The Last Night of Ṭáhirih

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of those close to the early history of the Faith. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Among all the heroic figures of the Faith's earliest days, few shine with the particular brightness of Ṭáhirih. She was a poet of rare gift, a theologian who could hold her own with the most learned divines of her age, and the only woman numbered among the Letters of the Living — the Báb's first eighteen disciples. She had renounced the comfort and security of a prominent family to follow the new Revelation; at the gathering of Badasht she had cast aside her veil before an astonished company of men, declaring by that single act that a new Day had dawned in which the old chains, including the chains that bound women, were broken. For years afterward she lived under the shadow of persecution, confined, hunted, her words forbidden. She knew where her road was leading, and she did not turn from it.

In the dreadful summer of 1852, when the attempt on the life of the Sháh unleashed a slaughter of the Bábís across Ṭihrán, the authorities resolved to put Ṭáhirih to death along with so many others. She had been held in the house of the Mayor of the capital. There, in her last days, she awaited the end not with dread but with a strange, settled joy.

What those around her remembered most was the calm. On the night appointed for her death, Ṭáhirih did not weep or plead or break. She prepared herself as a bride prepares for her wedding. She put on, the accounts relate, her finest garments; she perfumed herself; she made of her last hours an occasion of adornment and dignity rather than of terror. She had dressed herself as for a festival, and she met her death with the calm of one who had long been ready. To those who would carry out the sentence she gave no satisfaction of fear; she was the freest person in the house.

She had foreseen this hour and welcomed it. She knew that her death would seal, with the highest possible testimony, the truth for which she had given her whole life. And she knew something more — that her death was not an ending but a beginning. To those who held her, she spoke words that have echoed down the years since: that they might kill her whenever they wished, but they could never stop the emancipation of women. It was a prophecy uttered by a woman about to be killed precisely because she would not stay silent — and it looked clear past her own grave to a liberation she herself would never live to see.

In the dark of that night she was taken from the house to a garden on the outskirts of Ṭihrán. There, away from witnesses, she was put to death and her body lowered into a well, which was then filled in — her enemies hoping, as the enemies of the martyrs so often hoped, that to hide the body was to erase the deed. They could not. The memory of how she died spread among the believers and beyond them, and grew rather than faded. Western observers in later decades, far from the Faith, would speak with wonder of the Persian poetess who had gone to her death for the cause of a new age and for the dignity of her sex.

There is something in Ṭáhirih's last night that gathers up the whole meaning of the glory of Jalál. Hers was not the heroism of resistance by force; she carried no weapon and led no defence. Hers was the heroism of utter steadfastness — of a soul so certain of the truth she had recognized, and so detached from the life she was about to lose, that her executioners found in her not a victim to be broken but a witness who had already won. She had been told to recant, to be silent, to disappear. Instead she dressed for a wedding, spoke a prophecy, and walked into the garden of her death as one walks toward a long-promised reunion.

She gave her life, in the end, for two things bound together: the truth of the Revelation she had embraced, and the future emancipation of countless women she would never meet. The first she sealed with her blood; the second the world has been slowly, haltingly, vindicating ever since. The well was filled in; the voice was not.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.