The Babi movement, which began in the 1840s, went on to become an important catalyst of social progressiveness in mid-nineteenth-century Iran, promoting interreligious peace, social equality between the sexes and revolutionary anti-monarchism.
The new current was also a product of Iran’s grappling with novelty and change, and it went on to present a vision of modernity that was based on secularism, internationalism, and the rejection of war.
There was a series of uprisings between 1848 and 1852, when government forces laid siege to Babi strongholds or pursued militants into the mountains.
Yet even if the theology of Bahaism was a little whacky, the social vision was anything but. The manifesto that Bahaullah laid out during his long exile was in part a reflection of the progressive bits of the Tanzimat agenda. But it went far beyond the Turkish reforms in its vision of consultative democracy, the distinction it made between religion and politics, and its promotion of a world civilisation united by a common language and eschewing nationalism and war.
Bahaullah was in favour of a constitutional monarchy and equality for all subjects, regardless of religion, which put him in the ranks of Ottoman constitutionalists like Namik Kemal.
Perhaps surprising for a doctrine fired by persecution and revolt, Bahaullah declared the abolition of religious war…
The Bab, Bahaullah and their followers were outriders and the causes and controversies they espoused would occupy Islam, the cavalcade they spurned, for decades to come. Perhaps most surprising of all, the Bab’s most celebrated follower became – though she may not have recognised herself as such – Iran’s first feminist.
Gifted, pious and endowed with an irresistible combination of beauty and charisma, Fatemeh Zarrin Taj Baraghani (whom the Bab renamed Qurrat al-Ayn, ‘solace of the eye’) is one of the most remarkable characters in nineteenth-century Iranian history. She is both feminist icon and medieval saint – Simone de Beauvoir meets Joan of Arc – and now that she is gone and her place in history is secure it is possible to see in the events of her life a chain of clairvoyant images, snapshots of a society that, while riddled with superstition, also teetered on the edge of modernity.
She was born in 1814, in Qazvin, the daughter of Muhammad Saleh, a leading local divine. Despite being puritanical in his observance of Islamic law, in matters of female learning Muhammad Saleh was a progressive, and he gave Fatemeh an education of the kind that was barred to almost all girls at the time. She soon surpassed many of her father’s students, and such were her accomplishments in memorising the hadiths and esoteric interpretations of the Quranic verses, he was moved to declare that ‘if she were a boy she would have illuminated my house and come to be my successor’. Married off at fourteen to her cousin Mullah Muhammad, another cleric, she and her husband went to live in the shrine city of Karbala, in Ottoman Iraq, where she gave birth to two children but did not relax her cerebral pursuits. Mullah Muhammad, it soon became clear, was perplexed and not a little discomforted by this headstrong spouse whose interests ran dangerously beyond the generally accepted limits of womanly enquiry.
Qurrat al-Ayn was not at peace with the legalistic mood in the cloisters – to which her husband fully subscribed. This laid emphasis on the role of the clergy, almost invariably men, as arbiters of temporal affairs, but did little to prepare people for the revolutions in society that, according to the doctrines of millennial Islam, will prefigure the end of the world. Qurrat al-Ayn’s Islam was of an ecstatic nature, and she directed her prayers and fantasies towards this liberating end time, when the sharia would be abandoned and replaced with perfect freedom under God.
“The writings of the then unknown Bab came as a blessing on her spiritual quest. ‘As soon as I heard of this cause,’ she wrote, ‘I recognised it,’ and she abandoned Mullah Muhammad and their children (with whom she had returned to Qazvin) to devote herself to its prosecution.66 Back in Karbala she built up a following of acolytes, using her talents in oratory to captivate audiences of both men and women whom she addressed from behind a curtain, or smaller classes admitting women only, when she would not have to be veiled. An eyewitness wrote that ‘a large number of people attended her teaching circles and prayed behind her. As she spoke, they listened with great astonishment in their hearts and were moved by her speeches.’ To be a prayer leader as a woman and to be an acknowledged theologian was remarkable for the time. In the words of a Babi hagiographer, ‘none could resist her charm; few could escape the contagion of her belief. All testified to the extraordinary traits of her character, marvelled at her amazing personality, and were convinced of the sincerity of her convictions.
In a poem that expresses the sense of ecstatic anarchy that is contained in the concept of the end time, she wrote:
Cast off the garments of old laws,
Of outworn traditions!
Immerse yourself in the sea
Of my bounteousness!
Another expresses (with prophetic poignancy, as it would turn out) her impatience at God’s concealment and her desire for a naked truth:
How long must your lovers endure
This anguish from behind the curtain?
At least bestow upon them
A glimpse of your unveiled beauty . . .
