Refuting the Bahāʾī “scarecrow theory” of the Bābī succession
From a note of our forthcoming translation of Tanbīh al-nāʾimīn.
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In Asad’ullāh Fāḍil Māzandarānī’s Asrār al-āthār-i-khuṣūṣi, vol. 5, 347, Bahāʾuʾllāh is quoted as saying, “Glory be to God! Haven’t the critics and detractors (muʿariḍīn va munkirīn) realized by now that what was sent over to the forerunner (mubashshir), meaning the Point [i.e. the Bāb], was by whom? The knowledge is with God, the Lord of the worlds!” Glossing upon this statement, Asad’ullāh Fāḍil Māzandarānī writes: “The intention here is that the letters of correspondence between Mīrzā Yaḥyā [i.e. Ṣubḥ-i-Azal] and the Point [i.e. the Bāb] in the prison of Mākū (sic) [it was actually Chihrīq – WA], which became the reason for issuing the specified written decree [of succession], was at the dictation of that holiness [i.e. Bahāʾuʾllāh].” However, such statements by the Bahā’ī founder (as well as its gloss by Māzandarānī) are re-imagined as well as conflated positions from the later period of the Azalī-Bahā’ī schism and so can be safely dismissed as tendentious and therefore without foundation because they clearly reflect a later sectarian Bahāʾī construction and point of view. Furthermore, the retrospective Bahāʾī claim hinges on a conspiracy purportedly hatched originally by Bahāʾuʾllāh and Mullā ʿAbd’ul-Karīm Qazvīnī (d. 1852 CE), one of the eminent Letters of the Living and scribes of the Bāb. In the original Persian text of A Traveller’s Narrative (maqāla-i-shakhṣī-i-sayyāḥ), we read:
...Since Bahāʾ had attained great renown in Tehran, and the hearts of the people had become inclined toward him, he and Mullā ʿAbd’ul-Karīm took counsel together concerning this matter: that, in view of the agitation of the divines, the hostility of the greatest faction of Iran, and the manifest power of Amīr-Niẓām [i.e. the prime minister, Mīrzā Ṭaqī Khān Amīr Kabīr, d. 1852 CE], both the Bāb and Bahāʾ stood in the gravest peril and were exposed to severe persecution. It was therefore necessary to devise some expedient whereby attention might be directed toward an absent person, and through this means Bahāʾ might remain protected from the hostility of the people. And since, for certain considerations, they deemed it inadvisable to select an outsider, they cast the lot of this augury upon the name of Bahāʾ’s brother, Mīrzā Yaḥyā. In short, through the support and instruction of Bahāʾ, they caused him to become celebrated and made his name known upon the tongues of friend and stranger alike. In his name they composed writings which, outwardly, were addressed to the Bāb; and since secret correspondence was being conducted between them, the Bāb approved this plan to the utmost. In short, Mīrzā Yaḥyā became concealed and hidden, while his name circulated upon tongues and in mouths. And this great stratagem produced a remarkable effect: notwithstanding the fact that Bahāʾ was renowned and celebrated, he remained protected and preserved...(my trans., 67–69).
The fundamental weakness of this argument is that the passage offers an elaborate reconstruction of motive without furnishing evidence commensurate with the claim. ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ asks the reader to accept a sequence of propositions: Bahāʾuʾllāh and Mullā ʿAbd’ul-Karīm Qazvīnī devised a plan to divert official attention from Bahāʾuʾllāh; they selected Ṣubḥ-i-Azal as a nominal figurehead; they deliberately manufactured His public reputation; writings were composed in His name and sent to the Bāb; and the Bāb knowingly approved the entire arrangement as a stratagem. Yet within the passage no letter, contemporary testimony, instruction from Bahāʾuʾllāh, statement by Mullā ʿAbd’ul-Karīm Qazvīnī, or text of the Bāb is adduced to establish any of these propositions. The narrative therefore moves imperceptibly from possible political calculation to asserted historical fact. More seriously, the argument has to explain away rather than explain the documentary relationship between the Bāb and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. The difficulty is not merely that later Bābīs regarded Ṣubḥ-i-Azal as the Bāb’s successor. There exists a body of texts addressed by the Bāb to Him, including the testamentary material, whose language itself assigns Him an exceptional relationship to the Primal Point, the Bāb. Once those documents are admitted, ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ’s thesis requires something considerably stronger than the proposition that concealment served a useful political purpose. It requires the reader to believe that the Bāb deliberately participated in producing (nay, fabricating) texts which apparently confer genuine authority and metaphysical status upon Ṣubḥ-i-Azal while privately understanding those texts to constitute a protective deception. The hypothesis therefore multiplies assumptions precisely where the surviving primary material ought to control the reconstruction. There is an especially serious problem with the assertion that writings were composed in Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s name and ostensibly addressed to the Bāb. Taken literally, this amounts to an allegation of pseudonymous or fabricated correspondence. But ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ neither identifies the writings concerned nor explains how he knows that they were produced in this fashion. Nor does the passage establish which texts genuinely originated with Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, which supposedly originated with Bahāʾuʾllāh or Mullā ʿAbd’ul-Karīm Qazvīnī, and by what textual or historical criteria the two classes may be distinguished. As historical method, the claim is consequently unfalsifiable in the form in which it is presented: documentary evidence for Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s prominence can simply be redescribed as evidence of the alleged stratagem itself.
