by Unknown
From 1500 to the 1800s
Iranian society underwent a radical transformation at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when at the age of fourteen the Safavid ruler Shah Esmail I (r. 1501–24) established his court in Azerbaijan (northwest Iran), declared himself Iran’s king, and set about conquering the country to ensure its loyalty. From the Arab conquest onward, Iran had been a very varied nation, with different kings and dynasties ruling in different places, often simultaneously, and with various religious affiliations (predominantly Sunni Moslem but also Shia, with pockets of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism scattered about the country, and with a number of Sufi orders that had flourished especially vigorously during the period of Mongol rule). Esmail was a Twelver Shia and he declared Iran to be a Shia country; not only did he insist on political suzerainty, uniting the whole country into one political entity under his own rule, but also on religious conformity. Almost overnight, from having been something of a religious hodge-podge with a rather laissez-faire attitude toward private belief, Iran became, nominally and in public at least, a Shia country. Although Sunnism survived in many places, it was relegated to a state of relative political powerlessness and Sunnis were frequently persecuted. The Safavid family, to which Esmail belonged, were members of a Sufi order, and one might have expected Esmail to have had a tolerant attitude toward other Sufi orders than his own, but in reality he saw them as possibly subversive rivals and did his best to eradicate them.
The cultural variety of pre-Safavid Iran, with its concomitant regional differences of government, tradition, and belief, was replaced by a would-be monolithic state that insisted on religious uniformity in so far as this was achievable. Esmail fancied himself as a poet, and in his poetry he claimed semi-divine status, implying that his rule was divinely sanctioned, so that political rebellion became equivalent to religious blasphemy. Esmail’s successor, Tahmasp I (r. 1524–76), advised his court poets to occupy themselves with writing poems in praise of the most revered figures of Shia Islam, and the exuberance and diversity of secular Persian poetry found little encouragement at the Safavid court; as courtiers tend to imitate their prince, the patronage of secular poetry by the rich and powerful declined precipitously.
The relative freedom that at least aristocratic women had enjoyed at a number of the courts of pre-Safavid Iran also disappeared. At the court and in the cities the only unveiled women were entertainers, musicians, and courtesans; respectable women lived in seclusion from the world of men. A further curtailing of women’s agency is shown by the way in which, with their retreat from the public sphere, fewer women were now taught to read and write, and in seriously religious families illiteracy became the expected norm, even for well-born women. Some Shia clerics were still fulminating against the pernicious evils attendant on women’s literacy well into the early twentieth century.
It seems almost inevitable then that there is little evidence of women poets writing in Persian in the heartland of Iran during the Safavid period (1501–1736); with a few exceptions it is only toward the end of the eighteenth century that we begin once again to come across poems by Iranian women poets in any substantial number. And when we read the few poems that were written by women in Iran during this period, we encounter none of the witty high spirits, bawdiness, and flirtatious frivolity that we find in poems by, for example, Mahsati or Mehri or many of their female contemporaries. Instead the predominant tone is proper, serious, unexceptionable.
But while the Safavids were setting up a dynasty in Iran, the Moghuls were establishing theirs in northern India. The Moghul court was rich, Sunni, and, under most of its emperors, relatively tolerant of religious differences. Above all, in the eyes of Iranian poets, it was Persian-speaking,* and during the Safavid period many Iranian poets who had found such slim pickings at home flocked* to India to try their fortunes there. As one such émigré poet (Ashraf Mazandarani) put it:
In Iran there’s no market for knowledge
Even though there’s a lot of it for sale;
In India fame comes to those with skill—
In the night the brightness of a lamp is visible.
Persian culture had been present in much of northern India before the appearance of the Moghuls; the first Moslem incursions occurred in the early eleventh century, and continued Moslem expansion culminated in the establishment, in 1206, of the Delhi sultanate, which ruled over much of northern India until 1526. The conquerors in this period were mainly of Turkic origin, but among Moslems during the medieval period Persian culture was seen in western and southern Asia as a civilizational ideal (much as French culture was seen in Europe in the eighteenth century), so that Persian mores and the Persian language permeated Moslem rule in India from its inception. It was during this period, for example, that Urdu, a Persianized form of Hindi, emerged as the lingua franca of the area. The establishment of the highly Persianized culture of the Moghul empire, by the first Moghul emperor, Babur, in 1526, was therefore building on what had become by this time a centuries-old philo-Persian foundation. When Babur’s son Humayun lost power for a while, it was natural that he should turn to Iran for help, and the Safavid court welcomed him until he was able, with Safavid assistance, to regain his throne in 1555. But despite this cultural proximity, the two empires were beginning to diverge in their general ethos; as Safavid Iran became politically and religiously more monolithic and isolationist (as a Shia country in a predominantly Sunni part of the world), Moghul India was entering into a particularly complex relationship with its host country. The emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), for example, extended the empire by conquest but also abolished the tax on non-Moslems that was customary in Moslem-ruled countries, and under the influence of Sufi teachers first espoused a form of Islam that attempted to transcend sectarian differences within the faith (his mother was a Persian princess, and both Shia and Sunni were welcome at his court), and then elaborated his own even more inclusive religion (the din-e elahi, or divine faith) with the intention of reconciling Hindu and Moslem beliefs. His descendant Prince Dara Shukoh (1615–59) went even further, translating the Upanishads into Persian (or so it is claimed, although it seems likely that he commissioned the translation rather than doing it himself, as this would have been an enormous undertaking to manage single-handedly, in terms both of the scholarly knowledge and the time required),* again with the intention of finding common ground between the faiths.
