This presentation will examine the nuanced and evolving responses of Persian scholars to the rise of Shah Ismail as emperor of Iran by considering the life and work of Idris Bidlisi (1457-1520). Bidlisi’s status as a dynamic scholar and statesman of the Aqquyunlu and Ottoman courts who recorded, interpreted, and strove to shape the tumultuous events of his lifetime render him one of the most enduring intellectual figures of the early sixteenth century. Through his authorship of the Salimshahnama, a chronicle celebrating the conquests of the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) in western Iran and elsewhere, Bidlisi has been cited frequently in modern scholarship as one of the principal architects of the Ottoman ideological response to the Qizilbash threat in Anatolia and Iran in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. While it is certainly true that Bidlisi became a vocal and persuasive advocate of an aggressive policy of Ottoman conquest during Selim’s reign, his religious background and personal circumstances in Iran point to a more gradual trajectory to vehement ideologue than is suggested by an examination of his later writings in isolation. Idris’ initial response to the political mission of the Safavi Sufi order was conditioned by his religious and intellectual upbringing within the Nurbakhshi Sufi tradition and by his professional work within the Aqquyunlu chancery. His religious upbringing under the supervision of his father emphasized a reverence for Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Twelve Imams, which in certain respects accorded well with Shah Ismail’s message. In contrast, the evolving attitude of the Aqquyunlu court to the Safavi order conditioned Bidlisi to assess Shah Ismail’s threat primarily within a political framework. Indeed, all of Idris’ unedited works and poetry from the years immediately following 1501 reflect this nuanced and subtle attitude to Shah Ismail, and stand in stark contrast with his later writings. In this manner, Bidlisi’s evolving attitude toward the Qizilbash in the years following his immigration to Ottoman lands responded to an ideological shift within the Ottoman court in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The example of Bidilsi and other Persian scholars like him is therefore instructive. While intellectuals certainly shaped the rhetorical parameters of debate on Shah Ismail, their views on the matter were equally susceptible to the wider political contexts in which they lived and worked.

The gradual transformation of the Safaviyya sufi order into an extremist Shi‘i political-military force during the second half of the 15th century profoundly disturbed many contemporary men of Persian letters. The threat this presented was gravest for the Aqquyunlu Empire due both to geographic proximity and to Safavid claims to Aqquyunlu legitimacy. As a consequence, scholars connected to the Aqquyunlu court were the most discomfited, and hence the first to develop sophisticated forms of anti-Safavid and anti-Shi‘i propaganda that would shape Ottoman-Safavid and Uzbek-Safavid politics during the 16th century. Their number includes Jalal al-Din Davani (d. 1502), ideological mainstay to the Aqquyunlu, and two of his students who worked together as high-ranking members of the Aqquyunlu chancery, Fazl Allah Khunji Isfahani (d. 1521) and Idris Bidlisi (d. 1520). But unlike his colleague Bidlisi and other contemporary observers, who were initially more cautious in their critique of the burgeoning Safavid threat, Khunji — a highly sensitive, idealistic, outspoken and powerful writer of ornate Persian prose — was anything but. He was responsible for the earliest literary attacks on the Safavids during the 1480s, a project he continued with increasing vigor and rage during his self-imposed exile among the Uzbeks after the fall of the Aqquyunlu capital in 1501; from the safety of Transoxania he pushed every promising Sunni sultan within earshot, Uzbek and Ottoman, to liberate his beloved Iran from the depraved Qizilbash horde. His passionate appeals were met with charges of Sunni fanaticism, however, and his Sunni patrons proved distressingly willing to accept the reality of a Safavid Iran for reasons of realpolitik. Khunji died a despairing exile; but his influence in anti-Safavid and anti-Shi‘i polemics was seminal. This paper, then, examines the development of these polemics from 1480 to his death in 1521. It first identifies the various rhetorical and scholarly strategies the Isfahani ‘alim deploys throughout his oeuvre, then turns to an analysis of his last known letter (Topkapı E. 8334), written sometime after June 1519 to a physician friend in the retinue of the Ottoman sultan Yavuz Selim (r. 1512-20). This remarkable document shows Khunji still in singleminded pursuit of his life’s project and fervent in his belief that the Safavid conquest was reversible. Most significantly, it proposes Selim as the universal ruler of Islamdom, from Egypt to Khurasan (Selim having annexed the Mamluk domains in 1517), and details plans for a joint Uzbek-Ottoman invasion of western Iran.

The religious dichotomy between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires and the early modern Ottoman state’s role in the persecution of Kızılbaş communities in Anatolia have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest. While scholarship from the 1960s through the 1980s explained Ottoman anti-Kızılbaş policies in the context of mere security concerns, revisionists, who have dominated the field since the 1990s, rightfully emphasize the importance of the religious motivations behind political decisions made by these two empires. These studies, however, not only depicted the formation of Kızılbaş communities in Anatolia as an “umbrella movement” against the Sunni Ottomans but also reduced the nature of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its Kızılbaş subjects to a perpetual struggle against rebellious heretics. I rather argue that pro-Safavid propaganda disseminated by certain political and religious actors in early modern Anatolia constituted a significant dynamic that shaped Ottoman policy vis-à-vis its Kızılbaş subjects and its rival to the east for more than a century. Beginning with the transformation of the Safaviyya sufi order into a military and political movement under the leadership of Junayd in the 1450s, Safavid shaykhs, then shahs, deployed the tool of pro-Safavid propaganda among Anatolians both to recruit new followers for the order and to find soldiers and taxpayers for the newly-established political entity. The main methods utilized by the Safavids included the dispatching of religious agents, or halifes; circulating books, poems, and objects; making marriage alliances; supporting political and social upheavals; and encouraging migration to Safavid Iran with the lure of lands and titles. Significantly, in the second half of the sixteenth century pro-Safavid propaganda intensified to an extent that the Ottoman central authority switched its focus from born Kızılbaş to Kızılbaş converts as a response to ongoing pro-Safavid efforts. This fraught period in the history of early modern Anatolia provides us with a vibrant case of the “rationalization of religion" as a complex process shaped by the interplay of material conditions, social groupings, active state involvements, and value commitments. An examination of the intricacies of pro-Safavid propaganda in Anatolia is, therefore, crucial for a deeper understanding of both the early modern religious transformation of the Ottoman and Safavid polities and the formation of Anatolian Kızılbaş communities. To this end, I use utilize both Ottoman and Safavid sources, including imperial degrees, legal opinions, treaties, court chronicles, polemics, and poems, as well as the accounts of European travelers and merchants.