From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:23 >> Well good afternoon and welcome to the African Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress. I'm Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the Division, and I'm delighted to see you all for a program with a most intriguing title, "The Woman Who Read Too Much." Reading too much here at the Library of Congress is that possible? Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, about whom you will hear much more in a minute, when she's introduced, is this color [phonetic] and a novelist, who writes about the [inaudible] of the world from which this division is responsible, the Persian speaking word. As most of you already know, our division is made up of three sections, the African, the New East Section, and the Hebraic Section. We're responsible for materials from 78 countries in the Middle East, and Central Asia, the Caucasus, as well as from the entire continent of Africa, North and Sub-Saharan. Our Hebraic Collections come from all over the world. We also serve these materials to patrons here in our reading room, and organized programs, exhibits, conferences, and other activities that highlight these collections, and that inform our patrons about the countries and the continents these publications come from. Our presentation today is a case-in-point. It is a story and a history, which Bahiyyih publishers describe as quote "Set in the world of the Qajar monarchs, mayors, ministers, and mullahs. It explores the dangerous and at the same time luminous legacy left by a remarkable woman. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani offers a gripping tale that is at once a compelling history of a pioneering woman. A story of 19th century Iran, told from the street level up, and a work that is university relevant to our times." And now, to introduce her is Hirad Dinavari, the Persian world specialist, and a scholar, and a person who has organized the most wonderful exhibit on the Persian book. And I hope you all had the chance to see it last year. It was done on the occasion of Nowruz and today, once again, we are celebrating I think the last day of Nowruz. And so welcome here and happy Nowruz. This is Hirad right now. Thank you. >> Thank you very much Mary-Jane. Again, I want to thank everyone for coming in today, especially since it is the 13th, Sizdah Be-dar and usually people go out picnicking. So it's an honor to have you here. I also wanted to bring to-- I mean mention that today's also we're getting close to the beginning of [inaudible], starting Passover and also Easter. So all the holidays are coming together, and it's a wonderful period and season of the year. As Mary-Jane had mentioned we had this lovely exhibition last year which had 13 lectures that went with it. The lecture series will continue this year. We are having six lectures that has to do with philosophy. It's still on the Persian book, but this year's focus is philosophy. But in-between we also have a series of other lectures that we conduct as part of our new [inaudible] series section lectures. We are very proud today to have one of our new [inaudible] lectures featuring a very dynamic personality, who no matter how hard I try to explain or try to give her biography, I will not do her justice. Well, she's a professor of English, but she's also a creative writer. And, it so happens that I found out today that she is related to the famous Dr. Banani [assumed spelling] who passed away a few years ago. A great personality of Persian literature that I had met at UCLA, and a personality in the Baha'i community. He has done amazing work on the famous woman Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn who in this novel that you're going to hear about is based on her life. She is many ways was the first Iranian woman to speak out in the late 18th Century-- 19th Century and unveil, and has been canonized in the Baha'i and also among Persians as an icon of the women's movement. So, Dr. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani who's here with us has a very interesting background herself, in addition to a very wonderful family. In short, she was born in Iran, but raised in New Ganda Africa, and has lived in the U.K, the U.S., and is a British citizen, but lives in France right now, and has worked in Canada, Cyprus, Israel, and, of course, Africa. Currently she is teaching English in Paris. So, without taking more time, and without speaking more flowery about her, because she has several books and publications in French, in Persian, and in English, and, of course, translations in several languages. I will turn the floor to her and have her take the lead and actually speak of her art and her work. Thank you. Before we finish, I wanted to say her books are available, this book specifically, "The Woman Who Read Too Much." It's available for sale at the end of the lecture. We have a wonderful lady back there who is going to be able to sell you copies, and the author, Dr. Nakhjavani will be there to sign for you as well. Thank you very much. ^M00:06:09 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:17 >> Well, thank you very, very much indeed for the honor of being here. Thank you above all to Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division for this great privilege. Thank you dear Hirad, the Iranian Wealth Specialist. I'd also like to thank Mona [inaudible] for having arranged this, and most of all thank all of you for having given up your lunch hour and not gone for [foreign language], which is my shame, that I'm keeping you indoors for that. I hope you'll be able to throw off some of the old world ideas that we have in the course of