On the eve of his jubilee, which was to inaugurate a new era, and the celebration of which had been elaborately prepared, he fell, in the shrine of Shah 'Abdu'l-'Azim, a victim to an assassin's pistol, his dead body driven back to his capitol, propped up in the royal carriage in front of his Grand Vizir, in order to defer the news of his murder.
(68:2)
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