A Lamp Carried East: Dr. Susan Moody Answers the Call to Tehran

A retelling based on the early issues of Star of the West, the first Bahá'í periodical of the American community, which carried the letters of Dr. Susan I. Moody and her fellow workers from Tehran. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

The Feast of Núr is a feast of light — and light is not only something a soul receives. It is also something a soul carries. There is a particular kind of believer who, having found the light, will not keep it, but picks it up like a lamp and walks it deliberately into the darkest room she can find. Dr. Susan I. Moody was such a believer, and the dark room she chose, well past the middle of her life, was a city half a world from home.

A summons answered late

By 1909 Susan Moody was an established American physician in Chicago — a woman of middle age, with a settled practice, a circle of friends, and every reason to expect that her remaining years would be spent in the comfortable usefulness she had earned. She was also a Bahá'í, and word had been carried from 'Akká that 'Abdu'l-Bahá wished for capable Western believers — and especially women trained in medicine — to go to Persia and labour alongside their Persian sisters. The Master had a particular concern for the women of that land, who lived under heavy restrictions, were largely barred from education, and had little access to medical care that a woman could decently receive.

To answer such a call was no small thing. Persia was distant, its language and customs foreign, its journey long and uncertain. Moody was fifty-eight years old. The sensible counsel of the world is that fifty-eight is an age for consolidating a life, not uprooting it. She closed her practice, said her farewells, and set out — alone — for Tehran. By the spring of 1910 she was in residence in the Persian capital and writing back to America.

There is a quiet heroism in that bare sequence of facts that the years can hide. She did not go as a young adventurer with nothing to lose. She went as a woman who had a great deal to lose, and chose to spend it. She picked up her lamp and walked east.

Two kinds of light

The work she had come to do was, from the first, a work of light in two senses, and she pursued both at once.

The first was the light of healing. As a respected physician — and, crucially, a woman physician — Moody could reach a population almost no one else could reach. The women of Tehran, hedged about by custom, could not freely be treated by male doctors. To them Moody was something close to a deliverance: a competent Western physician before whom they need feel no shame, who could tend their bodies and their children with skill and with tenderness. In a city where sickness among women too often went quietly untreated behind closed doors, she opened a door.

The second was the light of learning. The Bahá'í community of Tehran had founded, in 1909, a school for girls — the Tarbíyat Madrisah-i-Banát, the Tarbíyat Girls' School — at a time when the very idea that girls were worth educating was not yet accepted by the wider society or recognised by the state. Such a school was a fragile thing: small, underfunded, eyed with suspicion. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had given it His firm support, and Moody, with her standing as an American doctor, was asked to lend her name and her energy to its survival. She did. She taught; she encouraged; she helped hold the little institution together through its precarious early years.

The joining of these two lights — healing for the body, learning for the mind — was not accidental. In the Bahá'í understanding, the education of a people and the health of a people rise or fall together, and the education of women is the education of mothers, who are the first teachers of every generation that follows. To bring a girls' school into being in Tehran was to light a lamp whose glow would fall on children not yet born.

"The girls' school is assured"

The American friends who read the Star of the West in 1910 followed Moody's work through the letters the magazine printed in nearly every number. One issue carried a letter from a Persian believer, Fareeza Khánum, describing a gathering of the women of Tehran who had assembled to meet the new American doctor — photographs shared, spiritual matters discussed, the prospects of the work ahead weighed with hope. The next issue carried Moody's own words.

She did not write at length about hardships, though there were many. She summed up the thing the American friends had most been waiting to hear in a single sentence, plain and certain: "The girls' school is assured." Five words. No flourish. But in those five words a whole future was being promised. The school would not collapse. The daughters of Tehran — Bahá'í, Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian alike — would find, inside its walls, the kind of education the wider city was not yet willing to give them.

It is worth pausing on how a great light often actually arrives in the world: not as a blaze, but as a small, steady flame, tended by ordinary hands, reported in ordinary letters. The girls' school is assured. It reads like a note about business. It was, in truth, a sunrise being announced for thousands of girls who would otherwise have grown up in the dark.

The lamp that outlasted its bearer

The school Moody helped to steady did endure. The Tarbíyat Girls' School went on for another quarter of a century, until it was closed in 1934 by order of the Persian government along with all the other Bahá'í schools of the country. By the time its doors were shut, it had educated thousands of girls. Its graduates became the teachers, the physicians, and the capable women of a generation that had grown up under the discipline of an idea Moody had crossed the world to serve.

She herself gave the rest of her long life to Persia, returning there even after difficult years, and is remembered among the early American believers as one of the first to answer, in the flesh and at real cost, the Master's call to carry the light eastward. She had been an established doctor with everything to lose; she laid it all down to become a lamp in a far city.

That is the facet of Núr this story holds up. Light received is a gift; light carried is a calling. Susan Moody heard the call when she was old enough to have declined it with honour — and instead she rose, closed her comfortable life, and walked her lamp into one of the darker rooms of the world, where it is burning still in every life it touched. "The girls' school is assured," she wrote. And so, because of such bearers of light, it was.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Star of the West, Volume 1.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1910). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1