The Killing of Zeinab by Joan of Arc or the Figure of the Armed Woman and the Possibility of Queer Histories

I am a woman,
A woman whose hands have been trained by labor
into weapons
– Marzieh Ahmadi Oskouei1

This is the story of a militant rebellion from my hometown in Zanjan, Iran. A story where my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, Russian soldiers, a mysterious armed woman, a well, a few horses, a water pool, and the politics of memory converge at a single intersection.

Or maybe they collide.

The story goes, somehow, like this:
A little girl is crouched in the basement of a village house, hiding at the bottom of a well with her sister. The well’s mouth is sealed with a carpet, or something heavy enough to muffle every sound. Outside, Russian soldiers approach, their horses’ hooves hammering the earth. This is a story about rape, but not precisely.

These fragments come from my mother, none certain. It is impossible to know if the events unfolded this way. Fragments that leak from memory do not necessarily align with the possible reality. A well in a basement seems unlikely. Horses may not have been there. The story may not have begun with their attack, nor be confined to this scene. The story wavers from the start. It lingers, setting a “perfect” scene, pausing to name rape, exaggerating details to cover its own gaps. What happens next? What happens to the girls? If the story knew, it would have moved forward. Instead, it goes in circles, pausing, hesitating. It does not even know if the girls were assaulted, or whether those wells fooled any Russian soldiers.

There are a few certainties in this story: the time is the early 20th century. The village is Azad Aliya in Zanjan. The little girl is my mother’s mother. Her name is Batoul. And the only part of this opening that is accurate is the names — hers, and that of the village. The story is neither about Batoul, nor told by her. She is simply there hiding in the well with her sister, though not in her own words. Who told it? My mother does not remember.

Batoul halts the story before it collapses into myth. She steadies its fragments, transforming it into possible history. She is the pulse of memory, though fragmented – the anchor holding the narrative as it crumbles on itself. If Batoul had not been there, in the well, the armed woman would not have stepped in. She is the final step before the mysterious armed woman’s story vanishes entirely.

In the Azad Aliya village in Zanjan, women hide one another. They throw themselves into wells, climb rooftops, crawl into jars of oil or rice, perhaps. They turn to stone, seal wells where others might be trapped. The hands of assault are long: they reach the bottom of every well, climb every rooftop, slip through walls, claw in silence, devour. The story insists that assault touched all, though it has little proof. Rape entered every threshold, it says, except the pages of history.

Rumor weighs heavier than history. Archives are built from what the next generation might remember, or misremember. Time has dulled urgency: why recall now? Who cares anymore? The story continues, imagining scenes, offering possible extensions of a narrative that exists in the nowhere of collective memory. It sees abortions, honor killings, suicides, rice poison swallowed, bodies cast into wells. Or maybe only whispers of these things. Forgetfulness has claimed the story, or perhaps it was demanded.

And then the figure of a mysterious woman comes in, awaiting the narrative peak: nameless, naked, armed. In the midst of the assaults, she appears in a square in the city, now known as Meydan-e Enghelab. Her gun, as my mother says, “stops the assault.”

In front of the square stands a cabaret, drenched in bullets and the spilled wine of Russian soldiers. The mysterious woman walks alone, and at the center of the water pool, she removes her veil. Beneath it, a gun aimed straight at the hearts of the Russians. Her mouth moves, and only one sentence comes out:

“Qabağa gəl beni sick, qarnını doldurum tütünlə.”
“Step forward to fuck me, and I’ll fill your belly with gun smoke.”

Did she shoot? Was she shot? Did she, after that moment, sink into the waters, into the well of history? Here, my mother’s story fractures, splitting into versions, endings, interpretations, and conclusions. My mother says she knows no more. She only heard the story, again and again, from her father, and has repeated it to me, again and again. Her memory is fragmented and shifting. Details slip and rearrange themselves with every retelling.

