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)