# Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Amin Banani, Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Published in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies Vol.10, number 1-2 (2000)
> © Association for Bahá’í ™ Studies 2000
> 
> Táhirih
> A Portrait in Poetry*
> Amin Banani
> 
> *Presented as the Thirteenth Hasan M. Balyúzí Memorial Lecture al the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the
> Association for Bahá’í Studies, San Francisco, California, on 14 October 1995.
> 
> Abstract
> Most accounts of Táhirih have been either adulatory and hagiographic, vituperative and condemnatory, or facile and
> distortive. She has been depicted either as a saintly martyr, a cunning vixen, or a fiery feminist. If the truly heroic
> dimensions of her life and her character are to be appreciated, she must be viewed as she saw herself and within the
> context of her awn culture. It is her poetry that both reveals the layers of her complex motivations and makes her
> accessible. The aim of this essay is to allow her own voice, through her poems, to speak for herself, her time, and
> her motivations.
> 
> One hundred and fifty years ago, in an obscure corner of Persia, a woman removed the veil from her face in a
> public gathering of men. This courageous act, which ultimately led to her martyrdom, had an unprecedented impact
> on some outstanding men and women in Europe, India, and America. But in her own society most of what has been
> said and written about her was intended to cover her over again with many layers of veils. The reasons for all the
> obfuscations are easy to detect. Initially the guardians of the order against which she rebelled did their utmost to
> deny her existence by accusations of heresy, slander, and vilification. Subsequent generations, who may have been
> free of religious dogmatism and fanaticism, have tried to make a fairer judgment. They have been, however, often
> ignorant of the historical facts and have neglected the underlying values and the prevailing culture of their own
> society. They have forced alien and ill-fitting ideological preconceptions upon her life and times. The results are
> invariably incomplete and inaccurate.
> The aim of this lecture is to allow her own voice to speak for herself, her time, and her motivations. The
> woman who was born in Qazvín in 1817 has come to be known by many names. She was given the names Fátimih
> Zarríntáj but is remembered by the beautiful appellations Qurratu’l-‘Ayn (Solace of the Eyes) addressed to her by
> Siyyid Kázim Rashtí, the leader of the Shaykhí School, and Táhirih (The Pure) given her by Mírzá Husayn-‘Alí
> Núrí, Bahá’u’lláh, a leader of the Bábí community and the subsequent founder of the Bahá’í Faith.1
> She lived an eventful, rebellious, tumultuous, and heroic life and was killed at the age of thirty-six for her
> deeds and words. What has survived of her writings is a number of theological discourses, doctrinal disputations,
> and polemical tracts in affirmation of her new faith, written mostly in Arabic prose, and a very small number of
> poems, mostly in Persian. A clear distinction is implied, in this lecture’s focus, between her words and her voice.
> She was, insofar as her family provenance, her education, her social interactions, and her social position defined her,
> a scholar of religion. A full account of her philosophical, doctrinal, and intellectual positions must include a
> painstaking and judicious examination and analysis of all her prose treatises. But it is her poet’s voice that provides
> us with a portrait of her passion and her person.
> She was, first and foremost, a woman of action. Her words alone, were they not limned against the
> dramatic deeds of her short and stormy life, give ample evidence of her revolutionary and pioneer character. But it is
> the resonance of deeds and words that brings into focus the heroic figure of Táhirih. Of her extant words, the prose
> writings in Persian and Arabic are works of religious scholarship too arcane and abstruse for the general public. A
> handful of poems, however, reveal her tempestuous temperament and make her accessible to all people at all times.
> The present lecture is an attempt to provide a portrait of Táhirih through her poems. That is not to say that she was
> deliberately autobiographical in her poems, or that any narrative scheme can be detected in her verse.
> Her historical identity and the events of her life are well documented and have been recorded by friend and
> foe. And there is the rub. The foes have reviled and slandered her, and the friends have defended and sanctified her.
> Except for a few recent treatments, all the writing about her is either hagiographic or vituperative.2 She is depicted
> either as a saintly martyr, a cunning vixen, or a fiery feminist. The pious treatments—true enough so far as they
> go—underplay elements of her social and personal power struggles and gloss over profoundly meaningful private
> choices in her life. The vituperative attacks are nothing more than the fanatical rantings of a patriarchal religious
> hierarchy startled and enraged by her encroachment on their monopoly of the domain of learning and her unveiled
> threat to their power. The strictly feminist revolutionary accounts, while bringing out an essential dimension of her
> historical impact, do so at the cost of compartmentalizing her personality, ignoring the context of her struggle, and
> distorting her motives. Only with the help of her poems can one hope to see through the layers of her profoundly
> complex and remarkably single-minded motivations:
> 
> He has come to strip all veils away
> And show the face of prophecy today . . .
