When Tahirih returned to Baghdad in the summer of 1847, her family immediately held a family council. It didn’t go well. The family deeply divided by the Bab’s claims. Her time in the holy cities of Iraq had not brought her back to the traditional faith of her father. To the contrary, she was now acknowledged as a leading Babi teachers by the Bab himself.
Her father wanted conciliation between the family members and said that if Tahirih had been born a man and declared herself to be the Bab, he would have believed her, but he couldn’t understand her devotion to this “Shirazi lad” as he referred to the Bab. She told her father that she had come to her faith through reasoned consideration. This enraged her eldest uncle, the powerful cleric Mullah Taqi who cursed the Bab and then struck her. She uttered the warning that she saw his mouth filled with blood.
Tahirih moved into her brother’s house holding classes for women. She corresponded with the Bab who was imprisoned in the stone fortress of Mahku in the far northwest of Persia.
Tahirih’s estranged husband asked her to return to his home but she replied that she could have changed his unbelief into belief had he stood by her, but he hadn’t. Now, because he had rejected the religion of God, she was casting him out of her life forever and, in so doing, divorcing herself from him.
Click the first video to learn about the Bab’s days in the prison of Mah-Ku and the building of the Shrine of the Bab, and the second one to see first-hand a divorce court in action in Iran
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