Resurrection, return, reform: Tacziyeh as model for early Babi historiography

Abstract

The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among the people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.—Walter Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History”Although The Title of this Paper is Inspired by the Title to Abbas Amanat's now classic history of the 19th-century Babi movement, its concerns are in essence different. Its aims, rather than being a study of the history of the messianic movement itself, are to reflect on the theoretical conditions or the modes of witnessing that structured the engagement with that history by the movement's contemporaries and early inheritors. This paper emerges out of a larger cultural and literary study of the early texts that narrate Babi history.