 |
| collage by j.r-s. |
A
look at Táhirih and some of her
literary daughters, for International Women's Month
In
July, 1848, Táhirih stood unveiled before 72 men at a religious conference in
Badasht, Iran, breaking the great taboo. A woman's face had to remain unseen by
anyone not related to her. Yet, although an avowed opponent raised his sword as
if to strike her, Táhirih bared her face and raised her voice, announcing the
dawn of a new era. Her deed was a piece of dangerous, living theater. But what
else would one expect from a mystic poet of radical change who happened to be a
woman? The religious leader Bahá'u'lláh was present at Táhirih's announcement
and approved it. It was he who titled her Tahirih, the Pure One.
Four
years later, she was dead, strangled on an August night by a drunken henchman
of the Minister of War. She was killed and buried secretly because many people
compared her to Mohammad's daughter, the saintly Fatima. In fact, though deemed
by some a harlot, others called her a saint and said her appearance unveiled
fulfilled an Islamic prophecy that Fatima would be glimpsed, bare-faced, on the
Day of Judgment, crossing the Bridge of Sirat (finer than a hair, stretched
over an abyss.)
We
could say that all her life Táhirih walked a bridge over an abyss, claiming
freedoms that belonged, in her world, to men, and living by them. Her husband
was an instigator of her end; he hunted her down, he made sure she was arrested
and imprisoned, he didn't stop until she was dead. The regime that killed her
then went after Bahá'u'lláh. He would be stoned, chained, imprisoned, poisoned,
exiled. Every effort would be made to silence him.
Every
effort didn't work. Bahá'ís today are of every culture and color, and function
as a world community. Táhirih was one of the first women in the world to be a
Bahá'í, and she's revered as one of the greatest of the dawn-breakers of the
faith. She sang:
Dawnbreak!
Daybreak! Blessed be today!
Revived,
renewed, fresh off the loom, blessed be today!...
Why
wait? My robe is re-embroidered on this very morn.
Why
hesitate? The veil splits, sun's up, splendor is born...
Before
she was taken to her execution from the attic where she'd been under house
arrest, she told a friend to remember her and rejoice in her gladness. She
chose her fate. Her husband and sons could view her death as an honor killing.
They considered her a disgrace; if she'd recanted her faith she would have
saved her family's honor and herself. She chose to preserve her own honor by
serving the cause of human oneness, putting the human family first.
"Rejoice in my gladness" could be interpreted, "Rejoice in my
act of love."
She
did have a daughter. I think. Some historians affirm the daughter, some don't.
Various personas and fates are attributed to her, so that she is the stuff of
legend; tales already evolve about her as human imagination takes hold of
herstory and comes to own it. But Táhirih has many daughters in spirit.
Before
we meet some of her literary daughters, I want to state my understanding that
the real veil is silence. You don't have to be a woman to be veiled. Czech
nobel-prize winner Jaroslav Seifert said, "If an ordinary person is silent,
it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying."
Táhirih
never lied. Neither did – neither do – her daughters. Foroogh Farrokhzaad, 20th
Century poet, didn't sing of mystic love, but simply of love and unlove. She revealed her heart to rend asunder
Iranian social as well as literary veils. Like Táhirih, she died young, killed
in a car wreck rumored to be suicide. With her free speech, she gave voice and
presence to men as well as women. In her intensity, she achieved mysticism after
all –
...and
in the martyrdom of a candle
there
is a brilliant mystery
which
that last and most drawn-out
flame
knows, well knows...
Simin
Daneshvar wrote Savashun, arguably the
greatest, most popular Iranian novel, and the first ever published by a woman.
She died last year at the age of 90. Censorship and repression limited her
creative output all her life and continued after her death, when authorities
refused to allow her to be buried beside her husband. Savashun – in a way an Iranian Gone With the Wind -- is a
saga of the loss of a beloved man murdered for his politics. It's final words:
Do
not weep, sister. In your home, a tree shall grow, and others in your city, and
many more throughout your country. And the wind shall carry the message from
tree to tree and the trees shall ask the wind, "Did you see the dawn on
your way?"
A
young tree summarily cut down was Nadia Anjuman, a 25-year old Afghani woman
who died in 2005 after one too many beatings by her husband. It was a so-called
honor killing. Under the Taliban, she was disgracing herself and her family by
writing poetry. And she refused to stop. She also wouldn't stop reading and
discussing banned writers like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. She wrote about
oppressed women --
O
exiles of the mountain of oblivion!
O
the jewels of your names, slumbering in the mire of silence.
O
your obliterated memories, your light blue memories...
...
Will one of your names, above the peaks, become bright as the sun?...
If
Nadia had silenced herself, she would have been saved. If Táhirih had recanted
her faith, she would have been saved. Mahvesh Sabet is a 21st
Century Bahá'í poet and educator held in Rajai Shahr prison in Karaj, Alborz,
Iran. Like Táhirih, she refuses to recant. She's one of the Yaran (Friends), seven Bahá'í leaders
imprisoned since 2008. Family, local and world communities support them, yet
the nature of torture/imprisonment is that each sufferer soldiers through
alone. Mahvesh wrote –
...I
perfume with poetry
this
stale camphor-tasting bread;
and
try to cast the ink of light
on
jaundiced faces, on bowed heads...
...I
try to give hope of flight to these caged birds,
Wing-bound
and broken, trapped without words...
Yes,
but there's melody in poetry and it lives, giving voice to the voiceless.
Táhirih's songs are still sung in Iran today, in the cave of the heart:
I
unloose my ambergris hair across the desert plain:
one
curl the wild gazelle ensnares.
