@@Broken Silence: A review of TAHIRIH THEALOGY by Starr Saffa@@
wahid...@gmail.com
Spirit of the Age Concealed No Longer"
By Starr Saffa
Zeus Publications (Gold Coast: 2005).
ISBN: 1-9210-0551-3
Everybody became my friend according to their own inclination
None searched for my secrets from within me.
- Rumi (Masnavi, Book I, prologue)
Never was a line of poetic verse more appropriately put to describe the
generally abysmal state by which one of Iran's greatest revolutionary
mystic poets, Babi leaders, feminists, not mention a great ancestor of
mine, has been continually misrepresented and misappropriated by those
with their own peculiarly idiosyncratic interests and sectarian
agendas. To the Baha'is Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn (d. 1852) has been
made the docile proto-Baha'i saint where both her antinomian and
solidly Babi and pro-Subh-i-Azal (d. 1912) credentials have been
conveniently brushed under the carpet and re-Imagined to fit their own
calculated, ahistorical perspectives. Of course this has been part and
parcel of their project of fictional recreation of early Babi history
tout court, projecting their own sectarian fantasies on to the past
(i.e. conflation), so Tahirih is not the only victim here. The whole
early Babi pantheon remains in the same position. To the Iranian Left
she has been made the patron saint of the women's suffragette
movement and a proto-Marxist of nineteenth century Iran while her Babi
and extreme heterodox Shi'ite mystical leanings have been totally
forgotten altogether because the Left in Iran, to its continual myopic
foolishness, has always viewed such things with a great deal of
embarrassment.
It is not necessary to even broach the ahistorical propaganda
within the hagiographical pseudo-narratives of a Nabil Zarandi (d.
1893?) or a Martha Root (d. 1939) to discover the deliberate and
systematic obfuscations made of her narrative and situs by the
Baha'is. One only needs to point out the earliest Babi histories
themselves such as Hajji Mirza Jani's (d. 1852) Book of the Point of
Kashan (kitab nuqtat'ul-kaf), her own surviving letters and
treatises, the poetry, and especially the reminiscences of people who
actually knew her intimately, such as Shah Sultan Jahan Izziyyeh Khanum
Nuri (d. 1903?), to realize the extent to which the Baha'is have
deliberately obscured her role and re-Imagined her life and career to
cater to their own shallow, whimsical and conceited sectarian notions
of who she ought to be. The Iranian Left, however, is perhaps even more
guilty than the Baha'is here, for at least unlike these religionists
they have possessed the intellectual tools, the subtlety, the
sophistication, not to mention the wherewithal, to have not allowed the
multifaceted aspects of her complex character and historical situation
to be thoroughly obscured as it has.
Everybody wishes to own and thereby attribute their own quirks and
nonsense upon Qurrat'ul-'Ayn. But none have as yet been prepared to
dispassionately investigate and portray the truth about her life and
career in detail showing who and what she really was. I have begun the
task of thorough research myself over the past several years (reading
and locating virtually everything in existence by or relating to her),
as did Denis Maceoin before he abandoned the project. But a great deal
remains to be done before anything resembling a publication is ready to
be put before a reputable publisher to thereby allow her to be snatched
back to freedom from the sullied hands of sectarian religionists and
leftwing ideologues. I do, however, wish to mention the following aside
as an example of the absolutely ridiculous misappropriation that the
memory of Tahirih has been subjected to of late. I will never forget
how in the mid '90s the - once Saddam Hussein backed and currently
Israeli backed - MKO organization continually compared their leader
and self-styled provisional president of the Democratic Islamic
Republic of Iran, Maryam Abrishamchi Rajavi, to Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn. To his total discredit, the LA based Iranian pop
singer Aref blatantly expressed this asinine stupidity on stage once at
the so called "unity concert" in Paris (summer 1994) and thereafter
it was repeated parrot fashion again and again by the editors of the
now defunct Mojahed newspaper. I was even more appalled then, as I am
now, that not a single academic or learned pundit called the MKO on
this simply scandalous comparison. Where were the Juan Coles or
Farzaneh Milanis to shut these political cultists up? Silent, as usual,
comfortably napping on their armchairs in the Ivory Tower. I am sorry
but Mrs. Rajavi couldn't carry Tahirih Qurrat'ul-Ayn's
jockstraps, let alone to be compared to this great visionary Babi.