the next 50 minutes so that we will have done it symbolically at any rate. It's just a great privilege to be in this temple of books. I see Bill Collins [assumed spelling] here who I know from having worked in other temples of books, and myself come from a city, forgive me, it wasn't quite Paris. It's on the other side of France in Strasburg, where we have a magnificent cathedral, which is known in the Vernacular as our Lady of Lace, because of the way it's been constructed to be almost transparent in stone. And it combines many extremes. It's got the reminisce as well as gothic architecture incorporated in it. It was briefly used during the reaffirmation for Protestants as well as Catholic mass. And it has on the south facing doors, on each side, there is a figure of two women. One who symbolizes the Old Testament, and the other who symbolizes the New. The Old Testament has this beautiful drooping head and broken glance, very poetic figure. The New Testament has the rather, forgive me, slightly priggish look on her face, but I'm sure she had good justification for it at the time. And it struck me every time I go to see this building, that a cathedral like a library contains all the extremes, contains all the multiple ways of looking at the world. And I was-- I'm a great friend of-- and a great admirer of Alberto Manquel, who I'm sure you have heard of and maybe heard speaking on the subject of the importance of reading, and the significance of libraries. And in one of his essays he states that "Our books are accounts of our histories, our epiphanies, and our atrocities. Individually, humans can remember little, even extraordinary feats of memories, such as that of Cyrus the Great, King of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name, are nothing compared to the volumes that fill libraries. In this sense, all literature is a testimonial. I have the great privilege of coming here last to this building, about 25 years ago, so almost a quarter of a century. I can't believe it. In order to do research on a work that was my testimonial, to the figure of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn. And the last time I was here, and had the privilege of a readers card and went into the stacks, it was in order to look up works about the early telegraph system in Iran in 1858, and the courier services that we used, because I had already begun the work that would culminate in the book which I'm very privileged to be able to share with you today. And this idea of stepping through the doors, going through the various barriers to enter this very wonderful building, reminds me of course of the many stories that we have of the difficulty of entering the sacred space, because in a world where frankly, our sense of the sacred has been successively debunked and discredited and dismissed as irrelevant and even ridiculed, finally worst of all sentimentalized, I think libraries really are one place which is most sacred still in our culture. I hope it will stay that way for a long time. ^M00:11:05 But I was reminded of the day when Virginia Woolf tried to get into the bubbly, and in 1928 she was stalked if you remember by what she calls "a guardian angel" who barbed the way of deprecating chivalry, kindly gentleman," she says "Who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back, that ladies are only admitted if accompanied by a fellow of the college, or furnished with a letter of introduction." And then she goes on she says "A famous library has been cursed by a women is a matter of complete indifference to that library. Memorable and calm, with all its treasurers safely locked it sleeps complacently." About 60 years after that event-- I mean 60 years before that event. I beg your pardon. In America we had another wonderful woman writer who described not the angel who barbed the way, but her father, if you recall, in the famous letter of Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She says "I have a brother and a sister. My mother doesn't care for thought," and her father "Too busy with his briefs to notice what we do, he buys me many books, but begs me not to read them because he fears it juggles the mind." Now, we have, of course, this going back in history from the 20th Century to the 19th with Emily Dickinson. I want to take you one further step back, and we go back to the early decades of the 19th Century in Karaj Iran about 170 - 80 years ago, to the city of Qazvin. And there we find this young woman, Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn who comes from a family of clerics, very well-known, all of them, oldest patriarch or figure of the family. The uncle was the [inaudible] of the Qazvin. And in that town, you have this extraordinary contradiction of a young woman from Muslin background with this weight of ecclesiastic history and tradition behind her and around her, who is given a library of her own. Tahirih may have been not the only person who had a library of her own. The women in Karaj Iran who came from the courtsly [phonetic] background were furnished with books were able to read and write. My grandmother, whom we have mentioned today, was a woman who always had her finger on the pulse of the ordinary, and she used to whisper to me "You know they're only taught to read, not to write," because they were allowed to read letters but not to write loved ones." So, I don't know whether that's true or not, but certainly Quarratu'l-Ayn was unusual in having a library of her own. And I found myself thinking what would have been in such a library of such a person at such a time? And obviously manuscripts of Islamic jurisprudence, because she was a student of Karbala, and had studied the Koran