Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī (d. 1939)
بِسم
الله الحاقق الأحقق
A note from a forthcoming work
The infamous
judgement in question is one made by Dawlatābādī –
that based on the account of Gholām-Rezā Agāh as sourced in Ḥusayn Makkī in zindigī-i-mīrzā taqī khān amīr kabīr (Tehrān, 1987 CE/1366 solar: 360-2) – is as
follows: either immediately after the passing of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal in 1912 or
twenty-three years later during the short period while he was acting as an
Iranian government envoy in Brussels, Belgium in the summer of 1935 CE, forty-three
prominent Bayānīs of Tehran visited him wherein Dawlatābādī after first making
each of these forty-three individuals swear an oath of obedience to him then
ordered these Bayānīs (and the entire Bayānī
community) into a perpetual state of extreme taqīya
(dissimulation) such that they were ordered by him to essentially absorb all of
their activities (interior as well as exterior) into the larger exoteric Twelver
Shiʿite orthodoxy of Iran and to unequivocally abandon all external and
internal features of their Bayānī identity and praxis until further
notice (further notice that never came). In essence, Dawlatābādī’s was an
illegitimate command to the Bayānīs to abandon the Bayān itself. While Bayānīs have
always practiced taqīya, that decision by Dawlatābādī
went way beyond the normal considerations of self-protection or exercises of
disciplinary arcana in not casting the pearls of secrets before
proverbial swine because effectively this decision by Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī sought
to put an end to the Bayān itself.
The circumstances of
that judgement (not to mention the thoroughly defeatist and duplicitous
psychological state of the one who made it) was an unequivocal betrayal of the Bayān,
its community and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal (who appointed him as the
first among equals amongst the witnesses of the Bayān in the first place based
on his father’s lifelong fidelity to Ṣubḥ-i-Azal and the Bayān: a position Hādī Dawlatābādī was initially supposed to fulfill before dying just four
years before Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s own ascension), no less a betrayal of the Bayān on
the same level and scope as the betrayal perpetrated by the Bahāʾī founder and
his misled acolytes: a decision which had incalculably deleterious long-term
effects on the Bayānī community, suspending and muting (nay, mutilating) altogether
many of its activities, not to mention growth, while inflicting an unnecessary (even
malicious) blow to it that only the years have been able to overcome...To his credit, Jalāl Azal (d. 1971) spent a
good portion of his adult life resisting as well as questioning the legitimacy
of that judgement by Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī as well as Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s overall leadership
over the Bayānī community. Given the intimate proximity they later enjoyed with
the family of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal in Cyprus, there is no question that even members of Yaḥyā
Dawlatābādī’s own family, such as Sidīqih, Nāṣir,
Qamar-Tāj, Fakhrīyah, Parvīn and others, acknowledged the unfortunate nature of
that infamous judgement over the Bayānīs because they appear to have completely
disregarded it and instead openly identified themselves as Bayānīs. Although
one can speculate as to why he made this turn, especially (that is, if it
occurred in the 1935 period) given that Iran at the time was entering the
height of Reza Shah’s secularization and westernization efforts – with the
mullahs and their power increasingly being relegated to the margins by the
Pahlavi state at that time wherein the lack of necessity for implementing any
such extreme measures becomes readily apparent – the incalculable damage and
untold harm of that ill-considered and unwise judgement of Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s
subsequently became the butt of public ridicule and abusive criticism by both
the ḥawzavī (seminarian) as well as the Bahāʾī enemies
of the Bayān while keeping the Bayānī community in a state of perpetual stasis,
paralysis and entropy (which the enemies of the Bayān have capitalized on), a situation that it
only now is beginning to emerge out of. That judgement is now hereby rescinded,
and so declared null and void and of no effect or consequence, and so therefore
is to be superseded by the judgement of a much higher authority than Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s...If 1935, it should be noted that the year
in which Dawlatābādī made this decision coincides with the same year in which Ṣadr
al-Muḥadithīn Isfahānī briefly made a false claim to being the Mirror of the Bayān
before dying under suspicious circumstances (suspected of murder by the Pahlavi
state due to his anti-Pahlavi political activism), a claim that on one level appears
to underscore dissent by some leading Bayānīs of Iran against Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s
decision. Our own judgement is that Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī ceased from being a Bayānī
altogether at the very moment he made that infamous judgment, with his
appointment as a Witness of the Bayān by Ṣubḥ-i-Azal effectively lapsing as a
result. The only question that remains is as to when he appointed Muḥammad Ṣādiq
Ibrāhīmī (d. 1963) as a Witness of the Bayān, before or after this event,
because if the appointment was made after the event in question, this now also
raises serious questions over the legitimacy of Ibrāhīmī’s own assumption of
that role.
