“God Has Made Love His Religion”: Some Introductory Notes on the Prose Works of Tahirih

While many of Tahirih’s poems have been translated and studied by scholars, her surviving prose works in Arabic and Persian whose size outweighs the number of her extant poems have not received much attention. This paper will attempt to partially fill a veritable lacuna by offering a categorization of the prodigious prose oeuvre of Tahirih. Specific attention will be given to Tahirih's use of the Qur’an and hadith literature, her conception of key eschatological portents, her frequent references to the writings of the Bab, Shaykh Ahmadu’l-Ahsa’i and Siyyid Kazim-i-Rashti, and the role of love and encouragement in her worldview as represented in these works.