and the Hadise and all the laws of jurisprudence. No doubt she had commontries [phonetic] on the Hadise and the Islamic traditions. She had verses of the great Persian poets, Sadi and Hafiz, the mystic writings of Rumi. She was herself a poet, herself a great writer of verse, so doubtless she read it. And she was-- she must have also had the writings of [foreign language], who apparently had a conviction at that time that no reform however drastic within Islam could achieve its regeneration. And these extremely disturbing ideas already in the very early years of the 19th Century caused a lot of debate in the family of Qurratu'l-Ayn. One uncle was very attracted to these ideas, the other one was strongly opposed to them, and so Qurratu'l-Ayn had in her own library some of the contradictions and extremes that I'm sure are contained here. And she was trying to reconcile all of them together. She also must have had copies written in her own hand of the writings of the Bab, Ali Muhammad, the Bab, whose beliefs she espoused in those years. She would have had the [foreign language]. She would have had, of course, his holy book the Bian. When I was writing this book of mine, I read everything I could in English about Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn. And those of you who know her history may have also seen a little photograph of her library, which was taken by a journalist from America, who was traveling in the Iran in the 1930's, Martha Root, went to Qazvin and she took a picture of what she described as "A quaint artistic library of the second floor of the family home of the [foreign language]." And it shows rows and rows of ransacked empty shelves. I thought it would be helpful to understand from why it was that these shelves were empty. The ideas of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn as I already mentioned, were very controversial at that time, and it caused a feud and disruption in her family. And the writings of the Bab, whose beliefs she espoused were very dangerous, and were frequently destroyed, not only censored. In the description given by the Great Chronicle of the Past [assumed spelling], as well as anticipator of the future of the Baha'i faith showed the offendee. He describes those writings of the Bab as being "Hurriedly transcribed, often corrupted, secretly circulated manuscripts, so furtively perused, so frequently effaced, the ink was washed off the paper, and at times even eaten by the terrorized members of the prescribed sect. These were all dangerous evidence of hearsay. My uncle, whom he kindly mentioned in his introduction to this little book of some 60 poems of Tahirih, the only ones that in his estimation could be authentically identified as belonging to her. So many having being lost. So many re-appropriated to others describes her in the following words. He says "Her short and tumultuous life. The belief of circumstances of the Babi community. The clandestine handling of Babi manuscripts. The scattering of her possessions. The hostility of her immediate family members who may have destroyed or suppressed her papers. All these mitigate against any sense of assurance that we now have access to all that she wrote." So it was extremely difficult to actually find original documents associated with Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn and written by her. Since I wrote this book, [foreign language] who has really dedicated her life to creating a unique collection online, a virtual library really, not only of books, but of artifacts, objects, artworks, and has gathered together in women's worlds in Kadjar Iran, many wonderful objects and documents. And they are online some of the writings of Qurratu'l-Ayn. I cannot say because I am illiterate whether they are tampered with or not. Who knows. It's an extremely difficult thing to write a testimonial therefore in the presence of so much absence. It's already awe inspiring to be in the presence of all these books, but it's a great responsibility to stand before empty shelves. They remind us of how slowly and painstakingly our civilizations have been built. They remind us of how easily they can be cut down. And we don't have to look that far back to realize that for women, empty shelves are internal as well as external. ^M00:20:28 The library is not the physical building alone, but the memorial of in the mind of all that has been read. And if women are denied that possibility of reading, then it's an emptiness that we have a responsibility for to future, for forever. I think that the world today is giving us many, many examples, heart-rending ones, most recently in Afghanistan, of young women who have been violated, abused, murdered, because of their desire for education, their activities in coming and going even to university. The latest one in Turkey was coming back from university when she was attacked in the bus. And the young woman in Afghanistan whose story just wrenches my heart, was attempting to reason with someone who was selling amulets outside the mosque and to try and say to him this is not in the Koran, the selling and buying of this kind of superstitious object." So for a person to attempt to reason, to attempt to gain knowledge and share it, and be a woman is so difficult, so difficult in many parts of the world. Alberto Manguel continues to say that all literature is civic action. So, we're in the presence of an openness of society, not only openness of shelves. All literature is civil action because it is memory. And reading is reclaiming the right to this human immortality. So, to erase that memory, to deny that immortality, not only by burning books, but by unfortunately in our days the shoddiness