nts
within it saw an opportunity at last to destroy the Iranian Baha'i
community.(137) The harrowing details of the campaign that followed need
no review here. Their significance lies, rather, in the response made to
these attacks by thousands of individual Baha'is--men, women and
children--throughout the country. Their refusal to compromise their faith,
even at the cost of their lives, inspired in their fellow believers
throughout the world a heightened dedication to the Cause for which these
sacrifices were being made. It was not, however, only the members of the
Faith who were affected by these events. Decades earlier, in 1889, a
distinguished Western commentator on the heroism of the dawn-breakers of
the Faith had prophetically written of the sufferings of the early
believers:

It is the lives and deaths of these, their hope which knows no despair,
their love which knows no cooling, their steadfastness which knows no
wavering, which stamp this wonderful movement with a character entirely
its own.... It is not a small or easy thing to endure what these have
endured, and surely what they deemed worth life itself is worth trying to
understand. I say nothing of the mighty influence which, as I believe, the
Babi [sic] faith will exert in the future, nor of the new life it may
perchance breathe into a dead people; for, whether it succeed or fail, the
splendid heroism of the Babi martyrs is a thing eternal and
indestructible.... But what I cannot hope to have conveyed to you is the
terrible earnestness of these men, and the indescribable influence which
this earnestness, combined with other qualities, exerts on any one who has
actually been brought in contact with them.(138)

These words prefigured the rise of a similar sentiment among non-Baha'i
observers during the Islamic revolutionary years; and this was to become
one of the most powerful forces propelling the emergence of the Cause from
obscurity. Captured in those early words, too, was the fundamentally
spiritual nature of what has always been at stake in the cradle of the
Faith. Beyond a revulsion at the senseless brutality of the persecution, a
growing body of foreign opinion has been profoundly moved by the response
of the Iranian Baha'is.

The twentieth century has, alas, been overwhelmed by the suffering of
countless victims of oppression. What made the Baha'i situation unique was
the attitude adopted by those who endured the suffering. The Iranian
believers