Focusing on idealists and visionaries who believed that Justice could reign in our world, this book explores the desire to experience utopia on earth.
Reluctant to await another existence—another form, or eternal life following death and resurrection—individuals with ghuluww, or exaggeration, emerged at the advent of Islam, expecting to attain the apocalyptic horizon of Truth. In their minds, Muhammad’s prophecy represented one such cosmic moment of transformation. Even in the early modern period, some denizens of Islamdom continued to hope for a utopia despite aborted promises and expectations. In a moment of enthusiasm, one group called the Qizilbash (Red Heads) took up arms at the turn of the sixteenth century to fight for Shaykh Ismaʿil Safavi, their divinely inspired leader. The Safavis succeeded in establishing an empire, but their revolutionary sensibilities were exposed to erasures and expulsion into the realms of heresy.
The social settings in which such beliefs were performed in early modern Iran are highlighted in order to tease out the relationship between discourse and practice, narrating the ways in which a Persianate ethos uncovered new Islamic identities (Alid and Sufi). Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs explores these belief systems within a dialogue between Semitic, Indo-Iranian, and Hellenic cultures that continued to resist the monotheist impulse to delay the meeting of the holy with the human until the end of time.
Author(s): Kathryn Babayan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 630
City: Cambridge
Tags: iran, early modern history, cultural history, early modern middle east
Contents
Note on Transliteration and Usage ix Acknowledgments xi
Preface x v
ONE: PERSIANA TE WAYS OF BEING AND SENSING TIME
1 • New Safavi Beginnings: Breaking with the "Way Of Metempsychosis" 3
2 • Cycles of Time and Rhythms of Change: Persianate Imaginations of History 9
3 • Mani's Image: Genealogies of Heretics in Persianate Historiography 47
4 • The Cosmos of the Nuqtavis in Early Modern Iran 57
PART TWO: ALID MEMORY AND RITUAL DRAMA: RELIGIOUS P ARADIGMS
OF POLITICAL ACTION
5 • Abu Muslim: Victim of the Waning of the Qizllbash 121
6 • Fraternal Circles of Alid Piety and Loyalty: Eulogists, Storytellers, and Craftsmen 161
7 • Situating the Master-Disciple Schema: Cosmos, History, and Community 197
8 • Epics and Heresy: Writing Heterogeneity out of Shi'i History 245
P ART THREE: CRAFTING AN IMPERIAL SAFAVI IDIOM
9 • Mirroring the Safavi Past: Shah Tahmasb's Break with His Messiah Father 295
10 • The Isfahani Era of Absolutism: 1590 to 1666 349
11 • Shaping a Mainstream: Mystics, Theologians, and Monarchs 403
12 • Conversion and Popular Culture 439 Epilogue 483
Appendix 499 Bibliography ofSources Cited 513 Index of Book Titles 545
Index of Key Concepts 549
Index of Names, Places, and Terms 553