One summer in 1956, Mahin Ahdieh, a Baha’i from Nayriz, took her young nephew Hussein, for a trip to show him cities and sites associated with the history of the Faith and the beauty of Northern Iran.
They stayed with Baha’i families or at local Baha’i centers which rented them rooms. The itinerary started with a train ride from Tihran northwest up into the mountains bound for Qazvin.
The Trans-Iranian Railway
Qazvin had been the home of three of the Bab’s Letters of the Living, most notably the only female, Tahereh. She suffered greatly at the hands of her father-in-law and her husband who attempted to silence her by using their ecclesiastical authority.
Her devotion to the Bab transcended the violent reprisals against the Babis in Qazvin that followed her father-in-law’s murder in 1847. After her departure, her memory was blotted out in Qazvin, but her poems of spiritual longing continued to circulate throughout Persia.
Many prominent Babis, merchants and citizens came to accept the new claims of Baha’u’llah whose influence reached leaders of the Kurdish Mafi tribe. They may have followed the Ahl-i Haqq religious sect which accepted the concept of the continuity of Revelation.
Several Sufi dervishes—mystics who practiced asceticism—also accepted the Faith.
A Zoroastrian priest visiting Qazvin in 1920 noted that all the Zoroastrians he met had converted to the Baha’i faith. After persecutions, the Baha’i community of Qazvin regained its vigor by the turn of the century, founding the Tavakkul School in 1908, and its sister school in 1910.
Qazvin became a pulsing center of religious practice after the arrival of Islam. It attracted mystics, legal scholars, and philosophers and spurred the construction of mosques, including a magnificent central mosque that dated back to the 9thc.
Qazvin had been the capital of Persia in the 16th century. Situated on the road from the Caspian Sea to the highland, the city’s economy grew from trade. Its location also gave it a more diverse population and history that included the tombs of four Jewish saints, a large Azeri population, and the presence of Russian Cossacks who built St. Nicolas Orthodox Church, a hospital and a road connecting Qazvin to Tihran and Hamedan.
Qazvin, Iran