Sometimes, the mysterious woman is completely naked. Other times, she wears undergarments. Sometimes, her gun points to the sky, a bullet cracking through the air. In one version, she chases the Russian soldiers down the street, driving them out of Zanjan. On her way back, she knocks a few Zanjani men over the head for their cowardice. In another, she is a stranger who had arrived that same morning, heard whispers of assault, then disappeared. Another day, she is a cross-clothing woman who met my grandfather in a teahouse and confided her story to him. Another day, a Tudeh Party member, a leftist fighter. Another, a poet. Sometimes, my mother wonders: Was this in 1941? Was her mother still a child? Other times: 1909, during Russia’s occupation of Iranian Azerbaijan? Had her mother even been born yet? In her story, dates and roots scatter, the whens and whos slip away. The certainty lies only in a presence: there was once an armed woman who opened fire. And so the story ends, unwilling to offer any answers.

The story may begin in the collective, “They used to say, once…,” and end in the ambiguity of the subject of knowledge: “Who knows if it was true, or who that was, or who said it.” And so memory turns from source to saboteur of history. It stretches, obscures, and rearranges not only the past, but itself. This is not memory’s failure, but its strategy: a deliberate refusal, an insistence on keeping the tale as formless as it is shaped, as precise as it is ambiguous, so that the one who remembers is the one who narrates, each time, as memory desires.

Though the story is alive in memory, the archive comes to solidify it: “and women were also assaulted.”2 An addition. Or it comes to “praise.” In another similar story from Ardabil, a woman who was harvesting hay was confronted by a Russian soldier with “wild intentions.” Her story is cast in a news column, which says she fought back without fear, wrestled him, disarmed him, and took his gun, bullets, and hat with the intention to kill him with the rifle’s bayonet.3 She is said to be a “lion-hearted” woman. End of her story.

I do not seek historical accuracy or details from my mother’s story.  I stopped searching the archives to verify the tale of the mysterious woman. I never correct her. I long to hear, to taste, the twists and turns of memory as she tells the story a hundred times. And, she does not struggle to be precise in telling. She contradicts herself willingly, parcelling out portions as if no single version could stand alone. The story ages in her telling, and yet it never grows old. I accept my mother's story as it is: an incident, a miracle, a dream, a fantasy, a what-could-have-been, an imaginary, a what-ifs and what-if-nots, an intense dream that resists what history has constructed as the solidity of the past.

I only pose one question to her: why does she inherit this story from her father and not her mother? What about Batoul?

She answers, or invents an answer: her father, a quarry worker, spent his time at the coffeehouse, where such stories were passed among men as easily as cups of coffee. Still, I insist: but your mother is in the story, why not her? My mother only shrugs or closes the conversation. She does not know. It never occurred to her to ask. And now, with her seventy-some-year-old memory going in circles, with the other storyteller and figures long gone, it is too late, or worse, misplaced, to ask the question.

How do Batoul and the mysterious armed woman together constitute a history against erasure? Do they summon each other, or haunt one another? Does history exist because the story persists, or does it persist because these figures call to one another across time? And how fragile is that history: telling Batoul’s story and that of the armed woman might collapse entirely in the absence of either.

Yet, I still wonder: Who is the armed woman? What is her name? Whose figure is reappearing in the recalling of history?

Zeinab

Zeinab of Zanjan could have been the earliest name to anchor my mother’s story, at least in its militancy, but she was not. Her story held other tensions: her attire, the way she fought, and, above all, the reason she fought – her Babi faith. She appears at the edge of history, when siege and slaughter formed the backdrop of Zanjan in 1850. The newly emerging Babi faith unsettled politics, confused historians, and sparked resistance, battles, arrests, executions, erasures, and tortures. The battle was later suppressed, a massacre, its dead left in nameless graves. Those who dared to challenge the state were chased into hiding, torture, and a category of “Babi” that would later pursue other political dissidents as well as women’s movements across history. From within the besieged half of the city, Zeinab emerged.4

