Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire by Andrew J. Newman

Author:Andrew J. Newman [Newman, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: General, Medieval, Iran, Middle East, History, Renaissance
ISBN: 9780857716613
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2008-12-14T21:00:00+00:00

1 Laying the Foundations: Ismail I (1488–1524)

1 Fazlallah Khunji Isfahani (d. 1521), the ferociously anti-Safavid and anti-Shi‘i Sunni historian to Uzun Hasan’s son Yaqub (d. 1490), wrote that the order’s members praised Junayd as ‘the Living One, there is no God but he’ and that followers from Anatolia and elsewhere viewed Junayd’s successor Haydar as Allah and neglected such daily religious duties as prayer. See Khunji’s Persia in AD 1478–1490, An Abridged Edition of Fadlallah b. Ruzbihan Khunji’s Tarikh-i Alam Ara-yi Amini (London, 1957), V. Minorsky, ed., 4, 61–80, 1f. J. Woods has produced a new edition of the text (London, 1992), which includes Minorsky’s original abridged translation and additional notes. On Khunji, see also A. Jacobs, ‘Sunni and Shi‘i Perceptions, Boundaries and Affiliations in Late Timurid and Early Safawid Persia: an Examination of Historical and Quasi-Historical Narratives’, unpublished PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999, 81–103. On a similarly anti-Safavid Arabic-language treatise composed in 1479–80 by a contemporary Hanafi cleric and the latter’s role in expelling Junayd from Syria, see A. Morton’s ‘Maulana Ahmad Pakaraji and the Origins of Anti-Safavid Polemic’, paper presented at Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, University of London, September 2002.

2 Minorsky, ‘The Poetry of Shah Ismail I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BSOAS), 10 (1942), 1006a–1053a, esp. 1042a, 1043a, 1044a, 1047a, 1048a. See also G. Garthwaite, ‘An Outsiders View’, citing Minorsky (1047a); W. Thackston, ‘The Diwan of Khata’i: Pictures for the Poetry of Shah Ismail’, Asian Art, I(4) (Fall 1988), 37–63. Thanks to G. Garthwaite for directing me to the latter source. See also J. Calmard, ‘Popular Literature Under the Safavids’, in Newman, ed. Society and Culture, 317–18; A. Karamustafa, ‘Esma‘il I. His Poetry’, EIr, 8. On the taj being adopted under Haydar, as noted by Khunji, see Persia in AD 1478–1490, Minorsky, ed., 73; Woods, ed. 260, 265, 282. There is no reference to such headgear in an earlier history of Diyar Bakr completed for Uzun Hasan between 1469 and 1478; see H. R. Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’, in Peter Jackson, et al., eds, 6: 207; Woods, The Aqquyunlu, 219–20. On representations of the taj as early as 1503, see B. Schmitz, ‘On a Special Hat Introduced during the Reign of Shah Abbas the Great’, IRAN, 22 (1984), 103–12. My thanks to G. Garthwaite for directing me to this source.

For editions of Ismail’s divan, see T. Gandjei, Il Canzoniere di Sah Ismail Hata’i (Naples, 1959), and I. Islanoghlu, Sah Ismail Hatayi (Divan, Dehname, Nasihatname ve Anadolu Hatayileri) (Istanbul, 1992).

Yazid (d. 683) was the Umayyad caliph during whose rule the third Shi‘i imam, Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, was killed at Karbala in 680, on the tenth day, Ashura, of the Muslim month of Muharram. Khidr was the companion of Moses (Qur’an, 18: 62–83) whom the Shi‘a identify as the Hidden Imam.

3 Other than references to the taj, Khunji’s history contains no evidence of Safavid identification with any distinctively, let alone exclusively, Twelver discourse to 1490.

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