Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
Preface
toward the
Master. ‘Who is that Persian nobleman?’ he asked. ‘That,’ answered Hippolyte, ‘is
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’ And now Ẓillu’s-Sulṭán spoke very humbly. ‘Take me to Him,’ he begged. Hippolyte told me all about it. ‘If you could have seen the brute, Juliet, mumbling out his miserable excuses! But the Master took him in His arms and said, ‘All those things are in the past. Never think of them again.’"
The two brothers who were put to death by “
The Wolf” and his accomplice are known to Bahá’ís as the
King of Martyrs and the
Beloved of Martyrs. They are also referred to as the Twin Shining Lights. Their names were Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥasan and Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥusayn, and they were
siyyids—descendants of the Prophet
Muḥammad. In after years a special link associated them with the West, because in 1933 the American
Keith Ransom-Kehler, representing her country’s
National Bahá’í Assembly, visited their graves and placed flowers there. Not many days afterwards she fell ill of smallpox and died, and her body was brought back and laid in the neighborhood of theirs.
This present book is addressed to the son of the man who murdered the Twin Shining Lights, the Son of the Wolf. He was called
Shaykh Muḥammad Taqíy-i-Najafí. A
Muslim cleric of
Iṣfahán, he and his pupils kicked and trampled the corpse of
Mírzá Ashraf, still another Bahá'í who, in 1888, was killed by order of the
mullás of that city. He is often addressed in this text as “O
Shay
kh!.”—this being a title denoting a
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