This relatively open and latitudinarian attitude extended to the position of women at the Moghul court. It was only with the accession of Akbar that the institution of the harem was introduced, and it’s clear that royal princesses and consorts of the emperor usually enjoyed a kind of freedom that was in many ways similar to that which had been enjoyed in Iran by women of the court under Mongol rule. If the women of the Moghul court were in theory secluded, this usually did not prevent them from appearing at court functions and festivities, and some of them—for example, Golbadan Beigum, Nur Jahan, and Zib al-Nissa—becoming a byword in the general culture in a way that would by this time have been thought shameful in Iran (the names and characters of a number of imperial consorts and princesses at the Moghul court have become part of the general lore of the Moghul empire; by contrast, although they were often important in squabbles over the royal succession, few female members of the Safavid court have left much trace behind them or are known to any but specialists in Safavid history).*
It is also obvious that many women of the Moghul court were literate, and not merely in the technical sense that they could read and write in a basic fashion, but as accomplished and respected authors. For example, Golbadan, one of Babur’s daughters, wrote a biography of her brother Homayun (the Homayun-nameh), while her sister Golchehreh’s talent was for witty poetry. The best-known such poet was Nur Jahan (1577–1645), the favorite wife of the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27); she was a widow aged thirty-four when Jahangir fell in love with her (and this was certainly a love-match since there w
ould have been no other reason for an emperor to marry someone middle-aged, as she would have been considered at this time, and a widow to boot). She had been born in Qandahar, in Afghanistan, to Persian parents who were on their way east as members of the steady stream of Iranians emigrating to India at this time. Her poetry has a distinctive individuality, one that is quite independent, even acerbic at times, but also self-possessed and gently playful. Virtually all pre-modern Persian poetry was written under a pseudonym, and Nur Jahan was said to have used the name “Makhfi” (“Hidden”) as her poetic name. This became a name used by a number of women at the Moghul court, the best known of whom was Zib al-Nissa (1638–1701), the daughter of the emperor Aurangzib (r. 1658–1707), who had her locked up for many years as he disapproved of the man she had become engaged to marry (they never did marry). Her poetry, like Nur Jahan’s, has a distinctive character—in Zib al-Nissa’s case, both witty and wistful, feisty but with an undertow of sorrow. The often personal nature of Moghul women’s poetry seems analogous to the portrait tradition that grew up in Moghul painting. Persian miniature depictions of people at this time represented idealized types (the lover, the warrior, the Sufi, and so on) with no attempt at realistic representation or portrayal; Moghul painting, which derived its technique from Persian miniature painting, quite quickly diverged from its model and became personalized, so that any given picture seemed to be of something (or someone) specific, rather than of the kind of Platonic ideal of a subject that Persian painting still aimed for.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century we find two important women poets writing in Persian outside of India, at the outer limits, as it were, of Iran. One was Afghan, and the other Kurdish. Associated with the court of the Afghan king Timur Shah Durrani (r. 1772–93), Aysheh Afghani wrote in a number of genres, including quasi-mystical verse and fairly conventional love poems. Perhaps her most distinctive poem is one that reads as a heartfelt elegy on the death of her son, killed fighting in one of Timur Shah Durrani’s wars. The Kurdish poet Mastureh Kurdi lived from 1805 to 1848. She too was mistress of a number of poetic genres, including poems in praise of wine (a traditional form going back to the origins of Persian poetry), poems of unrequited love-longing, and poems of religious regret, but her most distinctive poems are addressed to her husband, either regretting his absence or celebrating his presence, declaring her love to him or describing moments in their shared life. She is one of the very few pre-modern Persian women poets who not only wrote about marriage but did so positively, in a way that leaves the reader with the impression of eavesdropping on a real relationship, one that seems to have been in general mutually congenial but that also involved the ups and downs and difficulties attendant on any marriage.