Moreover Aref wouldn't know Tahirih Qurrat'ul-`Ayn from his
backside let alone to deign compare her to a convicted, morally
bankrupt leader of a Stalinist-Iranian style-Khmer Rouge terrorist
organization such as Maryam Rajavi and her MKO.
On the other hand, among the Iranian leftwing literati of the
early twentieth century one can forgive a Forugh Farrokhzad (d. 1967)
and her intellectual salon for not going further into the persona of
Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn in their writings. But at least Forugh had
the honesty to acknowledge the debt she owed to Tahirih personally and
the influence that this Houri of Badasht exerted on her own poetry
without however deigning to Imagine a Tahirih of her own making like
the others. That said I am not here specifically to air detailed gripes
at the Baha'is or the Iranian Left. All of that will appear in the
future where I plan to thoroughly dismantle the fictions these two
groups have been guilty in foisting for over a century and a half
against the memory of this great Babi martyr and Letter of the Living.
I am here instead, by way of the responsibility I feel I owe the legacy
of this great woman and ancestor of mine, to speak about a monster I
feel I am responsible for creating. This review, therefore, is my mea
culpa to Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn and to set the record straight for
the public at large as to where I stand on Ms Saffa's book.
I will begin by saying that TAHIRIH THEALOGY has disappointed me
tremendously because it is about anything but Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn. It is mainly a work of very superficial New Age
fluff that has as much to do with Qurrat'ul-'Ayn as sulphurous
fumes have to lightning. Let's get this straight from the get-go:
TAHIRIH THEALOGY is about Ms Starr Saffa and her own ideas. It is not
- repeat NOT -- about Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn. It is not even a
panegyric set to prose regarding Qurrat'ul-'Ayn, which would've
been fine in and of itself. Even the most sophisticated of
postmodernist intellectual contortions cannot make this out to be a
work about Tahirih. What it is, is an assembly of hodge-podge, half
digested ideas with Tahirih as an afterthought.
TAHIRIH THEALOGY is not an academic or scholarly work. It is not
particularly well researched and many of its positions are not well
thought out by the author. It is not even a work that fits the genre of
high grade contemporary occult and esoteric literature. It is primarily
an autobiography of the author's life experiences thus far with the
name and some very surface features regarding the life and ideas of
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn thrown in there for general effect whilst premised
on some of the more goofier popular New Ageisms floating around. I also
wish to point out that none of the reviewers of TAHIRIH THEALOGY so
far, from Canadian based fantasy writer Michael McKenney to Georgia
Efford, are remotely qualified to be discussing this book even
approaching the borders of anything resembling the informed. They
certainly are not contributing a diddle to the advancement of knowledge
with their sugar-coated reviews. Neither knows Persian or Arabic or has
ever been exposed to the corpus of Babi writings, or has extensively
reviewed the critical secondary literature in European languages, that
would've helped them better situate their overall appraisal of what
is going on in Ms Saffa's text. In short, where the proper
contextualization of this book is concerned, neither knows a fig as to
what they are talking about.
Before launching into my thematic critique, I wish to also to make
a confession in that I was very much responsible for encouraging Ms.
Saffa to write and publish a work in the first place. I say "a"
work and not "the" work because the initial impetus of what she was
going to be writing about was to be mainly a work of free gnostic
oriented inspiration very much like some of my own creative, esoteric
inspired prose and verse. I put a challenge to her. Be that as it may,
there is not an iota of that anywhere in TAHIRIH THEALOGY so I don't
believe she met it remotely, even half way.
The question I have kept asking myself for these months privately
after TAHIRIH THEALOGY first came out was what was the point of this
exercise, then? Knowing Ms Saffa personally before parting ways I
definitively know the answer to that question but do not wish to
articulate it publicly in any extensive detail. I will say this,
though, I am simply appalled by the misguided zealotry which everything
Ms Saffa is doing in the name of Tahirih has taken of late. This was
not what we initially envisaged, or at least I envisaged. My vision has
been around the concept of a mystery school and esoteric/occult
initiation into higher truth, i.e. the alchemical Great Work. She seems
to me to have transferred and therefore sublimated wholesale the warped
attitudes of her exoteric Baha'i missionary zeal of yore into this
whatever it is she has spawned and which this first book is intended to
spearhead. To me, she has become fixated on the allure of the shadow
rather than the light, yet she knows it not. There is almost a kind of
narrow-minded fundamentalism and dogmatism involved in her activities
since this book came out that is -- no matter how much I have pleaded
with her to abandon -- responsible for pushing me away from her, her
activities and her ideas for good. Starr Saffa, I am afraid to say, has
turned into quite the Tahirih-thumping fanatic, but with the Tahirih
being portrayed here completely and categorically a figment of her own
imagination and not remotely any Tahirih of history, or, for that
matter, any Tahirih of high gnostic truth. A pseudo-Tahirih of garbled
New Ageism, most definitely, but not my great ancestor Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn or what she represented, truly.
