How Táhirih Received Her Names

A retelling drawn from God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi and The Dawn-Breakers of Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. The narrative is in our own words; words in quotation marks are quoted from those two books.

Her father named her Fáṭimih. Her family called her Umm-i-Salmih, and also Zakiyyih. Believers remember her by two other names, each given to her by someone else: Qurratu'l-'Ayn and Táhirih.

She was born in Qazvín in 1233 A.H. (1817), the same year as Bahá'u'lláh. Her father, Ḥájí Mullá Ṣáliḥ, and his brother, Mullá Taqí, were both mujtahids of great renown. A note in The Dawn-Breakers records that her learning led her father to say more than once: "Would that she had been a boy for he would have shed illumination upon my household, and would have succeeded me!"

In the home of her cousin she found the writings of Shaykh Aḥmad and took them home to read. Her father objected strongly, but she began a secret correspondence with Shaykh Aḥmad's successor, Siyyid Káẓim, and wrote a defence of Shaykh Aḥmad's teachings which she presented to him. His reply opened with the words: "O thou who art the solace of mine eyes (Yá Qurrat-i-'Ayní!), and the joy of my heart!" "Ever since that time," Nabíl writes, "she has been known as Qurratu'l-'Ayn."

She set out for Karbilá hoping to meet Siyyid Káẓim, but he had died ten days before she arrived. Shoghi Effendi records that the Báb appeared to her in a dream. When her sister's husband, Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alí, was about to leave Qazvín, she gave him a sealed letter for the Promised One she was sure he would meet. He found the Báb and delivered it, and the Báb declared her one of the Letters of the Living. She was the only woman among the eighteen, and the only one of them who never attained His presence.

Her second name came at Badasht, in the summer of 1848. Bahá'u'lláh had rented three gardens in that hamlet, one for Quddús, one for Táhirih and one for Himself, and the eighty-one believers who gathered there were His guests. Shoghi Effendi writes that "on every believer He conferred a new name, without, however, disclosing the identity of the one who had bestowed it." Bahá'u'lláh was from then on known as Bahá. The Last Letter of the Living was named Quddús, "while Qurratu'l-'Ayn was given the title of Táhirih", the Pure One. The Báb afterwards revealed a Tablet for each of those present and addressed each one by the new name.

It was at Badasht, on a day when illness had confined Bahá'u'lláh to bed, that Táhirih appeared before the assembled believers without her veil and seated herself at the right hand of Quddús. The companions regarded her as the incarnation of Fáṭimih, the emblem of chastity, and even to look at her shadow seemed improper to them. One of them, 'Abdu'l-Kháliq-i-Iṣfahání, cut his own throat and fled; a few others abandoned the Faith. Táhirih then addressed those who remained, and declared: "I am the Word which the Qá'im is to utter, the Word which shall put to flight the chiefs and nobles of the earth!" Through that conference, Shoghi Effendi writes, the new Faith was "permanently divorced from the laws and institutions of Islám."

Afterwards some of those who had been at Badasht reported her conduct to the Báb and tried to tarnish her name. He replied: "What am I to say regarding her whom the Tongue of Power and Glory has named Táhirih [the Pure One]?" Nabíl records that these words were enough to silence her critics, and that from then on the believers called her Táhirih.

She was put to death in Tihrán in 1852, during the persecution that followed the attempt on the life of the Sháh. That night she put on the attire of a bride. She was taken to the Ílkhání garden outside the city gates, strangled with a silken kerchief she had set aside for that purpose, and her body was lowered into a well. Shoghi Effendi records that she had said to the one in whose custody she had been placed: "You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women." She was thirty-six years old.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi and The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/