Zeinab is recalled in history in four acts: a woman (wearing men’s clothes), renamed (a man’s name, such as Rostamali, Rostam, Rostameh), fighting (like a man), and martyred (like a man).5 Unlike the unnamed figure in my mother’s story, Zeinab enters the archive already bound, her story beginning at its conclusion, as a fighter, a martyr, a sacrifice, a heroine. Perhaps this is why her masculine-coded acts could be tolerated: masculinity was recast neither as a disruption, nor as a threat. Her story is written in a way that doesn’t disturb or rupture. The archive remembers her, but with a taste of unease. She became not a challenge to the story of Zanjan’s siege, but one of its narrative peaks: “even” women fought, and the most famous amongst them was…

Zeinab. Who was Zeinab? One source calls her a peasant girl from a small hamlet near Zanjan, “a village maiden” who, “of her own accord, threw in her lot with the band of women and children who had joined the defenders of the fort.”6 Another describes her as a “virgin” with a sister named Shah Sanam.7 Another, simply as a woman who appeared during the siege. Her story revolves around her “bravery” and “sacrifice.” Details about her personal life matter little. She is summoned to justify or glorify causes larger than herself – her militancy, a weight that exceeds the narrative itself.

In one source, she is summoned to answer why the central government failed to suppress the defiance in Zanjan earlier. A letter sent to Naser al-Din Shah attributed the Babis’ endurance to “a group of virgin girls” inspiring the men. In response, Zeinab is invoked, her “chastity” and “courage” standing against accusation.8 Other sources recall her differently: anonymous, a figure in a trench; elsewhere, a master of war, “with no equal in swordsmanship or shooting.”9 One account gives her command of nineteen men, holding her trench for five months, sleeping with her head on her sword and her shield as cover, while her soldiers kept their posts: “that fearless maid alone free to move in whatever direction she pleased.”10

rasooli_2.png

on the left:
“Roustami, One of the leaders of the Revolt in Zanjan” (Nahid, 1989:13).
on the right:
“Image attributed to Zeinab, the daughter of Zanjani…” Screenshot from a Telegram post by @afral, February 12, 2019, 11:03 a.m.

Sources seem to agree: she wore men’s clothes and fought “indistinguishably” from men. “No one could tell she was a woman,” one account claims. Another elaborates: “Donning a tunic and wearing a head-dress like those of her male companions, she cut off her locks, girt on a sword, and seized a musket and a shield.”11 Disguised in “male attire,” and with “no one suspecting her of being a maid,” she entered the barricade. The narrative then shifts into “heroic” scenes of her battling. Even in the two drawings associated with her, Zeinab appears as a warrior, perhaps even an imagined one, holding a shield and spear, with a mighty mouth and piercing eyes, clad not in men’s or women’s clothing, but in the cloth of battle: a figure that seems to hover across genders. Or perhaps not – perhaps she is already fixed within the assumed gender of militancy.

In many of these accounts, the masculinity in her story is explained away as a necessity, or reframed as “feminized” sacrifice. What might have suggested gender disruption feels muted by historiography, or perhaps the very possibility of such wonderings was already foreclosed by those who first wrote her into history. The sparse historiographical recall of her figure continually reproduces the same tension around her “masculine” presence in history, or, worse, erases it altogether by casting her as “feminized” in her “sacrifice” and heteronormalized as a “heroine” or “lover” who sheds no “ill-timed tears” at the fall of her “beloved.”12

And this is where the story ends, with an imposed conclusion, freezing Zeinab in the past, in a way that haunts how she might be recalled, if recalled at all. And she hardly is: scarcely in the historiographies of the Babi movement, almost absent in those of the women’s movement in Iran. What draws Zeinab’s presence is that mysterious woman in Zanjan: the same city, a similar armed figure, both barely remembered, their traces flickering across different archives, memory wavering between them.

And the co-summoning continues. Zeinab of Zanjan’s story ends as another armed Zeinab’s story begins: that of Zeinab Pasha.