I will not be broaching in this review the numerous spelling and
grammatical mistakes replete throughout the book, nor that Saffa gets
the numerical value of the letter Tau in Greek (the Hebrew Tav) wrong,
or that the so called Tahirih symbol is of her own contriving and not
particularly profound, at least to me. It was the responsibility of her
copy editors and proof readers at Zeus Publications to point these
things out, and they also have failed in their task. Nor will I ask the
pertinent question as to why a full chapter of the book is authored by
someone else. Nor am I going to contend with the concept
"Thealogy," which Saffa doesn't even critically examine or
elaborate much on in any case. These are irrelevant side-issues. I am
interested in a thematic critique of the core idea behind the book. I
will say this, however, a book that contends to pontificate upon such
an important figure such as Tahirih should at least utilize source
texts, even those translated by others. One prayer translated by Juan
Cole doesn't count. It is a doxological prayer that is not
representative of her overall complete views. Failing the source texts,
it should demonstrate a thorough and analytical mastery of the
secondary source material. Saffa has failed on both counts. She
doesn't know the source languages to deal with the source texts, and
her knowledge and analysis of the secondary material isn't even on
par with intermediary standards whereby she can somewhat critically
assort through the information. Furthermore, even with those sporadic
secondary material that she does utilize her conclusions and
interpretations of that material are often below the sub-standard and
usually wrong. In other words she is in no position to be writing
intelligently about Tahirih Qurrat'ul-`Ayn. And why, for the love of
God, does she keep spelling Abbas Amanat's name "Amanet"? This is
even more irritating than Sen McGlinns "Moojen" for "Moojan."
Let me now point out the most flawed idea in the book: twin
manifestations. Briefly, there is no support for it in the Babi
doctrine, or at least not in the manner Saffa is portraying it. The
concept of "Twin Manifestations" as it is, is completely a bogus
category of Baha'i manufacturing that is predicated on the notion
that Mirza Husayn 'Ali Nuri Baha'u'llah (d. 1892) was indeed the
Babi messiah as perceived by the Babi texts and that therefore the Babi
theophany and the apparent Baha'i one are therefore contiguous.
Clearly any study of the Babi oeuvre, specifically the Persian Bayan,
will quickly disabuse any validity to that idea, demonstrating that
nothing could be further from the truth. Granted there is a sort of
Babi pretext to the idea of twin manifestations, namely the unity of
the last Letter of the Living, Mulla Muhammad `Ali Barfurushi Quddus
(d. 1849), with its founder the Báb (d. 1850). But if this notion was
going to be explored with any sufficient depth or authenticity, the
Babi lexicon of authority needed to be explored, especially the
relationship and structure of the hierarchy of the Letters of the
Living together with the hierarchy of All-Things stemming from it,
which Ms Saffa clearly has not. Mind you, this is not exactly an easy
topic that just anyone can get their head around, either. It is heavily
nuanced with the intellectual horizons of almost a dozen centuries of
Islamicate gnosis and specifically a very sophisticated list of
Shi'ite esoteric speculations. Clearly Saffa is in no position here
to deal with these core issues, not to mention she harbours a visceral
bias against anything remotely resembling the Islamic to even deign
investigate them on any thorough level. But because that is the case,
her whole argument then begins to fall into tatters. Attention to such
detail in these things is paramount, and pre-eminently so.
