Using fiction to realize a new mental architecture.
Q:
The Woman Who Read Too Much is set in 19th-century Persia (now Iran) and is built in part on the life of a historical figure, the revolutionary female poets Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn. Am I right to think that you came to the idea of this novel initially through learning about her?
A:
The general outlines of this story have been familiar to me since childhood. Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn was my ideal, the “heroine” I learned about growing up in a Baha’i family; she was the first woman to embrace the revolutionary teachings of the Bab, who was the prophet herald of the Baha’i Faith. An erudite scholar, a theologian as well as a poet, Tahirih understood, from her reading of the Quran, that religion, like all other human institutions, has a life cycle; Islam was in need not merely of reform but of renewal. This belief, based on the teachings of Ali Muhammad the Bab, pitched her into a headlong battle with the clerics of her generation, a struggle that is still raging in Islamic countries today.
I learned all this from history; her ideas and her ideals are well documented. But I discovered much later, as an adult, how little I actually knew about her as a woman, how little I could trust about what people have written of her life. It was because there were so many contradictions surrounding this woman that I came to the idea of writing a novel: it was precisely in order to contain all the contradictions and the paradoxes she symbolizes, that I chose fiction.
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