With
kohl I darken my narcissus eyes and I darken
day
itself: I am the world's demise...
Táhirih's Daughters, 2
A
look at Táhirih and some of her
social activist daughters, for International Women's Month.
"You
can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of
women." So Tahirih reportedly told her executioner in a Tehran garden on
an August night, 1852. She was
strangled, thrown into a dry pit and covered with stones, never divested of her
garments and, therefore, most likely not mutilated or violated by her killers
-- but perhaps buried alive.
The
assassins, acting under the aegis of the shah and his prime minister, were
spurred by a powerful cleric who happened to be Táhirih's enraged husband. Both
husband and regime were sure they'd silenced the woman who condemned them to
irrelevance by her poetry and deeds.
Some
of those deeds:
In
July, 1848, she bared her face at a religious conference of 72 men who were no
relation to her, violating a deep taboo of her Islamic culture and immediately
endangering her life.
She
shed her husband by repeating, "I divorce you" three times,
arrogating to herself a right reserved for men.
She
left her family and traveled in her own caravan, first to fulfill her personal
spiritual quest, and then to share her discovery with the world.
She
dressed in bright colors on the day of mourning for Imam Husayn, because it was
also the birthday of the founder of her new Faith. She said it was a new era,
time for rejoicing.
She
taught women to read and interpret scripture, and taught men, although from
behind a curtain. She taught since girlhood, and her poetry and theological
essays circulated among Iran's scholarly elite since she was a child.
She
was among the first women in the world to be a Bahá'í. The founder of her
faith, the goal of her quest, was present when she bared her face during the
conference. The men nearly rioted. Should they kill themselves? Should they
kill her? Bahá'u'lláh calmly defended her. Enemies called her a heretic and
harlot, but he named her Táhirih, the Pure One.
After
she was dead, her enemies assumed she was gone. But Bahá'ís of every culture
and color remember and revere her today as a paragon of female virtue.
A
new ideal of female virtue: human virtue, abiding by the truth that lives in
one's soul. Putting her spiritual quest first, she left husband, sons and
parents. Putting service to humanity first, she only went home under duress and
then had to escape under threat of death. We can grant her the comfort of a
daughter, possibly. Some historians say she had a daughter who was with her
until her death.
We
know she has many daughters today, fighting repression. Some use veils, some
don't. The veil is a symbol; it can symbolize subjugation or chastity or piety.
It can even symbolize deceit. Depending on the wearer.
Táhirih
told a student, "Let deeds, not words, be your adorning." We could
also say, "deeds, not veils." Shirin Ebadi, human rights lawyer, is
under criticism by Iran's national press for various things, including not
wearing a headscarf, although she's in exile. In 2003 she won the Nobel Peace
Prize -- the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to do so -- for championing
women's and children's rights. In 2008 she defended 7 Bahá'í leaders summarily
imprisoned. Her latest book, The Golden Cage, tells of three brothers in conflict with one another, each caught in
the prison cell of his own ideology.
Mahnaz
Afkhami, member of Iran's exiled royal family, established and runs the Women's
Learning Partnership and the Foundation for Iranian Studies. As the Iranian
Minister for Women's Affairs, she was in New York City when the shah was
overthrown in 1979. She never went home. Her peer, a female Minister of
Education, was accused of corruption on earth (among other fabricated charges)
and executed, although she'd been retired for eight years.
Like
her younger contemporary and sister-exile, Azar Nafisi, author of Reading
Lolita in Tehran, Mahnaz Afkhami sees women's rights at the crux of
Iranian turmoil and believes that inevitably the tide will turn to favor woman,
because it's human destiny.
A
much younger woman, Malala Yousefzai, of Pakistan, is in the news after the
Taliban tried to kill her on October 12, 2012, when she was 14, for championing
girls' right to education. She'd been publicly campaigning for education rights
since the age of 11. Her courage undiminished, she's now in hospital in
England, recovering. (In traditional Islamic societies girls of 11 are not
necessarily young. They may be married and pregnant. Tahirih was forced to marry
at 14, considered old.)
Humaira
Bachai, in Karachi, also champions female education. Her mother secretly sent
her to school after fifth grade. Her father beat mother and daughter when he
discovered it, but her mother, who is Iranian, sent Humaira to take her final
exams, anyway. Humaira, now 25,
runs a high school with over 1,000 students and goes door-to-door convincing
fathers to educate their daughters.
Layli
Miller-Muro founded the Táhirih Justice Center, with offices in Washington, DC,
Houston and Baltimore, to protect immigrant women and girls fleeing violence.
Raised in a Bahá'í household, she was studying law at American University when
she learned of Fauziya Kassindja, a Togolese woman who fled gender mutilation
and forced marriage. The U.S. government refused to grant asylum and imprisoned
her under hopeless conditions. Layli found pro bono legal representation for
her, and, with lawyer Karen Musalo, won the case, changing U.S. law. Karen
founded the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. The book Do They Hear You
When You Cry tells the story.
Fauziya
said in a PBS interview that during her sufferings she wondered, "Why
me?" Later, she realized that
because of what she endured her case and her cause reached many people, and she
came to consider it the work of God.
Táhirih
said the same of herself. She didn't feel like a giant among woman; she felt
vulnerable, fragile, alone – her strength was that inner truth that she refused
to betray. She prayed, "Oh God, with this broken wing I desire to soar to
the divine clouds, and with this weary heart recount the story of the world of
paradise and purity. But of course
there is none except you to be my helper..."