In the same period, the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, we also find again, at last, a major woman poet from the Iranian heartland, the poet Reshheh, who was the daughter of the most famous Persian male poet of the period, Hatef Esfahani (d. c.1783). Reshheh’s poems are polished and elegant, though it must be admitted that they lack the personal distinctiveness of both Aysheh Afghani’s and Mastureh Kurdi’s poetry; it is as if Aysheh’s and Mastureh’s relatively peripheral affiliation with the heartland of Persian culture is what enabled each of them to retain an individual voice within the general confines of Persian poetry’s conventions, which they both observe and at times slightly stand aside from.
By the time we get to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Safavid rule is a thing of the increasingly distant past. In 1722 the Safavid capital Esfahan had been taken by an invading Afghan army, and the Safavid dynasty to all intents and purposes came to an end. The disintegration of the country (it was invaded more or less simultaneously by the Afghans, the Russians, and the Ottoman Turks) was halted by the warlord Nader Shah, who not only won back lost Iranian territory but invaded northern India and sacked Delhi. He was assassinated in 1747; for a while southern Iran was ruled wisely and well—at least by the chaotic standards of the time—by Karim Khan Zand and returned to relative prosperity, but on his death in 1779 civil war broke out to be finally ended with the armies of the Qajar family declaring victory in 1794 (when the last ruler of the Zand family was deposed), establishing their court in Tehran, and beginning the dynasty that lasted until the 1920s. The second Qajar monarch, Fath Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834), had a very large number of children (generally calculated as fifty-seven sons and forty-six daughters), and one of the notable features of women’s cultural presence in the early nineteenth century is the numerous daughters and other female relatives of Fath Ali who wrote poetry. Many of the women in early nineteenth-century Iran who wrote poetry (of what tends to be a rather tentative one-toe-in-the-water kind) that has survived were connected with the Qajar tribe and/or court. But there are two important exceptions to this rather tepid state of affairs: one is the aforementioned Mastureh Kurdi; and the other is Tahereh, also known as Qorrat al-Ayn (1814–52).
From the 1800s to the Present
The nineteenth century in Iran began with an autocracy that was in many respects indistinguishable from the autocracies of most of the previous centuries, and the fundamental social status of women remained as restricted as it had ever been; indeed, women from rich and powerful families were arguably more restricted than had been the case in some parts of Iran during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The century ended with widespread demands for representative government, and with a gradually increasing participation of women in literary and political movements that went hand in hand with growing demands for women’s emancipation and social parity with men. The social and political ferment of the century, which grew ever more urgent and widespread, had a striking effect on the kind of poetry women began to write, and was itself fed by the developing consciousness of women’s status as this was reflected in their poetry. Obviously women had always known that they were considered to be, and therefore treated as, subservient to their menfolk; the difference was that they now began to feel that it might, at last, be possible to do something about this.
The woman whose life perhaps best represents the beginning of the radically innovative direction in which women’s consciousness began to move in the nineteenth century is the poet Tahereh (or Qorrat al-Ayn). Educated by her father, Tahereh from a young age showed an interest in both theology and poetry, and she set off quite literally in search of spiritual enlightenment. Although she never met him in person, she became a follower of Mirza Ali Mohammad of Shiraz, known as the Bab (“the Gate”), who was in the process of founding a new faith derived from Twelver Shi’ism but including aspects considered heretical by the Shia themselves, one of which was the belief that another Prophet would appear in succession to Mohammad (who is known to all Moslems of whatever sect as the “seal”—or the last—of the Prophets). Tahereh became one of the Bab’s chief acolytes and proselytizers and took a prominent part in the Babi Conference of Badasht in 1848, the meeting at which Babism is considered to have irreparably broken away from Islam. Her appearance at the conference caused a scandal as she gave her address to the assembled delegates unveiled. As we have seen, aristocratic women had appeared unveiled in Iran at various times during the Middle Ages, and women of the nomadic tribes that still inhabited large areas of Iran often went unveiled; nevertheless, for an educated woman, and one who claimed proximity to someone considered by the conference’s audience to be a revered religious figure, to appear in this state at this time was regarded as both unprecedented and disgraceful, even though the Bab himself later defended her decision. After the formal schism with Islam, the Bab and his followers were persecuted wherever they could be found, and the movement went underground. The Bab himself was captured and executed in 1850. In 1852 an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the monarch, Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96), was blamed on the Babis, and many were killed in retribution, including Tahereh, who was strangled, perhaps on direct orders from the shah himself.
The chief ev
ents of Tahereh’s life—her personal quest for a spiritual leader, her joining and outspokenly supporting a generally despised and reviled religious movement, and not least the symbolic act of her deliberate unveiling in public—all indicate a fiercely independent and strong-minded woman. In terms of her contribution to women’s emerging consciousness of their potential roles in public life, the importance of her unveiling should not be underestimated; it said in effect that, in the same way that for her the Bab’s teachings represented an emancipation from the old religious order, so her unveiled appearance in public represented an emancipation from the status of women as being hidden and subservient.