> His spark has filled the world with wild delight
> Man he has made a being of pure light
> Táhirih, lift the veil that has concealed
> Let that hidden mystery stand revealed . . .
> *
> Come look at us with keen seeing eyes
> That you may see God’s face unveiled
> *
> O lovers, lovers! The Lord’s face at last is visible!
> Look! Creation’s veil is stripped off by His will!
> Arise! for God’s face shows itself in all its Glory3
> *
> God’s bright face, purity, and charm—how they dazzle
> He who made the universe makes all earth green again.
> Resurrection Day is here, O noble ones! Gone, the night so terrible
> The time for truth has come, and deceit withers away:
> The justice you hoped for, order and law are possible.
> The despot’s iron fist destroyed, and gentle grace restored
> With nurturing support, not endless woe and trouble.
> Ignorance flees the world, true knowledge shines clear:
> Tell the priest to shut his book and quit the temple.
> Though doubts and difference turned the world awry,
> Milk, not blood, flows now, and the new cup’s delectable.
> The lord of all reveals himself and warns the nations,
> Everlasting grace shall free them from chain and shackle.
> 
> Clearly what these verses proclaim, leaving no room for ambiguity, is the rolling up of an old and decaying
> order replete with ignorance and injustice, and the coming of a new age of social and spiritual vigor. They signal the
> end of the era of expectations, the advent of the Promised One, and the arrival of the Beloved. This code of renewal
> and resurrection—to come out of stagnation, to become young and fruitful again, to get over the past and to believe
> in the future, to uproot tyranny and to lay the foundation of justice, to end conflict and to spread love—is embedded
> in the myths of every human culture that has the stamina to survive and endure. It is a creative energy which
> manifests itself from time to time, causes great upheavals in society, shakes and frightens the worn-out established
> order, and opens up new horizons.
> The ebb and flow of trendy literary critical theories notwithstanding, the poems of Táhirih cannot be
> understood and appreciated outside their cultural and historical context. In the more than two and a half millennia of
> Persian cultural history, that impulse of renewal has been deeply encoded with spiritual yearning and religious
> fervor.4 Nearly every movement of note and consequence, ranging in origins and motivation from profoundly sacred
> impulses to expressions of social and economic protest and even urban or peasant uprisings, has appeared in the garb
> of a religious expectation or return. The worldview and the climate of thought of Persia are permeated by a religious
> outlook.
> To approach Táhirih as a crucial figure in the unfolding Movement of the Báb is the authentic view from
> within the texture of Persian society at mid-nineteenth century. This is a movement that rapidly emerged from the
> matrix of convictions and expectations of the Shaykhí school of the Shí‘í sect of Islam. Through the leadership of
> the Báb it broke out of its Islamic cocoon with revolutionary energy, and under the guidance of Bahá’u’lláh it
> achieved its true radical potential and became a world religion.
> Thus it is impossible to isolate Tahirih from the context of a religious movement. She was a leading actor
> in a grand passion of faith, a drama that at mid-nineteenth century occupied the center stage of the Persian world.
> The birth of a new religious movement from the roots of an established traditional faith is never calm and peaceful.
> Vehement denials, pronouncements of anathema, cries of heresy, torrents of outraged abuse and vilification issued
> from the guardians of the old order are to be expected. They are commonplace in the comparative history of all
> religions. From the outset of the Bábí Movement in 1844, for a full hundred years everything that was said or
> written in Persia about Táhirih, except for the adulatory and hagiographic accounts by Bábís and Bahá’ís, was
> nothing but fanatical condemnations of an outraged orthodoxy. In the last half century, however, a new vogue of
> writing has come into being among Persian intellectuals based upon naive application of borrowed analytical
> preconceptions to the events and personalities of their own society. They are primarily rooted in Marxian thought.
> There is no denying the efficacy and the penetrating power of some Marxian analytical tools for the
> understanding of social history. The dialectic process and the importance of the notion of class are indispensable
> tools that a social historian can neglect only at the risk of impoverishment of the analysis. But a facile, unrigorous,
> and uncritical recourse to vulgar Marxism,5 which has been discredited even in the Western, European societies
> from whose historical experience it was constructed, is doubly ludicrous when it is enforced upon the fabric of a
> Persian Muslim society with a radically different set of dynamics. It leads to gross distortion of the dynamics of
> social movements and misreading the motives of their prime movers.
> In the heyday of the Stalinist era in 1938, M. S. lvanov, a Russian historian in Moscow, published a short
> book called Bábí Uprisings in Iran (1848–1852). In it he subjected the Bábí Movement, the personality and role of
> its founder, Siyyid Alí-Muhammad of Shiraz, and a number of his early followers including Táhirih Qurratu’l-‘Ayn,
> to a rudimentary vulgar Marxist analysis. Shortly after that, the course of the Second World War led to partial
> occupation of Iran by Soviet troops and the rapid political rise of the Tudeh Party with its massive appeal among the
> so-called intelligentsia. It must be acknowledged that, from that time forward, nearly everything that has been
> written by this new group of intellectuals about the Bábí Movement and the personality and historical role of Táhirih
> is traceable to Ivanov’s book and its thought system. It is in principle a distorting approach.
> The character of Táhirih, her mindset, her worldviews, her motivations, and the depth of her passion cannot
> he examined detached from her deep faith in spiritual renewal, her eagerness to abrogate the Islamic law, and her
> willingness to sacrifice everything for the establishment of a new order. She must be viewed as she saw herself and
> within the framework of her own culture if we are to appreciate the truly heroic dimensions of her life. No doubt
> there have been other women of sharp intellect, bold resolve, eloquent tongue, and charismatic power in the Persian
> society who have felt the deep pain of tyrannical inequality, but seldom have the circumstances of their age allowed
> them to assert themselves and to leave an indelible mark upon history. The unique distinction of Táhirih is that she
> not only had all those qualities in superlatives, but that with all her natural gifts and innate abilities she set upon
> acquisition of knowledge and was quick to realize that knowledge is power.
> She encompassed the traditional learning of her culture, which was theology with all its attendant
> disciplines of logic, rhetoric, and literature. In debates and disputes with turbaned patriarchs who looked upon
> religious learning as their monopoly, she outshone them all and henceforth was not willing to forgo the exercise of
> power that was the right of the learned. Throughout her short and adventurous life she courageously fought for her
> own rights and those of her fellow women and fellow humans. She never feared or wavered, and although she paid
> for her convictions with her life, she ultimately triumphed. The example that she has left for all struggling, justice-
> seeking, and liberating women—although in her native land it has been suppressed under covers of ignorance and
> prejudice—has not escaped the attention of outstanding men and women throughout the world. In the second half of
> the nineteenth century, her name and her feats of heroism were known among poets, artists, intellectuals, and
> progressive groups in Europe and North America. Her name was inscribed on the list of pioneers for emancipation
> of women in the first Congress for the Rights of Women held in America nearly a hundred years ago. Poems and
> homages were written to her in Italian, German, French, English, and Russian. Sarah Bernhardt, the best known
> French actress of the late nineteenth century, asked two of her contemporary authors, Catulle Mendès and Jules
> Bois, to write a play about Táhirih and the Bábís for her to portray on the stage. The Russian poet Izabella
> Grinevskaya actually wrote such a play, which was staged at St. Petersburg. It was after seeing this play and reading
> other accounts of Bábís and Bahá’ís that Leo Tolstoy became curious and sympathetic.6 Nor has all the attention and
> interest in Táhirih been confined to the Occident. In his visionary epic poem Javídnámih depicting a journey to the
> heavenly realms inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Iqbal of Lahore, the foremost Muslim poet of the Indian
> subcontinent, identifies Táhirih Qurratu’l-‘Ayn as one of his three guides. Indeed the interest and admiration for
> Táhirih has remarkably persisted among the literary and intellectual Muslims of India and Pakistan, where
> dissertations, articles, and publications about her continue to proliferate.7
> At the outset of the Bábí Movement, and especially after the incarceration and, ultimately, the execution of
> the Báb Himself, it was not fully clear to the rapidly growing number of His followers what the advent of the
> promised Day meant. Even with the clear claim of being the return of the expected Qá’im of Shí’í Islam, which
> occurred at the midpoint of the short and tumultuous six years of His ministry from His declaration in 1844 to His
> martyrdom in 1850, the perceptions and expectations of most of His followers did not go beyond the walls of literal
> fulfillment of Shí’í traditions and prophecies. They thought of the new movement as the means for revival of Islam,
> not as an instrument of abrogation of Islamic law, freedom from its dogmas, and the dawn of a new dispensation and
> new order. Among the Bábís it was Táhirih who was absolutely the most active and eventually triumphant exponent
> of a radical break with the past and a far-reaching progressive outlook.
