Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Mohammad Norozi, Hajji Sulayman Khan Tabrizi, bahai-library.com.
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Hajji Sulayman Khan Tabrizi: a devout follower of the Bab with
Qajar court connections

What follows is a brief account of one the heroes in the Babi
history who followed the Bab earnestly and finally sacrificed his
life in His path (extracted and modified from “To dance like
Solomon: imitation and martyrdom in a Qajar ghazal” by Dominic
Parviz Brookshaw).
Compiled by: Mohammad Norozi

Hajji Sulayman Khan Tabrizi (d. 1852), the prominent Babi was the son of Yahya Khan,
a nobleman of Tabriz and commander of the royal stewards of the Crown Prince,
‘Abbas Mirza (d. 1833), who subsequently served in a similar capacity under
Muhammad Shah (r. 1834-1848). From an early age, Sulayman Khan showed no
interest in government or court position, preferring to journey to Karbala where he
frequented Sayyid Kazim Rashti’s lectures. Though he may have met the Bab in
Mecca while on Hajj in 1844, Sulayman Khan is thought to have become a Babi later,
possibly during a second journey to Iraq. Back in Tabriz, Sulayman Khan openly
praised the Bab in verse and proclaimed the new religion. He was arrested and was
to be taken to Tehran when his mother, Hajjiya Khanum, who was much respected by
the local authorities, appealed to the governor and demanded her son be allowed to
stay in Tabriz. After the Bab was transferred to the remote fortress at Chihriq in
Azerbaijan in the spring of 1848, Sulayman Khan managed to disguise himself and
enter the prison to enjoy an audience with the Bab. In early 1849, Sulayman Khan
ventured to join his fellow Babis in their struggle at Shaykh Tabarsi but by the time he
reached Tehran, the siege was over. Sulayman Khan remained in Tehran but refused
government position and associated continually with other leading Babis, seeking out
the few that had survived Shaykh Tabarsi.
In 1850, in collaboration with Baha’ullah, Sulayman Khan tried to reverse the death
sentence imposed on the Bab. When Sulayman Khan learned that the Bab was due
to be executed, Baha’ullah urged him to hurry to his hometown. Sulayman Khan
arrived in Tabriz on 10th July 1850, the day after the Bab was martyred. Learning that
the Bab’s remains had been deposited beside the moat beyond the city walls where
they were under armed guard, Sulayman Khan approached the city’s mayor, Hajji
Mirza Mihdi Baghmisha’i, for help. The mayor, a Sufi who was an old friend of
Sulayman Khan, enlisted the assistance of a certain Hajji Allahyar Khan. A much-
feared gang leader, Allahyar Khan intimidated the guards and facilitated Sulayman
Khan’s retrieval of the Bab’s remains on the second night following his execution.
Sulayman Khan took the remains to a silk factory owned by a Babi where he wrapped
them in silk and placed them in a wooden casket. From Azerbaijan, under Baha’ullah’s
instructions, Sulayman Khan transferred the wooden casket to Tehran where it was
hidden in various shrines and private homes in and around the capital for more than
four decades before being transported to Palestine and ultimately buried on Mount
Carmel in Haifa in 1909.
In 1850, Sulayman Khan’s brother, Farrukh Khan, who was sent to Zanjan to crush
the Babi uprising, was killed by followers of the town’s leading Babi, Hujjat
(interestingly, Sulayman Khan and Farrukh Khan’s sister, Khan Qizi, was herself a
committed Babi). The shah’s chief minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir (1807-1852),
though he knew of Sulayman Khan’s Babi leanings, tolerated him, and by 1851,
Sulayman Khan was hosting large gatherings of Babis in his residences in Central
Tehran and nearby Dizashib. Traumatized by successive massacres of Babis at
Shaykh Tabarsi, Nayriz, and Zanjan, and the execution of the Bab himself, Tehran’s
Babis gathered around various claimants to leadership. Many looked to Shaykh ‘Ali
‘Azim and to Husayn Jan Milani, who set about orchestrating the failed attempt on the
life of Nasir al-Din Shah on 15 August 1852. Following this unsuccessful assassination
attempt, Sulayman Khan’s Tehran house was raided and he was arrested along with
twelve other Babis suspected of involvement in the regicidal plot. In all around thirty of
Tehran’s leading Babis were soon put to death in frightful circumstances after being
subjected to various judicial tortures. The majority of the mob lynchings and executions
took place within a week of the attempt on the life of the shah (so between 16 and 22
August 1852). Though cleared of all wrongdoing, Sulayman Khan was executed in a
cruel and gruesome manner that, as Amanat notes, earned him a special place in the
chronicles of the Babi martyrs.
