The body lies crushed into a well, with rocks over it,
somewhere near the center of Tihran. Buildings have gone up around it, and
traffic passes along the road near where the garden was. Buses push donkeys to
one side, automobiles from across the world graze the camels' packs, carriages rock
by. Toward sunset men scoop up water from a stream and fling it into the road
to lay the dust. And the body is there, crushed into the ground, and men come
and go, and think it is hidden and forgotten.
Beauty in women is a relative thing. Take Layli, for
instance, whose lover Majnun had to go away into the desert when she left him,
because he could no longer bear the faces of others; whereupon the animals came,
and sat around him in a circle, and mourned with him, as any number of poets and
painters will tell you - even Layli was not beautiful. Sa'di describes how one
of the kings of Arabia reasoned with Majnun in vain, and how finally "It
came into the king's heart to look upon the beauty of Layli, that he might see
the face that had wrought such ruin. He bade them seek through the tribes of
Arabia and they found her and brought her to stand in the courtyard before him.
The king looked at her; he saw a woman dark of skin and slight of body, and he
thought little of her, for the meanest servant in his harem was fairer than she.
Majnun read the king's mind, and he said, 'O king, you must look upon Layli through
the eyes of Majnun, till the inner beauty of her may be manifest.’” Beauty depends
on the eyes that see it. At all events we know that Tahirih was beautiful according
to the thought of her time.
Perhaps she opened her mirror-case one day – the eight-sided
case with a lacquer nightingale singing on it to a lacquer rose - and looked
inside, and thought how no record of her features had been made to send into
the future. She probably knew that age would never scrawl over the face, to
cancel the beauty of it, because she was one of those who die young. But
perhaps, kneeling on the floor by the long window, her book laid aside, the
mirror before her - she thought how her face would vanish, just as Layi's had,
and Shirin's, and all the others. So that she slid open her pen-case, and took
out the reed pen, and holding the paper in her palm, wrote the brief self-portrait
that we have of her: "Small black mole at the edge of the lip - A black
lock of hair by either cheek -" she wrote; and the wooden pen creaked as
she drove it over the paper.
Tahirih loved pretty clothes, and perfumes, and she loved to eat. She could eat sweets all day long. Once, years after Tahirih had gone, an American woman traveled to 'Akka and sat at 'Abdu'l-Baha's Table; the food was good; and she ate plentifully, and then asked the Master's forgiveness for eating so much. He answered: virtue and excellence consist in true faith in God, not in having a small or a large appetite for food. . . . Jinab-i-Tahirih had a good appetite. When asked concerning it, she would answer, "It is recorded in the Holy Traditions that one of the attributes of the people of paradise is 'partaking of food, continually.'''
When she was a child, instead of playing games, she would
listen to the theological discussion of her father and uncle, who were great
ecclesiastics in Qazvin. Soon she could teach Islam down to the last hadith!.
Her brother said, "We, all of us, her brothers, her cousins, did not dare
to speak in her presence, so much did her knowledge intimidate us." This
from a Persian brother, who comes first in everything, and whose sisters wait
upon him. As she grew, she attended the courses given by her father and uncle;
she sat in the same hall with two or three hundred men students, but hidden
behind a curtain, and more than once refuted what the two old men were expounding.
In time some of the haughtiest 'ulamas consented to certain of her views.
Tahirih married her cousin and gave birth to children. It
must have been the usual Persian marriage, where the couple hardly met before
the ceremony, and where indeed the suitor was allowed only a brief glimpse of
the- girl's face unveiled. Love marriages were thought shameful, and this must
have been pre-arranged in the proper way. No, if she ever cared for anyone with
a human love, we like to think it was Quddus, whom she was to know in later
years; Quddus, who was a descendant of the Imam Hasan, grandson of the Prophet
Muhammad. People loved him very easily, they could hardly turn their eyes away
from him.
Quddus was one of the first to be persecuted for his
Master's Faith on Persian soil - in Shiraz, when they tortured him and led him
through the streets by a halter. Later on, it was Quddus who commanded the
besieged men at Shaykh Tabarsi, and when the Fort had fallen through the
enemy's treachery, and been demolished, he was given over to the mob, in his
home city of Barfurush. He was led through the marketplace in chains, while the
crowds attacked him. They fouled his clothing and slashed him with knives, and
in the end they hacked his body apart and burned what was left.
