Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: advocated communism and community of wives. This learned investigator further says:
The extraordinary proceedings at Badasht seem to have scandalized not only the Mohammedans but even a section of the Babis. 2 Mirza Jani, their first historian and a martyr, avers that not all
have understood the secret of what passed between Hazret-i- Kuddus and Kurrat-ul-Ayn at Badasht, and their real nature and what they meant. 3 The Mohammedan historians openly accuse them of immorality. The Sheikh of Kum, a Bahai, told Professor Browne,
After the Bab had declared the law of Islam abrogated and before he had promulgated new ordinances, there ensued a period of transition which we call fitrat (the interval), during which all things were lawful. So long as this continued, Kurrat-ul-Ayn may very possibly have consorted, for example, with Hazret-i-Kuddus, as though he had been her husband.
It may be that the scandals that followed Kurrat- ul-Ayn’s venture into public life and her tragic death in the cruel reprisals that followed the attempt of several Babis to assassinate the Shah, gave a backset to the efforts to liberate women in Persia. Certain it is that during the sixty years succeeding she has had no imitator or successor. Bahai women have continued to wear the veil and have remained secluded from the society of men, not only in Persiabut at Acca, the headquarters of Bahaism. The force of the new faith was not strong enough to free the women. Rather .they have compromised with their environment. Only in the Caucasus and Trans-Caspia under Russian protection, have they partly unveiled. Not even their women of the second and third generation have been trained to act up to their precepts, but in Acca, as in Persia, they are secluded from the society of even brethren in the faith. T…