of their production, the lack of their distribution, the limitations placed upon them by current market trends in publishing. All these are really violating our belief in the future as well as the past. I believe libraries protect the human rights of the dead. They're also a repository of hope for the living. And in that sense, no one could ever read too much. I want to give you if possible and hopefully I have the time, a brief synopsis of what I've done in this book. I've used the idea of reading as a metaphor to speak about reading the past, reading the future, and reading character. There's also a fourth element of the metaphor, which involves the reader and I'll get to that. Reading the past is of course very familiar to us. Retrospection is our instinct. In fact it's the only direction we can really look clearly is behind us. And we can never really transport ourselves into that past, so we create constructs of it each time we have that retrospective form of reading. Again, since I come from the eastern borderlands of France, I just want to remind you that this is an area in which the frontiers were crossed multiple times, that you were allowed to speak in German, then you were allowed to speak-- had to speak in French. Then you had to speak in German again and back into French. So that's-- at a certain point you ask yourself "Which past do we have in this part of the world?" Lead Boswell [assumed spelling], whose one of the essayist in a collection called "Perpetrators, Accomplices, and Victims." Very interesting collection of essays on checkered frontiers such as this, writes that which past he says "Does one need to address and come to terms with." He's speaking specifically of [foreign language]. One of collaboration or accommodation of courageous civil disobedience, or of simple adaptation. One of implicit complicity, or the courage of individuals who take a stand. Clearly, it is not an either or proposition. And the kind of history I was looking at, in looking at the history of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn, is also not an either or proposition. There are too many extremes there. And so when I went back in my retrospective analysis, I had to find ways in which to look at this character from multiple points of view. And so I created women at the time, mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, within the [foreign language]. The four walls of that [foreign language] symbolized by the four parts of my book, "The Book of the Mother, The Book of the Wife, The Book of the Sister, and the Book of the Daughter." These are the four roles that we all inherit. Of course not everybody turns out to be a mother. Not everybody turns out to be a wife. Not everybody has the good luck, or sometimes not good luck of being a sister, but we are all daughters. And in the course of our lives we know what it is to be part of that quadruple role playing as women. So much for retrospective reading. But I couldn't write a story about Qurratu'l-Ayn without also playing with anticipatory reading. Reading forwards, of course this is a little bit of a game with reading from right to left, from left to right, as a Persian and as an English mixture myself. I enjoyed the idea of weaving on the two sides of the page. But anticipation is something very close to the life of Qurratu'l-Ayn, because she was venerated as a prophetess. It was considered that she could read the future. And what that really meant was that she had enough intelligence to realize that every cause is going to have its consequence. So whether she was actually a see'er [phonetic], we don't know, but she would look and listen to people around her and say "Watch out. If you do this, it's going to lead to that." And many times her words were taken literally from her mouth and condemned her for events that then took place which then she was held responsible for. So I played with the idea of reading in the future by jumping in the timeline of this story and spanning 50 years in order to go ahead and look back. You must of all come across the wonderful writing of Hilary Mantel and the work that she has done on the Tudor period. Of course, the Tudor period is a giveaway. Everybody knows the story of Henry the Eighth and his various wives and who got their heads off and who managed survive. But we do not know generally, the general public, do not know Qurratu'l-Ayn as well as the Tudor period. I personally believe that one day the Qajar period is going to be our Tudor period and is going to be multiple because I have another [inaudible] library. We're going to have great writers who have written about it, because it's so rich with history. So full of paradox, so full of comedy as well as tragedy. And that idea of reading a past at which at the moment we don't know that one day we very much will, is part of the reason why I used anticipatory time in this book. I'll be brief because I don't want to use up too much time, but the third form of the time that I used was a circling form of time. Because if you do go back and then you do come forward in your timeline of your plot, you ultimately end up circling. And I used the circling movement really because the more I thought about the figure of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn, the more I realized that we have to sort of go around her in order to get closer and closer and closer to her. And maybe this is a very Persian thing to do, to [inaudible] almost by respect so that you don't just go in a direct, you know, accidental way of calling a spade a spade and getting there, but I mean we are of the oriental people. We move in circles, even in our language we move in a circular fashion