There is also an internal tension in the political logic. The supposed purpose of the scheme was to protect Bahāʾuʾllāh by transferring dangerous attention onto an absent Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. But that explanation necessarily concedes something important: Ṣubḥ-i-Azal was deliberately represented to both the Bābīs and outsiders as possessing a position sufficiently authoritative that attention would actually be diverted toward Him. The stratagem could work only if His status were credible. The more successful the alleged fabrication became, therefore, the greater the documentary and communal apparatus required to sustain it. ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ consequently explains the very evidence that requires demonstration—the prominence of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal—by positing an undocumented conspiracy extensive enough to have produced that prominence. The passage is furthermore retrospective. ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ was writing decades after the events and after the Azalī–Bahāʾī schism had transformed the meaning of the early Bābī succession into a central sectarian controversy. That does not make his testimony worthless; he possessed unusually close familial access to participants in the movement. It does, however, mean that his reconstruction cannot simply be treated as neutral contemporary reportage. The distinction between what occurred before 1850 CE and how those events were subsequently interpreted after Bahāʾuʾllāh’s claim is indispensable. A late source asserting that an inconvenient early succession was only camouflage requires corroboration from evidence independent of the later succession controversy.
Most revealing is the phrase bi-ḥasb-i-ẓāhir—“outwardly” or “according to appearances” because it performs enormous argumentative work. The documentary surface apparently shows correspondence with Ṣubḥ-i-Azal and the Bāb’s approval of His position; ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ responds by proposing that this was only the outward appearance, beneath which lay a different intention. That is structurally a hermeneutic of reversal: evidence apparently supporting Ṣubḥ-i-Azal becomes evidence for how successfully Bahāʾuʾllāh concealed the truth. Such reasoning is extraordinarily difficult to test historically because contrary evidence can always be absorbed into the hypothesis as another layer of concealment. This becomes particularly problematic when set beside the kind of evidence we have offered throughout this volume. The Azalī counter-narrative maintains that governmental pursuit of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal resulted precisely from His widely recognized status as the Bāb’s successor, whereas Bahāʾuʾllāh’s predicament followed from the aftermath of the attempt upon Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh. The two traditions therefore agree on an important underlying fact—Ṣubḥ-i-Azal became a principal object of governmental concern—but radically disagree about its cause. For the Azalī sources, this confirms His substantive succession; for ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ, it confirms the success of a calculated diversion. The historical question cannot be decided merely by repeating either retrospective explanation. It has to be adjudicated against the earliest documentary evidence. The strongest criticism, therefore, is methodological rather than sectarian: ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ supplies a theory capable of explaining away the primary evidence without supplying primary evidence for the theory itself. If an early document names, addresses, commissions, or elevates Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, the historian cannot presume that its apparent meaning is fictitious simply because a much later source says that a secret plan lay behind it. That conclusion must itself be demonstrated. Until contemporary evidence for the alleged agreement between Bahāʾuʾllāh, Mullā ʿAbd al-Karīm Qazvīnī, and the Bāb is produced, the passage remains valuable evidence for the later Bahāʾī explanation of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s early prominence, but is considerably weaker as independent evidence for how that prominence actually originated.
