In Your name, O God. To the released and unsuccessful rebel, the covenant-breaker who has disobeyed; to the man incapable of honorable obedience, who has run instead toward falsehood and flight; to the inventor of lies, division and discord, who has walked the road of treachery and hypocrisy.
Miserable man! After you were given respite your deeds have brought ruin upon you. As the interval grew longer your defects came into view. Wisdom has disclosed the disobedience concealed in your breast; the conditions of the Resurrection have brought into the open the baseness of your inward intentions. Your chosen belief, empty of true knowledge, has shown what you really harbor. You were once hardly a thing worth mentioning, and you have forgotten your origin. Yet you now claim extraordinary standing through the very teaching by which your conduct has made you a rejected and dishonored man.
Have you forgotten the time when the people you approached cast you away? Two of the ranks to which you appealed rejected you and threw you out; they left you without helper, deprived of strength or secure refuge. You returned to me seeking protection. I answered your cry, strengthened you when you had become feeble, defended you when humiliated, guided you when in error, and opened your eyes when you were blind. When you made your wish known, I repaired your broken condition, accepted your appeal, answered your prayers, and bestowed upon you what the Guardian of Religion had bestowed upon me for your well-being in this life and the next.
I granted you a standing above your expectations and beyond what you had hoped to obtain. I appointed you to address tribes and clans, made your name conspicuous in correspondence and epistles, and gave you the title of the Traveling Star to elevate you among the most honorable of the ranks. Through the favor of the true Guardian I supported you with the knowledge and means of the Call. I established the proof before you when he appeared and you accepted his command; and I sent you on your traveling mission, as the Guardian of truth commanded me, to the districts and regions in which your work could bring benefit. By his strength I prepared the lands before you and conferred upon you the means of speech and action.
But your weak soul and corrupt acts kept you from the service entrusted to you. Your evil intention and ancient errors deprived you of the power to fulfill it. Instead, you welcomed comfort and so-called permissiveness and invented innovations as the devil had done. You forsook the truth, manufactured a new doctrine, and reverted to the base element from which you had been delivered. By your conduct you denied the very favor whose administration had been entrusted to you, although its visible signs attest to your breach.
You met the light of that favor with the darkness of lying. You went back to believing in the imamate of the pretender, that foolish claimant, and denied the standing Imam of the Age. You severed what the Creator had commanded to be joined and sought to extinguish the light through which the Qāʾim of Religion had demolished the institutions of liars, opponents and tyrants. That light had brought the false idols down and humbled the deniers. But you embraced the very people from whom you had been delivered.
You have not retained the Guardian's teachings and signs except for the testimony they now offer against your own lies and contradictions. Remember what he commanded in the Letter of the Traveling Star, rebuking deceit, disobedience and stubbornness: 'If you understood the truthfulness of the tongue and the protection of the brethren that you were bound to observe, you would distinguish truth from falsehood and denial from faith.' Faith in the Arabic language means genuine acceptance and verification. A man who is untruthful with his tongue has even less truthfulness in his heart, weaker certainty and greater hypocrisy.
Truthfulness is the fullness of faith; lying is associationism and error. Whoever lies to his believing brother lies to his Caller. Whoever lies to his Caller lies to his Imam. Whoever lies to his Imam lies to our Lord, denies His grace and deserves His anger. Whoever attributes to his brother a statement he never made, alters his speech, permits him what his Imam forbade, or says of our Lord what should not even be said of His servant has renounced true favor and faith and manifested disbelief. Whoever opposes the servant of our Lord, the standing Imam of the Age, has disobeyed the Lord Himself even if he maintains that he worships none but that Lord. Whoever falsifies the Imam's or another rank's words and claims that the Lord is unaware of the lie has excluded himself from the company of the Unitarians.
These are the words you once learned and repeated. You have thus been judged by the standard you acknowledged. By the truth itself, you lied to your Caller, to whom you had promised truthful speech. You deceived the people of religion and abandoned the rights of the brethren. The discerning Unitarians can now distinguish the truth from the falsehood, and the believers from those who deny. By your public lying you have shown that your tongue is not truthful and your heart cannot hold firm conviction.
