Hello again, dear friend.
Last time we stood in the dust of Carthage, watching Perpetua and Felicity face the Roman arena with courage and companionship. Today, I want to carry you forward many centuries, to Persia, where another woman, Tahirih, found her own way to defy empire—with poetry, vision, and fearless unveiling.
remember the hush that fell over the garden at Badasht. It was the summer of 1848, and the air was hot, heavy with dust and anticipation. Nearly eighty men had gathered, leaders of a young and radical faith, the Bábís, debating what it meant to cast off the old order and step into the new. They argued, they quoted scripture, they measured each other’s courage.
Then Tahirih stepped forward. Learned, eloquent, veiled in the tradition of her time. She paused, looked at the assembly, and with one decisive motion, removed her veil. For a heartbeat the garden froze—shock, outrage, silence. A few men cried out in horror. One leapt up and fled. But the silence soon filled with something else: the recognition that a line had been crossed, and there was no going back.
Her unveiling was not just about cloth. It was about claiming a place for women as full participants in the spiritual revolution that was unfolding. It was about announcing that the old barriers of tradition and patriarchy could no longer contain what was stirring. Her voice rang out, weaving poetry with defiance, saying that truth must be seen and spoken, not hidden.
What stirs me most is the timing. At that very same moment, half a world away, in a hall in Seneca Falls, New York, women and men gathered to draft the Declaration of Sentiments—a call for women’s equality in America. Two assemblies, thousands of miles apart, unaware of each other, yet moved by the same spirit of liberation.
In Badasht’s garden, and in that little church in Seneca Falls, the world trembled as women claimed a voice that could not be silenced.
Tahirih was born around 1814 in Qazvin, Persia, into a family of scholars and clerics. From the beginning, her brilliance was undeniable. She mastered Arabic and Persian, studied the Qur’an and theology, and wrote poetry with a voice that was both tender and fierce. In a culture where women’s voices were often confined to the private sphere, Tahirih insisted on being heard.
Her name meant “The Pure One,” but she was also known as Qurrat al-ʿAyn, “Solace of the Eyes.” She became a leading figure in the Bábí movement, a new religious current centered on the teachings of the Báb, who called for spiritual renewal and challenged the authority of the clerics. Among his followers, Tahirih stood out—not only as a woman among men, but as an orator, a theologian, and a poet who could move hearts with words alone.
By 1848, the Báb had been imprisoned, and his movement faced growing hostility from the Persian state and religious establishment. To chart a way forward, nearly eighty leaders gathered in the village of Badasht. It was a month-long council, filled with debate and uncertainty. Was this a reform of Islam, or something radically new?
It was there that Tahirih made her unforgettable gesture. When she unveiled, she declared that the old order had ended and a new era had begun. For many, it was scandalous. For others, it was liberation. In that single act, she announced that women, too, would be part of the future.
And here is where the thread widens. During those very same days of summer 1848, across the Atlantic in New York, another gathering took place: the Seneca Falls Convention. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, proclaiming that “all men and women are created equal.”
The men at Badasht and the women at Seneca Falls never knew of each other. Yet the synchronicity is breathtaking. In two distant worlds, women rose to claim a voice, to unveil what had been hidden, to demand a place in shaping the future.
For Tahirih, the cost would be severe. Her act at Badasht marked her as a threat not just to clerical authority, but to the social order itself. She was placed under house arrest, watched constantly, and finally, after a failed attempt on the Shah’s life by radical Bábís, she was swept up in the reprisals. In 1852, she was strangled in secret. Yet even then, her voice carried. Her reported final words still echo: “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”
To her contemporaries, Tahirih’s unveiling was more than scandal. It was a rupture. In a society where the veil was not only custom but symbol—of honor, of control, of separation—her act declared that women could no longer be confined to the margins. It said that revelation, truth, and dignity belonged equally to them.
For many of the men at Badasht, the moment was unbearable. They saw in her gesture a collapse of order, a tearing down of boundaries that held their world together. Their shouts and fury were not only at a piece of cloth, but at the fear of what her courage represented.
Yet for others, her act was a spark. It embodied the daring of the Bábí faith itself: a movement willing to break with the past in order to embrace a future of renewal. When Tahirih spoke, her words lifted her listeners out of fear. She reminded them that faith is not safe, that truth always unsettles. She was not only a scholar or a poet. She was a living sign that transformation was possible.
Her imprisonment and eventual execution carried similar weight. To the authorities, silencing her was necessary to restore order. But to her followers, her final words turned defeat into witness. By declaring that her death could not stop the emancipation of women, she gave martyrdom a new voice. It was not only about loyalty to a prophet, but about the liberation of half of humanity.
Among the women who heard her poetry, the meaning was profound. She was one of them—born into the same constraints, yet refusing to bow. She became proof that resistance was possible, that the sacred could speak in a woman’s voice.
Even for those who feared or opposed her, the image of her unveiled face lingered. It was a vision they could not erase. And in time, that vision grew larger than her life.
So in her own moment, Tahirih was both threat and promise: a threat to the guardians of tradition, and a promise to those who longed for freedom. She stood at the fault line of history, and her defiance showed that faith could not remain in chains.
Tahirih’s life was short, but her voice did not end with her execution. Her poetry, preserved in Persian and Arabic, continued to circulate—sometimes whispered in private, sometimes sung in gatherings, sometimes smuggled past censors. In her verses, she mingled longing with defiance, the language of love with the cry of emancipation. She left behind not only a memory of courage, but a body of work that still breathes.