Quddus had never married; for years his mother had lived in
the hope of seeing his wedding day; as he walked to his death, he remembered
her and cried out, "Would that my mother were with me, and could see with
her own eyes the splendor of my nuptials!"
So Tahirih lived in Qazvin, the honey colored city of
sunbaked brick, with her slim, tinkling poplars, and the bands of blue water
along the yellow dust of the roads. She lived in a honey colored house round a
courtyard, cool like the inside of an earthen jar, and there were niches in the
whitewashed walls of the rooms, where she set her lamp, and kept her books, wrapped
up in hand-blocked cotton cloth. But where other women would have been content
with what she had, she could not rest; her mind harried her; and at last she broke
away and went over the mountains out of Persia, to the domed city of Karbila, looking
for the Truth.
Then one night she had a dream. She saw a young man standing
in the sky; He had a book in His hands and He read verses out of it. Tahirih
wakened and wrote down the verses to remember them, and later, when she found
the same lines again in a commentary written by the Báb, she believed in Him.
At once she spoke out. She broadcast her conversion to the Faith of the Báb,
and the result was open scandal.
Her husband, her father, her brothers, begged her to give up
the madness; in reply she proclaimed her belief. She denounced her generation,
the ways of her people, polygamy, the veiling of women, the corruption in high places,
the evil of the clergy. She was not one of those who temporize and walk softly.
She spoke out; she cried out for a revolution in all men's ways; when at last
she died it was by the words of her own mouth, and she knew it.
Nicolas tells us that she had "an ardent temperament, a
just, clear intelligence, remarkable poise, untameable courage." Gobineau
says, "The chief characteristic of her speech was an almost shocking
plainness, and yet when she spoke ... you were stirred to the bottom of your
soul, and filled with admiration, and tears came from your eyes." Nabil
says that "None could resist her charm; few could escape the contagion of her
belief. All testified to the extraordinary traits of her character, marveled at
her amazing personality, and were convinced of the sincerity of her
conviction."
Most significant is the memory of 'Abdu'l-Baha. When He was
a child, Tahirih held Him on her lap while she conversed with the great Siyyid
Yahyay-i-Darabi, who sat outside the door. He was a man of immense learning.
For example, he knew thirty thousand Islamic traditions by heart; and he knew
the depths of the Qur'an, and would quote from the Holy Text to prove the truth
of the Báb. Tahirih called out to him, "Oh Siyyid! If you are a man of
action, do some great deed!" He listened, and for the first time he
understood; he saw that it was not enough to prove the claim of the Báb, but
that he must sacrifice himself to spread the Faith. He rose and went out, and
traveled and taught, and in the end he laid down his life in the red streets of
Nayriz. They cut off his head, and stuffed it with straw, and paraded it from
city to city.
Tahirih never saw the Báb. She sent Him a message, telling
her love for Him:
The effulgence of Thy face flashed forth and the rays of
Thy visage arose on high;
Then speak the' word "Am I not your Lord" and
"Thou art, Thou art," we will all reply.
The trumpet-call "Am I not" to greet how loud
the drums of affliction beat!
At the gates of my heart there tramp the feet and camp
the hosts of calamity…
She set about translating into Persian the Báb's Commentary
on the Surih of Joseph. And He made her one of the undying company, the Letters
of the Living.
We see here there in Karbila, in the plains where more than
a thousand years before, Imam Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, had fallen of
thirst and wounds. We see her on the anniversary of his death, when all the
town was wailing for him and all had put on black in his memory, decked out in
holiday clothing to celebrate the birthday of the Báb. This was a new day, she told
them; the old agonies were spent.
