“To dance like Solomon: imitation and martyrdom in a Qajar ghazal”

[Ahanu]

The focus of this essay is a ghazal by Maryam Bushru’i (1815–1902), a sister of Mulla Husayn Bushru’i (1813–1849), the first disciple of the nineteenth-century messianic figure, Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi the Bab (1819–1850). A fine example of a Qajar response poem (javāb), Maryam’s ghazal is modeled on two ghazals by Rumi including his celebrated love lyric that opens, Binmāy rukh ki bāgh u gulistān-am ārizū-st (“Show your face, for it is the orchard and rose-garden that I desire!”). In her ecstatic poem, Maryam expresses her longing for the Bab and memorializes the brutal martyrdom in Tehran in August 1852 of Hajji Sulayman Khan Tabrizi, a prominent Babi with ties to the Qajar court. Prior to execution and in line with the victim’s own instructions, the torturers cut incisions into Sulayman’s flesh into which they inserted lighted candles. Enduring his fate with astonishing fortitude, Sulayman danced through the streets of Tehran’s bazaar reciting poetry by Rumi. Maryam concludes her ghazal with the hope that she too will be martyred for her faith and that, at the point execution, she will dance just like Sulayman. Maryam Bushru’i was for several years a close associate of the Bab’s most significant female follower, the scholar-poet, Tahira Qurrat al-‘Ayn (1814-1852). Tahira’s own imitations of Rumi may have inspired her sister in faith to voice her anguish at Sulayman’s martyrdom through the medium of istiqbāl (poetic imitation). In this essay, the connection of the eminent British Persianist, Edward Granville Browne, to Maryam’s ghazal will be discussed, Maryam’s role in early Babi and Baha’i history mapped, the gory details of Sulayman’s carnivalesque martyrdom presented, and Maryam’s poem read with and against Rumi’s two model poems and a chain of later imitative poems that may have influenced the Babi poet.

 

[Ahanu]

Now, after an introduction like that, no historian of the Baha'i Faith and Babi Faith would dare turn down such a page turner.

 

[Ahanu]

بر خیز و رخت بند که جانانم آرزوست
ایدل جمال حضرت سبحانم آرزوست
ناری ز عشق یار فروزان بطور دل
موسی جان فتاده به ثعبانم آرزوست
یک خرمی ز نار جمالش بدشت جان
کز آتش خلیل گلستانم آرزوست
این قلب را صفائی زان پس تجلّی
کز خویشتن ملولم و ایشانم آرزوست
یا ربّ مرا عری بنما از ظنون شرک
کاندر عراء حبّ تو عریانم آرزوست
در گردنم سلاسل زلفش چو سبق زار
کش وا کشی بکوه و بیابانم آرزوست
چشمم بروی یار و دلم محو طلعتش
بعد از وصال دوست بمیدانم آرزوست
بر فرق خویش تیغ عدوّ از چهار سو
چون ابر بهمنی به بهارانم آرزوست
افتاده بر تراب سرم غرق خون خویش
رقصی در آن زمان چو سلیمانم آرزوست

Arise and pack up your things, for the Beloved is my desire!
O heart, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord is my desire!
A fire for the love of my Companion blazes in the Sinai of my heart.
Seeing the Moses of my soul cast down before the serpent is my desire!
Just one spark from the fire of his beauty on the soul’s plain!
For from Abraham’s inferno, a rose-garden I desire.
Some small delight for this heart and then a manifestation,
For I have grown weary of my self and it is he whom I desire.
O Lord, strip me bare of the suspicion of idolatry,
For I wish to abide in the land of your love, rid of all attachment.
I wish his tresses like chains round my neck would drag me.
As though from the race-ground to the mountains and wilderness.
My eyes fixed on the Beloved’s cheeks; my heart mesmerised by his face –
After I am reunited with the Friend, I wish to enter the battleground.
Like the clouds of late winter that assail the spring, I wish to see.
The blades of my enemies attack my forehead from all sides.
With my severed head drenched in my own blood on the dust,
At that very moment, I wish to dance just like Sulayman!
-Maryam Bushru’i