Borandukht - Persian Princess who saved Middle East

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:06]All right, so according to Ibn Jarir Tabari and his wonderful, wonderful outline of the Sasanian Empire and it is tremendous. It's a tremendous read if you have time to read. I read through the whole thing.

[00:00:21]Uh caused a bit of controversy online when I mentioned a certain princess.

[00:00:25]We'll talk about it today as well.

[00:00:27]Uh but these are things that are maintained in the books of history.

[00:00:30]It's not fabricated. It's not a fantasy one that we want to put out there. It's in the books.

[00:00:35]All the praise and admiration that uh was on print is written by al-Tabari.

[00:00:42]And al-Tabari is not an ordinary man.

[00:00:44]Al-Tabari had himself uh his entire he he he was a mujtahid mutlaq.

[00:00:49]He had his entire madhhab.

[00:00:51]Huh? He had a madhhab. It didn't survive, but he had a madhhab, a Jariri madhhab.

[00:00:56]And he is the most voluminous writing in the history of Islam.

[00:01:01]When it comes to actual written text counted and accounted for nobody has written more than al-Tabari in the history of Islam. Hm?

[00:01:10]So, he has vast stores of knowledge and he would have certainly heard of hadith concerning women in rulership. He would have heard of it.

[00:01:20]So, the question is why would he having heard these ahadith and he was also a mufassir?

[00:01:26]Yeah, his famous uh tafsir.

[00:01:28]A famous jurist. An imam, a mujtahid mutlaq.

[00:01:33]How did he interpret the reign of a Persian princess who is said to be almost perfect in how she ruled her govern her empire for 2 years?

[00:01:43]How did he interpret that?

[00:01:45]That's the question we have to ask ourselves. Did he know something that we didn't know? Did we miss something that he probably read somewhere else? How do you corroborate that? Because he writes very, very highly of this one Persian woman uh who ruled at the time of the Islamic uh expansion. She was a contemporary of the Khulafa Rashidun and those who came after them. So, she was somebody who was, of course, fighting or at least on the other end of the uh of the Jihad.

[00:02:26]They said we wouldn't last, but here we stand.

[00:02:32]>> [music] >> He mentions her uh her speech when she was inaugurated, and he mentions the tremendous good she brought to her people. Although she survived only 2 years.

[00:02:45]So, her name was Boran.

[00:02:48]There is a longer uh Borandukht, the Persian uh the original Persian, but her name is Boran.

[00:02:55]And she was the daughter of Khosrow II, the one who was killed by his son.

[00:03:00]And it is said that when she took power, she swore to rule with justice and righteousness.

[00:03:07]She swore to rule with justice and righteousness.

[00:03:10]And she began by first of all making peace with the uh Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius.

[00:03:15]She began by making peace with him.

[00:03:18]She also returned to him the wood from the true cross, they believed to be the true cross of Christ.

[00:03:23]She returned it back to him.

[00:03:25]And she would tell her soldiers to fear Allah.

[00:03:29]She would advise them to fear Allah. She would advise people to be nice to one another. She would remind them of the Akhirah.

[00:03:35]She also began to print coins.

[00:03:38]She minted official coins once again.

[00:03:41]At that time when she took over, the dynasty was on its final leg. You had a regicide, you had father being killed by his son, all the brothers being rounded up and killed. So, the empire was all over the place. But, it took the feminine touch, a woman who came into power and put everything back down and calmed the situation, although it was only for 2 years.

[00:04:02]Calmed the situation. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. Some narrations mention she was poisoned.

[00:04:08]Others mention she was just she just died naturally. But, in that space of time, she brought order back.

[00:04:14]She also helped the impoverished. Those who couldn't pay their debts, she paid it off on their behalf. Right? Now, I'm not sure whether she was Christian whether she was Zoroastrian because her mother was Christian. So, it may be possible that she was a believer, but that level of detail is not provided to us in the sources. So, we don't know whether she was indeed Christian or not Christian.

[00:04:34]Uh let me share this again. But, I'd highly recommend you look into her story. It's fascinating, tremendous.

[00:04:42]Uh honestly, uh the segment on her life is very short and brief, but very very inspirational.

[00:04:49]And it gives you another perspective to look at history through, okay?

[00:04:52]What was Ibn al-Jawziyya thinking of when he wrote that story?

[00:04:56]Um he doesn't write a single bad thing about her.

[00:04:59]Not a single bad thing about her. Yeah?

[00:05:01]>> [music] >> He praised her throughout. And she dies, her sister takes over. So, she has a sister and she's also put in power because again, there are no men left.

[00:05:13]That's one of the points you have to keep in mind when you read that Hadith.

[00:05:16]There were no men left.

[00:05:18]And the reason why there were no men left is because one of the men killed his own father.

[00:05:24]An ab- an absolute crime, unforgivable crime, and then killed his own brothers and his relatives.

[00:05:31]He committed mass murder in his own household, and his father was also not spared.

[00:05:37]Right? So, the only people left were the women.

[00:05:40]So, if I said to you, for example, uh there is a house, and there were five men and two women two girls living in the house.

[00:05:48]And something happened, there was a homicide.

[00:05:50]And one of the boys killed all his male relatives.

[00:05:53]Only leaving behind his two sisters.

[00:05:56]And then I said to you, the house where the women survive will never be a house full of happiness or joy.

[00:06:04]I'm not condemning the women.

[00:06:06]I'm condemning the men or the man who killed all the other men so that there were no women there were no men left to look after the household. And only the women.

[00:06:15]I'm not condemning the women. I'm condemning the situation that created the need for the women to have to rule in the first place.

[00:06:24]I'm not condemning the women.

[00:06:25]I'm condemning the situation. For example, if I said to you a household that is headed by a woman, a household where there is a man in and men, but the woman pays the bills, is a failed household.

[00:06:40]I'm not condemning the wife for working.

[00:06:43]She may be doing a good job at paying the bills. I'm condemning the situation where she has to work and pay the bills.

[00:06:51]It doesn't mean that she can never work or she will never be able to pay the It means that the situation in which she finds herself having to work and take on that burden, that situation itself is not indicative of good a good family structure.

[00:07:04]She's being failed by her male relatives.

[00:07:07]So, these sisters were in a position where they had to rule because the brother had killed every other man in the household, including his father.

[00:07:19]When she was in power, she brought peace. She calmed things down again. And then 2 years later, her sister took over.

[00:07:26]And she also survived for only 1 year.

[00:07:29]She was assassinated.

[00:07:31]Eventually, they ran out of people to hand power over to. So, they had to look for distant relatives. And this is why in the chart you can see here, they found a man known as Mehr uh just last year.

[00:07:44]Very little known about him. He's an obscure figure. But there are some narrations that he was a relative that was somehow connected to some ancestors back.

[00:07:53]And so he was the closest thing they had left.

[00:07:56]And so from him and his children, there were two or three more uh, Shahs until the end of the entire, uh, of the entire, uh, dynasty.

[00:08:06]And so the context is very important here.

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