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I want to speak to Táhirih

March 6, 2012, Tuesday, Day 6 ~ 30-Day Blogging Challenge prompt is “If you could speak to anyone alive or dead throughout history who would you choose and why?”

There are many people in history with which I want to hold a conversation. The problem, I have, is choosing one person. I am the woman who goes into the supermarket for ice cream and cannot decide whether I want double vanilla, real strawberry, or fudge chocolate, so I buy all three. This explains why I do not have room in my freezer to very many leftovers.

Now getting down to my decision, I will not make a list of everyone in history want to speak to; I will limit my list to the top three women (my opinion) in religious history. This list is in chronological order according their appearance: (1) Eve (Garden of Eden), (2) Mary Magdalene (a follower of Christ), and (3) Táhirih (the only woman among The Bab’s 18 Letters of the Living). The one I picked for this entry is Táhirih.

Táhirih was born, Fátimih Zarrín Táj (the name her parents gave her at birth), sometime between 1814 and 1817 in Qazvin, Persia (Iran). Strangled by a “drunken soldier” in Tehran, in 1852, then soldiers placed her body in a well and covered it with stones. Qurratu’l-‘Ayn or Solace of the Eyes, is another title by which Táhirih, meaning Pure, is known.

Why did I choose Táhirih? I chose her because she was a mystic poet, a scholar of religion, and the first woman to remove in veil in Persia. In 1848, at the Conference of Badasht, she removed her veil and sent shockwaves through the Bábí leaders gathered there. By removing her veil, Táhirih made a statement for Women’s Rights that has echoed down through history.

What would I ask her? I do not have to ask her about her muse because I know her muse was The Bab. I would ask if she rewrote her verses or accepted them as the came out of her pen.

The first stanza of Point by Point
my favorite poem by Táhirih

If I met you face to face, I
would retrace—erase!—my heartbreak,
pain by pain,
word by word,
point by point.

from Táhirih: A Portrait in Poetry
Selected Poems of Qurratu’l-‘Ayn
Edited and Translated by Amin Banai

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