Táhirih — the title means the Pure One, given her by Bahá'u'lláh — was born Fátimih Baraghání into a prominent clerical family in Qazvin around 1817, was educated far beyond what was usual, and became sufficiently learned to teach male students from behind a curtain. She accepted the Báb's claim without meeting him and became the only woman among the eighteen Letters of the Living, his first disciples. At the conference of Badasht in 1848, convened to determine whether the new revelation constituted a break with Islamic law, she appeared before the assembled believers without her veil and declared the old dispensation ended; the reaction was violent enough that one participant cut his own throat and fled. She was arrested after the attempt on the Sháh's life in 1852 and strangled with her own scarf in a garden in Tehran, aged about thirty-five, and her body thrown into a well. The line most often attributed to her — that they could kill her but not stop the emancipation of women — is not securely documented, and Bahá'í scholars say so.