Chapter XXII: Appendix: 6

LORD PALMERSTON'S ENQUIRY

Lord Palmerston wrote to Sheil on May 2nd 1850:

'I have to instruct you to furnish me with a more detailed account than that contained in your despatch No. 20, of the 12th of February, of the difference between the tenets of the new sect of Bab, and those of the established religion of Persia.'[1]

Sheil answered Lord Palmerston on June 21st:

'In conformity with Your Lordship's instructions I have the honor to enclose an account of the new Sect of Bab--The statement contained in the enclosure numbered No. 1 is taken from an account given to me by a disciple of Bab, and which I have no doubt is correct. The other is extracted from a letter from a chief Priest in Yezd, and cannot be trusted--

'This is the simplest of religions. Its tenets are summed up in materialism, communism, and the absolute indifference of good and evil, and of all human actions.'[2]

Unfortunately both accounts sent to Palmerston are highly inaccurate. Moreover, Sheil's own comments indicate that he himself did not have an open mind. Plainly the account given to him, as he had stated, 'by a disciple of Bab', was not a verbatim rendering into English, but a reconstruction with interpolations, as witnessed by these two sentences: 'They believe in Mahomed as a Prophet and in the divine origin of the Koran: but Bâb contends that until this moment only the apparent meaning of the Koran was understood and that he has come to explain the real secret and divine essence of God's word. But it will be seen in a subsequent part of this account that the words _Prophet_ and _Divine origin_ have no signification.' Further evidence is provided by Sheil's rough notes with marginal additions[3] from which the account by a Bábí is drawn.

What disciple of the Báb would say: 'The intercourse of the sexes is very nearly promiscuous--There is no form of marriage; a man and woman live together as long as they please and no longer, and if another man desires to have possession of that woman, it rests with her, not with the man who has been her husband, if he can be so termed:--A man may have wives without limit; a woman has a similar licence.' This Bábí, unless his account was garnished, was either a nihilist of sorts, or totally ignorant of what the teaching of the Báb was.

Equally extraordinary, confused and contrary to the Writings of the Báb in the Persian and Arabic _Bayán_ are the following lines in that account by a Bábí: 'There is no hell or heaven, therefore there is no hereafter--annihilation is man's doom in fact--he with every living and vegetable thing, in short everything whatever, will be absorbed in the Divinity--Everything is God, and therefore _absorbed_, which is the phrase of the Soofees, who consider every thing is a reflection of God--Hell is suffered and heaven is enjoyed in this world; but there is no such thing as crime, nor of course virtue, only as they concern the relations of man and man in this world. A man's will is his Law in all things....

'The most absolute materialism seems to form the essence of their belief--God is one--Every individual substance and particle, living or not, is God, and the whole is God--and every individual thing, always was, always is, and always will be.'[4]

The account by the Chief Priest of Yazd, which was a vitriolic attack on the Báb and Vaḥíd, and which Sheil had ruled out in his letter to the Foreign Secretary as 'cannot be trusted', was not dissimilar, in some respects, to the account by 'a disciple of Bab'.

These extracts make it clear how misinformed was Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, by the reports of his representative in Ṭihrán.