Without Veil at Badasht: Ṭáhirih's Public Declaration

Nabíl’s Dawn-Breakers devotes a chapter to the conference at Badasht in the summer of 1848. The conference had been convened, in three small adjacent gardens in the village of Badasht in eastern Mázindarán, by Bahá’u’lláh — though the significance of His role would not be fully understood until later. Eighty-one of the principal Bábí teachers had been summoned. They came from across Persia.

The agenda was substantial. The Báb was confined at Chihríq. The community had grown rapidly in the four years since the Declaration. The relation of the new Faith to its Islamic inheritance — whether the Bábí dispensation was a renewal of the Islamic covenant or a wholly new one — had not been publicly addressed. The conference at Badasht was convened to consult on the question.

The three gardens had been arranged with care. Bahá’u’lláh, during the consultations, occupied one. Quddús — having travelled to Badasht despite the dangers of his presence in the open — occupied another. Ṭáhirih, the great woman of the new Faith, occupied the third.

The conference proceeded for several days. Tablets were revealed and read. The believers consulted in small groups. The senior figures consulted privately together. The general disposition of the gathering inclined cautiously: the rupture with the Islamic past, even if doctrinally necessary, would need to be made very gradually if the community was to withstand the shock.

The decisive moment came in a way no one in the gathering had expected. Ṭáhirih, whose teaching at Karbilá and at Qazvín had already made her one of the most controversial figures in the movement, appeared one afternoon at Quddús’s tent. She was unveiled. She was unveiled in the presence of men.

The shock to the assembled teachers, the chronicle records, was profound. Several of them cried out. One, ‘Abdu’l-Khálíq- i-Iṣfáhání, was so distraught that he cut his throat and ran bleeding from the gathering. Several others left Badasht the next day and never returned.

Ṭáhirih, undisturbed, addressed the gathering. The chronicle preserves the central sentence of her address:

This day is the day on which the fetters of the past are broken asunder.

She spoke for some time. She spoke of the new dispensation as the dispensation that the centuries of Islamic preparation had been waiting for; she spoke of the inadequacy of the old forms to contain the new content; she spoke of her unveiling as the declaration, in act, of the principle the conference had been considering in word.

Quddús, who had been at first apparently angry at the intrusion, by the close of her address had risen and embraced her as the trumpet-blast of the new day. The deeper arrangement — Quddús’s seeming opposition, Ṭáhirih’s seeming defiance, Bahá’u’lláh’s steadying hand behind both — was recognised by the careful observers afterward as a single coordinated move.

The conference dispersed within days. The teachers returned to their cities. The Bábí community had passed, in those few hours at Badasht, from a movement within Islamic reform into a new dispensation in its own right.

Ṭáhirih would, in the autumn of 1852, be martyred by silken cord in a Tihrán garden. She went to her death wearing the white silk gown she had set aside for the occasion. The unveiling at Badasht had been the public declaration of the woman who would, four years later, also be the first martyr of woman’s emancipation in the modern world.

Source: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, The Dawn-Breakers (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1932), Chapter XVII — The Conference at Badasht. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/