Zaynab
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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.

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-- Zaynab (Used by permission of the curator)