to say what we mean. And I was very much struck by the parallel also with satire number three of John Dunn, if you remember, who describes that circling motion in a configuration very familiar to those of your who know Dante [assumed spelling]. He describes going round and round truth he says. "On a huge hill, cragged and steep. Truth stands. And he that will reach her about must stand, about must go, and walk the hills suddenness, resists wind so." Now my movement going round and round was not going up towards paradise, it was going down. ^M00:29:43 I wouldn't say necessarily to the inferno, but it was the only way I could go down into the well where Tahirih's body was thrown at the end of her life. In order to go into that darkness, not only physical, but also 150 years of censorship and suppression and denial of who she was, took a circling motion. And, as a result of that, I found the only way I could try to reach who she was, was by negative definitions. By defining her in a sort of rather scientific way really, by what she was not. So, the circling of character was another way that I approached time as well. Excuse me. Well, that brings me to the fourth way I looked at time, and that was the reader's role. Of course, a book doesn't exist unless it has readers. The is the banality to say in such a place as this, but reading one's-- or reading a book is really a metaphor for reading oneself. The more you read, as Montaigne proved over-and-over again in his beautiful essays, the more you know yourself. The more you write, it's because you are reading yourself. So these things are very closely linked. And no words can have any meaning unless someone reads them. We need our gentle reader. Jeanette Winterson writes that "In spite of its past, this book have not been finished, but finished by whom? The reader? Or the writer?" So sometimes our participation in the act of reading is precisely what helps us understand what it's saying. So this challenge of time travel, which went backwards, forwards, and followed the linear plot of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn in this story where she was captured, brought to Tehran and finally died. Of course, three-and-a half years involves also the circling and the negating of what she was not, in order to ensure that the reader is participating in that act, because it doesn't make sense unless the reader really engages in that. I think it's William Gaddis that said it. It's all about what happens on the page between the reader and the writing. What I want is a collaboration, and I wrote this book really to have some kind of a collaboration with you. And maybe one way I can describe that is to go back to the empty shelves. I'll just read a short passage here at the end of my story, in which I describe the events that led to the escape of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn from her own father's house. She had been confined in this house after a tragedy that happened in the family. I can't possibly give you the spoiler, so you'll have to find out what it was that happened. But it lead to a feud within the family, a split in the society of Qazvin itself, and ultimately a catastrophe across the whole of Iran, whose tremors we still feel to this day. When she was incarcerated in her father's home, it was because on two occasions there had been attempts to poison her by the family members themselves. And this confinement was just killing her. And when she finally escaped, I will read you how her father felt about it. Now remember, this is the father unique at the time who comes from a family of [foreign language], but whose awareness of the intelligence of his daughter is such that he insists that she get given the education of a boy. So, in the 1830's to have such an occurrence is extraordinary. His love for her was profound. His dismay with her actions and her words subsequently was equally profound. And I got myself into a real tiz because I just loved this father of hers, and I wrote a scene in which I imagined what he would have felt in a fictional form. "How empty the library was after going." Her father stayed in there, touching the spines of the books. Caressing the pages she used to read to him. He lingered the whole day in there after her escape, murmuring, weeping, how he missed the sound of her voice, her chanting. How he deplored the silence in the end Aru [phonetic]. She had taken her pen case with her and her reeds. But it was only after several of hours had passed that he noticed the gaps on the shelves. She had chosen carefully. She had selected only the most important to her. And the spaces where the books used to be mocked him, teased him with his ignorance of their titles. He had the impression that if he could only remember which ones she had chosen, he might be able to trace where she had gone. But try as he might, he could not summon those texts to memory. He would recall their passionate arguments about them. He remembered why they had been so important to her, but the substance of the books, which were the pivot of their talks, eluded him. He realized that those gaps on the library shelves bore witness to his greatest loss of all. For without the knowledge of what had once lain on them, the mind, as well as the body of his beloved daughter had slipped between his fingers. Well, if that enables us to get a little glimpse of why it's important to be a reader, and to be able to read our own understanding of the text, and to retain it so that when the substance of either the person or the writer or the book itself disappears, we can go on having that conversation. Then I will have succeeded. And I think I should really come to an end here