Then she traveled in her howdah, a sort of curtained cage
balanced on a horse, to Baghdad and continued her teaching. Here the leaders of
the Shi'ih and Sunni, the Christian and Jewish communities sought her out to
convince her of her folly; but she astounded them and routed them and in the end
she was ordered out of Turkish territory, and she traveled toward Persia,
gathering disciples for the Báb. Everywhere princes, 'ulamas, government
officials crowded to see her; she was praised from a number of pulpits; one
said, "Our highest attainments are but a drop compared to the immensity of
her knowledge." This of a woman, in a country of silent, shadow-women, who
lived their quiet cycle behind the veil: marriage and sickness and childbirth, stirring
the rice and baking the flaps of bread, embroidering a leaf on a strip of velvet,
dying without a name.
Karbila, Baghdad, Kirmanshah, Hamadan. Then her father
summoned her home to Qazvin, and once she was back in his house, her husband,
the mujtahid, sent for her to return and live with him. This was her answer:
"Say to my presumptuous and arrogant kinsman . . . 'If
your desire had really been to be a faithful mate and companion to me, you would
have hastened to meet me in Karbila and would on foot have guided my howdah all
the way to Qazvin. I would . . . have aroused you from your sleep of
heedlessness and would have shown you the way of truth. But this was not to be....
Neither in this world nor in the next can I ever be associated with you. I have
cast you out of my life forever'." Then her uncle and her husband
pronounced her a heretic, and set about working against her night and day.
One day a mulla was walking through Qazvin, when he saw a
gang of ruffians dragging a man along the street; they had tied the man's
turban around his neck for a halter, and were torturing him. The bystanders
said that this man had spoken in praise of two beings, heralds of the Báb; and
for that, Tahirih's uncle was banishing him. The mulla was troubled in his
mind. He was not a Bábi, but he loved the two heralds of the Báb. He went to
the bazar of the sword-makers, and bought a dagger and a spearhead of the
finest steel, and bided his time. One dawn in the mosque, an old woman hobbled
in and spread down a rug. Then Tahirih's uncle entered alone, to pray on it. He
was prostrating himself when the mulla ran up and plunged the spearhead into
his neck; he cried out, the mulla flung him on his back, drove the dagger deep
into his mouth and left him bleeding on the mosque floor.
Qazvin went wild over the murder. Although the mulla
confessed, and was identified by his dying victim, many innocent people were
accused and made prisoner. In Tihran, Baha'u'llah suffered His first affliction
- some days' imprisonment - because He sent them food and money and interceded
for them. The heirs now put to death an innocent man, Shaykh-Salih, an Arab
from Karliba. This admirer of Tahirih was the first to die on Persian soil for
the Cause of God; they killed him in Tihran; he greeted his executioner like a well-loved
friend, and his last words were, "I discarded . . . the hopes and beliefs
of men from the moment I recognized Thee, Thou Who art my hope and my belief!"
The remaining prisoners were later massacred, and it is said
that no fragments were left of their bodies to bury.
But still the heirs were not content. They accused Tahirih.
They had her shut up in her father's house and made ready to take her life;
however, her hour was not yet come. It was then that a beggar-woman stood at
the door and whined for bread; but she was no beggar-woman - she brought word
that one sent by Baha'u'llah, was waiting with three horses near the Qazvin
gate. Tahirih went away with the woman, and by daybreak she had ridden to
Tihran, to the house of Baha'u'llah. All night long, they searched Qazvin for her,
but she had vanished.
The scene shifts to the gardens of Badasht. Mud walls
enclosing the jade orchards, a stream spread over the desert, and beyond, the
sharp mountains cutting into the sky. The Báb was in His prison at Chihriq -"The
Grievous Mountain." He had two short years to live.
And now Baha'u'llah came to Badasht, with eighty-one leading
Bábis as His companions. His destiny was still unguessed. He, the Promised One
of the Báb - of Muhammad, of Christ, of Zoroaster, and beyond Them of prophet
after prophet down into the centuries - was still unknown. How could they tell,
at Badasht, that His name would soon be loved around the world? How could they
hear it called upon, in cities across the earth; strange, unheard of places:
San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Adelaide? How could they see the unguessed men and
women that would arise to serve that name? But Tahirih saw. "Behold,"
she wrote, "the souls of His lovers dancing like motes in the light that
has flashed from His face!"
