Her father Hajj Nematollah was an outstanding spiritual personality who gave up a comfortable life a few years before she was born to devote himself to finding the Truth.

While in those days and in those remote regions of Kurdistan, new-born girls were greeted with condolences, it is noteworthy that Malak Jan received the same comprehensive education as her elder brother.

[3] With Kurdish as her mother tongue, she learned Persian and Arabic and set about studying the revealed books and the extremely rich Iranian poetry from which she would later draw her inspiration when writing her own poems.

[5] The loss of her eyesight, though, seems to have coincided with the awakening of a form of mystical passion[6] that led her to progressively draw closer to her brother Ostad Elahi and she became one of his most accomplished followers.

[7] Progressively, Malak Jan's personality, her meaningful spiritual reflection and constant practice of charity[8] earned her a reputation for saintliness in her deeply religious milieu.

[13] Although living in a deeply patriarchal society, she used her spiritual authority to defend more specifically women's rights, by gradually teaching mothers to look after their daughters as much as their sons, by getting fathers to leave them a share of inheritance equal to that of their brothers.

[14] Towards the end of her life, Malak Jan brought a certain number of reforms to the Ahl-e Haqq form of worship that contributed to attributing women the same level of dignity as men on the ritual plane.

La vie n'est pas courte mais le temps est compté, Diane de Selliers, Paris (2007).