Tahira Qurrat al-'Ayn's Sisters of the Pen: Some Early Babi Women Poets with Dominic Brookshaw

Fatima Baraghani, who is better known to history by her Shaykhi epithet, Qurrat al-‘Ayn, and her Babi penname, Tahira, was born in Qazvin in 1814 and executed in Tehran in 1852. A prominent follower first of Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1843) and then the Bab (Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi; executed 1850), Tahira played a significant role in the development and spread of both Shaykhism and Babism – two of the most radical movements to emerge out of Twelver Shi‘ism in Qajar Iran. As well as a charismatic orator and a learned theologian, Tahira was also an accomplished poet who used her original compositions and her reworkings of well-known poems by others to captivate her interlocutors and convince them of the veracity of her beliefs. In this lecture, Dr. Brookshaw will present poems by three of Tahira’s female contemporaries: a Shaykhi woman from Khurasan and two Qajar initiates of the Ni‘matullahi Sufi order. These women variously associated closely with Tahira in Karbala, Hamadan, and Tehran. Guided by their mentor, they joined the Babi movement. He argues that it is only through studying poets such as these that we can gain insight into the nature of the female-only social circles Tahira moved within that are hinted at in the vaguest terms in the extant chronicles and eyewitness accounts of the period.Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2011 - 2013, he was Assistant Professor of Persian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has published widely on premodern and modern Persian literature, and his articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, and IRAN: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. His most recent book, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance, and Patronage in Fourteenth-century Iran (Bloomsbury, 2019), won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award in 2020. He serves currently as the President of the Association for Iranian Studies.Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts