New Perspectives On Safavid Iran

Dedicated to the renowned Safavid historian Roger Savory, this book brings together a collection of studies on the Safavid state of Iran (1501-1722) from the perspectives of political, social, literary, and artistic history. Savory, a doyen of Safavid studies in the 1960s and 1970s, was responsible for expanding and popularizing the study of Iran in the 16th and 17th century. To celebrate this legacy, well-established scholars of medieval and early modern Iran have contributed specific studies reflecting an array of research interests and specializations, which include critical re-examinations of issues of gender, literature, art and architecture, cultural and linguistic currents, illustrated historical chronicles, and courtly and administrative practices under the Safavid dynasty. This unique compilation is indicative of a growing interest in Iran and Iranian studies in both the academic and public spheres, and as such contains a number of new perspectives which will serve to supplement and re-interpret the existing corpus of Safavid scholarly literature to date. It will be an important text for scholars of world history and Middle East studies, as well as to historians in general.

The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501–1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.

The Safavid dynasty, which reigned from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century, links medieval with modern Iran. The Safavids witnessed wide-ranging developments in politics, warfare, science, philosophy, religion, art and architecture. But how did this dynasty manage to produce the longest lasting and most glorious of Iran's Islamic-period eras?Andrew Newman offers a complete re-evaluation of the Safavid place in history as they presided over these extraordinary developments and the wondrous flowering of Iranian culture. In the process, he dissects the Safavid story, from before the 1501 capture of Tabriz by Shah Ismail (1488-1524), the point at which Shiism became the realm's established faith; on to the sixteenth and early seventeenth century dominated by Shah Abbas (1587-1629), whose patronage of art and architecture from his capital of Isfahan embodied the Safavid spirit; and culminating with the reign of Sultan Husayn (reg. 1694-1722).Based on meticulous scholarship, Newman offers a valuable new interpretation of the rise of the Safavids and their eventual demise in the eighteenth century. "Safavid Iran," with its fresh insights and new research, is the definitive single volume work on the subject.

I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation The decline and fall of Safavid Iran is traditionally seen as the natural outcome of the unrelieved political stagnation and moral degeneration which characterised late Safavid Iran. "Persia in Crisis" challenges this view. In this ground-breaking new book, Rudi Matthee revisits traditional sources and introduces new ones to take a fresh look at Safavid Iran in the century preceding the fall of Isfahan in 1722, which brought down the dynasty and ushered in a long period of turbulence in Iranian history. Inherently vulnerable because of the country's physical environment, its tribal makeup and a small economic base, the Safavid state was fatally weakened over the course of the seventeenth century. Matthee views Safavid Iran as a network of precarious alliances subject to perpetual negotiation and the society they ruled as an uneasy balance between conflicting forces. In the later seventeenth century this delicate balance shifted from cohesion to fragmentation. An increasingly detached, palace-bound shah; a weakening link between the capital and the outlying provinces; the regime's neglect of the military and its shortsighted monetary policies combined to exacerbate rather than redress existing problems, leaving the country with a ruler too feeble to hold factionalism and corruption in check and a military unable to defend its borders against outside attack by Ottomans and Afghans. The scene was set for the Crisis of 1722. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of Iranian history and the period that led to two hundred years of decline and eclipse for Iran.

I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation The decline and fall of Safavid Iran is traditionally seen as the natural outcome of the unrelieved political stagnation and moral degeneration which characterised late Safavid Iran. "Persia in Crisis" challenges this view. In this ground-breaking new book, Rudi Matthee revisits traditional sources and introduces new ones to take a fresh look at Safavid Iran in the century preceding the fall of Isfahan in 1722, which brought down the dynasty and ushered in a long period of turbulence in Iranian history. Inherently vulnerable because of the country's physical environment, its tribal makeup and a small economic base, the Safavid state was fatally weakened over the course of the seventeenth century. Matthee views Safavid Iran as a network of precarious alliances subject to perpetual negotiation and the society they ruled as an uneasy balance between conflicting forces. In the later seventeenth century this delicate balance shifted from cohesion to fragmentation. An increasingly detached, palace-bound shah; a weakening link between the capital and the outlying provinces; the regime's neglect of the military and its shortsighted monetary policies combined to exacerbate rather than redress existing problems, leaving the country with a ruler too feeble to hold factionalism and corruption in check and a military unable to defend its borders against outside attack by Ottomans and Afghans. The scene was set for the Crisis of 1722. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of Iranian history and the period that led to two hundred years of decline and eclipse for Iran.

John M. Flannery describes the establishment and activities of the Portuguese Augustinian mission in Persia.

In Twelve Muslim Revolutions, Professor Kortepeter presents a broadly encompassing study of the medieval and modern history of the central lands of Islam over a period of centuries. Told in three parts: 1) Revolutions from pre-Islamic Arabia to the Ottoman Turks, 2) The imperial powers establishing footprints in the Middle East in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and 3) American presidents and their inability to fully comprehend the complexities of the Middle East since World War II. This narrative is told in a very personal manner, borne of on-the-ground experience in those lands, an essential read for anyone wishing to comprehend the story of the Middle East present, past and future. University students, scholars, and policy-makers alike will find Kortepeters insights equally compelling.

The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501–1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.

In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter's delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist's likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist's imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist's signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed.

An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire's capital, The King and the People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah's devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled. Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities. As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.