November 18. On this date in 1962, Faydu'lláh Subhí, school teacher who is best known as a children’s storyteller, collector of folktales, broadcaster, and Bahai apostate, passed away in Tehran. What follows is part of an entry by Moojen Momen in the Encyclopædia Iranica.

 

November 18. On this date in 1962, Faydu'lláh Subhí, school teacher who is best known as a children’s storyteller, collector of folktales, broadcaster, and Bahai apostate, passed away in Tehran. What follows is part of an entry by Moojen Momen in the Encyclopædia Iranica.

FAŻL-ALLĀH MOHTADI ṢOBḤI

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.