ved.

"The dark blue and white domes"--an allusion by 'Abdu'l-Baha to the rotund
and massive headgears of the priests of Persia--had indeed been "inverted."
Those whose heads had borne them, the arrogant, fanatical, perfidious, and
retrograde clericals, "in the grasp of whose authority," as testified by
Baha'u'llah, "were held the reins of the people," whose "words are the
pride of the world," and whose "deeds are the shame of the nations,"
recognizing the wretchedness of their state, betook themselves,
crestfallen and destitute of hope, to their homes, there to drag out a
miserable existence. Impotent and sullen, they are watching the operations
of a process which, having reversed their policy and ruined their
handiwork, is irresistibly moving towards a climax.

The pomp and pageantry of these princes of the church of Islam has already
died out. Their fanatical outcries, their clamorous invocations, their
noisy demonstrations, are stilled. Their fatvas (sentences), pronounced
with such shamelessness, and at times embracing the denunciation of kings,
are a dead letter. The spectacular sight of congregational prayers, in
which thousands of worshipers, lined row upon row, participated, has
vanished. The pulpits from whence they discharged the thunder of their
anathemas against the powerful and the innocent alike, are deserted and
silent. Their waqfs, those priceless and far-flung endowments--the landed
property of the expected Imam--which in Isfahan alone at one time embraced
the whole of the city, have been wrested out of their hands, and brought
under the control of a lay administration. Their madrasihs (seminaries),
with their medieval learning, are deserted and dilapidated. The
innumerable tomes of theological commentaries, super-commentaries,
glosses, and notes, unreadable, unprofitable, the product of misdirected
ingenuity and toil, and pronounced by one of the most enlightened Islamic
thinkers in modern times as works obscuring sound knowledge, breeding
maggots, and fit for fire, are now buried away, overspread with cobwebs,
and forgotten. Their abstruse dissertations, their vehement controversies,
their interminable discussions, are outmoded and abandoned. Their masjids
(mosques) and imam-zadihs (tombs of saints), which were privileged to
extend the bast (right of sanctuary) to many a criminal, and which had
degenerated into a monstrous scandal, whose walls rang with the
intonations of a hypocritical and profligat