This panel examines several texts and figures in early Baha’i history that have yet to be studied in depth by scholars. The first talk discusses an Arabic prayer by Bahá’u’lláh that uses the Qur’anic language of paradise to describe the experience of divine intimacy. The prayer employs the metaphorical genitive to define sensory-rich descriptions of paradise and divine reality. The second talk highlights the life of Fatimah Baraghání, a Persian woman who stood up for women’s rights and her beliefs and was martyred in the 19th century. She challenged societal norms and pursued an education outside of patriarchal restrictions, becoming an early heroine of the Bahá’í Faith. The third talk explores another early work of Bahá’u’lláh, the Poem of Rashḥ-i-’Amá, which celebrates the revelation of the Báb and the entirety of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation. This final talk discusses the challenges of translating Bahá’u’lláh’s unique blending of Persian and Arabic and explores the poem's vivid, mystical imagery. All three speakers hope to introduce these lesser-known texts and figures to wider audiences and understand Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation in historical contexts.
This paper explores an unlikely heroine—a 19th-century Persian woman who, despite living in a patriarchal society, wrote poetry, educated girls, and became well-known as a writer, reformer, and Bábí. Fatimah Baraghání, who became known as Tahirih, was from a well-known family in the city of Qazvin, Iran. Her father, Mulla Salih, was a Mujtahid who ran a school with students as far away as India and all over Persia. Mulla Salih gave all his daughters something unusual: an education. This paper examines Tahirih’s understanding of Persian literature, poetry, religious jurisprudence, Islamic tradition and Qur'anic commentary. It also examines her ways of subverting gender norms, her involvement with the new Bábí movement, and her eventual martyrdom.
The Arabic prayer “From the Sweet-Scented Streams of Thine Eternity,” by Bahá’u’lláh recenters Qur’anic motifs, language, and imagery of the pleasures of paradise (janna) from quotidian comforts to a dynamic relationship of intimacy with God. Each verse of this prayer, employing the metaphorical genitive, contains a structure of supplicating God for a symbolic blissful joy (e.g., “sweet-scented streams”) as the paradise of intimacy with Him (e.g., “of Thine eternity”), followed by proclaiming one of God’s attributes or actions. I identify this exegetical and poetic move of Bahá’u’lláh in this prayer as foreshadowed in the Islamic tradition, even while its richness and clarity by Bahá’u’lláh raises to new heights this vision of the experience of paradise as an expression of divine reality.
Tahirih, also known as Qurratu’l-‘Ayn (18---1852), was one of the leading disciples of the Bab (1819-1844), Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad of Shiraz, the founder of Babism. She was formally educated in Islamic learning and theology, but relied heavily on inspiration for some of her most radical doctrines. Her poems contain radical theological pronouncements that would propel the Babi movement beyond Islam.
By no means typical or representative of other Babi scholars, her theology seems to be filled with a woman’s sensibility, with its inclination towards peace, justice, and reconciliation. At certain moments, Tahirih anticipates developments in Babi/Baha’i teachings that would not take place until decades later. Tahirih’s poetic voice offers a unique Babi theology understood, perhaps, only by her few (women?) followers at the time.