There is, moreover, a profound moral difficulty inherent in ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ’s reconstruction. If his account is accepted on its own terms, it places the Bāb in the impossible position of being either a dupe or a willing participant in an extraordinary deception. If the Bāb did not understand what Bahāʾuʾllāh and Mullā ʿAbd al-Karīm Qazvīnī were allegedly doing, then He was successfully manipulated into conferring apparent authority upon Ṣubḥ-i-Azal through a contrivance devised by others—in which case the Bāb becomes the dupe of His own followers. If, on the other hand, as ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ explicitly maintains, the Bāb understood and “approved this plan to the utmost,” the moral consequence is considerably worse: the Bāb is made knowingly to participate in a deception whereby an innocent young, eighteen-nineteen year old late adolescent was publicly represented as His successor, invested with the outward tokens of authority, and thereby deliberately exposed to the murderous attention of the Qājār state so that another, older man might remain comparatively secure. On this reading the Bāb ceases to be merely deceived and is instead transformed into something morally monstrous: a prophet consciously sanctioning the use of one of His own disciples as a human decoy. Nor does this scenario reflect more favourably upon Bahāʾuʾllāh. Taken literally, ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ’s account attributes to his father a calculated programme of deception: manufacturing Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s reputation, arranging correspondence in His name, persuading others that He possessed an authority which Bahāʾuʾllāh supposedly knew to be fictitious, and intentionally directing dangerous governmental and public attention toward His younger brother for the purpose of protecting himself. If this really occurred as described, it would be difficult to characterize the conduct as anything other than deliberate fraud accompanied by a grave moral betrayal. The problem is therefore not merely historical but ethical. In attempting retrospectively to neutralize the documentary evidence for Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s succession, ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ advances an explanation whose moral implications are arguably more damaging to the Bāb and Bahāʾuʾllāh both than the succession it was designed to explain away: it requires either a Bāb who could be manipulated by Bahāʾuʾllāh, or a Bāb who knowingly sanctioned the deception and endangerment of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal (his own younger step-brother)—and, in either case, a Bahāʾuʾllāh prepared to deceive his fellow Bābīs and place his own brother in mortal jeopardy as an instrument of self-preservation.
As such, the overall Bahāʾī narrative cannot have matters both ways. It cannot simultaneously insist that Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s succession was an elaborate fiction deliberately manufactured by Bahāʾuʾllāh for his own protection and then condemn Ṣubḥ-i-Azal for subsequently occupying the very position which, on this account, Bahāʾuʾllāh himself had apparently laboured to create for him. If Ṣubḥ-i-Azal was publicly represented as the Bāb’s successor, correspondence was generated in His name, His authority was deliberately advertised among the Bābīs, and the Bāb Himself was induced to approve and perpetuate this arrangement, then the subsequent recognition of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal by the Bābī community was precisely the intended consequence of the alleged stratagem. Bahāʾī polemic cannot logically blame Him for accepting as genuine a station which Bahāʾuʾllāh had supposedly gone to extraordinary lengths to make everyone—including, apparently, the Bāb Himself—believe was genuine. Either Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s position rested upon authentic Bābī authority, in which case the later Bahāʾī attempt to reduce it to camouflage fails; or it was an elaborate deception, in which case responsibility for the resulting succession belongs first and foremost to those whom ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ identifies as its architects. To manufacture a succession and then indict its beneficiary for behaving as the successor is not an explanation of the historical problem; it is the very contradiction that the explanation was supposed to resolve.
The mature Bahāʾī explanation of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s position is considerably more complex than the simple assertion that his succession was merely “nominal” or that He functioned as a convenient “figurehead.” In its developed form, the argument amounts to a retrospective relocation of the source of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s charismatic and revelatory authority from Ṣubḥ-i-Azal himself to Bahāʾuʾllāh. Thus, evidence apparently establishing Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s station—whether the Bāb’s recognition of Him, Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s own verses, the early Bābīs’ recognition of his authority, or Bahāʾuʾllāh’s own earlier professions of submission to and exaltation of Him—can be retained at the level of historical appearance while its actual source is reassigned to Bahāʾuʾllāh. This mechanism is already discernible in Bahāʾuʾllāh’s Edirne-period Sūrah-i-Haykal, where, referring explicitly to Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, he retrospectively declares that “We singled out for Our favour one of Our brothers,” imparted to him “a dewdrop from the fathomless ocean of knowledge,” “clothed him with the garment of one of Our Names,” and raised him to such a station that all were moved to praise him (Sūrat al-Haykal, in Bahāʾuʾllāh, The Summons of the Lord of Hosts, para. 25). In this construction, therefore, Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s acknowledged elevation need not be denied: it is instead represented as an elevation conferred upon him by Bahāʾuʾllāh and consequently dependent upon Bahāʾuʾllāh’s own superior, though at the time concealed, authority.