It was in this village of Badasht that the old laws were
broken. Up to these days, the Bábis had thought that their Master was come to
enforce Islam; but here one by one they saw the old laws go. And their confusion
mounted, and their trouble, and some held to the old ways and could not go
forward into the new. Then one day, as they sat with Baha'u'llah in the garden,
an unbearable thing came to pass. Tahirih suddenly appeared before them, and
she stood in their presence with her face unveiled. Tahirih so holy; Tahirih,
whose very shadow a man would turn his eyes from; Tahirih, the most venerated woman
of her time, had stripped the veil from her face, and stood before them like a
dancing girl ready for their pleasure. They saw her flashing skin, and the
eyebrows joined together, like two swords, over the blazing eyes. And they
could not look. Some hid their faces in their hands, some threw their garments
over their heads. One cut his throat and fled shrieking and covered with blood.
Then she spoke out in a loud voice to those who were left,
and they say her speech came like the words of the Qur'an. "This day,"
she said, "this day is the day on which the fetters of the past are burst
asunder - I am the Word which the Qa'im is to utter, the Word which shall put
to fight the chiefs and nobles of the earth!" And she told them of the old
order, yielding to the new, and ended with a prophetic verse from the Holy
Book: "Verily, amid gardens and rivers shall the pious dwell in the seat
of truth, in the presence of the potent King."
Tahirih was born in the same year as Baha'u'llah, and she
was thirty-six when they took her life. European scholars have known her for a
long time, under one of her names, Qurratu'l-'Ayn, which means "Solace of
the Eyes." The Persians sing her poems, which are still waiting for a translator.
Women in many countries are hearing of her, getting courage from her. Man have
paid tribute to her. Gobineau says, after dwelling on her beauty, "(but) the
mind and the character of this young woman were much more remarkable." And
Sir Francis Younghusband: "... she gave up wealth, child, name and
position for her Master's service. . . . And her verses were among the most
stirring in the Persian language." And T. K. Cheyne, "... one is
chiefly struck by her fiery enthusiasm and by her absolute unworldliness. This world
was, in fact, to her, as it was… to Quddus, a mere handful of dust."
We see her now at a wedding in the Mayor's house in Tihran.
Her curls are short around her forehead, and she wears a flowered kerchief
reaching cape-wise to her shoulders and pinned under her chin. The
tight-waisted dress flows to the ground: it is handwoven, trimmed with brocade
and figured with the tree-of-life design. Her little slippers curl up at the
toes. A soft, perfumed crowd of women pushes and rustles around her. They have
left their tables, with the pyramids of sweets in silver dishes. They have forgotten
the dancers, hired to stamp and jerk and snap their fingers for the wedding
feast. The guests are listening to Tahirih, she who is a prisoner here in the
Mayor's house. She is telling them of the new Faith, of the new way of living
it will bring, and they forget the dancers and the sweets.
This Mayor, Mahmud Khan, whose house was Tahirih's prison,
came to a strange end. Gobineau tells us that he was kind to Tahirih and tried
to give her hope, during those days when she waited in his house for the
sentence of death. He adds that she did not need hope. That whenever Mahmud Khan
would speak of her imprisonment, she would interrupt, and tell him of her Faith;
of the true and the false; of what was real, and what was illusion. Then one morning,
Mahmud Khan brought her good news; a message from the Prime Minister; she had
only to deny the Bab, and although they would not believe her, they would let her
go.
"Do not hope," she answered, "that I would
deny my Faith . . . for so feeble a reason as to keep this inconstant,
worthless form a few days longer.... You, Mahmud Khan, listen now to what I am
saying.... The master you serve will not repay your zeal; on the contrary, you
shall perish, cruelly, at his command. Try, before your death, to raise your soul
up to knowledge of the Truth." [1] He went from the room, not believing.
But her words were fulfilled in 1861, during the famine, when the people of
Tihran rioted for bread.
Here is an eye-witness' account of the bread riots of those
days; and of death of Mahmud Khan: "The distress in Tihran was now
culminating, and, the roads being almost impassable, supplies of corn could not
reach the city.... As soon as a European showed himself in the streets he was
surrounded by famishing women, supplicating assistance . . . on the 1st of
March . . . the chief Persian secretary came in, pale and trembling, and said
there was an emeute, and that the Kalantar, or mayor of the city, had just been
put to death, and that they were dragging his body stark naked through the
bazars. Presently we heard a great tumult, and on going to the windows saw the
streets filled with thousands of people, in a very excited state, surrounding the
corpse, which was being dragged to the place of execution, where it was hung up
by the heels, naked, for three days.
