Last night I was reading the collected poems of Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn and came across these beautiful verses.

How fully these words, filled with intelligence, love, and pain, portray the whole story of the singular women of this land and their centuries-long struggle against the immaturity and ignorance they face:

The moral guardian and the sheikh are there, while I speak of love;
how can I persuade them—one mature, and two still raw?

Because of your face and hair, O beloved, my day is like the night;
alas for my condition—one day, yet two evenings.

The accompanying image is in fact an AI-assisted reconstruction of Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn’s face, based on the one or two photographs of her that have survived to the present.

The eyes of the Iranian woman—herself a mystery, speaking mysteries...