with one last little story to tell you about the importance of the books in my book. And it's built on the story which we have inherited from history, which only has one source, so I cannot authenticate it. But, it's the story recorded by the woman in whose house Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn was kept as a prisoner for these last three-and-a-half years of her life. And just before she was taken away to be killed, she gave this woman a bundle. Now, in the text that I have, which was probably in its original version, verbally, oral, spoken, said to x, repeated to y, repeated to zed, and then finally written. Who knows with how many mistakes, and then finally translated. The word used is package. And when I looked at that word I said "No way was it a package," because a package means wrapped in paper and there was no paper around to wrap anything in in Qajar Iran in the middle of the 19th Century. Paper was so valuable at that time, and would it have been wrapped in cloth, obviously. And it was a book [inaudible], and that also had four sides, so I was very pleased with the idea. You fold, you fold, and what do you put in a book [inaudible]of that kind? She gave it to the wife of the [foreign language] and she said "Three days after they take me away, a woman will come to the door. Give this to her." Now, we have the record of the wife of the [foreign language]. She says "And three days afterwards, a woman did come to the door." And you can see what she thought was important was the prediction. Right? Fulfilled. We have no idea. History doesn't tell us what was in that bundle. The wife of the man doesn't say anything about what was in that bundle. But then she says something very interesting. And it was because of what she said or what I have heard through the echoes of history, retrospectively of what she said that I wrote this book. She said "The woman came to the door just as predicted. I had never seen her before, and I never saw her again." And when I read that I said to myself "So." That is telling us a great deal about what was in the package. Because she clearly did not want to be known to have known who took it, nor did she ever want to know where it went, so she disclaimed all further contact with this person. And therefore, what was in that bundle was very precious indeed. I don't know how many millions of books are in this library, but I think that just a small bundle of them would have been equally precious to Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn and that they were both precious and dangerous, and therefore, had to be denied. And it was such a powerful statement to me to deny the presence of books, that I had to write one. Thank you. ^M00:39:30 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:42 >> Thank you very much. No, go ahead and [inaudible]. Thank you very much for a wonderful talk, and quite an amazing story. I'm looking forward to actually reading the book. I would love to open the floor up to about three or four questions. Feel free to ask any questions. Go ahead. ^M00:40:00 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:40:05 >> Because I can only read-- >> Could you say it again, but in here? ^M00:40:08 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:40:11 >> Why did you decide the write the book in English? Every question that's asked if you could say-- >> Repeat it? >> Yes, I would appreciate that. Go ahead. >> Thank you. I'm very limited in my capacity to read and write. So, English is the language in which I do it. But the book has been translated into other languages. But unfortunately, I don't-- I wouldn't have the ability to read to writers in Persian. That's why I pretend and do things backwards. ^M00:40:36 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:40:47 >> Did she have brothers? And was it-- what happened? And if she did have brothers, did they also follow-- >> Yes. Did she have brothers? Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn had brothers. She had sisters. She had cousins. They were multiple in the family. I know for a fact, I can't answer about the brothers, but I know that one of her sisters did become a poet in her own right. This particular sister, I have my eye on, because I wonder whether she wasn't the recipient of the bundle. I don't know for sure, but she lived on. And she lived until 1858-- 1896, which was the year of the assassination of the [foreign language]. There were others in her family who were deadly opposed to her. And their history I don't know so well. But, I know a story about her daughter which is interesting. I should add that it wasn't just the men in that family who were erudite. Within the family of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn already her mother was a great woman of letters. Her aunt was a calligrapher in the court of fatalehsa [phonetic]. So, she comes from a tradition of highly literate women, and her daughter, about whom there is some contradiction. In the most sentimental versions she died of a broken heart soon after her mother was taken away. In other versions, she lived on to a ripe old age. She went back to Qazvin because apparently in her last years, or the last year of her life, she lived with Tahirih in the house of calantar [phonetic]. She returned to her father's home and she went on to become herself a teacher in one of the theological schools which the family had established there. So, she was educating women too. What's fascinating is that there are traces all through the life of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn that she had circles of women who she taught to read and write. And it's ironic that her own daughter, who at