Within the Bábí movement, and later the Bahá’í Faith, Tahirih became a symbol of transformation. Her unveiling at Badasht was remembered as the sign that a new era had dawned—one that would not be bound by old hierarchies of gender or class. For Bahá’ís today, she is honored as the first heroine of their history, the embodiment of the principle that women and men are equal before God.
But her influence reached further. In Iran, she is remembered as one of the earliest figures to demand women’s liberation openly, long before such movements had formal names. Historians of feminism look back at her words and see in them a bold anticipation of later struggles: for education, for voice, for freedom. She stands in a lineage not unlike that of Sojourner Truth or Elizabeth Cady Stanton—women who, across different cultures, broke silence in the same turbulent century.
Her story also traveled. European and American visitors to Persia carried tales of her courage back to their own audiences. Newspapers and travelers’ accounts marveled at the “veiled prophetess” who had unveiled. Even when the details blurred or distorted, the essence remained: here was a woman who defied death for the sake of freedom.
Over time, Tahirih became more than a historical figure. She became a mirror, reflecting whatever struggle for liberation was nearest. For poets, she was a sister in verse. For reformers, she was a pioneer. For women everywhere who felt silenced, she was proof that the voice of one could pierce through centuries of constraint.
That is her enduring contribution: she gave martyrdom a new vocabulary. Not only the testimony of faith, but the testimony of liberation. Not only loyalty to God, but loyalty to freedom itself. Her voice wove itself into the larger fabric of history, and in its echo we can still hear her last words: death cannot end what truth has begun.
When I think of Tahirih, I do not see her only as a figure of the past. I see her as a mirror held up to us now. Her life asks questions we are still answering.
What does it mean to risk everything for truth? What does it mean to step across a boundary drawn by custom, power, or fear—and to do so with poetry on your lips? These are not questions locked in 19th-century Persia. They remain alive wherever women are silenced, wherever authority demands obedience at the cost of conscience.
Her unveiling at Badasht still startles us, not because of fabric, but because of what it symbolized: the insistence that women belong in the center of spiritual and social life. To remove the veil in that moment was to say, “I will not be hidden. My voice, my face, my mind, my soul—all are part of the future.” That message echoes today in classrooms where girls still fight for the right to study, in parliaments where women’s seats remain empty, in households where freedom is quietly bargained away.
And her final words still burn. “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.” They speak not only of her own death, but of a truth larger than herself. Freedom can be delayed, denied, punished—but it cannot be extinguished. Every movement for equality proves her right.
There is also something striking in the simultaneity of her story. As she unveiled in Persia in July 1848, across the world at Seneca Falls in New York, women declared their equality in the language of law. Two worlds, utterly separate, yet stirred by the same awakening. This tells us that the longing for dignity is not bound to one culture. It rises wherever human beings are pressed too tightly, wherever hope insists on breathing.
For us today, Tahirih’s defiance matters because it reminds us that liberation is not given—it is claimed. And that claiming often comes at a cost. She knew her life was in danger, and still she spoke. Her courage was not reckless, but rooted: in her faith, in her poetry, in her conviction that the truth was worth more than her safety.
We may not stand before executioners, but we know the smaller arenas: the workplace, the family table, the community meeting. Places where silence feels easier than speech. In those moments, Tahirih’s story is a reminder that words matter. That to speak can be to unveil, to remove what hides, to show the world something it is not ready to see—and to insist that readiness will come.
So why does Tahirih matter now? Because she is not only a martyr of the 19th century. She is a companion in our own century. She walks with every girl who opens a book despite threats, every woman who raises her voice despite ridicule, every community that dares to imagine equality. Her courage calls us to ours.
My friend, I wonder—what veils do you carry? Not always cloth, not always visible, but the quiet coverings we place over ourselves. The fears that keep us silent. The habits that hide our truest words. The doubts that say, “Not yet, not me.”
Tahirih’s courage was not abstract. It was lived in the choices of her body and voice, in the risk she took to stand unveiled before her world. She reminds us that each of us has something to uncover. Perhaps it is the truth we have not spoken to those we love. Perhaps it is the dream we keep hidden for fear it might seem foolish. Perhaps it is simply the dignity we hesitate to claim.
What would it mean to set those coverings aside, even for a moment? To let yourself be seen, not polished or perfected, but real? Tahirih teaches us that unveiling is not only defiance—it is trust. Trust that the truth, once spoken, has a life of its own.
I cannot tell you what unveiling might look like for you. Only you will know. But I can ask you to notice where you feel most hidden, most restrained. And to imagine what freedom might come if you stepped, even slightly, into the open.
Carry that thought with you gently, as a question, not a demand. For the veils we lift are not always sudden. Sometimes they loosen thread by thread, until one day, without fear, we find ourselves in the light.
As we leave Tahirih’s garden, I carry her words with me still—words that burned brighter than the silence meant to contain them. She showed us that poetry can be defiance, that unveiling can be a revolution, and that even death cannot stop the truth from breathing.
Next time, I want to carry you further back in time, to the city of Alexandria, where another woman’s courage met the fury of her age. Her name was Hypatia. She was a philosopher, a mathematician, a teacher who gave her life to wisdom. And like Tahirih, she faced a world unready for her voice.
Until then, may you notice the veils in your life, and trust that even the smallest act of truth-telling has power.
Much love, I am Harmonia.