True, that at the Badasht conference of 1848 Tahirih made her own
theopathic claims to divinity. But so did Quddus, as apparently had
others. However I believe the fact has totally eluded Saffa that Babi
theophanocracy was at this stage based on the underlying notion of a
sort of 'ecclesia gnosticae divinitatis' with the Primal Point --
being the Bab personally and not Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn -- always
standing in for the godhead below while the Letters of the Living and
the other Babi believers below them standing in for the godhead's
names and attributes. Put another way, if the Bab was the One below
here on earth, his immediate lieutenants were the One's emanations
here below on earth. All of this by way of intellectual genealogy is
referrable to a complex Neoplatonic theophanology as found in the
metaphysics of Ibn 'Arabi (d. 1240). If one where therefore to
envision a series of concentric circles stretching into infinity, but
with a single point at its centre, the Bab would be this point, while
each of the Letters the various rungs of the circles all the way going
out. Amanat has discussed this, albeit briefly. Maceoin's article
"Hierarchy, Authority and Eschatology in Early Babi Thought" deals
with it thoroughly, albeit with some misinterpretation. If one was to
draw a further analogy, and from the Qabbalah, in order to understand
the dynamics of this theophanocratic hierarchy better -- and
specifically who is where, in what rank and why -- then the Bab would
constitute the first sephirot Kether (the crown), Quddus the second
sephirot Chokhmah (wisdom) and Tahirih only its third, Binah
(knowledge), and so on and so forth. Why this idea has been so
difficult to understand to not only Saffa, but others as well, is
because there is a lack of attention (or outright ignorance) regarding
the basic axioms of universal esotericism, especially as they have
played themselves out in Islamicate. Had she even pondered upon one of
the central maxims of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes - i.e. as above,
so below - and how in the historical manifestation of its chiliastic
dramaturgy this played out in the minds of the actors of early Babism
(all solid Shi'ite esotericists), she would have immediately grasped
what is going on and not left the matter in such an unnuanced,
confused, chaotic, haphazard, simplistic and largely ahistorical state
of disarray.
And this is precisely the problem with Saffa's visioning of
Tahirih. She has transferred the simplistic presumptions of Baha'i
theology into her re-Imagined Tahirih. I am amazed that one who raved
endlessly to me about the Jungian concept of enantiodromia should then
commit such a blatant enantiodromic faux paus as this! Therefore, the
concept of twin manifestation that Saffa posits, making Tahirih equal
to the Bab, is tout court ahistorical, undoctrinal, unsupportable by
any text, including Tahirih's own, and thus harkens precisely to
those assumptions that have no bearing on the authentic worldview of
Babism. Talk about enantiodromia, the shadow recoiling on itself!
Furthermore, even if she wished to bring out the dichotomous
Shiva/Shakti dynamic as a conceptual framework to read back the
relationship of the Bab and Tahirih into; again, she would fail because
the Shiva/Shakti dynamic is a complex principle referrable to an even
more complex doctrine of theophanies in Tantric metaphysics where Shiva
stands always as the ultimate transcendent Source while Shakti remains
the imminent divine Force. This is not an issue about equality but one
of metaphysical complementarity. Unfortunately the generally flat-land
ontologies of New Agers and the even more flat-land, politicized
epistemologies stemming from it usually fail to grasp such important
nuances. Which leads me to the point that New Age feminists or even
their male counterparts who have not worked out, or sufficiently
grasped, the principia of gnostic high metaphysics are usually not in
any position to be talking intelligently about esotericism either.
Saffa is a sore thumb example of this. She has not resolved for herself
whether she wants to be a feminist or a gnostic. Note that this has
nothing to do with sexism or feminism or whatever else, either. This is
an unfortunate fact borne out by the unresolved ambiguities, the
ambivalences which the personal temperaments of such people often
demonstrate and which are, then, carried over into virtually all their
intellectual discussions and perspectives. Gnosis by definition is
beyond the temporal. It is of the vertical dimension and
mind-bogglingly complex in its principles. It takes a certain spiritual
type to actively engage in its universe. That is why both lock-jawed
religionists and New Age fluff bunnies stay away from it. There are no
gender politics in the domain of gnosis, which properly belongs to the
horizontal, this-worldly sphere. I make no apologies for waxing
Guenonian on this point. But facts are facts, however hard they might
sound to some.
