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

Abstract

ABSTRACT Iran’s neoclassical Literary Return movement (Bāzgasht-i adabī) that reached its climax in the first half of the nineteenth century has, to date, been studied almost exclusively in relation to the Qajar royal court and the elite male poets who received imperial patronage. This article examines how one of the founding mothers of the violently persecuted and socially marginalized Babi-Baha’i religious community succeeded in producing a bold, emotionally charged response to a celebrated ghazal by one of the towering figures of the Persian poetic canon, Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi. Considering herself a worthy imitator and drawing on a transhistorical chain of responses to Rumi spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this Babi-Baha’i poet refused to be excluded from the dominant literary currents of her day. Consequently, study of this unknown poet and those like her who, for far too long have been erased from modern Iran’s literary history, demands of us a broader definition of the community of Qajar poets, one that transcends social, doctrinal, and gendered lines.