by Brian Griffith.
In telling stories about great Persian women, I don’t mean to endorse any of their religious beliefs. I just want to tell about powerful women’s lives, partly because they often defy expectations. One of these stories concerns a female leader of the Babist movement, which later produced the Bahai religion. Although I am not a believer in that faith, I suspect that this woman was the greatest religious leader of the 19th century, anywhere in the world.
The Babist movement formed around a charismatic man, Seyed Mohammad Ali Shirazi, who is more widely known as “the Bab” (the Gate). However, it is arguable that the sect’s greatest saint was Fatemeh Baraghani (ca. 1815–1852), who took the title of Tahereh Qorratol’Ayn. As Edward G. Browne argued, “had the Babi religion no other claim to greatness, this were sufficient—that it produced a heroine like Kurratul’Ayn [Qorratol’Ayn]” (Milani, 81).
Fatemeh was the daughter of a liberal-minded mullah, who encouraged her curiosity as she devoured books on philosophy, Arab and Persian literature, theology, and jurisprudence. Her father allowed her to participate in his classes and debates among religious students—from behind a curtain—much as the unexpectedly brilliant intellectual Anna Maria van Schurman was allowed to attend lectures at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) in the 1600s, also sitting behind a curtain. Fatemeh’s father reportedly said, “If she were a boy she would have illuminated my house and come to be my successor” (Milani, 83). As it was, she was married off to a theology student, who took her to Karbala, Iraq, for the next 13 years as he completed his studies.
In the great Shia religious center of Karbala, Fatemeh continued her independent study, and gravitated toward a highly unorthodox teacher named Seyyed Kazem Rashti, who gathered a following known as the Sheykhi sect. According to ‘Ali Quli Mirza E’tezadol-Saltaneh, “her persistent study of the Sheykhi materials … totally absorbed her and slowly changed her whole life. Ultimately it made her leave her sacred marriage to wander from place to place.” Her brother said that her learning and intellectual disagreements with her husband became a disaster for the family, which showed why “the clergy have prevented all women from studying lest they should become believers [in heresy] like [my sister] Tahereh” (Milani, 78).
When her husband went back to Iran, Fatemeh felt forced to choose between her husband and her religious vocation. The vocation won, and she returned to Karbala to help as a teacher with the Sheykhis. By the time she got there, however, her instructor Rashti had died. She therefore determined to take his place as the sect’s chief teacher. Later she became one of the eighteen original disciples of Seyed Mohammad Ali Shirazi, or the Bab.
The Babists started out as a movement for spiritual reform, claiming to be enlightened Muslims who would purge the faith of traditions involving social inequality. Although the Bab and his male disciples generally retained their habitual gender roles, they spoke of relaxing restrictions on women, protecting wives from spousal abuse, ending legalized polygamy, and reducing the severity of legal punishments. It was a message appealing to women, and especially to Fatemeh, because the Bab encouraged her to help teach it in public. She led classes and public debates, inviting leading Islamic scholars to participate. As Farzaneh Milani puts it, “She assigned herself a public role and a public space. A triple transgression—verbal, spatial, and physical” (p. 80). The Bab and his followers gave her a new name: Tahereh Qorratol’Ayn, meaning “the pure one, a solace to the eye.”
In calling their leader a “prophet,” the Babists meant to add him onto the list of history’s great prophets such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc. Unfortunately, however, many Muslim clerics felt that granting a new preacher the same title as the Prophet Muhammad was unforgivable apostacy. According to an old Sufi saying, “Prophets don’t fight over who among them is the greatest; only their stupid followers do that.” But for many clerics, the question of who was greatest was the most important religious question of all.
In 1847, the governors of Iraq expelled Tahereh as a troublemaker, and she had to go back to Iran. At this, some 30 devoted followers determined to uproot their families and go with her. She began teaching in Hamedan, where she placated the local authorities by speaking from behind a curtain. As a preacher, she proclaimed the themes of Babist doctrine: divine guidance, a progressive cycle of revelation, a new creed for a changing age, the legitimacy of the Bab as a source of divine inspiration. She was also a poet, echoing the lyrical passion of Rumi or Hafez, but combining this with a wild celebration of self-love as a woman:
Should
I unveil my scented hair
I’ll captivate every gazelle
Should
I line my narcissus eyes
I’ll destroy the whole world with desire
To
see my face, every dawn
heaven lifts its golden mirror
Should
I chance to pass a church one day
I’ll convert all the Christian girls (Milani, 92–93)
H. M. Balyuzi reports that, “her eloquence and the clarity of her disquisition so impressed the chiefs [of the Kirand area] that they offered to place twelve thousand men under her command, to follow her wherever she went” (p. 164).
As disputes mounted over whether the Babists were traitors to the shah and to Islam, the Babists were not completely innocent. In one confrontation with the authorities, a mullah named Mohammad Taqi was killed. The dying Taqi reportedly warned, “When the signs of the promised one appear, the Zindiq [heretic] … will also appear, and the words of the Zindiq will be the words of a woman’s religion! Now this woman and her religion have appeared” (Milani, 78). The governor of Qazvin threw Tahereh in jail as a suspected party to murder, not to mention heresy. Suspicions only grew when she escaped, vanishing somewhere on the roads toward Tehran.
In the summer of 1848, before a convention of Babists at Badasht, Tahereh threw off all restraint. Speaking with no veil, she proclaimed that all unjust laws of the past were suspended—a new kingdom of justice and truth had appeared. When leading men among the Babis objected to such presumption, the Bab himself endorsed her, saying that she was the pure one who had his full blessing (Momen). He wrote to her saying “Women have been permitted to come out of their houses dressed and made up like angels of paradise and to mix with men … unveiled” (Paidar, 36). Some claimed that Tahereh was Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, returned to earth. Traditional moralists claimed she was presenting herself as a new deity for worship as a sex object. They tracked her down and put her under house arrest.
As the Babists were officially labeled a rebellion against Persia, government troops set out to capture or kill them. In 1850 they crushed resisting Babists in several provinces, and executed the Bab for treason. Then in 1852, several vengeful Babists tried to kill the shah, Naser al-Din. At this point, the shah’s men strangled Tahereh Qorratol’Ayn, deeming her a direct threat to the state. In her memory, the Turkish poet Suleyman Nazif wrote “Oh Tahereh! You are worth a thousand Naser al-Din Shahs!” (de Bellaigue, 152). Bahiyyeh Nakhjavani wrote a novel based on Tahereh’s life called The Woman Who Read Too Much. People called her a saint, a scholar, a sorceress, a martyr, a dangerous lunatic, a female messiah, a whore, “the leader of emancipation for women of the Orient.”
Sources
Balyuzi, H. M. (1974) The Bab. George Ronald, Oxford.
de Bellaigue, Christopher (2017) The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. Liveright Publishing Corp., New York.
Momen, Moojan (2012) “Women, iv. In the Works of the Bab and the Babi Movement,” Encyclopaedia Iranica. www.iranicaonline.org/articles/women-babi
Paidar, Parvin (1995) Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-century Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
From the upcoming book, Mother Persia, by Brian Griffith (Exterminating Angel Press, Summer 2020)