By 1850, the royal court concluded that the Babi movement constituted a dangerous
revolutionary menace to the Qajar state that needed to be eradicated entirely. The
Babi bloodbath that followed, Amanat says, “set new standards for cruelty and sadistic
frenzy.” Thus began the ‘ulama’s extensive and comprehensive persecution of the
Babis that at times involved the enforced participation of the Iranian people in the
extermination of the Bab’s followers. The notorious Hajib al-Dawla (the chief court
chamberlain, ‘Ali Khan Maragha’i; d. 1867) had been instructed by the shah that, if
assured of Sulayman Khan’s innocence, he should persuade him to recant. If he did
so, Sulayman Khan’s life was to be spared. The Hajib al-Dawla found Sulayman Khan
to be innocent but, since he refused to deny his faith in the Bab, the shah ordered he
be put to death; the one concession being that Sulayman Khan could choose the
manner of his execution. Zarandi’s account of the tortures inflicted on Sulayman Khan
and the gruesome details of his martyrdom is based largely on information provided
to him by Baha’ullah’s full brother, Mirza Musa Nuri.
Sulayman Khan was conducted southwards from the vicinity of the Gulistan Palace
through the bazaar via the Darvaza-yi Naw (the southerly city gate built by Muhammad
Shah also known as Darvaza-yi Muhammadiya), to an open area just beyond the walls
that came to be called Maydan-i I‘dam (Execution Square). The bazaar quarter, with
its many mosques, shrines, and takyas (buildings used for mourning rituals during
Muharram), was the center of socio-religious life in early Qajar Tehran and, in effect,
an open air public performance space for the Muharram mourning processions (dasta-
gardānī). Given the popularity of such events at all levels of Qajar society, the
spectacle of Sulayman Khan’s real-life martyrdom unfolding as he was paraded
through the streets may have appealed to Tehran’s majority Shi‘i population. Sulayman
Khan was taken on a long procession around the alleyways of the bazaar from morning
until nightfall. And since the capital’s Azeri residents lived predominantly in the bazaar
quarter, this meant that Sulayman Khan was marched to his death past throngs of his
fellow Tabrizis.
Being led around the city streets formed the basis of tashhīr, punishment by exposure
aimed at publicizing the accused’s infamy with the goal of inciting ridicule.
In accordance with Sulayman Khan’s wishes, burning candles were inserted into
wounds made in his flesh in a barbaric torture method called sham‘-ājīn (lit. stitched
or sewn with candles). Once the lighted candles had been inserted into the cuts in his
body, Sulayman Khan asked to be conducted through Tehran so that the populace
might witness his torment (his motivation being that the intensity of his suffering may
inspire them to recognize the validity of the Bab’s claims). Though often used as a
degrading torture method, sham‘-ājīn was also one of the more violent self- mutilations
(alongside qama zadan and tīgh zadan [self-laceration performed with a short blade,
typically on the forehead and scalp]) performed by men as pious penance or as a way
of fulfilling a vow (nazr). This self-reflexive aspect of the devotional form of sham‘-ājīn
potentially prompted Sulayman Khan to choose this specific form of torture for his own
execution.