> In every age when the tempo of change and the pulse of social transformation is accelerated, the
> gravitational pull of the past and the resistance of the old order are also increased. A dynamic force is required to
> free the movement for the new from the grip of the past and to thrust it into the new space. Táhirih was the most
> outstanding personification of this prodigious dynamic force. Her role at the Conference of Badasht in 1848 was a
> masterpiece of combining signal with symbol, reality with drama, and the secret code with the open message. With
> one ploy she accomplished two feats. By removing her veil in an assemblage of men she did at once proclaim, by
> word and by deed, both the abrogation of the law of Islam and the emancipation and equality of women in the new
> Faith. That such a radical and momentous principle as the breaking of the old law and the advent of a new order was
> proclaimed by a woman, albeit confirmed and upheld by the Báb Himself, as well as the fact that the first signal of
> the new order was an act which was clearly nothing less than an affirmation of emancipation and equality of rights
> of women, were not accidental. These two facets of Táhirih’s dramatic and courageous act were mutually affirming
> and inseparable. Any attempt to focus on them separately or out of balance distorts the face of Táhirih and obscures
> her true historical role.
> Some historians have chosen to dwell on the substance of her doctrinal dissertations and dogmatic
> disputations and point to the absence of any explicit statement on the rights of women, and have concluded that she
> was nothing more than a heretically inclined theologian. Others have portrayed her as a fiery feminist pioneer,
> discounting her profound spiritual motivation and her religiously integrated worldview. The statement attributed to
> her at the hour of her death—”You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women”
> (qtd. in Shoghi Effendi 75)—was probably never uttered, just as Louis XIV probably never said “L’état c’est moi” (I
> am the state). But they both should have done so, for every act of their lives was a testament to the truth of those
> statements. Táhirih’s indomitable will; her forthright claim to equal power based on learning; her uncompromising
> defense of her beliefs in the face of opposing men; her implacable refusal to bow to domestic pressure; her painful
> choice to abandon home, husband, and children rather than submit to injustice; and, above all, the dramatic gesture
> of public unveiling are more eloquent than a thousand tracts on the rights of women. In the context of nineteenth-
> century Persian Shí’í society—or indeed this late in the twentieth century—what more could a woman do that would
> mark her a greater champion of women’s rights?
> Táhirih is indeed a heroine and pioneer model of emancipation, equality, and power of women because the
> Movement of the Báb prepared the ground for the inception of those struggles, and the Bahá’í Faith made their
> ultimate victory possible. And the Bábí Movement and Bahá’í Faith can justify their progressive claims because
> equality of rights of women is a fundamental tenet of their belief.
> When Táhirih proclaims that:
> 
> New friendship must from ancient hatred spring
> And far and wide the seeds of kindness sow,
> 
> we instantly recognize the acute and compassionate vision of a forward-looking woman who is painfully aware of
> the ancient hatreds that have been heaped upon her half of the human race, and she sees her own emancipation in
> liberation of the whole of humankind and seeks the remedy for ancient hatreds in friendship and kindness. Her truly
> revolutionary outlook and her clear vision of the new world which she struggled to bring about are revealed in a
> short poem of unusual power and forceful diction. It is the closest thing to a manifesto that can be found in all the
> literature of the Bábí Movement:
> 
> Look! our guiding dawn breathes even now
> The world with all its peoples is aglow
> 
> No canting priest now raves from the pulpit
> No mosque hawks sanctimony to the crowd
> No sheikh, no sham, no holy fraud prevails
> The turban knot’s cut to the root below
> Freed from the fear of wicked whisperings
> Mankind is rid of magic’s foolish show
> 
> Ignorance is doomed by the search for truth
> Equality’s arm shall bring the tyrant low
> 
> Warring ways will be banished from the world
> And justice everywhere its carpet throw
> 
> New friendship must from ancient hatred spring
> And far and wide the seeds of kindness sow
> 
> Strictly speaking in terms of its meter, rhyme scheme, and length it is a ghazal, a form of lyrical love poem. But it is
> in every real sense as far from a ghazal as a poem can get. There is nothing lyrical, nothing amatory about it. It is a
> proclamation. epical, assertive, full of startling images and radical vocabulary not seen in Persian poetry before, and
> not to be encountered for another half a century until in the post-Constitutional Revolutionary poetry of men such as
> Farrokhi Yazdi and Lahuti. The abstract notion, “guiding dawn,” is depicted as an animate, awesome personification
> of nature that has begun to breathe. A sequence of deeply aspirated h’s—hán subh-i-hudá—creates an aural
> affirmation of this remarkable animation. Its exalted rank is underlined by the use of the honorific verb farmúd. The
> emphatic sibilant rhymes punctuate the triumphant and assertive statements. The open writ of dismissal handed to
> the clergy could not be more devastating. The unambiguous condemnation of cant and hypocrisy, of ignorance and
> superstition, and of fanaticism, all go to the root of what ailed her society. In its defiance of tyranny and cry for
> justice and equality, as well as its eloquent call for love and friendship, this poem bids well to be adopted as the
> anthem of Táhirih’s future heirs.
