# Zaynab

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: John Walbridge, Zaynab, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Zaynab
> 
> John Walbridge
> 
> Reina Pennington, editor
> published in Amazons to fighter pilots, a biographical dictionary of military women pp. 503-504
> 
> Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003
> 
> ZAYNAB (killed 1850, Zanjan). Known as "Rustam-'Ali." Babi irregular fighter in the Babi urban revolt in Zanjan, Iran, 1850.
> 
> The Babis were the followers of the Iranian prophet Sayyid 'Ali-Muhammad Shirazi, usually known as the Bab (1819-50). After he
> announced his prophecy in 1844, his religion soon attracted bitter
> persecution by civil and religious authorities. In three places where
> there were significant concentrations of Babis, there was open fighting.
> The largest such conflict was in Zanjan, a small but strategic town in
> northwestern Iran. Here in 1850 a charismatic cleric known as Hujjat
> Zanjani led some two thousand Babi fighters with their families in an
> eight-month seige. The Babis, who carried out their defence with skill,
> energy, organization, and religious zeal, were aided by the incompetence
> and lack of enthusiasm of the government regular and irregular forces,
> eventually amounting to some 30,000 men. After eight months the Babi
> ranks had been reduced to fewer than a hundred fighters. When Hujjat
> was killed, the Babis surrendered, and most of the surviving men were
> executed. The women and children, after a brief informal imprisonment,
> were released.
> 
> Zaynab was one of two daughters of an elderly Zanjan Babi. When
> their
> father died, her sister married Hujjat and was killed by a shell near
> the end of the siege. Zaynab though protested that the prohibition of
> women fighting in the holy war had been abrogated by the Bab's new
> revelation. Having no brother, she ought to have the right to fight on
> behalf of her family in the holy war (jihad). She was allowed to cut
> her hair, dress in man's clothing and fight under the name of "Rustam-
> 'Ali." She is variously reported as having been in command of a platoon
> of nineteen men guarding a barricade or fighting independently where she
> was needed. She was killed during a sortie, having acquired a
> reputation among both the Babis and the beseiging troops for dash and
> valor.
> 
> Despite rumors that the Babis had "a regiment of virgins," Zaynab was
> evidently atypical. The Babi women did play an important support role
> remarked on by most of the historians of the siege, but for the most
> part they did not fight. In the simultaneous siege of the Babis of
> Nayriz in southern Iran, women also took an active part, but again are
> not recorded as fighting.
> 
> Zaynab, whose story straddles folklore and history, is most important
> as a symbolic figure. The Bab had challenged the very legalistic
> Shi'ite Islam by proclaiming the abrogation of Islamic law and its
> replacement with a new system of religious law. Moreover, many Babis
> believed that they were in an interregnum in which no formal religious
> law applied. Since Islamic law enforced strict gender roles, the
> activities of individuals like Zaynab symbolized to the Babis and their
> Bahá'í successors the liberating quality of the new revelation; to their
> Muslim opponents she personified the danger to the foundations of
> society posed by the new religion.
> 
> It is interesting that one of the Muslim clerics of Zanjan issued a
> ruling during the siege that Muslim women were obliged to participate in
> the jihad in Zanjan. There is no evidence that any did so.
> 
> Bibliography
> 
> Zanjani, Mirza Husayn. "Tarikh-i Waqayi'-i Zanjan," Bahá'í World
> Center MS 1632, pp. 55-56.
> 
> Sipihr, Nasikh al-Tawarikh: Dawra-yi Kamil-i Tarikh-i Qajariya, ed.
> Jahangir Qa'im-Maqami. Tehran: Amir-Kabir, 1344/1965 3:94.
> 
> Nabil Zarandi. The Dawn-Breakers: Nabil's Narrative of the Early
> Days
> of the Bahá'í Revelation. Trans. Shoghi Effendi Rabbani. Wilmette,
> Ill.: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1932, pp. 549-52, 558-59, 563.
> 
> 'Abd al-Ahad Zanjani, Aqa. "Personal Reminiscences of the Babi
> Insurrection in Zanjan in 1850," trans. E. G. Browne, Journal of the
> Royal Asiatic Society 29 (1897) 761-827.
> 
> METADATA
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> Views19534 views since posted 2000; last edit 2025-01-30 13:28 UTC;
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> previous at archive.org.../walbridge_encyclopedia_zaynab;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Citation: ris/462
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> — *Zaynab (Used by permission of the curator)*