Newman - Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire

ANDREW J NEWMAN is Reader in Islamic Studies and Persian in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Safavid Iran

Marys Book

Paperback edition published in 2009 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. Reprinted 2012

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First published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

Copyright Andrew J. Newman, 2006

The right of Andrew J. Newman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 1 84511 830 3

eISBN 978 0 85773 366 5

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

I have been interested in Safavid Iran since 1977 when, as a first-year graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, searching for a PhD topic, I read Laurence Lockharts 1958 description of the well-known Twelver Shii scholar Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1699) as an extremely bigoted mujtahid , a rigid and fanatical formalist, an opponent of all philosophical inquiry and a persecutor of Jews and Armenians. Echoing the decades old judgement of E. G. Browne (d. 1926), Lockhart stated that Majlisis influence was such as to render Safavid Iran unable to respond to the attacks which culminated in the fall of the capital of Isfahan to the Afghans in 1722. Although alone the 19823 Beirut edition of Bihar al-Anwar , Majlisis massive, Arabic-language collection of the hadith s of the twelve imams, runs to some 110 volumes, Lockharts source for such sweeping characterisations was a single, rather short, essay

My 1980 oral examinations, the passing of which allowed me to commence my dissertation research, were partly predicated on a proposal to examine Majlisis life and works. In the process of that research I discovered a dearth of secondary-source works on Twelver Shiism and the 1986 PhD became, instead, an examination of developments in Shii jurisprudence from the disappearance of the twelfth Imam in 8734 to the years immediately following the establishment of Twelver Shiism as the realms official faith following the 1501 capture of Tabriz by the first Safavid shah, Ismail. Several subsequent articles on Shiism in the Safavid period did not immediately relate to Majlisi. When I returned to Majlisi, while preparing a paper for the Third International Round Table on Safavid Persia, which I convened in 1998 in Edinburgh, I discovered that although Western scholars had yet to commence any systematic examination of his many, mostly Arabic-language, works the aforementioned sweeping characterisations of the man and his legacy had, in fact, assumed the status of received wisdom in the field.

In 2000, in the aftermath of sending in the proofs for my first book, on Twelver doctrine and practice in the late I.B.Tauris asked me to write a new general history of the Safavid period. Given the logarithmic expansion in the scholarly interest in the period since the Iranian revolution, as discussed below, this was a daunting challenge for someone whose research interests in the period had to date involved research into apparently arcane aspects of Shii religious discourse.

In attempting to rise to this challenge I owe much to the comments, criticisms and assistance of such well-respected figures in Iranian and Safavid history as Iraj Afshar, Sussan Babaie, Kathryn Babayan, Stephen Blake, Sheila Canby, Ehsan Eshraqi, Willem Floor, Gene Garthwaite, Edmund Herzig, Robert Hillenbrand, Rasul Jafariyan, Paul Luft, Rudi Matthee, Sandy Morton, Sholeh Quinn, Mansur Sefatgol and Maria Szuppe. These, along with many others, may well not recognise their own contributions to, and in any case are to be absolved of responsibility for any aspect of, the present volume, let alone my failure to adhere to the original deadline for its submission. The latter has been met only with the utmost patience and forbearance of I.B.Tauriss Publisher and Managing Editor Mr Iradj Bagherzade, my patient editor Dr Lester Crook and his assistant Ms Clare Dubois.

I would also like to thank Dr Ian Revie, Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Edinburgh for his help in securing the support of the Schools Research Fund to assist with the reproduction of the dustjacket.

I must also thank my wife and, especially, my daughter, to whom this volume is dedicated, for their constant patience and encouragement over the last four-plus years.

Upon my graduation from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1974, having never been West of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, let alone outside the US, with the encouragement of Dartmouth Professor Gene Garthwaite I journeyed to, and spent two years in Iran. There, teaching English and travelling throughout the country, I became acquainted with something of Persian language, culture and history. As many travellers in the East, my sojourn was also an occasion for introspection and, when I commenced my graduate studies in California in 1977, with the encouragement of Afaf Marsot, Peter Gran, Amin Banani and Nikki Keddie and such colleagues as Yahya Sadowski, Fred Lawson, Ken Cuno, Halah Fattah and others, I became as interested in the study of the study of the history of Iran and the region as a whole as in the memorisation of legions of names and dates.

In the years since and, especially, in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, the Safavid period has taken on meanings for Iranians different to those it has in the West. The present volume is directed primarily to the Western-language audience, including the growing number of specialists in the various sub-disciplines of Safavid Studies and those in other branches of Middle Eastern Studies but also, and in particular, the nonspecialist interested in Iran and the region generally. Hence any scientific effort to reconcile the all-too many efforts to transliterate Arabic and Persian words into English by recourse to a complicated system of diacritical marks is eschewed in favour of somewhat idiosyncratic system of transliteration based loosely on that used in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies ( IJMES ). Dates also are generally given only in their ad version, except for occasional dates of publication; where this makes for flagrant inaccuracy, two Christian years may be given as, for example, in AD 8734, corresponding to the Hijri 260, the year of the disappearance of the twelfth Shii Imam. Moreover, while footnotes do refer to Persian and Arabic sources, care is also taken to refer to available translations of primary sources as well as secondary works by specialists available in English and other Western languages. The bibliographical convention of omitting names of publishers is followed throughout.