The historical difficulty with this retrospective construction becomes especially acute when it is compared with evidence from the Bāb’s own lifetime. Denis MacEoin drew attention, for example, to a letter of Sayyid Ḥusayn Yazdī to Mullā ʿAbd al-Karīm Qazvīnī (originally reproduced in Qismatī az alvāḥ-i-khaṭṭ-i-nuqṭa-i-ūlā va āqā siyyid ḥusayn-i-kātib: 23-5) in which Yazdī reports receiving writings associated with Ṣubḥ-i-Azal and repeatedly reading them before the Bāb, who is described in the same communication as the one who “creates lordship in whomsoever He wills from among His servants”; subsequent writings of “that Pre-Eternity” were likewise requested and said to be appreciated by the Bāb (Denis MacEoin, “Divisions and Authority Claims in Babism [1850–1866],” Studia Iranica 18, no. 1 [1989]: 93–129; subsequently reprinted in MacEoin, The Messiah of Shiraz: 369–408). This evidence assumes particular importance when placed beside ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ’s much later assertion that Bahāʾuʾllāh and Mullā ʿAbd al-Karīm Qazvīnī deliberately manufactured Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s reputation, that writings were composed “in his name” and ostensibly addressed to the Bāb, and that the Bāb, being privy to the secret correspondence, “approved this plan to the utmost.” Taken literally, the latter assertion supplies a retrospective explanation for precisely the kind of contemporary evidence represented by Yazdī’s letter: writings recognized by the Bāb as emanating from Ṣubḥ-i-Azal may now be construed as having secretly originated elsewhere.
The resulting argument is methodologically circular unless independent contemporary evidence can establish the alleged concealed arrangement. A document in which the Bāb recognizes or elevates Ṣubḥ-i-Azal can be answered by asserting that Bahāʾuʾllāh secretly caused the recognition; a writing of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal exhibiting revelatory authority can be attributed ultimately to Bahāʾuʾllāh; a Baghdad period text in which Bahāʾuʾllāh acknowledges Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s station can be explained as maintenance of the protective fiction; and the widespread recognition of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal among the Bābīs can itself be treated as proof of how successfully Bahāʾuʾllāh’s alleged stratagem operated. Evidence which might otherwise falsify the hypothesis is thereby absorbed into it as further evidence of the concealment the hypothesis postulates. The argument consequently becomes extraordinarily difficult to falsify: virtually every documentary indication of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s authority can be retained while its underlying agency is transferred retrospectively to Bahāʾuʾllāh. The chronological problem is equally serious. In writings of the Baghdad period Bahāʾuʾllāh could still represent himself in terms of servitude rather than independent revelatory authority; the Lawḥ-i Kull-i Ṭaʿām, for example, contains the categorical profession that he had claimed “naught but servitude to God, the True One” (Bahāʾuʾllāh, Lawḥ-i Kull-i Ṭaʿām; trans. Stephen Lambden). Such statements acquire particular significance when placed alongside contemporary or near-contemporary texts in which Bahāʾuʾllāh acknowledges or exalts Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. The later Edirne period explanation therefore stands in a chronologically asymmetrical relationship to the earlier evidence: the Baghdad texts document what Bahāʾuʾllāh represented his own and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s stations to be before the open contest for authority, whereas the later writings explain retrospectively why those earlier representations supposedly did not mean what their surface language would naturally suggest. Bahāʾuʾllāh himself acknowledges elsewhere that readers might encounter apparent discrepancies among his revelations and resolves these through the doctrine of differing spiritual “stations” (maqāmāt) (Sūrat al-Aṣḥāb, or Lawḥ-i Ḥabīb, Edirne period, c. 1864–65; trans. Juan Cole; for the dating and textual identification see Stephen Lambden, “Sūrat al-Aṣḥāb [The Sūrah of the Companions] or Lawḥ-i Ḥabīb”). Such an appeal may constitute a theological hermeneutic for reconciling apparently divergent statements, but it cannot by itself establish as a matter of historical fact that an earlier categorical profession of servitude secretly contained the superior claim subsequently asserted.
