The media are in a fine stramash about House of Commons Leader Jack Straw’s stated preference that Muslim women not wear face-covering veils when they attend his Blackburn constituency ’surgery’. There have been many condemnations of his very frank statement about this, but there has also been a good deal of support for his position from Muslims amongst others.

This story is bound to remind Baha’is of the story of Tahirih, the 19th century Iranian poet who was an early follower of the Bab, the first of the two Messengers of God Who founded the Baha’i Faith. Followers of the B?b were known as Babis (prounounced “Baabees”) and Tahirih was a Babi.

Tahirih stood out in an Islamic society that oppressed women. Born in 1817, she was highly intelligent, a gifted poet, and a descendent of an illustrious Iranian family. She became one of the first 18 followers of the Bab, as described by Shoghi Effendi in his wonderful history of the first 100 years of the Baha’i Faith, God Passes By:

… a woman, the only one of her sex … was invested with the rank of apostleship in the new Dispensation. A poetess, less than thirty years of age, of distinguished birth, of bewitching charm, of captivating eloquence, indomitable in spirit, unorthodox in her views, audacious in her acts, immortalized as Tahirih (the Pure One) by the “Tongue of Glory,” and surnamed Qurratu’l-’Ayn (Solace of the Eyes) by … her teacher, she had, in consequence of the appearance of the B?b to her in a dream, received the first intimation of a Cause which was destined to exalt her to the fairest heights of fame…

Tahirih was utterly fearless in her promotion of her new faith. It is difficult for us to imagine how much the B?b and his followers upset the orthodoxy of Shi’i Islam and the hierarchy of mullas and ‘ulama, how much more so the impact of this extraordinary woman.

Amongst many other courageous acts, she had the temerity to write long letters to each of the ‘ulamas (the Islamic scholars) in Karbila, a Shi’ite stronghold. These religious scholars regarded women as little better than animals, enforced the wearing of the veil, and even denied that women had souls. Tahirih’s letter set out the tenets of the new faith and exposed the malignancy of the ‘ulamas. She used to give brilliant speeches to glittering audiences and discourses about the B?b’s teachings and entered into debate with scholars and government officials about religion and her faith.

But perhaps Tahirih’s most audacious act took place at a conference of B?b?s during the summer of 1848 at an Iranian hamlet called Badasht. The B?b was incarcerated and the conference was subtly guided by Baha’u'llah, the second of the two Founders of the Baha’i Faith. The B?b’s followers were struggling with a central question: how to implement the sudden, complete and dramatic break with the the the order, the ecclesiasticism, the traditions and the ceremonials of the Shi’ite past that the Bab’s revelation mandated?

Unsurprisingly, Tahirih advocated what seemed to many of those gathered at Badasht to be extreme action. And she was not afraid to make her point with a dramatic gesture.

Towards the end of the conference, Tahirih, who was regarded as the emblem of chastity and purity, suddenly appeared amongst the men at the conference without her veil.

“The effect was electric and instantaneous,” writes Shoghi Effendi in God Passes By.

She, of such stainless purity, so reverenced that even to gaze at her shadow was deemed an improper act, appeared for a moment, in the eyes of her scandalized beholders, to have defamed herself, shamed the Faith she had espoused, and sullied the immortal Countenance she symbolized. Fear, anger, bewilderment, swept their inmost souls, and stunned their faculties.

One man cut his throat and fled from the place. Others immediately renounced their faith. Most stood mute and transfixed. One of the leading B?b?s looked as if he would strike her down.

Tahirih, undaunted, joyful, immediately delivered an eloquent and unpremeditated speech in which she pronounced the end of the Islamic dispensation and announced the new dispensation inaugurated by the B?b.

Of course, such temerity on the part of a mere woman, no matter how gifted, could not go unpunished. In August 1852 she was strangled with her own silk handkerchief by government soldiers in a garden in Tehran; her body was lowered into a well, where it was covered with stones.

By removing her veil in public, Tahirih struck a blow for women’s freedom. But more than this, she symbolized the end of an obsolete, tyrannical order and proclaimed the advent of a new dispensation in which women would play as important a part as men. As Shoghi Effendi writes in God Passes By, Tahirih and her fellow followers of the B?b

… were themselves, in the hamlet of Badasht, abrogating the Qur’anic law, repudiating both the divinely-ordained and man-made precepts of the Faith of Muhammad, and shaking off the shackles of its antiquated system.

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