"On inquiry we learned that on the 28th of February,
the Shah, on coming in from hunting, was surrounded by a mob of several thousand
women, yelling for bread, who gutted the bakers' shops of their contents, under
the very eyes of the king... Next day, the 1st of March ... the Shah had
ascended the tower, from which Hajji Baba's Zainab was thrown, and was watching
the riots with a telescope. The Kalantar ... splendidly dressed, with a long
retinue of servants, went up to the tower and stood by the Shah, who reproached
him for suffering such a tumult to have arisen. On this the Kalantar declared
he would soon put down the riot, and going amongst the women with his servants,
he himself struck several of them furiously with a large stick. . . . On the
women vociferously calling for justice, and showing their wounds, the Shah
summoned the Kalantar and said, 'If thou art thus cruel to my subjects before my
eyes, what must be thy secret misdeeds!' Then turning to his attendants, the
king said,-'Bastinado him, and cut off his beard.' And again, while this
sentence was being executed, the Shah uttered that terrible word, Tanab! 'Rope!
Strangle him! '" [2]
One night Tahirih called the Kalantar's wife into her room.
She was wearing a dress of shining white silk; her hair gleamed, her cheeks
were delicately whitened. She had put on perfume and the room was fragrant with
it.
"I am preparing to meet my Beloved," she said.
"... the hour when I shall be arrested and condemned to suffer martyrdom is
fast approaching."
After that, she paced in her locked room, and chanted
prayers. The Kalantar's wife stood at the door, and listened to the voice rising
and falling, and wept. "Lord, Lord," she cried, "turn from her
... the cup which her lips desire to drink." We cannot force the locked
door and enter. We can only guess what those last hours were. Not a time of
distributing property, of saying good-bye to friends, but rather of communion with
the Lord of all peoples, the One alone Beloved of all men. And His chosen ones,
His saints and His Messengers. They all were there; They are present at such hours;
she was already with Them, beyond the flesh.
She was waiting, veiled and ready, when they came to take
her. "Remember me," she said as she went, "and rejoice in my gladness."
She mounted a horse they had brought and rode away through the Persian night.
The starlight was heavy on the trees, and nightingales rustled. Camel-bells
tinkled from somewhere. The horses' hooves thudded in the dust of the road.
And then bursts of laughter from the drunken officers in the
garden. Candles shone on their heavy faces, on the disordered banquet-cloth,
the wine spilling over. When Tahirih stood near them, their chief hardly raised
his head. "Leave us!" he shouted.
"Strangle her!'! And he went back to his wine.
She had brought a silk handkerchief with her; she had saved
it for this from long ago. Now she gave it to them. They twisted it round her
throat, and wrenched it till the blood spurted. They waited till her body was
quiet, then they took it up and laid it in an unfinished well in the garden.
They covered it over and went away, their eyes on the earth, afraid to look at
each other.
Many seasons have passed over Tihran since that hour. In
winter the mountains to the north have blazed with their snow, shaken like a
million mirrors in the sun. And springs came on, with pear blossoms crowding
the gardens, and blue swallows flashing. Summer times, the city lay under a
dust-cloud, and people went up to the moist rocks, the green clefts in the
hills. And autumns, when the boughs were stripped, the dizzy space of plains
and sky circled the town again. Much time has passed, almost a hundred years
since that night.
But today there are a thousand voices where there was one
voice then. Words in many tongues, books in many scripts, and temples rising.
The love she died for caught and spread, till there are a thousand hearts offered
now, for one heart then. She is not silent, there in the earth. Her lips are
dust, but they speak.
- Marzieh Gail (‘The Baha’i World 1940-1944)
[1] Gobineau, Comte de, Les Religions el les Philosophies
dans l'Asie Cenlrale, p. 242.
[2] Eastwick, E. B., ‘Journal of a Diplomat’s Three Years'
Residence in Persia, Vol. 1, p. 287 ff.
