Dr. Susan Moody and the Tehran Girls' School

The early issues of the Star of the West in 1910 carried, in nearly every number, news from Persia. The editors in Chicago had arranged a regular flow of correspondence from believers in Tehran — particularly from the small group of American women who had answered 'Abdu'l-Bahá's call to go and work alongside their Persian sisters.

The first of those Americans was Dr. Susan I. Moody, an experienced physician from Chicago. She had been called by the Master in the autumn of 1909, had closed her American practice, and had set out for Tehran at the age of fifty-eight. By the spring of 1910 she was already in residence in the Persian capital and writing back to America.

In Issue 1 of the Star of the West, a letter from Fareeza Khánum — a Persian believer in Tehran — described one of the gatherings of the maid-servants of God in the city: many women had assembled to meet Dr. Moody, photographs were distributed, and the conversation had ranged over spiritual matters and the prospects for the work to come. Issue 2 carried correspondence from Dr. Moody herself, summarizing the conditions of women in the country and offering one short and decisive sentence:

The girls' school is assured.

The school was the Tarbíyat Madrisah-i-Banát — the Tarbíyat Girls' School — which had been founded in 1909 to provide modern education for the daughters of Tehran's Bahá'í community and other families willing to enroll. In 1910 it was still small. Funding was uncertain. The Persian state did not yet recognize girls' education as a public good. But the Master had given the project His firm support, and Dr. Moody, in her capacity as a respected American doctor, had been instructed to lend her name and energy to its survival.

Her letter back to Chicago was the assurance the American friends had been waiting for. The school would continue. The girls of Tehran — Bahá'í, Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian — would find inside its walls the kind of education the wider city was not yet prepared to give them.

The Tarbíyat Girls' School would in fact endure for another quarter-century, until 1934, when it was closed by order of the Iranian government along with all other Bahá'í schools in the country. By that time it had educated thousands of girls. Its graduates would go on to become the doctors, the teachers, and the artists of a generation that had grown up under the discipline of an idea announced in three words by the Master and pursued, in small letters back to Chicago, by an American physician already past the years when many would have begun a long work.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 1, Issues 1 and 2 (March-April 1910), letters from Dr. Susan I. Moody and Fareeza Khánum in Tehran. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

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