In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

105 4 Badasht and Seneca Falls Tahirih Qurratul‘Ayn and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ah! Alas, Qurratul‘Ayn! You were worth a thousand Nasiru’d-Din Shahs. —Sulayman Nazif, “Passages from Nasiruddin Shah ve Babiler” She was not kneeling before him, as she should. She was not sitting with her head bowed in his presence as might be expected of a daughter of the house. She was pacing restlessly, back and forth, across the room. It was hard to glare satisfactorily at a woman in constant motion. —Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, “The Woman Who Read Too Much” Walled in Anonymity, Veiled in Ambiguity There are no photographs of Tahirih Qurratul‘Ayn (1817–52), the Iranian poet who publicly unveiled herself in 1848 and was executed at the age of thirty-six in 1852, after almost four years of imprisonment in the city of Tehran. In midnineteenth -century Iran, the newly introduced art of photography was reserved for the court, and no official prisons existed for women anywhere in the country.1 There was no need for them, really. Women were virtual prisoners, anyway, circumscribed in delineated boundaries, with every move under control. So no mug shots were needed, no wanted posters were required for this female who was under house arrest in the upper storeroom of the mayor’s residence; not even any prison records were kept about this Iranian woman, who at the height of her intellectual and creative powers had been placed in solitary confinement in the capital. There is, however, an image of Tahirih carved during her life and preserved against all odds in an unlikely place: the tombstone of her father-in-law, Taqi 106 • W I N GS A N D WO R DS Baraghani, in the private mausoleum of the family in the northwestern city of Qazvin. A carving on a tombstone, let alone an elaborate one that tells a story, is rare, if not unique in Iran. Pictorial representation is usually frowned upon for tombstones. More baffling yet is the scene depicted: a veiled woman, holding a piece of paper and half hidden by a curtain, looks on as two men, spears in hand, are stabbing a turbaned mullah in the back while he kneels down in prayer. Underneath this grisly image are inscribed the following words: “The martyrdom of Mullah Taqi by a Babi heretic.” Who is the “Babi heretic” charged with this dreadful murder? Why the singular reference when two men are clearly attacking the prostrate priest? Or is it the woman, rather, caught red-handed, who is being thus implicated? More important , who is the revengeful accuser absent from the scene but relentlessly pointing a finger of blame at this mysterious woman? She is covered in a chador and halfconcealed by a curtain but is apparently overseeing and masterminding the assassination of Mullah Taqi Baraghani, the Friday Prayer leader of the city of Qazvin. The paper she holds is incriminating evidence against her, for it is clear that the woman’s usurpation of the written word is as lethal as any assassin’s dagger. The iconography of the tombstone seems to suggest that the death of the patriarch and the presence of a woman in a public place amount to the same thing. That Tahirih had nothing to do with the murder of her father-in-law, other than perhaps predicting it, is a matter of historic record now. The real murderer, one Mirza ‘Abdullah Shirazi, admitted his guilt and presented to the authorities the bloody dagger with which he had assaulted Mullah Taqi in the mosque in 1847 as he was praying. However, the person who commissioned the carving, the murdered mullah’s son and Tahirih’s estranged husband, Mullah Mohammad , remained unaffected by his wife’s acquittal, even though it was approved by no less a personage than the king himself, Mohammad Shah Qajar (reigned 1834–48). He continued to hold her culpable or at least complicit in the killing of his father and had several other men tortured and executed in his unquenchable desire for revenge. Wrong but resolute in his allegation of homicide, he was nonetheless right in his recognition that the killing of his father was effectively the symbolic end to patriarchy in Iran, at least as he knew it. A new era was in the making: one in which women were no longer absent, one in which women could read and write and with daring insert themselves, body and voice, in the public scene. And yet, ironically...

Share