The Spirit of Tahirih Lives!

On a crowded Tehran street a few weeks back, a young woman calmly got up on a metal housing for phone wires, took off her scarf and waved it back and forth, bare-headed, for more than an hour. Eventually, two policewomen took her away. Nothing has been heard from her since.

Her defiant act reminds me of Iran’s first feminist heroine, Tahirih Quratulain.

Known as Tahirih, she lived about 160 years ago during the Qajar dynasty.

Iran’s ruler at the time was Naserdin Shah who, among other things, condoned extreme polygamy among upper-class men. Princes were allowed to have as many as 20 wives at a time.

Enter Tahirih.

One Russian historian describes the moment in his book The History of Civilized Nations. 

Tahirih arrived at an all-male meeting of political dissidents known as the Conference of Badasht. Beautifully made up and be-jewelled, she suddenly swept off her headscarf and made a highly charged speech calling for an end to the old order.

She was a driving force at one of the key moments in Iran’s political history – the founding of Bab’ism, which rejected sharia law and later declared polygamy unlawful — a radical idea that sowed the seed of women’s emancipation.

Now it seems we have a new Tahirih, brave enough to sweep off her scarf in the heart of our capital city, and make a stand for women’s rights.

But who is she? No one knows.

Wednesday has become the day of protest for women who resent being forced by the Islamic Republic to wear hijab. To show their opposition,  they put on white headscarves, loosely tied, and make a point of being seen – in parks, shopping centers and busy streets.

One Wednesday in December, just before the wave of unrest that convulsed the country, our latter day Tahirih got up on the phone box at the Vesal-Engelab crossing, right in front of the French Coffee shop. It was a strategic choice — a part of town where young, educated Tehranis go to see and be seen.

Eyewitnesses, corroborated by videos that quickly went viral, say she calmly took off her white scarf and waved it slowly back and forth, as a banner of protest. Incredibly, she stayed there for an hour and 20 minutes before a police car showed up. Two policewomen in floor-length black chadors handcuffed her and drove her away to the station at the nearby Palestine-Engelab crossing.

An employee of the French Coffee shop tried to object, shouting “This isn’t any of your business!”. He, too, was handcuffed and taken away.

According to human rights lawyer Nasreen Sotoudeh, the police interrogated the woman but would not reveal her name.

The search is now on.  Social media is buzzing. Sotoudeh and her husband posted on Facebook that the mystery woman is 31 years old and has a 19-month-old baby. We are all longing to know more.

In the meantime, this incident has proved to me that our old role models are not forgotten. For more than a century, Shia clerics and conservatives have called Tahirih a whore and a blasphemer.  

But legions of women – and men — have ignored this sneering official line. They recognize her as a pioneer and valiant political activist.

She met a tragic end, as fierce women sometimes do. Tahirih was strangled by her own scarf in Tehran, in a garden where the Melli bank compound now sits. Not too far from the spot where our mystery woman made her stand.

Tahirih’s spirit is alive and well.