When the executioner hesitated to make the incisions, Sulayman Khan attempted to
snatch the knife to cut into his own flesh. The executioner then ordered his men to tie
the victim’s hands behind his back and to cut a total of nine deep holes in Sulayman
Khan’s naked flesh: two in his chest, two in his shoulders, one in the nape of his neck,
and four others in his back. In each wound, the guards inserted a burning candle and
then processed him with much pomp and gaiety through the bazaar to the rhythm of
music played by minstrels blowing long horns and beating large drums. Some
accounts say this carnivalesque cavalcade was accompanied by dancers, and even
by trained monkeys and bears (used to humiliate the victims and entertain the crowds).
Throughout his ordeal, Sulayman Khan displayed stoic fortitude. Followed on his
march by a large crowd, Sulayman Khan was goaded by bystanders to dance. He is
said to have been unperturbed by the screams of the curious male and female
spectators who gathered in large numbers to watch the gory spectacle and hurl dust
and ashes upon him. Active crowd participation was encouraged: spectators were
prompted to insult and molest Sulayman Khan or to reward the executioners as a sign
of their loyalty to the shah. Yet even the sight of his own blood gushing from his wounds
did not diminish Sulayman Khan’s courageous resolve. Interrupting this macabre
parade, Sulayman Khan frequently paused to address the bystanders, to glorify the
Bab, and to recite verses from the Qur’an. A poet of some talent, Sulayman Khan is
said to have recited poetry during his torture, including
the following bayt adapted from the opening hemistich of a ghazal by Rumi:
‫باز آمدم باز آمدم از راه شیراز آ مد م‬
‫با عشوه و ناز آمدم هذا جنون العاشق‬
I have returned, I have returned, I have come back by way of Shiraz.
I have come with coquetry and charm; such is the lover’s insanity!
Here Sulayman Khan alludes to his beloved, the Bab, by modifying Rumi’s az pīsh-i
ān yār (“from the presence of that dear friend”) to az rāh-i Shīrāz (“by way of Shiraz”),
an allusion to the Bab’s hometown and the birthplace of the Babi movement.
According to another account, Sulayman Khan, appearing to delight in seeing the
candles flicker in his bleeding wounds, whenever one of the candles fell, would pick it
up, light it from one of the still burning candles, and reposition it. The breeze blowing
through the bazaar increased the intensity of the burning of the candles and, as they
melted and their flames reached the level of the incisions, those nearby could hear the
sizzling of Sulayman Khan’s flesh. The wicks are said to have burned so deep that,
“the fat flickered convulsively in the wound like a newly-extinguished lamp.” No longer
sensitive to the sting of the fire and indifferent to the pain to which he was subjected,
Sulayman Khan, enveloped by the flames, “walked as a conqueror might have
marched to the scene of his victory.”
The executioner mocked Sulayman Khan and asked him why he does not dance when
he finds death so pleasant. Having arrived at the open space beyond Darvaza-yi Naw,
Sulayman Khan once again addressed the crowd, prostrated himself in the direction
of Imamzada Hasan, murmured something in Arabic, and instructed the executioner
to do his work. It was then that his long and painful death reached its climax when he
was sawn into two halves. His scorched, blood-soaked remains, as per his request,
were then suspended on either side of the city gate. According to the Hungarian
Persianist, Ármin Vámbéry (1832-1913), Sulayman Khan’s bare feet were shod with
horseshoes, and his teeth were all pulled out shortly before he was cleaved in two.
The cruelty, barbarity, and violence of the agonies inflicted on Babi victims prior to
execution were noted by the British envoy to Iran, Sir Justin Sheil, in a dispatch dated
22 August 1852 in which he reports, “About ten persons have been executed, some
with circumstances of great cruelty. Lighted candles have been stuck into the bodies
of two or three, and after being allowed to linger, they have been halved with a hatchet
while still alive …
Of Sulayman Khan’s gory ordeal in the streets of south Tehran, Lady Sheil writes,
“During these horrific tortures he is said to have preserved his fortitude to the last, and
to have danced to the place of execution in defiance of his tormentors, and of the
agony caused by the burning candles … ”

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