The clergy reacted to Qurrat al-Ayn’s growing fame and following by complaining about her to the Ottoman governor, while the more circumspect Babis charged that she had ‘abrogated the Sharia that we inherited from our fathers and grandfathers without the mandate of [the Bab]’. The truth was obscured by the deliberate ambiguity of the Bab’s pronouncements, which used the established Shia practice of taqiyya, or the expedient white lie, to evade accusations of apostasy. Imprisoned and then released, Qurrat al-Ayn was expelled from Ottoman territory in March 1847. She went back to Iran, where her progress from town to town met with the same mix of fawning and suspicion – such were the polarising powers of the new faith. Meetings were violently broken up and she began to advocate direct action against the movement’s enemies. Even though the Bab also called her Tahereh, ‘the pure’, she was denounced as unchaste and the official Qajar chronicler accused her of conducting sermons like an orgy.
The Qazvin to which she returned later that year was sharply polarised between the Babis and their opponents – of which her uncle and father-in-law, Muhammad Taki, was a leading example. In the summer of 1847 Muhammad Taki was assassinated while saying the dawn prayer in his own mosque. Qurrat al-Ayn was suspected of involvement, and she fled to Tehran where she sought refuge in the household of Bahaullah (this was before his exile and declaration of his own prophetic mission). Muhammad Taki’s assassination and the government’s repression of anyone suspected of involvement marked a shift towards open warfare between the Babis and conventional Shias.
The rising tides of persecution and a quickening spirit of Babi defiance led to a sensational meeting in the summer of 1848. Under conditions of unprecedented tension, angst and secrecy, eighty-one leading Babis convened in the orchards of Badasht, on the Mazandaran–Khurasan road in north-eastern Iran. They were bereft of the Bab himself, who had been imprisoned in a remote castle on the Kurdish borders; in his absence the movement’s leaders had to decide once and for all whether Babism constituted an entirely new religion or simply a new coat for an old one. The aim of the radicals among them was also to hoist the black standard that in the Shia tradition signifies the advent of the Mahdi, divine herald of the end of time.
For the Babi religion the debate amid the almond and pomegranate trees was primarily doctrinal, but Badasht is also recognised as a milestone in the history of women’s political consciousness in Iran. Qurrat al-Ayn was among the delegates. She, Bahaullah and their followers were joining forces with another leading Babi, known by the moniker Quddus, meaning ‘holiness’, whom the anti-Babis had driven out of the shrine city of Mashhad. Qurrat al-Ayn’s sacred mission turned out to be of acute social significance because it involved overturning one of the most symbolic restrictions that Islamic orthodoxy places on women.
The council at Badasht started as a power struggle, with the radical Qurrat al-Ayn standing against the conservative Quddus, who denounced her as ‘the author of heresy’, and the conciliatory Bahaullah trying to arrange compromise between the two. The factions were divided into the three camps, each established in a different orchard in the village, where the principals and their supporters had pitched their tents. At a crucial stage in proceedings Quddus was in Bahaullah’s garden when he received a pressing invitation from Qurrat al-Ayn to visit her. He refused, saying, ‘I have severed myself entirely from her,’ so Qurrat al-Ayn came to him – and she did so in a state of undress that constituted open rebellion against religious law.
According to one eyewitness:
Suddenly the figure of Tahereh, adorned and unveiled, appeared before the eyes of the assembled companions. Consternation immediately seized the entire gathering. All stood before this sudden and most unexpected apparition. To behold her face unveiled was to them inconceivable. Even to gaze at her shadow was . . . improper . . . that sudden revelation seemed to have stunned their faculties. [One of the participants] was so gravely shaken that he cut his throat with his own hands. Covered with blood and shrieking with excitement, he fled away from the face of Tahereh. A few, following his example, abandoned their companions and forsook their faith.
The same informant leaves no doubt of the religious importance of Tahereh’s sensational entrance.
Undeterred by the tumult that she had raised in the hearts of her companions [she] began to address the remnant of the assembly. Without the least premeditation, and in language that bore striking resemblance to that of the Quran, she delivered her appeal with eloquence and fervour. She concluded her address with a verse from the Quran: ‘Verily, amid gardens and rivers shall the pious dwell in the seat of truth, in the presence of the potent King.’ Immediately after, she declared, ‘I am . . . the Word which shall put to flight the chiefs and nobles of the earth.’
Qurrat al-Ayn’s removal of the veil was a blatant rejection of the Prophet Muhammad’s command to his followers, set down in a famous hadith, that ‘when ye ask of them [the wives of the Prophet] anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain. This is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.’ ‘Curtain’ and ‘veil’ are the same word in Arabic, and this ambiguous hadith is the basis on which the practice of veiling women has been sanctified – and its observance often presented as a litmus test for faith. In the Persia of the mid-nineteenth century unveiling in the presence of any male other than a member of the immediate family was akin to prostitution in its sinfulness. By removing her veil, Qurrat al-Ayn was showing her companions that the old laws no longer held true, and through this gesture she impressed on them that the Bab’s revelation of his miraculous status and the dawn of a new prophetic cycle were at hand.
