Shahr?sh?b, a Persian poetic genre from the Safavid period, gives us primary, first-hand material about different aspects of urban life, society and social relations in early modern Iran. One aspect of early modern Iran we observe through this genre is sexuality and its relationship to physical spaces. For example, in the bathhouse we see erotic desire unfold in a particular way that is outside the more conventional sphere, where eros and love are experienced; therefore, I read the Shahr?sh?b at the intersection of poetry, the language of eroticism, and quotidian social interactions within the city of Isfahan. Such an integrative reading enables us to see not only how poetry can be representative of the city or the social structure, but of individuals as well. Thus, I explore how the Shahr?sh?b employs a certain kind of language that approximates quotidian interactions, which then provides insight into how everyday interaction unfolded in early modern Iran. I will examine how the specific genre of the Shahr?sh?b depicts social relations as they unfolded in a particular space, and how place impacts the way sexuality is represented by I’j?z love or erotic interactions. In this paper, I examine In Praise of Isfahan (dar ta’r?f i Isfahan) by Mulla I’j?z i Hirati, a poet in the late Safavid period. In In Praise of Isfahan, I’j?z creates a new aesthetic of masculinity through the Shahr?sh?b genre- a genre that allows him to connect specific individuals with specific places and occupations and thereby create a map of the city through eros. Unlike other Shahr?sh?bs in which the poet directly addresses the beloved, I’j?z in the description of his desire for youth does not directly address his beloved and instead focuses on the aesthetics of their body. It seems that his description of youths is more related to his erotic desire for them rather than for the ideals of love. This desire is contextually shaped according to space, the physical site in which it occurs.

After two centuries of critical neglect and disparagement, Persian poetry of the early modern period has enjoyed increasing scholarly attention over the last few decades. This revival has focused largely on the work of poets and writers who emigrated from Iran to Mughal India and has left intact the historiographical truism that Safavid rulers had scant interest in poetry and devoted their cultural resources solely to the propagation of Shi’ite doctrine, driving poets to distant lands. But even at the height of the great Indian migration between 1580 and 1625, not all the poets went to India, and biographical compendiums and the literary record both attest that Safavid Iran was home to a dynamic literary culture. Sh?h ‘Abb?s in particular took an active personal interest in poetry and often conversed directly and knowledgeably with the poets of his realm. As a step toward offering a fuller account of literary life under the Safavids, this paper examines one of the most prominent and well-rewarded poets of ‘Abbas’s court, Sh?ni Takallu (d. 1023/1614). As his name indicates, he was a member of one of the Qizilbash tribes that provided military support to the dynasty, but were seldom known for their cultural accomplishments. Contemporary accounts of Sh?ni’s life show how ethnic identity could play out in the contentious literary rivalries that swirled around Isfahan at the turn of the sixteenth century. But the main focus here is on Sh?ni’s poetry, recently made available in a published critical edition. In Sh?ni’s div?n, poems of devotion to the Shi’ite imams stand side by side with odes in praise Shah ‘Abb?s and other prominent Safavid officials. Devotional poetry, far from displacing the praise of temporal rulers, is integrated into the long tradition of panegyric, throwing into doubt the secularist assumption that interest in religious ideology is incompatible with other forms of cultural expression. Sh?ni’s large corpus of lyrical ghazals further suggests that even as he wrote for the court, he was also active in the broader social practice of poetry, where the idiom of the amorous ghazal was the common language for negotiating various social relations. Sh?ni’s life and works show the many literary venues in which poetry circulated in Safavid Iran throughout the sixteenth and seventeen centuries.