the end of her life denied that her mother was a Babi. The only way she could resolve the contradictions for herself was to insist to the very end that she died a devout Muslim. In defiance of the fact, nevertheless, she went on and did exactly what her mother had done, and went on teaching women to read and write. Yes? ^M00:43:18 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:43:29 I think the reason was that she was brilliant. And that is what caused so much jealousy and controversy and tension within the family. She was given privileges nobody else was given. Neither girl nor boy. And it caused the conflict in her marriage, because she married her cousin. So, I mean, can you imagine being married to a woman like that? It was tough, you know? And I think she would have been resented by the girls in the family because she was allowed to study and not do the ordinary stuff. Yes? >> Go ahead Joan [assumed spelling]. ^M00:44:06 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:44:33 >> This is such a good subject really. I realize that in talking about time. I forgot the punchline. Can I get the punchline? When you've got a figure whose life is full of controversy, who's full of contradictions as she was, who is associated with a massive trauma, collective trauma, which takes place in society as a whole. There was some 20,000 people killed within a very short space of time during the lifetime of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn who were Babi's. So, this has stayed like a shadow, like a stain, in the minds of the Iranian people. And, for many years, the very name of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn was enefma [phonetic]. You could not utter her name. She was considered a prostitute. She was called-- she couldn't initially be called a heretic because you cannot kill a woman for apostasy, because that would admit to her having a soul and an independent mind. She could be misguided, but she couldn't be an apostate. So, we see already the contradictions that she contained. So, obviously, in the years of the 19th Century and early 20th, right up to my childhood even. I can remember it was not a subject that you would ever be able to talk about to the Iranians who were not familiar with the story as the Baha'is were. I come from a Baha'i family. I was raised with the knowledge of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn. But, most of the Iranians did not, unless they were very educated, unless they had studied anew. But the common people were not so sure about who she was, or else had negative feelings about her and who she was. This is ironic to because incredibly it's not only her poems that we should remember her for, not only her commentaries, and treatises, but there were things she said which seemed to have stayed in the popular memory. So, for example, when Gobineau was in Iran, and even later when Khorasan was there, the statement that she made about the [foreign language]. "The monster that you serve will one day betray you" she said. It was still echoing in people's minds. The little poem that she apparently not yet authenticated responded to the invitation of [foreign name] to become a concubine in his court. That little poem was also repeated, you know, the wealth and power and honor of thyne, [inaudible] poverty, etc. You keep what is yours, I'll keep what is mine. And this is people who didn't know really who Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn was. But, in recent years, now this is very important. In recent years, since the revolution in Iran, the name of Qurratu'l-Ayn has become known. And I cannot leave this podium without mentioning the name of my-- I don't know what to call her. She's my patron saint, [foreign language], who is in fact-- we have a legacy here, because she was a student of my uncle. She did her doctorate under my uncle [foreign language]. And he told me 25 years ago, "You must meet [foreign language]. And I did. And I got everything I could possibly get about Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn from her. Because she is a woman for the first time really in the history of letters in Iran has put the name of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn right up there as one of the founding mothers of modern Persian literature. So, it's really since the revolution. It's because of people like Dr. MI Lanai [assumed spelling] who teaches at the University of Virginia, that the name of Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn has become commonplace now amongst the Iranians. >> But also during the green movements and what have you, she's become synonymous in many ways with both the freedom, cause, and also the women's movements. I mean, in the Iran [inaudible] and the women's movements have pretty much become-- ^M00:48:46 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:48:55 >> Well, I try to explain how I reconstructed her life through negatives first of all. And the way I did that was I looked up everything I could possibly find about her that I could get hold of, and then I saw the contradictions, you know? Some people consider her a saint, other people consider her a whore. You've got everything in between. So, then I had to find a way to reconcile that. And then I looked at the other women that I could find in Iran at the time. So, I found out everything that I could about [inaudible]. The mother of the Shaw, [foreign name] the sister of the Shaw. I couldn't find out very much about [foreign name] the daughter, except for the contradictions that I shared with you. But in order to try to understand her roles, I had to look for other women at the time. And then I had to think of