by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian.
It’s widely assumed that women in medieval Persia were powerless, illiterate, and cloistered, and some of them were. But accounts from those times also show a host of bold, brilliant, or powerful women who made their marks on the country’s history and folklore. Here we give four brief accounts of such women.
Mahsati Ganjavi (1089–1159 CE)
This poet is regarded as one of the most brilliant lights in Persia’s medieval courts. Her work is so widely esteemed that 60 of her quatrains were included in the Nozhat al-Majales anthology of Persia’s great poems. Her art celebrated joy and love as the greatest aims in life, and she lived her dreams on a public stage, as both an intellectual associate of Omar Khayyam and an advisor of the Seljuq Sultan Sanjar. She aroused controversy, condemned the dogmatism of professional clerics, and wrote odes to freedom like this:
No force can bind us: pull of moment, arrows flying home,
Nor any wild nostalgia that seized our hearts whilom
Though my soft braids turned chains of steel and anchored in your heart,
Could any chain keep me home if I should wish to roam? (Evans)
Mahsati became the fictionalized heroine in a famous poetic work named “Amir Ahmed and Mahsati.” In this tale, Mahsati is a popular musician and poet, holding court in a Ganja city tavern. One night, a prominent religious teacher named Amir Ahmed dreams of a glorious woman in paradise, and is then shocked to see this very woman, namely Mahsati, performing on a harp. Naturally he falls madly in love with her, abandons his 400 students, and spends all his time in the tavern with her. This utterly outrages Ahmed’s father, who is a high-ranking official. The father orders Ahmed seized and thrown into a locked cell. There, Ahmed writes a stream of rapturous love poems, which his students believe are mystical tributes to God. The king decides to shut down Mahsati’s tavern, and she moves away to Khorasan. Ahmed is released from prison and rushes to follow her. He arrives in Khorasan to find Mahsati engaged in learned discussions with 300 poets and scholars (Sharma).
This medieval tale is roughly equivalent to a modern Bollywood song-and-dance film about the adventures of a famed diva. As for the real Mahsati, her city of Ganja, which is now in the Republic of Azerbaijan, has a beautiful center for art and literature devoted to her memory.
Padishah Khatun, ruler of Kerman from 1291 to 1295
This noblewoman agreed to marry the fifth Mongol ruler of Persia, Gaykhatu Khan, but in her marriage negotiations she demanded the right to administer the region of Kerman independently. She then had coins struck in her name and was officially named as Kerman’s ruler in the Friday prayers. This queen proved to be both a generous patron of arts and religion, and a strong military leader. Her forces extended the domain of Kerman across much of Persia to include Yazd, Shabankarah, and Hormuz. She oversaw the construction of several major religious buildings, and was reportedly a patron for Rumi (who was teaching at Konya, in Anatolia). Marco Polo wrote of visiting Padishah Khatun’s court, and of being impressed that she employed a Nestorian Christian priest as well as Muslim clerics. Her court historian composed a tribute to her titled “The Sublime Necklace for Her Great Majesty” (Di Nicola, 276–281).
As usual in that age of warlords, Padishah Khatun faced numerous threats to her rule. At one point she was exiled to Anatolia. Her brother fought her for control of Kerman, and she killed him. But after her powerful Mongol husband died, allies of her dead brother closed in for revenge. Reportedly, she was murdered by her brother’s Mongolian wife, Princess Khurudjun.
Padishah Khatun was also among the early female poets of Persia whose work has been preserved. Here is one rather arrogant composition:
Two yards of veil won’t make any woman a lady
nor a hat make any head worth of command.
For whom should I remove my veil when in its place would be a priceless crown?
I am a ruler from the dynasty of Ologh Soltan.
If there is sovereignty in this world,
it takes after us. (translated by Deirdre Lashgari)
Jahan Malek Khatun (1324–1382)
This poet worked in the famously literary city of Shiraz, and she was active there during the same decades as Hafez-e Shirazi (ca. 1325–1389), the most revered poet of Iran to this day. These two artists knew and inspired each other, with some of their poems seeming to interact in a dance of stylistically mirroring lyrics (Brookshaw, 2005, 188). Actually, Jahan Malek Khatun was about three times more prolific than Hafez. Both of them produced fountains of love poetry, but the sentiments she expressed were less ecstatic than profoundly compassionate. In 1353 the warlord Mobarez al-Din invaded Shiraz and killed all her male relatives. She wrote 23 heartbroken elegies to a deceased infant daughter, including lines like this:
My heart, if you have words you need to say,
Be warned! Keep would-be confidants away.
Seek help from no one here: five times a day.
The entrance to his court is open: Pray. (Davis, 27)
Her love poetry went beyond celebration of rapture and joy, to explore love’s grief, longing, and burden. Her works included hundreds of odes, quatrains, and 1,413 ghazal love poems, the earliest manuscripts of which are embellished with gold or illuminated with fine artwork, preserved as treasures of world heritage in Paris, Istanbul, and Cambridge (Brookshaw, 2008).
“Mulla Fatemeh” Naghai (1700s)
This female star of the pre-modern age was a performer of music and poetry for the Zand dynasty court in Shiraz. She gave public concerts outside the Vakil bazaar, playing the lute, harp, tambourine, and reed pipe, and she could recite over 20,000 verses of classical or contemporary poetry from memory. She was an outspoken critic of clerical hypocrisy and of bigotry in general, demanding justice for the powerless both in the court and on stage (Amanat, 156; Farhadipour).
From the work in progress, “Mother Persia,” by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian
Sources
Amanat, Abbas (2017) Iran: A Modern History. Yale University Press.
Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz (2005) “Odes of a Poet Princess: The Ghazals of Jahan-Malik Khatun,” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, XLIII, pp. 173–95.
Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz (2008) “Jahan-Malek Katun,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jahan-malek-katun
Davis, Dick (2019) The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women. Mage Publishers.
Di Nicola, Bruno (2020) “Padishah Khatun: An Example of Architectural, Religious, and Literary Patronage in Ilkhanid Iran,” in Biran, Michael, Brack, Jonathan, and Fiachetti, Francesca, eds., Along the Silk Roads of Mongol Eurasia. University of California Press.
Evans, Gladys, translator, in Vakil, Sanam (2011) Women and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Action and Reaction. Continuum.
Farhadipour, Arash (2010) “The First Female Narrator a Big Lie,” Arash (Ali) Farhadipour’s Blog, arashalifarhadipour.blogspot.com/2010_04_04_archive.html
Lashgari, Deirdre and Bankier, Joanna (eds.) (1983) Women Poets of the World. Macmillan.
Sharma, Sunil (2021) “The Courtesan and the Preacher: The Romance of Mahsati, an Early Female Persian Poet.” Asian and African Studies Blog, March 1.