The Last Night of Ṭáhirih

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi (chapter 5) and on the account in **The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative** (chapter 26), which Nabíl gathered from informants, some of them witnesses. Words in quotation marks are quoted from those books.*

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Ṭáhirih, the poet of Qazvín, was the only woman among the Letters of the Living, the Báb's first eighteen disciples. At the gathering of Badasht in 1848 she had appeared unveiled before the assembled believers. By 1852 she was a prisoner in Ṭihrán, confined in the house of Maḥmúd Khán, the Kalantar (mayor) of the city. Nabíl writes that the leading women of the capital crowded to her door to hear her, and that the Kalantar's wife, who acted as her hostess, grew deeply devoted to her.

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It was the Kalantar's wife who described Ṭáhirih's last day. "One night," she said, "whilst Tahirih was staying in my home, I was summoned to her presence and found her fully adorned, dressed in a gown of snow-white silk. Her room was redolent with the choicest perfume." When she asked the reason, Ṭáhirih replied: "I am preparing to meet my Beloved."

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Ṭáhirih then told her that the hour of her arrest and martyrdom was near, and gave her last wishes. She asked that the Kalantar's son go with her to the place of her death, and make sure she was not made to take off the clothes she wore. She asked that her body be thrown into a pit and the pit filled with earth and stones.

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She said she would fast until she met her Beloved, and asked to be left alone. The Kalantar's wife locked the door. Several times that day and night she stood outside it and heard Ṭáhirih chanting.

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Four hours after sunset the attendants of 'Azíz Khán-i-Sardár came to the door. The Kalantar's wife found Ṭáhirih veiled and ready, pacing the floor and "chanting a litany expressive of both grief and triumph." She kissed her hostess, gave her the key to her chest, and rode out with the Kalantar's son to the Ílkhání garden outside the city gate.

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The Sardár was drinking with his officers there, and ordered that she be strangled at once and thrown into a pit. Ṭáhirih gave the Kalantar's son a silken kerchief she had kept for this purpose, and two of the Sardár's attendants used it to take her life. Her body was lowered into a well that had been dug and left unfinished, and the well was filled with earth and stones, as she had asked.

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Shoghi Effendi calls her "the first woman suffrage martyr." He records that at her death, turning to the one in whose custody she had been placed, she declared: "You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women." Her fame, he writes, travelled "as far as the capitals of Western Europe."

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*This is a retelling. For the full account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, chapter 5, and **The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative**, chapter 26.*

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