OK, if she combined all these contradictions, and these were the other women at the time, what sort of woman was she? Why were they saying these things about her? I had to piece it together like that. I found what I could in the Baha'i literature, and I found also a great deal of useful material in the works of [foreign name]. In the work of [foreign name] in his book about the Shaw. And I put in the back of my-- this is a novel, but it's actually got a bit of geography in the back of it. It's also got a chronology of corpses. So, although it's a work of fiction, I do not name anyone in this book. In the chronology of corpses you can see the names of the actual historical figures who inspired the story. So, that's why I need the collaboration of the reader, so you can piece together who is who, and figure out, you know, what was going on. I also name all the men of course who were very significant both in this story and in her life, like [foreign name] and so forth. Yeah? >> Last question. ^M00:51:00 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:51:31 And the young lady is referring to the fact that she's read about Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn and her involvement in debates in [foreign language]. I'm sorry. About his works and his writings and what have you. And she's asking our author here if there is any content in the novel about these debates. >> Well, I wish very much that I had written a theological book. I didn't write about the actual contents of the debate, so that will disappoint you. However, I did describe her arguments with family members, and also with others about the ideas behind the theories of [foreign language] and also the Bab. One of the points that is shocking to her contemporaries is the idea of not only reform, but renewal. The idea that a religion like all great institutions needs to be revived, needs to be renewed periodically. And therefore, needs a spiritual impulse within it to have that happen. This was the most shocking. And this idea of change, you know, the idea that you should change the way things were and have a new way, was one of the things that upset her contemporizes very much. In her own family I have scenes where there is this debate going on about change. With her daughter, I have examples of it. In other places in the story, I have her with the women and they are discussing with her well, you know, what do you mean by change, you know? Is it you take your clothes off, but you're the same person. You put new clothes on, it's a new dress, but you deep down haven't changed. So, I tried to find way in which I translate some of the theology into something which is more appropriate to a story, and which fits in with my narrative plot. I hope that answers your question. >> Last but not least, she's become synonymous [foreign language] with the unveiling. Many speak about her, about the woman, the first Persian woman to unveil in public. Could you say a word or two about that? >> Yes, I'm so interested that you noticed I specifically didn't say anything about that. Yes. Most people who know about Tahirih Qurratu'l-Ayn know one thing. They know that-- and it always starts with a date. In 1848, in the remote province of [inaudible] a woman walked into a public space occupied only by men with nothing at all on her face. OK? That's basically what we know. And we don't take it much further than that, but that act of unveiling it says something we have to read and re-read and re-read. And in history, interestingly enough, it has been re-read in many different ways. It has been seen as an act of violence outrage in custom against orthodox and dignity and decency. So, it's been symbolic of her being a prostitute, the fact that she took her veil off. It has been reclaimed much later by feminist as an act of emancipation of women, which wasn't her intention at all. Her intention was theological when she did that. She was making a statement about the end of the [foreign language]. That's why she did it. She said "By taking my veil off, I will show them not just by words, but by deeds. That we've come to a new stage of our development." And it's also been understood more symbolically as an act of unveiling the hypocrisies, the subterfuge, the manipulations, the lies, so that we are plain and truthful with each other. So, she was also doing that. But I think that in the future that action will be replayed multiple times. And it's such an epic scene. It makes a legend of her. We don't really know how to understand it, because it's so full of complexities. So, like all great myths, it is surrounded Tahirih. And it is sort of almost veiling her again. And one of the reasons that I didn't use it was because I didn't want yet again to add-- in fact, I have used it as hearsay, as rumor, which is the way we've understood her action. So, I have all the women gossiping about what does it mean. And all the [inaudible] coming and saying "Oh, did she do that? No, she didn't do that, she did this." So, that we have all the different contradictory ways of understanding exactly what happened on that profoundly important occasion. I hope that answers the question. >> Thank you very much. The book is available right there. I really want to thank you for visiting us. I know she's only here for two or three days from France, so this is a huge honor. And thank you everyone for coming in the middle of your lunch break, especially [inaudible] for the Persians in the house. Thank you very much [applause]. >> Thank you so, so much. I really thank you. ^M00:56:54 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:00 [ Silence ] ^M00:57:04 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.