A clamor,
unparalleled in the history of _Sh_i'ih Islam, greeted, in the land of its
birth, the infant light of the Faith, in the midst of a people notorious
for its crass ignorance, its fierce fanaticism, its barbaric cruelty, its
ingrained prejudices, and the unlimited sway held over the masses by a
firmly entrenched ecclesiastical hierarchy. A persecution, kindling a
courage which, as attested by no less eminent an authority than the late
Lord Curzon of Kedleston, has been unsurpassed by that which the fires of
Smithfield evoked, mowed down, with tragic swiftness, no less than twenty
thousand of its heroic adherents, who refused to barter their newly born
faith for the fleeting honors and security of a mortal life.

To the bodily agonies inflicted upon these sufferers, the charges, so
unmerited, of Nihilism, occultism, anarchism, eclecticism, immorality,
sectarianism, heresy, political partisanship--each conclusively disproved
by the tenets of the Faith itself and by the conduct of its followers--were
added, swelling thereby the number of those who, unwittingly or
maliciously, were injuring its cause.

Unmitigated indifference on the part of men of eminence and rank;
unrelenting hatred shown by the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the Faith
from which it had sprung; the scornful derision of the people among whom
it was born; the utter contempt which most of those kings and rulers who
had been addressed by its Author manifested towards it; the condemnations
pronounced, the threats hurled, and the banishments decreed by those under
whose sway it arose and first spread; the distortion to which its
principles and laws were subjected by the envious and the malicious, in
lands and among peoples far beyond the country of its origin--all these are
but the evidences of the treatment meted out by a generation sunk in
self-content, careless of its God, and oblivious of the omens, prophecies,
warnings and admonitions revealed by His Messengers.

The blows so heavily dealt the followers of so precious, so glorious, so
potent a Faith failed, however, to assuage the animosity that inflamed its
persecutors. Nor did the deliberate and mischievous misrepresentations of
its fundamental teachings, its aims and purposes, its hopes and
aspirations, its institutions and activities, suffice to stay the hand of
the oppressor and the calumniator, who sought by every means in their
power to abolish its name and extirpate its system. The hand whi