After the Badasht meeting broke up, with the principal delegates reconciled and marching north to establish a Babi enclave, the sight of an unveiled Qurrat al-Ayn chanting prayers alongside Quddus prompted a group of villagers to attack them. Several Babis were killed; the rest fled. Persecution of the Babis, orchestrated by Amir Kabir, was now reaching its bloody climax, and it culminated with the Bab’s execution in July 1850.
After her revolutionary removal of the veil, Qurrat al-Ayn became a hunted fugitive, slipping from village to village before eventually being captured. She was brought before Nasser al-Din Shah in Tehran, who liked her looks and ruled that her life should be spared, but still she refused to recant and the house of the Kalantar, or chief of police, where she was confined, was besieged by admirers. Finally, in September 1852, following the unsuccessful assassination attempt on the shah, she was sentenced to death.
According to a Babi account of events:
one night, aware that the hour of her death was at hand, she put on the attire of a bride, and anointed herself with perfume, and, sending for the wife of the Kalantar . . . confided to her her last wishes. Then, closeting herself in her chambers, she awaited, in prayer and meditation, the hour which was to witness her reunion with her Beloved. She was pacing the floor of her room, chanting a litany expressive of both grief and triumph, when the guards . . . arrived, in the dead of night, to conduct her to the Ilkhani garden, which lay beyond the city gates, and which was to be the site of her martyrdom. When she arrived [the military officer overseeing her execution] was in the midst of a drunken debauch with his lieutenants, and was roaring with laughter; he ordered offhand that she be strangled at once and thrown into a pit. With that same silken kerchief which she had intuitively reserved for that purpose . . . the death of this immortal heroine was accomplished. Her body was lowered into a well, which was then filled with earth and stones, in the manner she herself had desired.
At the time her fame was so widespread that The Times of London reported on the execution of the ‘fair prophetess of Qazvin’. In the decades that followed, her renown continued to grow, despite the unrelenting efforts of the Qajar authorities to suppress Babism and Bahaism. ‘Oh Tahereh!’ mourned the Turkish poet Suleyman Nazif, in 1919, ‘you are worth a thousand Nasser al-Din Shahs!
The execution of Qurrat al-Ayn ranks with that of the Babis’ tormentor, Amir Kabir, as an illustration of the tortuous relationship that mid-nineteenth-century Iran had with movements of reform. The fact that these two important figures were on opposite sides shows too that modernity can have many faces, from the Western-inspired, utilitarian state-building of the amir, for whom orthodox Shia Islam was a restraint on disorder, to the intuitive individualism and spiritual anarchy of Qurrat al-Ayn. Of course her values belong to the enchanted age, of magic and divine grace, but the way she chose to express them, by casting off first her husband, then her religion, and finally her veil, prove to us, down the years, that aspirations we complacently associate with the West need not have a Western origin at all.
“For all the diffuse strivings of Qurrat al-Ayn, Amir Kabir and Abbas Mirza, and for all the optimism and industry of Mirza Saleh, the fact remained that well into the second half of the nineteenth century Iran was a distant third in the race towards modernity that had engaged the heartlands of Muslim civilisation. The hand of Nasser al-Din Shah would get heavier as the century advanced, and his aversion to sharing power more untenable, but the unfinished efforts of its early modernisers added up to a compelling heritage that later innovators would adopt, unify and take forward. When that happened, and their efforts were allied to wider demands for freedom, even this most medieval of modern tyrants would be unable to resist.
Excerpt From The Islamic Enlightenment - The Struggle Between Faith and Reason - 1798 to Modern Times by Christopher de Bellaigue, 2017
“The first major social movement in modern Iran, the messianic Babi movement, began in the mid-nineteenth century. Among the goals of the movement was to end many Shi’i rituals that were the basis of social and gender hierarchies in Iranian society, including mandatory veiling and gender segregation. These issues have been at the heart of modern Iranian social movements from the beginning.
Islam, especially in its Iranian Shi’i form, is a “pollution-conscious” religion, much like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Hinduism. In these religions, the orifices from which blood, semen, and urine seep out are particularly guarded because they are entry points through which impurities might enter the body. Women are seen as the door of entry to the community, and their access to public spaces and control of their own bodies are seen as threats to the whole society, since their exposure might allow impurities (physical and moral) to infiltrate the family. In nineteenth-century Shi’i Iran (as in Orthodox Jewish and Zoroastrian communities), a woman’s sexual and reproductive functions turned her body into a contested site of potential and real ritual contamination. It was therefore not surprising that the most important leader of the Babi movement was a woman named Qurrat al-Ayn, who in a radical act publicly unveiled. In part because of her unveiling, there was a backlash against the movement and its demands. The royal court and high clerics ordered that the Babis be massacred, starting with its leaders, including Qurraat al-Ayn, who died in 1852.”
Excerpt from The Origins of the [2022] Uprising in Iran
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