The Safavid World

1. The emergence of the Safavids as a mystical order and their subsequent rise to power in the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries
2. Who really were the Kizilbash? a rethinking of the Kizilbash movement in light of new sources and research
3. The rise of the Safavids as a political dynasty: the revolution of Shāh Esmā‘Il, the founder of the Safavid state
4. Custodial politics and princely governance in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran
5. Beyond charismatic authority: the crafting of a sovereign’s image in the public sphere
6. Against all odds: the Safavids and the Georgians
7. Safavid Iran from Shāh Saf to Shāh Soltān Hoseyn: stability and stasis
8. Safavid historiography: the place of the Safavids in Iranian history
9. Continuing a legacy in times of change: courtly historiography in the sixteenth-century Safavid world
10. The Safavid court and government
11. The Safavid army: continuity and change
12. The economy
13. Trade in Safavid Iran
14. Coinage and the monetary system
15. The status of women in Safavid Iran
16. Suf habitus and shari‘a practitioners in late Safavid Iran
17. Sufsm in the Safavid period
18. Vaqf in the Safavid period
19. ‘In the rifts of history’: Iranian Jews in the Safavid era
20. The occult sciences in Safavid Iran and Safavid occult scientists abroad
21. The mathematical sciences and medicine in Safavid Iran
22. Not all of the poets went to India: literary culture in Iran under Safavid rule
23. Deluxe manuscript production in the Safavid period
24. The Safavid ceramics industry
25. Safavid architecture
26. Safavid relations with Muslim neighbors
27. The Kurdish frontier under the Safavids
28. Safavid Iran in the South Asian political imagination
29. Diplomatic relations between Safavid Iran and Europe
30. Portrait of a traveler in Safavid Iran: the frontispieces of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s Six Voyages (1678–1726)

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.