To explicate historically this point totally confused by Saffa,
among other things during the Karbalah period (1844-7) Tahirih had
claimed to be the Point of Knowledge (nuqtat'ul-'ilm), not the
Primal Point (nuqta ula), which is reserved for the Bab and the Bab
exclusively. That she had claimed and even been validated in this claim
of pointship in knowledge in no way, shape or manner supports the
thesis that she was then ipso facto to be considered the Bab's
co-equal. Saffa has heard "point" and concluded "equality"
without grasping or distinguishing the fundamental difference between
"primacy" and "knowledge" in the scheme of things. Clearly her
Thealogy is garbled here, and badly. Admittedly, even Tahirih did not
entertain as radical a notion such as this regarding the role Saffa
attributes to her, as a perusal of her untranslated treatise "The
Divine Effusions" (ishráq-i-rabbani) will immediately demonstrate.
Indeed she was a senior Babi leader and Letter of the Living, deemed
the return of Fatima no less, even divine. But she was not the chief
central figure of Babism, let alone its partner co-Christ. She would be
the first to flee and absolve herself from such an idea, as her
laudatory poem to Subh-i-Azal (d. 1912), not to mention her ecstatic
poems to the Bab lauding him as her absolute master, clearly shows
without any reservation or equivocation. Even the Qurratiyyah Babis did
not presume to go this far. As such Saffa has yet to comprehend the
complex notion regarding the gradations of divinity in the Babi scheme
of things that animates this discussion from first to last. That said I
believe I bear some responsibility for seeding this misguided idea into
Saffa. Unfortunately I have concluded that Saffa never really listens
carefully to what I say nor has she really understood what she did
listen to, nor did she grasp the complexity of what I was alluding to
when I lauded the divinity of Tahirih, as I still do and always will.
Nor, moreover, do I believe she is a careful reader of those sources
she has claimed to read which would have moved her away from the
inanities she has so far articulated.
The next point I wish to draw attention to is the subtext
animating the author personally, i.e. the unspoken yet transparent
Derridean "presences" behind her text. Starr Saffa is a feminist
and a New Ager. Note I do not begrudge her this on its own. Until her
formal withdrawal in 2001 she was officially a longstanding member of
the Baha'i faith for about thirty years. She was a Baha'i
missionary (i.e. "pioneer") to the South Pacific for a number of
those years. Clearly her formative worldviews have all been shaped by
her activist Baha'i past and the sectarian presumptions animating it.
She is also a white American woman who has had quite a turbulent, often
bitter, experience with the sub-culture of Iranian Baha'is during
most of that time. Let me first say this about that Iranian Baha'i
sub-culture. In my considered opinion, the Iranian Baha'i sub-culture
is largely unrepresentative of Iranian culture tout court, whether in
Iran itself presently or among the non-Baha'i Iranian diaspora
abroad. The Iranian Baha'i sub-culture very much inhabits a space all
to its own and it engages in a love/hate relationship with the greater
Iranian community, whether in Iran or abroad. The privileged elite
amongst this sub-culture are another rung unto themselves and very much
a species of what the late Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969) distinguished as
the "Westoxicated" (gharbzadeh). Most of these people are frozen in
the past, exhibiting in every facet the marks and attributes of the
Pahlavi era dictatorship. Therefore there is no way that the elite of
this sub-culture can be associated or representative with the
contemporary dynamics of Iranian social and cultural mores. Twenty-six
years have elapsed since the Revolution. Much, much has changed in that
time -- and on every level. In many ways, as several others have also
repeatedly pointed out, the present Iranian Baha'i sub-culture
suffers the same cultural gaps and insularities which the European Jews
suffered before the end of the Second World War and the formation of
the state of Israel. There is no exaggeration here and an impartial
sociologist or cultural anthropologist would have a field day studying
this group of people.
But be that was it may, in my view based on my interactions with
her over the years, Saffa has universalized her experience with the
Iranian Baha'i sub-culture - as have many others as well within the
matrix of Saffa's own specific sub-culture - and hence much of her
re-Imagining of Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn is predicated on it. While
wishing to portray Tahirih as the cultural maverick and social
iconoclast that she was, the idiosyncratic hue this portrayal takes
with Saffa is more akin to a '60s type bra-burning protest of a
Gloria Steinem or Susan Faludi type. It seems to me that in the mind of
Saffa the '60s feminist bra-burner and Tahirih unveiling is to be
seen in a one to one relationship and thus tout court analogous. They
are categorically not the same thing. Saffa's image of the paragon
feminist and spiritualist (small "s") is thus coloured by these
historical-specific paradigms of late 1960s American radicalism which
are as separated from the experiences, assumptions and historical
situation of a nineteenth century Iranian Muslim Shi'ite woman and
Babi mystic as anything can possibly get. Their ideations regarding the
universe and the very lifeworlds inhabited by the two are fundamentally
different. Any good cultural anthropologist would know this truism
instinctively. So, to then make such blanket associations, even
implicitly, is a first order fallacy of reasoning and to indulge in it
beyond the sensible, an outright atrocity to truth. Which leads me to
the point that Saffa is largely (mis)appropriating Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn for her own ends to give voice to her own specific
political agenda of alienation, whether from society at large or from
the Iranian Baha'i sub-culture she has longstanding gripes against.
