November 18. On this date in 1962, Fażl-Allāh Mohtadi Ṣobḥi (spelled Faydu'lláh Subhí in the Bahá'í orthography), school teacher who is best known as a children’s storyteller, collector of folktales, broadcaster, and Bahá'í apostate, died in Tehran.
Ṣobḥi
was born in Kashan to a Bahai family. His paternal grandmother, Ḥājiya
ʿAmma Ḵānom, was the paternal aunt of Bahaʾ-Allāh’s third wife Gawhar
and had been a Bābi from the earliest days of that movement. In about
1916-17, he assisted Mirzā Mahdi Aḵawān Ṣafā on a journey propagating
the Bahai faith in Azerbaijan, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, following
which he lived in Ashkhabad for a time before returning to Tehran in
1918. In late 1919, Ṣobḥi travelled to Haifa to visit ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ.
ʿAbd-al-Bahāʾ asked him to remain and be a secretarial assistant. He
acted in this capacity for two years alongside several other secretaries
(monši) and secretarial assistants (kāteb) Ṣobḥi was strongly opposed
to Shoghi Effendi’s leadership of the Bahai community and began to speak
out about this among the Bahai community in Iran. This, as well as his
association with ʿAbd-al-Ḥosayn Āyati, a Bahai apostate, led to
warnings from the Bahai elected council in Iran and eventually to his
expulsion from the Bahai community in the spring of 1928. Shortly
afterwards, in 1933, he published the first of his refutations of the
Bahai faith, Ketāb-e Ṣobḥi, and over twenty years later, in 1956, he
published another anti-Bahai tract, Payām-e pedar, which repeats much of
the material in the first book.
After
his expulsion from the Bahai community, Ṣobḥi was employed by Yaḥyā
Dawlatābādi as a teacher at the latter’s Sādāt School, and he later
taught at the American High School in Tehran. In 1931, he visited the
head of the Kowṯariya branch of the Neʿmat-Allāhi Sufi order, Moḥammad
Ḥosayn Maḥbub ʿAlišāh, in Marāḡa and was initiated into this order. In
1933, he began to teach Persian language and literature at the Higher
Academy of Music (Honarestān-e ʿāli-e musiqi) in Tehran, where he
remained until his death except for a short break in 1937-38, when he
taught at the Law College (Dāneškada-ye ḥoquq).
On
26 April 1940, a few days after Radio Tehran (later named Radio Iran)
began broadcasting, Ṣobḥi delivered the first of his children’s stories,
which became a regular program at noon on Fridays (and sometimes also
in the evenings). He would often chant some verses from Rumi’s Matnawi
and then proceed to tell a story. The program was very popular with
children (and many adults), and he continued with it for 22 years (until
cancer of the larynx stopped him shortly before his death), thereby
becoming one of the most well-known radio personalities in Iran. At
first, the main source of his stories was a collection compiled by Ṣādeq
Hedāyat, whom he visited regularly. There has been a debate about
whether Ṣobḥi plagiarized Hedāyat’s work (see HEDĀYAT, ṢĀDEQ iii), but
what is certain is that the two of them had a falling out in 1948 with
Hedāyat stating that Ṣobḥi had launched a vitriolic attack on him
(Hedāyat, p. 131). Later, Ṣobḥi relied on his listeners to send him
stories, and in this way he was able to collect a great deal of folklore
from around the country. On the back of this work, he became the first
to publish collections of Persian folktales rewritten for children (see
Bibliography), an endeavor which Ulrich Marzolph (p. 210) considers to
have been valuable but not rigorous or academic. His books contained
illustrations by Layli Taqipur and Moḥsen Waziri Moqaddam.
Ṣobḥi
did not marry and lived alone with a simple lifestyle that was
described as “dervish-like” and in a simple, spartan room with a kaškul
(an oval bowl carried by dervishes, suspended from the shoulder) and two
tabarzins (halberd) attached to the wall against which he sat. His
storytelling for children on radio was continued after his death by
Mawlud ʿĀṭefi and others, and then for 24 years after the Islamic
Revolution of 1978-79 by Moḥammad-Reżā Saršār (i.e., Reżā Rahgoḏar), who
also wrote a book about Ṣobḥi. Ṣobḥi’s work in collecting folktales
and broadcasting them on radio was also continued on a much more
rigorous and academic basis by Abu’l-Qāsem Enjavi (d. 1993) and the
Markaz-e farhang-e mardom (Center for popular culture) that he founded.
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