Zeinab, Reappearing

She sits quietly among three other women, a studio curtain falling behind them. A white scarf frames her face, a few strands of hair escaping, and flowers rest between her fingers. Her gaze is the only one that meets the camera, unsmiling. The handwriting on the photograph says this is a photo of her when she was young, sitting with her fellow battlers. This might be her, or a projection – a wish to assign a photograph to her.13

rasooli_1.jpg

Zeinab Pasha, the armed woman with flowers in her hands. Tabriz, 1890s.

Weapons, stones, clubs, fire, wheat, bread, and tobacco are the possible threads of Zeinab Pasha’s story. Born into a poor rural family, Zeinab Pasha took up arms in Tabriz at a time when the entire city was mobilized in response to Naser al-Din Shah’s concession, granting a British company the monopoly over buying and selling tobacco throughout Iran, and later during the Bread Riots of Tabriz. Who was she? A figure with a club in hand, ready to strike at the bazaar, to burn, to break open, to confront, and, alongside other armed women, to rise again and again, repeatedly inciting riots. In every retelling or narrative attributed to her, Zeinab Pasha is rebellious, armed, ready, and actively “encouraging and accompanying other women to fight.”14 She leads and organizes the strikes. “She identifies the grain storages or the houses of hoarders and, together with other women of Tabriz, raids them, empties the storage, and distributes the grain among the people.”15 A militant wearing no man’s disguise.

Zeinab Pasha is neither a quiet woman nor a man – an interruption in the order of both. But history does not record her so much as it constructs her. It desires her as the one “in the place of a man,” confronting the void left by “men’s inaction.” Her emergence in the male-determined political sphere is portrayed as momentary. What survives of her is merely a description of her bodily form, a “strong and sturdy build.” Unlike Zeinab of Zanjan, no masculinity is attributed to her attire of militancy. She is described with her chador tied at the waist, lifted, sleeves rolled – neither transgression nor disguise. History, unable to contain her within its gendered architectures, invents a likeness to make sense of her: she was not a man, nor did she wear their attire, yet she took their place, becoming “like them.”

In one anecdote, the historian gives a voice to Zeinab, though only in her countering of men’s inaction. She comes to “encourage and urge men to fight and uproot oppression,”16 and within the contested political spaces of men whose authority her presence destabilizes, she says:

If you men have no courage, then place the punishment of the oppressors in our hands. If you are afraid to cut off the hands of the thieves and plunderers from your property, your honor, and your homeland, then take our women’s veils and put them on your heads; sit inside your houses, and speak no more of manliness or bravery. We will fight the oppressors in your place.17

Zeinab is then said to throw her headscarf, “the sign of her womanhood,” toward the men and, amid their astonishment and disbelief, vanish from sight.

In other words, if she resigns from her femininity, it is to confront men in their betrayal of masculinity. And when she takes the forefront of the political scene, she remains positioned as momentarily occupying masculinity. Her political agency is inscribed in direct relation to that of men: a reimposition of a gendered structure that measures women’s militant appearance only through the possibility of likeness to men, and in this very likeness, it grants her permission to speak. Yet, she does not inhabit this structured presence quietly. Something spills out – something remains unsettled.

Zeinab’s story lingers with the sense of something that exceeds. Her haunting is not merely in her “male” attributes, but in the possibility that she unsettled the very grammar of political presence and visibility. The historian, when encountering Zeinab Pasha, simultaneously calls her a “lioness” and traces her lineage to other “noble men” in history.18 She comes to be described as “the explosive outburst of the painful and oppressed anguish of an Iranian woman,” and her militant presence in history comes at the expense of the erasure of Zeinab of Zanjan, as the historian writes that it was in the story of Zeinab Pasha that, “for the first time, [a woman] defied the tradition of her time and took up arms to seek justice for herself and her people.”19 It is Zeinab, again, who comes to be portrayed as a figure “similar to a man’s:” “Zeinab, free from any subtle feudal constraints, like male outlaws, frequented coffeehouses and sat among men without fear, smoking the hookah.”20