Again, like her New Age feminism, I do not begrudge her alienation in
and of itself. I also happen to share it. But that Tahirih has become
her personal vehicle - the tool -- to articulate this alienation, I
find sad and unfortunate, but also predictable. Predictable because
this has become one of many established patterns in the continual
(mis)appropriation of this figure, whether by the Baha'is or by the
Iranian Left - and now, alas, Saffa herself.
Finally, it should also be noted that there is an almost twisted
sort of fetishized representation of Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn -- a la
Edward Sa'id's argument in "Orientalism"-going on in Saffa.
Tahirih is being 'represented' and mediated through the specific
cultural lens of late twentieth century Anglo-American
historical-cultural perspectives. The use of the word "Christ" is
one glaringly obvious example of this. Her persona is being read into
the lexicon and hegemonic paradigms of Anglo-European Christianity
which are in fact as far removed from Tahirih's own situation as
anything can possibly get. Behind such assumptions is always lurking
another mistaken fallacy that she cannot in fact represent herself so
thus must be represented. Underneath this layer is the abiding
ethnocentricism that looks upon non-Anglo-European cultures and
societies with a mark of disdain and superiority. Such representations,
fundamentally the hallmark of the mentality of cultural colonialism,
then begins to take on a whole new life of its own whereby the
originary premises are then finally forgotten altogether, or
conveniently side-stepped. This mediation/representation then ends up
becoming an end in itself and the one represented twisted or
re-Imagined to fit the conclusions of the representing mediator. In my
considered opinion, this is precisely what Starr Saffa has done to
Tahirih Qurrat'ul-`Ayn, without possibly even realizing it herself.
In conclusion, other than Saffa's detailing of her own life
experiences as a Baha'i and thereafter (i.e. her personal narrative),
as a serious work TAHIRIH THEALOGY: Female Cosmic Christ Spirit of the
Age - whether as a vanity publication or otherwise - has very
little redeeming qualities to it vis-à-vis either as an example of
scholarship regarding Tahirih or as esoteric meanderings on her life
and career. Although my boldly asserting my views with such frankness
will possibly seal matters, I do believe that I am responsible to the
memory and legacy of Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn as both a living
descendent as well as a longstanding devotee and practicing Babi. To
reiterate the point, I am alarmed at the misappropriation that Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-`Ayn continually suffers, and I am especially alarmed at
this misappropriation being taken by those who otherwise do not exhibit
much sensitivity to the Iranian cultural universe, its history,
temperament and the matrix of its various religious universes. All my
preceding comments, even when incendiary, have been made in absolute
good faith by virtue of the above. I trust that Starr Saffa will also
remain adult enough to take it all in her stride.
Wahid Azal
Ecclesia Gnostica Bayani Universalis
QLD, Australia
August 9th 2005
star...@yahoo.com
may have something to do with the following post I received the day
before before he wrote his polemic review.
-----Original Message-----
From: Wahid Azal [mailto:wahid...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, 6 August 2005 10:18 AM
To: Starr* Saffa
Subject: No more contact
Dear Starr,
I took the daime yesterday, and although this might seem bizarre to
you, due to the vision and information I got I am afraid that we are
going to have to sever all contact for good. I have taken you off my
lists so if you have other aliases still there, please do the honorable
thing and unsubscribe yourself. The vision also has made it very clear
to me that I must henceforth sever every and all contact and
interaction with all the Baha'is on every level forever. I am not going
to attempt to explain the stuff I got, because there is tomes, but I
have something very important to do on this planet and as such our
paths must from here on go their separate ways. I hope the opportunity
opens up for you to take the ayahuasca yourself at some point soon.
Please take this in stride and please respect my wishes.
