The Empires of Senses: Multisensory Experience in the Ottoman and Safavid Realms, 1400s-1600s
Panel I-18, 2024 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 11 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
This panel explores the rich and diverse sensorial landscapes and experiences in the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the late medieval and early modern periods. In this transformative era forged by sociopolitical shifts, economic upheaval, technological advancements, and religious change, these imperial landscapes were sensorily reconstituted. Bringing together five different case studies drawing on various sources and sensorial experiences, this panel investigates the role of senses in the reconfiguration of religiopolitical landscapes and identities.
The panel begins by exploring the role of the senses in cultivating the cult of sainthood and the immersive spiritual experiences of early Ottoman devotees. Examining epic narratives and hagiographies, it shows how sight, sound, and touch were central to faith, fostering a deeper corporeal and material understanding of religious experiences. Next, it analyzes the symbolic power of the crimson headgear worn by the Safavid-Qizilbash movement, a distinctive expression of both faith and political identity. Integrating insights from the history of senses and material culture, it investigates how the red color and the twelve-gored shape engaged the gaze of both detractors and supporters, drawing on depictions in diverse contemporary sources. Delving deeper into the Qizilbash sensorium, the panel analyzes an occult text, a grimoire commissioned by a Qizilbash warlord, to reveal how the senses were weaponized and exploited within the Safavid court and military life. This democratizing manual of magic offers a strategic glimpse into the sensory world of the Qizilbash. Moving beyond sight and touch, the panel lends an ear to the vibrant sonic world of the iconic Safavid square in Isfahan, the Maydan-e Naqsh-i Jahan, and its bustling bazaar. It demonstrates how the square emerged as a site of sensations, which involved sonic scenes of death, carnival, and life. Finally, the panel discussion zooms into the heart of the square, exploring the multisensory experiences of Shi'i believers in the Shah Mosque. Drawing comparative parallels with the Sultan Ahmet Mosque in the Ottoman realm, it demonstrates how both structures, through their captivating designs and rich sensory elements, offered their congregants profound and immersive experiences.
By transcending abstract doctrinal speculations and political and monarchy-centric narratives, this panel seeks to elucidate the agency of senses in reconfiguring the Ottoman and Safavid landscapes.
This paper seeks to explore the role of the body in the transmission and expression of spiritual power in the late medieval literary corpus of Old Anatolian Turkish. The paper will look at epic narratives such as the Battalname and the Book of Dede Korkut, hagiographies such as those of Hacı Bektaş and Abdal Musa, mesnevis such as Şeyyad Hamza’s Yusuf u Zeliha and Şadi Meddah’s Maktel, among others. It will explore representations of the body as the locus of spiritual power and wisdom, where access to the Prophet or saint’s body, as expressed in the transmission of saliva, ablution water and the like, denotes the attainment of one’s own spiritual perfection and leads to the performance of miracles. The senses play a special role in this material understanding of spiritual lineage, where the saint’s gaze, sound or smell define and create the unique spiritual experience of the devoted follower.
The Safavid Revolution was a sensational one, for it transformed the sensorial and material landscape in Iran and beyond. The adoption of the Shi'i adhan, with its distinctive proclamations, and clamorous rituals involving effigy burning and symbolic violence, inundated the senses of both allies and adversaries. This transformation was further reflected in the iconic twelve-gored crimson headgear instituted by Shaykh Haydar (d. 1480), father of Shah Ismail I (r. 1501-1524). This red hat served as a powerful visual marker, captivating the gaze and refashioning the Safavid identity. The moniker "Qizilbash" ("Redheads") itself testifies to its significance. For Safavids, it represented sanctity and loyalty, while for Sunni rivals, it symbolized heresy and rebellion. Drawing on diverse sources like travelogues, Qizilbash religious texts, legal documents, and polemics, this analysis delves into the contentious role of the headgear. By integrating material and sensory studies, it argues that grooming practices like headwear played a critical role in shaping confessional and communal identity. This approach challenges traditional narratives that overemphasize theological debates and legal pronouncements in understanding Sunni-Shi'i differences. It posits that tangible artifacts, sensory experiences, and even grooming habits were equally, if not more, crucial in differentiating communities, fostering belonging, and building associations.
The occult-imperial turn that defined the post-Mongol Persianate world saw a proliferation of grimoires as handbooks of court culture—and invaluable typologies of courtly sensorial experience. I present and contextualize for comparative study a minor Persian manual of illusionism and trickery, Boon for the Khan, by the Herati Naqshbandi Sufi, preacher and occultist ʿAlī Ṣafī (d. 1533), as strategic window onto this turn generally and the politically and militarily fraught Timurid-Safavid, Sunni-Shiʿi transition specifically. Commissioned by a Qizilbash warlord in 1522, it emblematizes the wider democratizing, Renaissance ethos that is a distinctive feature of early modernities West and East, especially occult-scientifically; it was written to help make Safavid courtly and military life quite literally stage-magical. This wonderfully accessible manual of warlord magic—devoted to boozing and battling (bazm u razm) in a way no known previous grimoire in the Western tradition had been—marries ancient Platonic-Alexandrian occult philosopher-kingship to modern “occult democracy” to engage and indeed weaponize all the physical (and a few extraphysical) senses.
Built during the most intense phase of Safavid centralization under Shah Abbas I (1587-1629), Maydan-e Naqsh-i Jahan represents one of the most magnificent civic spaces of the early modern Islamicate period. The square is symbolic of state power in the spatial construction of royal authority made visible with the building of Ali Qapu, a pavilion that identifies the entrance to a large royal residential complex. This paper, however, seeks to go beyond a monarchy-centric account of Safavid politics in the architectural design of maydan-e Naqsh-i Jahan by offering an experiential conception of the political life of the square as a site of sensations. While relying on the writings of Mirza Hasan, a Safavid historian, about the square, the study shows how the clamor of myriad activities ranging from sports to military parades and religious ceremonies marked an experiential site of noises and utterances as sonic scenes of death, carnival, and life. In a sensory account of the Maydan, the paper also argues that at the center of Safavid civic and political life lay the embodied practices of the utterances whose clamors resonated along with noises of the bazaar, the mosque, and the palace, all architecturally part of the visual assemblage of the urban order. The paper finally considers other resonated performances that played a crucial role in Safavid public life and state power by producing a spectacle of clamors to sustain a political body.
