Did Abdul Baha personally oversee the murder of Siyyid Muhammad Isfahani?

submitted by wahidazal66

In his marginalia and commentary on tarjumih-i-tārīkh-i-bābīyih (A translation of the history of Babism from Russian into Persian), Shaykh Maḥdī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm Kirmānī contends that the murder of Hājjī Siyyid Muḥammad Iṣfahānī (d. 1869-70) took place at the hands of ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ personally who was accompanied by three accomplices who helped him in the deed. He alleges that one of the wives of Ṣubḥ-i-Azal who had been banished by the Ottomans to Acre alongside the Bahāʾīs, namely Badr Jahān Khānūm (the sister of Mīrzā Riḍā-Qulī Tafrishī, also killed by the Bahāʾīs), was a personal eyewitness to the event, see Princeton University, William M. Miller Bābī MSS Collection, Islamic Manuscripts, Third Series, No. 261, vol. 36, folio 60a-b (paginated at 117 and 118). However, we note here that this attribution of the murder of Hājjī Siyyid Muḥammad Iṣfahānī directly to ʿAbdu’l-Bahāʾ is Shaykh Maḥdī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm Kirmānī’s own contention and is not one that, to our knowledge, other Bayānī sources have explicitly made. Be that as it may, E.G. Browne observes that this event was viewed with some level of complaisance by the Bahāʾī founder, where he also quotes (in the original as well as in translation) one of Bahāʾuʾllāh’s own epistles from the period addressed to one of his disciples where he is quoted as saying, “O phlebotomist of the Divine Unity! Throb like the artery in the body of the Contingent World, and drink of the blood of the Block of Heedlessness for that he turned aside from the aspect of thy Lord the Merciful!,” see A Travellers Narrative Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Bāb, Volume 2, Note W, 359, 363 and 370.