ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|64 pages
Foundations
chapter Chapter Two|19 pages
Who really were the Kizilbash? A rethinking of the Kizilbash movement in light of new sources and research *
chapter Chapter Three|21 pages
The rise of the Safavids as a political dynasty
part 2|123 pages
History and historiography
chapter Chapter Four|32 pages
Custodial politics and princely governance in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran
chapter Chapter Five|14 pages
Beyond charismatic authority
chapter Chapter Seven|20 pages
Safavid Iran from Shāh Safi to Shāh Soltān Hoseyn
chapter Chapter Nine|18 pages
Continuing a legacy in times of change
part 3|124 pages
Safavid society
part 4|75 pages
Religious life
part 5|136 pages
Science, art and architecture
chapter Chapter Twenty|25 pages
The occult sciences in Safavid Iran and Safavid occult scientists abroad
chapter Chapter Twenty-two|22 pages
Not all of the poets went to India
part 6|104 pages
Safavid Iran and the world