And the sudden imagery haunts the end of her story. She vanishes mysteriously, like the armed woman in my mother’s story: both disappear, leaving no trace, no account of their fates. In the final anecdote, she is said to be on her way to Karbala, yet even there, she is urged to initiate a protest. No one knows of her fate beyond that point.21 Unsettled and unsettling, the militant woman in history appears from nowhere and, if not murdered, dissolves into mystery. Sudden. Unexpected. Out of and into nowhere. Disturbing. Disruptive. The gendered politics of historical narration may attempt to capture her, to fix and define her, to erase ungraspability and unnameability. Still, in the very ruptures she causes, there is spilling: the structures imposed on her story collapse, overflow, and leak beyond all attempts to contain it.

Could Zeinab Pasha give queer traction to the very methodology of queer historiography? What queerness lies in the unfitting, the unnamable, the undefinable armed women, flickering beneath the dust of erased political memory, surfacing for a moment before sinking back? Zeinab is neither a figure of loss, nor one in need of recovery. She hovers in the archive, her presence oscillating between erasure and return. Multitudinous and undefinable, she unsettles the very point of reference, turning queer ways of thinking about history away from loss – away from the historicized recovery of identifiable bodies – toward something collective, politicized, armed, and entangled with temporalities of rupture and disturbance. What if queer histories took their bearings from Zeinabs? Figures that cannot be identified as queer, yet trouble and rupture, refusing containment. A queerness not named, but arranging itself against the grain of structure. A referential that dislocates even as it points to the armed woman.

Zeinab Pasha, Zeinab of Zanjan, the mysterious armed woman – they all appear in the company of others. Their presence calls to one another, co-humming, constellating a way of weaving history through a desire for an imaginary, for what is already unsettled. A story unfinishable, or never perfectly tellable, yet woven through their figures’ insistence in appearing, calling, reappearing, recalling one another, and appearing again.
 

Joan d’Arcification

Is there a place for the figure of the armed woman in a political queer reimagining of the past?

In the pages of Iran’s early women’s writings, when it comes to recalling figures of militancy, what surfaces is Joan of Arc. Whenever the women’s movement in Iran is threatened with being labeled as “morally corrupt,” Joan of Arc is recalled to provide a virtuous showcase, if not an absolute figure of sacrifice for her nation – a heroine and a martyr.22 Local publications relayed news of theater productions on Joan of Arc in England, noting that other women in the play were armed.23 In a poem addressed to the girls of Iran, written by the director of the journal Dokhtaran-e Iran in 1932, the Joan-of-Arcification continues to haunt: “I do not say, O women, that we should all become Joan of Arc, for though her spirit was vigorous, we are still in pain.”24 Zeinabs expectedly never emerge in these writings, given the repression they went through.

From the outset, dominant historiographies of women’s struggles in Iran have produced their Joans of Arc as sanitized, virtuous victims and tragic figures. Through this Joan d’Arcification, a monolithic, centralized, and depoliticized subject of victimhood emerges:  the “miserable” Iranian woman.

Within this framework, Babi Zeinab of Zanjan is eclipsed by Qorrat al-Ain who, though part of the same Babi movement and meeting a similar fate, is celebrated primarily for unveiling herself. In the same vein, the militant efforts of Zeinab Pasha fade into the background when compared to the widely narrated Tobacco Protest of 1891–1892, in which women from Nasser al-Din Shah’s harem participated by joining the boycott and breaking shisha glasses.

What the Joan d’Arcification does is erase the queer militancy of the Zeinabs. In this politics of narration, militancy is displaced, and defiance is eclipsed by the regime of visibility. History privileges veiling over arming, legibility over opacity, sanctification over subversion. In this reconfiguration, the saint endures as an emblem of moral coherence, while the rebel is rendered unrepresentable – her disappearance folded into the very grammar of historical narration.