The majority of Safavid literature, including the qasidahs, has remained unexplored. The literary production of the Safavids (1501-1736), according to Iranian scholars such as Muhammad Taq? Bah?r and Ja‘far Mahj?b, was written during the period of literary “decline”. These two scholars, who have greatly influenced the views of Western academics on the 16th-17th – century Persian literature, believed the poetry of Safavids to be “corrupted in language and image”; and therefore unworthy of study. In my research, I challenge this representation. I argue that Safavid qa??dahs bear significant historical value, as they demonstrate the political legitimacy and ideological beliefs of the monarchical rule of the Safavid dynasty. This paper focuses on the creation of new discourses of authority and sacral kingship in the 16th-17th century Safavid qa??dahs. It examines various patterns of political legitimacy as articulated by Persian poets to express, reaffirm and redefine Safavid political theology of divine right that bestowed sacral charisma onto Shah Ism?‘?l and his progeny. Through the analysis of the images of kingship and power in Persian qa??dahs, I identify the shifting aspects of political legitimacy from Persianate ideas of legitimacy to later Timurid-Shi‘i aspects. I argue that these qa??dahs defied the dominant, orthodox representations of political authority in Islam that foregrounded the terrestrial aspects of kings. Safavid poets avoided such worldly characteristics to the effect of distinguishing their Shi‘i Safavid rulers from their Sunni-Muslim neighbors. By drawing on Timurid and Shi‘i themes, as well as moving away from the previous stifling notions of Persianate kingship, Safavid poets depicted their patrons not as the rulers of the Persian lands, but as the supreme leaders of all Muslims, Sunni and Shi‘ia. To achieve this, the poets presented the Safavid kings as spiritual, everlasting beings whose authority rested on their elevated lineage and their humble character. This has been demonstrated in expressions such as muravvij-i ma?hab-i ?aq-i (the propagator of the right religion) ghul?m-i bi-ikhl?s-i ‘Al? (the true servant of Imam ‘Ali), kalb-i ?st?n-i ‘Al? (the dog of Ali’s threshold), along with the expressions that emphasized the Safavids’ ?asab (achievements by personal abilities). These expressions metaphorized and elevated the terrestrial king as otherworldly. In conclusion, by analyzing the patterns of political legitimacy in Safavid qa??dahs, this paper sheds light on the neglected but important historical aspects of the qa??dahs that elaborate the poets’ perspectives about the shi‘i kings.

Research concerning the Timurid and Safavid arts has made welcome advances from the 1980s onwards. However, much of this research focuses mainly on painters and calligraphers whose biographies are relatively well-documented in primary sources, or illustrated and illuminated manuscripts which supply explicit details concerning the date, production site, or the name of executer or patron. To date, scholarship is yet to fully explore the primary sources regarding craftsmen and inscriptions on crafts from these periods. Notably, art historians have paid surprisingly little attention to the context and content of Persian verses inscribed on the objects themselves, with the exception of those who conduct research on metalwork. This presentation aims to seek a gradual process which Persian verses had been integrated into the material culture of Iran and Transoxiana between the early-fifteenth and early-eighteenth centuries, with a focus on artistic, literary, social, economic and religious contexts surrounding the development of crafts inscribed with Persian poems in particular. While the past two decades witnessed a marked interest in discussing the Persian verses applied to art and architectural works, there is no study that has systematically evaluated such forms of inscriptions applied to ceramics, metalwork and textiles produced from the Timurid period onwards, and contrasted them with the figural and non-figural representations favored during this time as a whole. Meanwhile, the contemporaneous primary sources such as tazkiras (bibliographies of poets), which indicate an increasing population of craftsmen who were educated enough to compose Persian verses on their own, have yet to be investigated thoroughly from art historical viewpoints. Making the best use of both material and literary evidence, this is an attempt to contribute to the existing field of the Timurid and Safavid arts by approaching the topic from the various new perspectives including: 1. What sorts of Persian poems were favorably inscribed on objects of art? Were they quoted from a divan or composed specifically for each piece? Does such preference have any relation with the shifting reception of traditional verses by elites in Iran and Transoxiana between the early-fifteenth and early-eighteenth centuries? 2. How did social status of craftsmen in Iran and Transoxiana change over the course of time, and why, when, where and how did craftsmen become poets? 3. To what extent did poets (both professional ones e.g. Muhtasham Kashani and poets-cum-craftsmen) contribute to the execution of the Persian poetical inscriptions on crafts from the so-called “Timurid renaissance” onwards?

The paper focuses on the politics of confessionalization and vernacular language in the context of the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran around the mid-sixteenth century. It presents a catechism written by a certain Gharibi in defense of Shiism. Bearing the title Hikayat-i Yuhanna, ‘The Story of Yuhanna,’ and surviving in a unique copy preserved at the Majlis Library in Tehran, the treatise is the Turkish version of a widely circulating anonymous work with various renditions in both Arabic and Persian; it features a Jew who, after he interviews four religious scholars representing the four Sunni legal schools, becomes convinced of the superiority of Twelver Shiism and converts to it. As to the author, Gharibi, we only know that he was originally an Ottoman subject affiliated with the Sufi brotherhood of Ibrahim Gulsheni, and that he may have later emigrated to Safavid Iran, writing literary works mostly in Turkish which he dedicated to Shah Ismail (r. 1501-1524) and Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-1576). After attempting to establish the relationship between Gharibi’s work and the extant Arabic and Persian versions, the paper will analyze the piece against the background of the increasing number of popular theological treatises appearing in the era mainly in Persian and less prominently, in Turkish, as part of the crystallization of Twelver Shii orthodoxy in Safavid Iran, a process parallel to the consolidation of Sunni orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. Written in Turkish by an Ottoman enthusiast of the Safavids, the work sheds a unique light on the dynamic relationship between confessionalization and vernacularization in the early modern Iranian and Ottoman context.