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.
Introduction
Rudi Matthee
Part 1: Foundations
1. The emergence of the Safavids as a mystical order and their subsequent rise to power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer
2. Who really were the Kizilbash? a rethinking of the Kizilbash movement in light of new sources and research
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
3. The rise of the Safavids as a political dynasty: the revolution of Shāh Esmā‘il, founder of the Safavid state
Riza Yildirim
Part 2: History and Historiography
4. Custodial politics and princely governance in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran
Colin Mitchell
5. Beyond charismatic authority: the crafting of a sovereign’s image in the public sphere
Hani Khafipour
6. Against all odds: the Safavids and the Georgians
Hirotake Maeda
7. Safavid Iran from Shāh Safi to Shāh Soltān Hoseyn: stability and stasis
Rudi Matthee
8. Safavid historiography: the place of the Safavids in Iranian history
Sholeh A. Quinn
9. Continuing a legacy in times of change: courtly historiography in the sixteenth-century Safavid world
Tilmann Trausch
Part 3: Safavid Society
10. The Safavid court and government
Willem Floor
11. The Safavid army: continuity and change
Willem Floor
12. The Safavid economy
Willem Floor
13. Trade in Safavid Iran
Willem Floor
14. Coinage and the monetary system
Alexander V. Akopyan
15. The status of women in Safavid society
Nozhat Ahmadi
Part 4: Religious Life
16. Sufi habitus and shari‘a practitioners in late Safavid Iran
Rula Jurdi Abisaab
17. Sufism in the Safavid period
Ata Anzali
18. Vaqf in the Safavid period
Nozhat Ahmadi
19. ‘In the rifts of history’: Iranian Jews in the Safavid era
Vera B. Moreen
Part 5: Science, Art and Architecture
20. The occult sciences in Safavid Iran and Safavid occult scientists abroad
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
21. The mathematical sciences and medicine in Safavid Iran
Sonja Brentjes
22. Not all of the poets went to India: literary culture in Iran under Safavid rule
Paul Losensky
23. Deluxe manuscript production in the Safavid period
Marianna Shreve Simpson
24. The Safavid ceramics industry
Lisa Golombek
25. Safavid architecture
Sussan Babaie
Part 6: Safavid Iran and the World
26. Safavid relations with Muslim neighbors
Ernest Tucker
27. The Kurdish frontier under the Safavids
Akihiko Yamaguchi
28. Safavid Iran in the South Asian political imagination
Azfar Moin
29. Diplomatic relations between Safavid Iran and Europe
Giorgio Rota
30. Portrait of a traveler in Safavid Iran: the frontispieces of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s Six voyages (1678-1726)
Elio Brancaforte
Biography
Rudi Matthee is the John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Delaware. He works on the political and socioeconomic history of early modern Iran. He is the author of four prize-winning scholarly books and the co-editor of another five volumes.
