by WAHID AZAL
‘We have given the power of the world and its leadership over to women! O you women of the world, be you responsible with it, if you be just and fair!’
– First Gate of the Fifteenth Unity of the Bay?n
As several historical narratives have detailed,[1] during the summer of 1848 as revolutions were raging across Europe, and closely contemporaneous with the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels; an ancestor of mine and iconclastic revolutionary B?b? leader and Iranian Shi?ite woman hailed by the B?b as the ‘return’of F??ima (i.e. the prophet Mu?ammad’s daughter), and known to posterity as ??hirih Qurrat’ul-?Ayn (the Pure Solace of the Eyes) (d. 1852), appeared publicly unveiled atop a make-shift d?’is in the hamlet of Badasht northern Iran, Semnan province, where B?b? leaders and laity had gathered at the time on their leader’s behest, i.e. the B?b (himself incarcerated at the time in Iranian Azerbaij?n), in order to determine the fate of their movement. Creating an uproar that resonates to this very day by scandalizing the orthodox religious establishment for appearing publicly unveiled, there Qurrat’ul-?Ayn is apparently credited for proclaiming the abrogation of the Islamic dispensation altogether with its shar??a, declaring her own divinity in the process, while promulgating a new scripture on behalf of the B?b superceding the Qur?n known as the Bay?n (exposition). A few accounts have dramatized words uttered by her to the effect that, ‘I am the word which the Q??im has uttered putting the kings and rulers of the earth to flight!’[2]
Four years later in the late summer of 1852, as the absolutist Q?j?r monarchy and its reactionary clerical allies had struggled on the brink of collapse to put down B?b? uprisings throughout Iran with the heresy it represented to them; and following a four year incarceration by government forces as a vocal religio-political dissident; on the back of a failed B?b? assassination attempt on the life of the Q?j?r monarch, N??irudd?n Sh?h (d. 1896); by royal edict Qurrat’ul-?Ayn was strangled to death with her body buried somewhere in the royal gardens (b?gh-i-ilkh?n?) of Tehran.[3] Although neither Bah?ism nor a modern Iranian feminist movement were to emerge for a few more decades yet from 1852, both movements have subsequently claimed her as theirs, and often for contradictory reasons. Twentieth century Iranian feminists and activists such as Sad?qa Dawlat?b?d? (d. 1961)[4] or the modernist poet and iconoclast Forough Farrokhz?d (d. 1967)[5] were inspired by her example. There is even speculation that the Islamo-Marxist ideologue of the Islamic Revolution himself, ?Al? Shar??at? (d. 1977),[6] was secretly a B?b? – his uncompromising anti-clericalism being implicit evidence to that end, not to mention that his late wife never donned the ?ij?b until forced to by the Khomeinist state. Shar??at?’s series of Hosseiniyah-Ersh?d lectures bound as a single volume, entitled ‘F??ima is F??ima’ (f??ima, f??ima hast),[7] also seems to be a bow to Qurrat’ul-?Ayn rather than the F??ima of orthodox Shi?ite piety.
That said, while as yet unacknowledged, the historical shadow of ??hirih Qurrat’ul-?Ayn, the ‘Remover of the Veil’, hangs long over current events unfolding in Iran, with Mahsa Amini (who was murdered by the security forces of the Morality Police of the Islamic Republic on the 13th of September 2022 which triggered current events) becoming a sort of archetypal Qurrat’ul-?Ayn revisited, since Qurrat’ul-?Ayn was the first modern Iranian woman to have challenged the Islamic patriarchy at its root, and the ?ij?b in particular, in the way it is once more being decisively challenged and defied, this time by all sectors of Iranian women rather than just a single person. The slogan of this uprising, ‘Woman, life, freedom’ (zan, zendeg?, ?z?d?), also epitomizes what Qurrat’ul-?Ayn and all Iranian women who came after her have stood for, struggled and fought for. In a sense, given its conspicuous anti-clericalism, current events are also a reprise of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1909) itself from where it left off: a movement initially spearheaded by late nineteenth century and early turn of the twentieth century Iranian Azal? B?b?s that was originally designed to curb both the unchecked power of the absolutist monarchy as well as the reactionary Shi?ite clergy behind it.[8] Given Tsarist Russian intervention in an anti-Constitutional coup d’etat in 1909 on the side of the Q?j?rs and some of their clerifical allies, such as Khomeini’s bigotted anti-B?b? hero Shaykh Fa?lull?h N?r? (d. 1909) – an arch-reactionary figure of the period which the Islamic Republic has gone out of its way over the years to celebrate and lionize – this movement slowly unravelled over the next decade before being twilighted altogether with the rise of the Pahlavi shahs and their uber-modernist, statist and petro-dollar dictatorship during the 1920s. But its memory and thrust lived on because it re-appeared in a new guise during the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran (1941-1946) and with the two shortlived premierships of Mohammad Mossadegh (d. 1967)[9] in the early 1950s.
While contemporary histories of Iran punctuate its history with Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989), his Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the veiling of women, the past forty-three years have proven that 1979 and the Islamic Republic were in fact a historical aberration and so not a progressive stream connecting it with the Constitutional Revolution and its aims. So perhaps contemporary events, especially if the mullahs’ regime were to be taken down, are a historical self-correcting mechanism, as it were. Indeed events have proven that Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution were in fact a counter-Revolution vis-à-vis the Constitutional Revolution: a counter-Revolution that has critically stymied and crippled Iranian society for the past four decades on all fronts, and one that merely replaced the absolutism of the former kings with that of the mullahs (what else is the system of the Guardianship Jurisprudent and Supreme Leader other than an absolute monarch with a turban); this, since it has been the mullahs who always bolstered the worst excesses of entrenched power and its patriarchy whether under the Safavids or the Q?j?rs and then the Islamic Republic, i.e. the ‘black Shi?ism’ which ?Al? Shar??at? had vociferously criticized in his books and lectures, as opposed to the people-powered ‘red Shi?ism’ that arguably was the Shi?ism once briefly represented in Iran by the Azal? B?b?s[10] with their revolutionary aspirations to transform Iranian society from the authoritarianism of the royal court as well as, and especially, the patriarchal power structures reinforced by the religious hierarchy of the seminary with its unchecked hold and power over the consciousness of Iranian society.
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