Ya Tahirih,
Wahid (Nima) Azal
----------
Here is another opinion by Dr C. Saunders to which I appended some
factual quotes about Tahirih-Qurratu'l-Ayn which support what is said
in the book about Her station and life. Starr*
Subject: Mention of Tahirih TheAlogy launch by Dr Charmaine Saunders
When I was asked to say a few words at Starr's book launch, I didn't
feel qualified to speak in depth about the content so I chose to
discuss the writing process. Having penned 6 books myself, I feel like
an old veteran in the publishing war.
I had a dream beginning to my life as an author
insofar as a publisher approached me rather than the other way round.
He was from Singapore and after the book was a physical reality, he
left me with 2000 copies in boxes and returned to his own country. It
fell to me to promote the book and I knew zero about marketing. Somhow,
through persistent door-knocking, I got myself on The Midday show and
into newspapers and on radio. In the end, overtime, we sold 10,000
copies of that first book. It was incredibly hard work so I'm always
happy to help out any new writers with tips, leads, contacts,
shortcuts, whatever can make the the journey easier.
Writing is, by its very nature, a solitary pursuit. It requires great
self-belief to take an idea you've birthed and make it into something
tangible, something you have created out of your soul and now have to
hand over to strangers - publishers, editors, distributors, booksellers
and scariest of all, readers! People who are going to judge your work
objectively and perhaps harshly. It is your baby and you can't expect
anyone else to believe in your child, your dream unless you do; in
fact, writing a book is a lot like birthing. When I wrote my first
book, I used an electronic typewriter and not being a typist, found it
very difficult. The friend who shared my house at the time was an
unemotional, scientific type and would often come home to see me at the
typewriter, with tears streaming down my face, saying, `This is like
giving birth - it hurts!'
On top of all this, Starr has chosen to write a revolutionary book, one
that will divide opinion and divide people, create discussion and
argument, maybe even offend and provoke criticism.
This takes a special brand of courage. I've come to understand in life
that it's not being right or wrong that matters, not being conventional
or rebellious, but being true to your own inner voice, finding the
courage to speak that truth, no matter what.
Starr has courage to spare and is a walking embodiment of her name -
she already is a star!
Dr. Charmaine Saunders
*******Remember the courage of the Tahirih of Badasht:
"In practice, Babism did not become the pietist clique it might have
done. By 1848, it had genuine aspirations to being a mass movement in a
number of provinces. Several factors were responsible for steering the
sect away from its original, rather precious orientation. Among the
most important were the opinions and interventions of an outstanding
woman cleric called Fatima Khanum Qazvini, better known as Qurrat
al-'Ayn or Hadrat-i Tahira. Belonging to an important clerical family
of Qazvin, a nd long familiar with Shaykhi ideas, Qurrat al-'Ayn
embraced the Bab's cause at an early date, and soon set up an important
circle in Karbala, where she became the focus for what was almost her
own sect, known as the Qurratiyya.
>From an early stage, she showed a radicalism that suggests she knew
exactly which way Babism was ultimately headed. By the summer of 1846
she seems to have inferred from the Bab's writings that it was time to
suspend the laws of Islam..... It i s said that she used to speak of
permitting women to be seen by men, and the suspension of all religious
obligations whatsoever.'
At this stage, Qurrat al-'Ayn's motivation for suspending the shari'a
was tightly linked to her perception that it was time for the
revelation of the inner meaning of Islam, transcending and displacing
the twelve-hundred-year age of outward truth.
Qurrat al-'Ayn remained in Karbala' for another year, then embarked on
a series of moves which culminated, in the summer of 1848, in her
arrival at a small gathering of Babis at Badasht in Mazandaran. Just
prior to this conclave, the Bab, now in prison in Azerb aijan, had
announced himself to be the Mahdi in person. This proved the trigger
Qurrat al-'Ayn was looking for. Now she proclaimed the shari'a wholly
abrogated,..."
Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Shari'a:
the Babi and Baha'i Solutions to the Problem of Immutability
Denis MacEoin
Among ALL of the Letters of the Living, She was the only one who
accepted the ESL without even meeting Him, and as far as we know She
never ever met the ESL physically in person. Furthermore, whilst the
ESL and Quddus saw each other as One Soul, it was in fact Tahirih who
from the outset didn't play taqqiyyah (dissimulation) and was the
radical pushing for the complete break with Islam as early as the
first months of 1845 in Karbalah (where She first unveiled Herself).
