The February 18, 2000 Parliamentary Elections in Iran Resulted in a clear victory for the groups associated with President Khatami's reform programs. The electorate was allowed to reject the forces of authoritarianism and conservatism through a free election, and the media and the experts considered this event to have historic significance. It seemed that the result of the elections convinced more and more people that democratic transition is possible in Iran through the reform of the system without first dismantling the Islamic republic. But soon after the elections there was a crackdown which included the closing down of a large number of newspapers and the arrest of a few prominent journalists, lawyers, and other political activists thus obscuring the future path of the Iranian polity. How are we to understand the character of this polity and is it possible to make educated guesses about its future?

Ever Since The Appearance of the Notion of the “Intellectual,” Writers and theorists have been preoccupied with attempting to define just what an intellectual is, or ought to be. Is an intellectual a detached observer, one who is free from the immediate concerns of life, and interested primarily in the pursuit of timeless and universal truths, as Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des clercs, or is an intellectual one who very much engages with society, necessarily challenges power, one who, in Edward Said's words, “is a spirit in opposition” who raises “embarrassing questions … and cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug”? Sociologists and historians have adopted a variety of approaches to this concept: in a sociological sense, they have applied the term to all those who produce and propagate thought and culture, thus designating a neutral although wide socio-professional category, or in an attempt to narrow down the grouping, they have qualified the word with distinct characteristics, pointing out a certain way of acting in public life.

In The Spring Of 1997, I Attended a Memorial Dinner for My Aunt, Dr. Na‘imeh Amin. There, one of her friends from medical school, Dr. Maryam Tusi, shared pictures of herself and my aunt from their medical school days. In 1946, they had been among the first women students admitted to the University of Tehran Medical School directly from Iranian high schools. I was fascinated by what I thought I saw in three of the pictures. One showed ten young women on the steps of the medical school, looking eager and confident. Another showed men and women marching together in a street demonstration. The third was of men and women on a country outing, huddled together to fit into the picture and seemingly unconcerned about traditional anxieties regarding mixed-gender socializing. These images of women's progress and activism could have been produced by the propaganda of the Pahlavi state during its Women's Awakening project, 1936-41. In fact, the picture of the demonstration went beyond Women's Awakening propaganda and implied a new demand for gender equality that appeared in the Iranian press in the wake of the Women's Awakening.

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.