Your lying against your appointed guide is worse than lying against an ordinary brother. You have fallen from the company of truthful believers into the party of associators and hypocrites. Your false reports about the Guardian of the Age and the persons of his ranks deny the grace that raised you. You appointed men of your own choosing to offices and judicial positions within a Call which had already abrogated the religious laws, and presented these appointments as though they flowed from genuine authority.
You introduced among the people entrusted to your direction a doctrine of ibāḥa, license or indiscriminate permission, along with lies and arbitrary alteration. You taught them to commit acts they had previously treated as prohibited, to follow illicit attachments, to corrupt their communal obligations, to violate what was held inviolable, and to kill children. You went beyond even these innovations, treating the divine trust as a thing to be broken, until your own followers' breaches of the faith could no longer be concealed.
Everyone knows that the possessed servant relieved you of your appointment and removed two companions alongside you. Who, after that removal, authorized you to speak in the name of the Call or to appoint officials? You and your associates are pretenders, not lawful representatives. What are you and those like you but an evil tree, uprooted from the face of the earth, with no firm place to stand? You have invented falsehood, denied faith, openly embraced apostasy, lies, unbelief and tyranny, and cast away the Guardian who first supported you.
You returned again to the people from whom I had removed you, flattering them with fabricated miracles and extraordinary signs. You claimed to have visited the Qāʾim and found his son seated at his right hand. You said you had entered upon al-Riḍā, 'ambassador of power and herald to the believers'. You then spoke of your wonders, saying that you had been burned twelve times for the religion of tawḥīd. These statements were among your new inventions for winning followers.
You even wrote to the brethren, purporting to inform them of the ranks they had occupied in former ages and saying that, but for your compassion, you could tell them their ranks in this age and in the ages yet to come. They disowned you and whoever attached himself to you, and sought vindication before the Lord and His Guardian against the errors you had spread among them.
What made you a pretender, unfortunate and overturned? How did your passions so master you and blind you? You have damaged your present life and the life to come. Was the problem a deficiency in what you had been taught? No; it was the corrupt disposition that the interval of testing brought to the surface. The teaching was supplied; you chose to apply it falsely.
You and your companions resemble an emaciated donkey turning a waterwheel to irrigate an orchard, or a mule walking in a mill. Both seem to move forward with great effort but remain bound to a circular labor, turning the wheel for the benefit of others. They produce the finest food and fruit yet obtain only barley and fodder for their work. So you, with all your words about wisdom, have failed to attain the benefit of what you learned and have returned to a miserable state. Your learning was not defective because it was too little, but because it was employed in deceit.
Now I have composed this letter of rebuke against the people of defiance, dissent, lying and disobedience, after explaining what has been said about you and your deeds and showing you the just measure of your conduct. Yet even now the more suitable course for you is to repent of your pretensions. Seek forgiveness and return while the Guardian's protection has not been withdrawn and your return might still be heard and accepted. Do this before the doors of the truth are shut in your face and your name becomes a curse upon the tongues of all people.
If you persist, correspondence will be sent to the regions recounting your defection, and those who once honored and followed you will disown you. Your rivals will rejoice in your downfall, your reputation will be extinguished, and the company you deceived will abandon you. Listen instead to the guidance of the sincere servant and the counsel of the standing Imam's possession. Cast off the garment of falsehood, remove from yourself the cloak of hypocrisy and domination, and accept the discipline of truth. I have acted with restraint and endured your ignorance despite the justice of the charge against you.
If you return to the Guardian, confess your wrong and abandon your false claims, the servant will ask his Lord to overlook your wrongdoing, forgive the excess of your transgression and cover your faults. He is gentler to you than you are to yourself in those false devices, more just and compassionate to you than any father or mother in all their ways of care and counsel. But if you continue in rebellion and disbelief, your wasted efforts will lead only to the day of retribution that you cannot avoid.
Praise belongs to the Lord who frustrates the plots of treacherous transgressors, exposes the unbelieving hypocrites and reveals what their breasts conceal at the hour of distinction. Peace rests upon the Intellect of the worlds, the Guide of the nations, the Imam of justice, the Qāʾim of Religion, the Master of the Covenant who takes vengeance against the rebels by the sword of the Most High. He suffices me; the Qāʾim of Religion, holder of command and prohibition, is my trust.
The rebuke is complete. Praise to our Lord alone, and thanks to the Qāʾim of the Age, His servant.