> No self-portrait of Táhirih in poetry is more revealing in its beautiful imagery of feminine charm and allure
> and its audacious self-assurance than these challenging lines:
> 
> Once let the wind my scented locks unravel
> And I would capture every wild gazelle
> 
> And should I blue my flashing, blue-black eyes
> I would condemn the world to darkest hell
> 
> At daybreak heaven lifts its golden glass
> And gazes awestruck at my dazzling face
> 
> If I should chance to pass a church one day
> Christian virgins would run to hear my gospel!
> 
> Here we are back in the tonal, metaphoric, and imagery world of classical Persian poetry, with its familiar tropes and
> strong vowel music. The “desert deer” (áhúán-i-sahrá), the “blue-black-eyes” (nargis-i-shahlá) and “golden glass”
> (á’íniy-i-mutallá) create an aura of the known terrain, but it is inhabited by a woman of irrepressible passion and
> indomitable will.
> It is not a face could be hidden in a veil and it is not a voice that could be choked to silence.
> Notes
> 1. There is some uncertainty concerning when and by whom she was first addressed as Táhirih. An undated letter
> from the Báb calling her Táhirih is ascribed by some researchers as possibly dating from 1847. What is certain
> is that the appellation was used by Bahá’u’lláh at the Conference of Badasht in 1848 and thereafter it became
> her prevailing and preferred identity. She herself used it in some of her poems as a traditional nom de plume
> (takhallus). Two further strong pieces of circumstantial evidence must be taken into consideration in support of
> Bahá’u’lláh’s initiative in the use of this title: (1) it was at Badasht where Bahá’u’lláh also gave new titles to a
> number of other Bábís present and took the appellation Bahá for Himself, and (2) in subsequent years the Bábís
> and Azalís, who naturally hold her in high esteem, overwhelmingly refer to her as Qurratu’l-‘Ayn and refrain
> from using Táhirih.
> 
> 2. See Amanat, and Milani.
> 
> 3. The word in the original is Bahá.
> 
> 4. For the best treatment of this subject, see Bausani.
> 
> 5. This term is not used in its popular pejorative sense. Vulgar Marxism is actually a term coined by more careful
> Marxist thinkers to denote the simplistic knee-jerk determinism of unsophisticated dogmatics.
> 
> 6. For all early references to Táhirih and Bábís and Bahá’ís in the West, see Mornen.
> 
> 7. For the impact of Táhirih in the Indian subcontinent, see Áfáqí.
> 
> Works Cited
> Áfáqí, Sábir. “Ta’thír-i-Táhirih bar Shu‘aráy-i-Shibh-i-Qárrih” (Influence of Táhirih on the poets of the
> subcontinent). In Gulzár-i-Shi’r va Adab. Darmstadt, 1992.
> 
> Amanat, Abbas. Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Bábí Movement in Iran, 1844–1850. Ithaca: Cornell
> University Press, 1989.
> 
> Bausani, Alessandro. 1959. Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Bahá’u’lláh. Trans. J. M. Marchesi. New York:
> Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000.
> 
> Ivanov, M. S. Babidskie vosstaniia v Irane (1848–1852) (Bábí uprisings in Iran 1848–1852). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
> Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1939.
> 
> Milani, Farzaneh. Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse: Syracuse University
> Press, 1992.
> 
> Momen, Moojan, ed. The Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, 1844 1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts. Oxford:
> George Ronald, 1981.
> 
> Shoghi Effendi. God Passes By. Rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974.
>
> — *Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry (Used by permission of the curator)*