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Resurrection, Return, Reform: Taᶜziyeh as Model for Early Babi Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Negar Mottahedeh
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Summer 1999 , pp. 387 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the 1997 Middle Eastern Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, California. My thanks to Amin Banani, Jackson Ingram-Armstrong, William Garlington, Houchang Chehabi, and Juan Cole for their thoughtful comments on its first draft.

References

1. Amanat, Abbas, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran 1844-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

2. Specifically, chapter 3 of my Ph.D. dissertation Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran, (University of Minnesota, 1998).Google Scholar

3. Kitab-i Nuqṭat al-Kāf: Being the Earliest History of the Babis, ed. Browne, E. G. (Leiden: E.J. Brill; 1910.Google Scholar reprinted Lansing, Michigan: H-Bahai, 1997), has been republished on the World Wide Web: <http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/index/diglib/arapub.htm>.

4. At issue in the debates that followed the unearthing of this text and its corollary, Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, are the authorship of the texts and the actual dates of their completion. These issues according to the participants, divided along partisan lines, would determine their value as historical sources for the Babi movement prior to the definitive break between the surviving Babis into Azali and Bahaᵓi camps. (Jārīkh-i-Jadīd or The New History of Mirza Ali Muhammad the Bab, ed. and trans. Edward G. Browne, Cambridge, 1893.) An able account of the controversy and further speculations on the directions one could take in order to verify the dates and authorship of these sources is found in chapters 6 and 7 of part two in Denis MacEoinᵓs Sources For Early Babi Doctrine and History: A Survey (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992).Google Scholar Browne takes up the debates in the introduction to Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, (pp. xii, xxxiv-xlvii) and in the introduction to Nuqṭat al-Kāf (pp. xii-xx and xxxiv-xlvii). Kashf al-Ghiṭāᵓ ᶜan ḥiyal al-aᶜdā written by Abu'l-Fazl Gulpaygani and completed after his death by his nephew Sayyid Mahdi Gulpaygani, is devoted entirely to resolving the problems and exposing the distortions and discrepancies of Nuqṭat al-Kāf. In an attempt to do so, Amanat claims, it creates more problems of its own. Again, see further discussion in MacEoinᵓs Sources (136-139). Kashf al-Ghiṭā ᶜan ḥiyal al-aᶜdā is reprinted on the H-Bahai website (see URL in note3 above).

5. The taᶜziyeh itself never transforms the traditionally understood history of Islam in order to pose these question. Its structure, temporal and spatial modes, rather than its historical contents, achieve this effect.

6. Godzich, Wlad, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 165.Google Scholar

7. Arnold, Matthew, “A Persian Passion Play,” Cornhill Magazine (December 1871): 677.Google Scholar

8. Godzich, 166.

9. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, xvii.

10. Ibid., 337; Nuqṭat, 170.

11. Nuqṭat, 169-71.

12. Amanat, Resurrection, 194.

13. Ibid., 195-96.

14. See Mottahedeh, Negar, “The Mutilated Body of the Modern Nation,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 18, no. 2 (1998), 38–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. See Browne, E. G., A Literary History of Persia, vol. 4Google Scholar, Modern Times (1500-1924) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 188.Google Scholar

16. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, 338; Nuqṭat, 170.

17. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, xviii.

18. Nuqṭat, 172.

19. Nuqṭat, 171.

20. Ibid.

21. John Walbridge's discussion of the Babi uprising in Zanjan clearly suggests this as well. See especially his “Babi Uprising in Zanjan: Causes and Issues,” Iranian Studies 29, nos. 3-4 (Summer/Fall 1996): 359.Google Scholar

22. The 1858 history by Riza Quli Khan Hidayat, Rawżat al-ṣafā-yi Nāṣirī New Edition, vol. 10 (Tehran, 1960-61), 121, mentions the proceedings of the Badasht conference (121); see also ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, A travellerᵓs narrative written to illustrate the episode of the Bāb; translated into English from the original Persian by Edward G. Browne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891], 188.Google Scholar Sipihrᵓs Nāsikh al-Tawārīkh: dawrah-yi kāmil-i tārīkh-i Qājārīyah vol. 4, 57 records Qurrat al-ᶜAyn Tahirehᵓs address at that Conference and remarks at an earlier point (46) that she discarded the veil and openly preached the Babi doctrine. Shaykh Abu Turab, quoted in The Dawn Breakers: Nabilᵓs Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahaᵓi Revelation trans, and ed., Shoghi Effendi (Wilmette, 1932), Samandarᵓs memoirs, and Baghdadi include at least a passing reference to the incident. For the latter two see Abuᵓl-Qasim Afnan, Chahār Resālih-i-Tarikhi dar Bāriyih-i-Tahirih Qurratu'l Ayn (Landegg, Switzerland 1991).Google Scholar

23. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, 356; Nuqṭat, 141.

24. MacEoin, Denis, From Shaykism to Babism: A Study in Charismatic Renewal in Shiᶜi Islam Ph.D. dissertation (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1979), 206.Google Scholar

25. Nuqṭat, 140.

26. MacEoin, From Shaykism to Babism, 225.

27. Browne, E. G., Selections from the writings of E. G. Browne on the Bábí and Bahá'í religions, Momen, Moojan, ed. (Oxford: G. Ronald, c. 1987), 323–24.Google Scholar Although the Persian Bayan is one of the Bab's last known written works, it is obvious that the belief that these figures had returned in the persons of such Babi leaders as Qurrat al-ᶜAyn and Quddus was commonly held long before the dissemination of this work. Browne's summary of the Persian Bayan is reproduced in chapter 3.

28. Amanat, Resurrection, 326.

29. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, 357.

30. Ibid., 357; Nuqṭat, 151-52.

31. Tārīkh-i-Jadīd, 357-59.

32. Ibid., 359; Nuqṭat,152-51.

33. Nuqṭat, 154.

34. Of course, as Juan Cole has pointed out to me, the divergences between the two narratives does occur along Bahaᵓi and Azali lines (Nuqṭat al-Kāf as we know it was at one point rewritten by Azali sympathizers). The question then becomes, what is at stake in ignoring or even denying her unveiling, or on the other hand representing it? My argument is that the tools for representation (form) situate the contents of the historically represented. Thus while Nuqṭat al-Kāf relies on the redemptive tools of the taᶜziyeh drama, Abu Turabᵓs recollection relies on the imagistic rearticulation of the Qurᵓanic traditions surrounding that drama. For further discussion of the representation of the Badasht conclave in Nabil see Negar Mottahedeh, “Ruptured Spaces and Effective Histories: The Unveiling of the Babi Poet Qurrat al-ᶜAyn- Tahireh in the Gardens of Badasht,” H-Bahai Occasional Papers series 2, no. 2 (February 1998), <http://hnet2.msu.edu/~bahai/bhpapers.htm>.

35. Nuqṭat, 145.

36. “Taᶜzieh of Qasem” from Himavuni, Sadeq, Taᶜziyeh wa taᶜziyeh-khʷānī (Tehran: Shirkat Aftiyat, 1975), 113–31Google Scholar (translated in Rebecca Ansary Petty, The Ta'ziyeh: Ritual of Renewal in Persia, Ph.D. diss., vol. 2 (Indiana University).

37. The first of these, according to Browne, was Rūznāmah-i Waqāyi-i Ittifāqiyya: see Browne, Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1983), 98.Google Scholar

38. Cf. Taj al-Saltanehᵓs memoirs Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from Harem to Modernity, Amanat, Abbas, ed. (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1993) 309Google Scholar, where she discusses the familyᵓs reaction to her “modern,” “Europeanized” acts and unveiling.