Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu'l-'Ayn

by Anthony A. Lee and Qurratu'l-'Ayn

Tahirih's poems are well known among Persian Baha'is, but until now there has been no suitable translation of her work that would give English-speaking readers a sense of her genius. Now Amin Banani, Professor Emeritus at UCLA in Persian history and literature; Jascha Kessler, Professor of English at UCLA; and Anthony A. Lee, historian and award-winning poet, have teamed to produce this translation of her work. The poems are brilliant in emotional...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1890688363
• ISBN13: 9781890688363
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Kalimat Press
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Significant contribution in the bibliography of Iran's greatest mystic and feminist

The publisher (Kalimat Press), the two translators, and especially Professor Emeritus (UCLA) Amin Banani are to be commended and praised to the highest celestial heavens for producing this significant volume of poetry by Iran's greatest woman revolutionary mystic and Babi martyr. Long overdue, this volume brings together for the first time ever over a dozen of Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn's (d. 1852) most important surviving poems, giving a Western audience for the first time a glimpse at the rich literary spiritual legacy of this great, towering woman of 19th century Iranian religious history, whom I have dubbed the Houri (Angel-Celestial Damsel) of Badasht. While a very significant contribution to the growing bibliography on the subject, where this volume suffers is precisely in the choice of its selections. The editors and translators have not, for example, consulted *Qurratu'l-'Ayn: In Memory of the 100th Anniversay of a Genius of an Era* (Tehran: 1948) which was published by the Iranian Bayani community in the late 1940s. The majority of the poems seem to have come directly from the selection of Baha'i Nuqaba'i, which was far from exhaustive. Given that the publisher, editor and the translators are one and all Baha'is, this point is one where this volume ought to be treated with some level of caution, particularly in the editors introduction. Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn was the 17th Letter of the Living of the initial Babi hierarchy established among the first 18 individuals who came to believe in him by Siyyid 'Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Essence of the Seven Letters, the Bab (d. 1850). Tahirih was martyred by a servant of the Qajar deputy Mahmoud Khan-i-Kalantar on the orders of Nasiruddin Shah (d. 1896) in the summer of 1852, well over a decade and a half before Mirza Husayn 'Ali Nuri Baha'u'llah (d. 1892) made his prophetic claims, which ruptured the nascent Bayani (i.e. Babi) community led by the Bab's legitimately appointed successor Subh-i-Azal (d. 1912), thus splitting this community into the rival Azali-Baha'i factions. Several panegyric poems by Tahirih addressed to Azal (one of which I have translated and which will be appearing in a publication by me in 2006) clearly demonstrate that the Baha'i twist on Tahirih's life and religious sentiments is rather ahistorical, not to mention obfuscatory. Baha'i sources, from Pseudo-Zarandi (i.e. Nabil's Narrative which ought to be regarded in its present version as an independent work by Shoghi Effendi instead), have sought to portray Tahirih as a proto-Baha'i saint. Much of what animates these portrayals have been motivated by Baha'i sectarian legitimacy claims, thus the argument could be made that Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn has indeed been re-Imagined and re-sculpted ( or "conflated," rather to use Denis Maceoin's term) to reflect such motivations by the Baha'is. While the introduction of this volume largely stays away from explicitly purusing sectarian agendas of one sort or another, the 'presences' (a