At every turn when people complained to the ESL about Her radicalism,
He supported Her in no uncertain terms, and not only supported Her but
made Her radical activism the cause for pushing His own claims
explicitly further each time from being the Gate to the Imam in 1844,
to the Imam Himself in 1846, to finally an independent Theophany
superceding Islam altogether in 1848. Tahirih was the driving impetus
of getting the Babis to break with Islam. After the ESL and Quddus,
She is the foremost Central Figure of the early Babi movement, and the
person actually in the drivers seat pushing the movement to where it
went.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/talk.religion.bahai/msg/939fe69a67abade6?dmode=source&hl=en
Joyous Journey! Starr*
Her Splendor lives in all that is!
Order "Tahirih Thealogy" direct on line at:
http://www.zeus-publications.com/tahirih_thealogy.htm
or go to Book site: http://www.arach.net.au/~starjo/
wahid...@gmail.com
analytical review of your vanity publication that drags the name of
Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn literally through the mud, and which to date you
have not been able to begin answering. Besides, slander is spoken,
audible words, not written words. An author who thinks herself the
embodiment of Qurrat'ul-'Ayn ought to have enough intellectual rigor to
know the difference. Tahirih Qurrat'ul-'Ayn, besides being the great
mystic that she was, was also a mind unmatched amongst her male peers;
so much so, that she held ijazas from her own father as well as Siyyid
Kazim Rashti, a feat unheard of amongst any women before or since.
Unfortunately you are none of those things.
As for the Daime, yes, indeed. My finally waking up to the fact that
you are bane to my existence, that of the Bayani community's, that
everything that happened in 2002 was at your specific manipulation,
that all the contents of our private conversations were being forwarded
by you to certain third parties in your attempt to ingratiate yourself
to these parties, not to mention that attributing urine therapy to a
holy figure of my path, above all that I finally had it with your
continual bad-mouthing of my family and the Iranian community en toto,
and, finally, that your book is literary garbage squared, certainly had
much, much to do with it as well. Ayahuasca indeed reveals Truth -
often unexpected - by ripping all the veils clean off. It is a power
you can never fathom or understand seeing how you are so submerged in
the contents of your own limited nafs and cannot see the forest for the
trees any longer, thinking you can recreate the wheel by becoming to
Tahirih what that charlatan nutcase JZ Knight was to this fictitous
entity she has bamboozled people with for years calling Ramtha.
Absolutely after what was shown to me I was not going to sit around
with business as usual any longer. Unlike you, who sits around all day
on the internet posting to baha'i groups who don't care a fig as to
what you write or have to say, I also have responsibilities, especially
to a group of people whom I dearly love and respect -- and whom you in
your utter mind-boggling selfishness and jealousy thoroughly despise
and have attributed all manner of your twisted fictions upon in our
conversations for three straight years. I let it slide to a point.
After that, no more.
The question is what, exactly, do you have to prove to these baha'i
cultists, Ms Saffa? Weren't you the one that two weeks before I wrote
the review promised me in no uncertain terms that you would no longer
post to TRB or any other baha'i list? Why, pray tell, are you still
around? What possible relevance does your New Age fluff have to any
discussion happening in these unhallowed halls? You have nothing to
prove here because there is nothing for you to prove, or that anyone
will find convincing enough to constitute demonstrable proof. Until you
realize this, as I did, your life will continue in the sorry vein it
has. However, know this, in your insistent misattribution of
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn's name you are not making any friends nor are you
serving her memory and legacy in any manner whatsoever other than as a
means for you to have something to pass your time with. This is
selfishness and it is an utter travesty to the memory of a great woman
saint of my people, and it is categorically unfair and unjust.
Also, please note, that I have yet to post a single item from our
private conversations publicly. Your so doing proved beyond a shadow of
a doubt and to a moral certainty that the Daime spoke the unalloyed,
unequivocal truth, as it always does and always will. That said, I pray
you reform your ways, seek sincere help and solace for your tormented
soul, especially seeking forgiveness from the Spirit of Tahirih
Qurrat'ul-'Ayn for dragging her name, memory and legacy in the mud in
order to serve your own selfish and limited ends.
Best Regards,
Wahid Azal