Many of these martyrs died with verses of poetry on their lips. Sulaymán Khán, with wicks flaming in his mangled body, sang:

<text in Arabic script omitted>

“In one hand the wine-cup, in the other the tresses of the Friend,
Such a dance in the midst of the market-place is my desire.”

One of the “Seven Martyrs” exclaimed, when the headsman's sword, missing its stroke, dashed his turban to the ground:

<text in Arabic script omitted>

“Happy that intoxicated lover who at the feet of the Friend
Knows not whether it be head or turban which he casts.”

Of the ancient Arabs Wilfrid Blunt well says: * “Their courage was of a different quality, perhaps, from that Characteristics of Arabian and Persian courage. admired among ourselves. It was the valour of a nervous, excitable people who required encouragement from onlookers and from their own voices to do their best…,” and the same holds good to some extent of the Persians. Poetry is called “Lawful Magic” (Siḥr-i-Ḥalál) because, in the words of the author of the Chahár Maqála, * it is “that art whereby the poet… can make a little thing appear great and a great thing small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in the form of good…in such a way that by his suggestion men's temperaments become affected with depression or exaltation; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great things in the order of the world.”

The Karbalá legend is a potent factor in producing in these martyrs the psychological state which makes them not only endure with fortitude but glory in their sufferings. In one of the two celebrated poems ascribed to the Bábí heroine Qurratu'l-'Ayn, * who was one of the victims of the great persecution of August, 1852, occurs the verse: * <text in Arabic script omitted>

“For me the love of that fair-faced Moon who, when the call of
affliction came to him,
Went down with exultation and laughter, crying, ‘I am the Martyr
at Karbalá!’”

In its original and primitive form Bábíism was Shí'ism of the most exaggerated type, and the Báb himself the ‘Gate’

Primitive Bábíism essentially Shí'ite in its Weltanschauung. to the unseen Imám or Mahdí. Gradually he came to regard himself as actually the Imám; then he became the ‘Point’ (Nuqṭa), an actual Manifestation of the Supreme Being, and his chief disciples became re-incarnations, or rather “returns” or “recurrences” of the Imáms, and the whole tragedy of Karbalá was re-enacted “in a new horizon” at Shaykh Ṭabarsí in Mázandarán. The nineteen chapters constituting the first “Unity” (Wáḥid) of the Persian Bayán (the most intelligible and systematic of the Báb's writings) are entirely devoted to the thesis that all the protagonists of the Islamic Cycle have returned in this cycle to the life of the world, and Ḥájji Mírzá Jání, the earliest Bábí historian and himself a victim of the persecution of 1852, gives a long comparison between Karbalá and Shaykh Ṭabarsí, greatly in favour of the latter.

In the eleventh and last section of my Materials for the Study of the Bábí Religion (pp. 341-58) I published Mírzá Na'ím, the Bahá'í poet of Si-dih. a selection of Bábí and Bahá'í poems, and here I will only add to these a qaṣída comprising 133 verses composed in the spring of 1885 by Mírzá Na'ím * of Si-dih near Iṣfahán, an ardent Bahá'í, whose son, as I lately heard from a friend in the British Legation at Ṭihrán, is still resident there. Mírzá Na'ím sent me an autograph copy of this poem in the summer of 1902 through my late friend George Grahame, and in the concluding colophon he states that he was born at Si-dih in 1272/ 1855-6 and came to Ṭihrán in 1304/1886-7. The poem is so long that I originally intended only to give extracts from it, but, finding that this could not be done without injury to the sequence of ideas, I have decided to print it in full as a typical Bahá'í utterance having the authority of an autograph.