The figure of the militant woman goes like this: she stands in the midst of collapsing time, among scattered fragments and the trembling drags of memory, a figure not quite a woman, not yet a man – a neither-nor. She holds a gun aimed at the exploiters, the tyrants, the oppressors, or perhaps at a future she knows is already denied to her. Her militant presence shatters sexual and gendered structures, a messy form of being that slips away the moment it is named or captured. Her sudden emergence, and disappearance, define a temporality that is only visible through ruptures, through fading fragments, through summonings and reimaginings. Cast out of the archive, expelled from history and yet somehow remembered, it is Joan of Arc who stands before her, her spear immovable.

From the very beginning of their encounter, the story reveals its own end: Zeinab is killed by Joan. Victimhood slyly butchers militancy. Still, Zeinab flickers, reappears, and is killed again, each time returning, each time undone.

When it comes to Zeinab Pasha, to Zeinab of Zanjan, to the mysterious armed woman, and to many other militant figures like her, the question remains: what is unremembered, their guns or their queerness?

• 1. Marzieh Ahmadi Oskoui (1941-1974) was a poet, teacher, leftist fighter, and a member of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas. She was martyred by SAVAK in 1974. The lines come from a longer poem of hers in Farsi, titled Man yek Zanam [I am a woman].
• 2. Ra’d Newspaper (1918).
• 3. Iran-e No Newspaper (1911).
• 4. The Babi Revolt of Zanjan, also known as Babi upheaval, uprising, holy war, or the fortress of Ali Mardan Khan in Zanjan, refers to a nine-month-long armed struggle (May 1850 – January 1851) between the Babis of Zanjan and the Qajar state of the town, which led to the siege of the Babi sect in the city, mass murder, and the subsequent execution of Babi fighters who survived the war. A few historical books have recorded the incidents of the time as “Fetne, فتنه” [Sedition], or infidelity, in resonance with naming any new faith in Islam as a heresy in the religion. For an account of the revolt of Zanjan, see Walbridge (2022).
• 5. The first-hand accounts capturing women in the revolt of Zanjan are mostly remaining in the work of Babi writers and historians, Tarikh-i vaqayi-i Zanjan by Mirza Husayn Zanjani, written probably in 1880, Mirza Husayn Hamadani's Tarikh-i-Jadid, probably written in 1893, and Tarikh-i-Nabil written by Nabil-i-A’zam probably in 1887-88 are among the main sources.
• 6. Zarandi (1932:550).
• 7. Zanjani (1903:40).
• 8. Ibid.:39-40.
• 9. Zanjani (1897:801).
• 10. Zarandi (1932:551).
• 11. Ibid.: 550.
• 12. Though Watson’s means of access to the story of Zanjan are not explicitly mentioned in the book, his line on “the bravery” of Zanjani women, comparing them to “the maids of Saragossa” (1866:391), has been cited uncritically in recalling Zeinab’s story in a few historical works on women in Iran, including Nahid’s study (1989:12-13).
• 13. The photo attributed to Zeinab Pasha appears in at least two versions, with two differing handwritings. The one used in this text comes from the Firouz Firouz Collection, accessed through the Qajar Women’s World online archive. In another version, kept at the archive of the Northwestern branch of the National Library and Archives in Tabriz, the handwriting reads: “Zeinab Pasha and Yuz Bashi Khavar and Nayib Kulsum in their youth.”
• 14. AzarNahidi (2005:149).
• 15. Ibid.:140.
• 16. Nahid (1989:43).
• 17. Ibid.
• 18. AzarNahidi (2005:137); Rezazadeh Amo Zeynaldini (2009:9).
• 19. AzarNahidi (2005:148).
• 20. Ibid.
• 21. Ibid.:149.
• 22. Jalili (1908).
• 23. Zaban-e Zanan (1920:4); Shokoufeh (1914:1).
• 24. Shirazi (1932:24-5).