The Eros of Female Friendship in Seventeenth‐century Isfahan

Muhammad Qasim, Woman Smoking a Pipe, dated 1650. Topkapi Museum, TSMK. H 2137, folio 21 recto. Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, the Directorate of National Palaces.

This talk, by the historian Kathryn Babayan, will enter the social world of Isfahan through the words of one female resident: an unnamed widow who writes her own extraordinary self-narrative. Her versified travelogue begins as she leaves Isfahan upon the death of her husband, a distance that incites the expression of an emotional and gendered sensibility. In the process of telling her story, the widow reveals another, earlier, experience of loss that, as a respectable married woman in Isfahan, she had borne secretly for many years —a forced separation from her female companion now living in Urdubad (NW Iran). This friendship had generated suspicion, with rumours circulating in Isfahan about their relationship to such an extent that her friend was forced to leave the city. While the widow provides suggestive evidence for the practice of intimate female friendships, the question of the practice and acceptance of female homoeroticism more broadly remains speculative. The tensions between profane and sacred love and friendship that torment the widow motivate her journey away from Isfahan; these are the unresolved tensions that will be discussed.

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