The problem becomes still more acute in light of the Bāb’s own writings to Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. The issue is not simply whether the Bāb designated Ṣubḥ-i-Azal to perform certain administrative functions. As the documents reproduced and translated here demonstrate, the Bāb addresses Ṣubḥ-i-Azal through an elaborate theophanic grammar of the Mirror, authorizes Him to interpret revelation according to what God shall cast upon his fuʾād, establishes extraordinary pronominal relations between the Primal Point and His designated Mirror, and elsewhere formalizes the succession in the Lawḥ-i-viṣāyat. The later Bahāʾī theory must therefore do considerably more than reinterpret an administrative appointment: it must make Bahāʾuʾllāh the invisible source or ultimate referent of a theophanic relationship which the Bāb’s own documents overtly articulate in relation to Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. In effect, the documentary evidence is not disproved but annexed: whatever establishes Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s authority is accepted phenomenally and then reassigned metaphysically to Bahāʾuʾllāh. There is also an unavoidable logical and moral irony in this explanation.
The deeper historiographical issue is consequently not whether later Bahāʾī theology can construct an internally theological explanation for the documentary prominence of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal; plainly it can, and Bahāʾuʾllāh himself had already begun doing so by the Edirne period (Sūrah-i-Haykal, para. 25). The question is whether there exists contemporary, pre-schism evidence demonstrating that the Bāb, Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, Bahāʾuʾllāh, and the early Bābī community actually understood Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s authority in this secretly derivative sense. Unless such evidence can be produced, the later theory cannot legitimately be used as its own proof. At most, it establishes how Bahāʾuʾllāh and subsequently ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ retrospectively explained the inconvenient documentary fact of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s earlier authority. The mature Bahāʾī argument thus operates less by disproving the evidence for Ṣubḥ-i-Azal’s station than by retrospectively appropriating it: the evidence is allowed to stand, but its subject is changed. This is precisely why the earliest documents must retain evidentiary priority over post-schism explanations of what those documents were secretly intended to mean.
The preceding commentary by us here above is our refutation of the absurd (nay, twisted) Bahāʾī “scarecrow theory” of the Bābī succession whose implications hurt the Bahāʾīs themselves as much as anyone else because it clearly reveals the foundation of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s own claim to self-admittedly rest upon deception and subterfuge. It is twisted because the later Bahāʾī explanation seems to solve one historical difficulty only by creating several larger ones. The central problem is that every evidentiary route is made to lead back to Bahāʾuʾllāh. If the Bāb praises or appoints Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, Bahāʾuʾllāh was supposedly behind the arrangement. If Ṣubḥ-i-Azal produces verses which the Bāb recognizes, their authority is retrospectively derived from Bahāʾuʾllāh. If Bahāʾuʾllāh himself acknowledges Ṣubḥ-i-Azal during the Baghdad period, this becomes concealment appropriate to a particular maqām. If the Bābīs consequently recognize Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, that proves how effectively the protective arrangement worked. And when Bahāʾuʾllāh later repudiates His authority, the earlier evidence is reread through the later claim.
This is why chronology is so important. Historical method normally moves from the earlier evidence toward reconstruction of the later development. This apologetic method effectively reverses the direction: the later claim becomes the interpretive key that determines what earlier documents were really saying, even when their apparent meaning points elsewhere. And there is a rather brutal paradox at the center of it. If the “scarecrow” explanation is accepted literally, the Bahāʾī account itself tells us that Bahāʾuʾllāh helped create the very Azalī succession that Bahāʾī historiography later treats as illegitimate. The early Bābīs who followed Ṣubḥ-i-Azal would then have been doing exactly what Bahāʾuʾllāh’s alleged scheme was designed to persuade them to do. That does not by itself prove the Azalī reconstruction in every particular. But it does mean that the later Bahāʾī reconstruction needs independent pre-schism evidence. Without that, it risks becoming a closed explanatory system in which no conceivable evidence for Ṣubḥ-i-Azal can count against it, because such evidence is automatically reclassified as evidence of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s concealed agency. And that is precisely where historical explanation starts turning into retrospective apologetics, and thus why Bahāʾī accounts cannot be trusted on face value.
