The Family and Early Life of Tahirih Qurrat al-`Ayn

by Moojan Momen

About: This paper is an attempt to bring together a large amount of information about the ancestry and immediate family of the Babi heroine, poetess, and martyr, Tahirih Qurrat al-‘Ayn, that has become available in Persian and Arabic, mainly in biographical dictionaries of Shi‘i religious scholars and from family sources. Among the interesting points that emerge is the fact that Tahirih, whom the Babis regarded as the return of Fatimih, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, was also descended from this lady on her mother’s side. The paper also tries to sketch out what these sources say about the early life of Tahirih, her education, her marriage and her introduction to the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i, up to the time that she first heard of the Bab and became a Babi. The paper describes some of the tensions in the paternal family of Tahirih, which must have affected her as she grew up.