Identity, both personal and national identity, is a notoriously difficult and elusive topic. We all tell ourselves stories to justify our existence, to rationalize our behavior, and to embellish our past in order to look better in the present and protect an even more glorious image of ourselves for the future. Nations do the same, except that they perform at a much larger stage than most of us do. Construction has been the operative term for quite some time now when it comes to national identity, as it does with regard to so many other aspects of social life in the past as much as in the present. Ever since Benedict Anderson's famous book, Imagine Communities, was published in 1991, we have been talking about imagined communities. Yet scholars since have reminded us that communities are not just imagined, let alone constructed out of thin air. Most notably, they have sought to correct what they suggest has been an overemphasis on the modern inventiveness of nations from above. Anthony Smith and other so-called ethno-symbolists, more specifically, have provided a corrective to the notion that everything pertaining to collective identities is just imagined by cautioning that there is a primordial ethnic element in most forms of nationalism. With Smith, most scholars of nationalism now accept that the construction of nations is largely a top-down process in which symbols and then their manipulation play an important role. Yet, they have also come to recognize collective identity. They have also come to recognize collective identity formation as an interactive process, meaning that if we want to understand why national cultures are often so deeply and widely felt and can persist across generations, we have to factor in the weight of the past as perceived and felt by the masses. And a shared culture, or at least the perception of a shared culture, is generally acknowledged as a necessary ingredient of a common identity. Smith has used the term sacred ideology for this type of national feeling. Now, this is true for Iran, as it is for any other nation. The question is how Iranians got there, how they acquired their sacred ideology. In what follows, I will develop some ideas about the nature of this process during the reign of the Safarids. The mythology that history over time inevitably dissolves into, eventually to emerge as nationalism, tends to have the notion of an unbroken cultural lineage at its core. The concept of eternal Iran, Iran and Javedon, is a good example of this. Modern Iranians look at their country as a natural entity, a realm extending from sea to shining sea, from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, and doubt with a glorious history that stretches uninterruptedly from the ecumenist to the Islamic Republic, or perhaps to the reign of the Pahlavis in the eyes of the secular minded. To the extent that interruptions occurred, they came in the form of eruptions, invasions by foreign forces, keen to rob Iran of its wealth and bent on destroying its primordial identity. From Alexander and the Arabs to the Mongols, and more recently the Western imperialists, beginning with the Portuguese and ending with the British and the Americans. Yet the country has overcome each and all of these invasions. It has suffered by rising each time, phoenix-like, by way of defeating and absorbing the invaders. This image of redemption through defeat goes to the heart of modern Iranian identity. Now, the Safavids are accorded to special role in this narrative, as the dynasty that united Iran and revived its glory, embodied in the still existing magnificent urban layout of Esfahan, as the rulers who gave the country its particularism by adopting 12 Rashiism as their faith, and as the last sovereigns who stood tall for Iran by proudly resisting the onslaught of foreigners, the Ottomans as much as the European proto-imperialists, such as the Portuguese, the English, and the Dutch. This is a soothing story, one ready-made for nationalist pride. There's also quite a bit of evidence for its role in a continuing saga. In an earlier iteration of the idea of Iran series, published as a book, Hugh Kennedy and C. Bossworth offer a compelling overview of the transmission of Iran yet through the early Islamic centuries and beyond, leading to what Bossworth calls a quote symbiosis of two cultural traditions, unquote. They point to the deep-rooted administrative and fiscal theories and practices combined with age-old motifs, such as the cycle of justice, that survived a seventh century invasion because these served as a template for the administratively challenged Arabs. Kennedy identifies a strong hereditary element in the notion of power among the Dichlons, the Zoroastrian elites from Iraq, which survived the imposition of Arab rule. Most importantly, he draws attention to the newly-developed New Persian language, relatively easy to master, fluid, capacious, which emerged as a vehicle for the expression of culture. In some ways, all this culminated, did culminate in the Safiid period, which in a popular imagination hoarded the cultural capital that had accumulated over the centuries, preserving it as something strong enough to withstand the chaos of the 18th century and the onslaught of an alien culture that followed. Yet, however real or true, the putative identity that unfolds in accompanying this trajectory is still retraductive, perceived from the modern vantage point by us moderns, whether Iranian or non-Iranian, who are obsessed about identity in ways that the Safiids manifestly were not, and it tells us little about the way the Safiids or more precisely Iranians in the Safiid period perceive themselves. Obstacles stand in the way of unearthing this self-view in light of a relative positive of surviving documents other than heavily propagandistic ones, including the scarce ego documents from the period, we can do no more than assemble a proximate picture of the Safiid self-identification. The first thing I'd like to submit is that the Safiids are not that preoccupied with the question of identity and certainly not in the modern sense of the word, and that if they were, it doesn't figure prominently in their writings. To be sure, they hearken back to earlier times, including a mythical past. It is not for nothing that Shah Ismail named his sons after old Persian heroes. In this, they followed the long series of Iran-based dynasties that may have had a foggy idea about the distant past, yet were cognizant enough of it to hitch themselves to it. Yet, that does not mean that the Safiids were engaged in a systematic and comprehensive search in the past to retrieve an authentic identity. That would be a modern way of going about it. If the Safiid rulers and the Persephone elites had an identity that they articulated self-consciously, it was, of course, religiously based. They saw themselves as the inheritors of the legacy of the Shi'i Imams and saw to connect this legacy to this legacy by forging a fictitious genealogy, linking the last Sasanian monarch, Yaziget III, to Imam Hussein by way of a presumed marriage with the king's daughter, Shah Rebanu. Safiid history, the way it comes to is in the court chronicles, thus is salvific, intimately connected to the cosmological order and its eschatology. Of course, a religiously grounded identity does not preclude a secular sense of self as the masters of an empire with worldly concerns in an opposition to other empires near and far. Incidentally, this did not include a need for the Safiid authorities to position themselves in relation to Europe, the West, which in modern times became the touchstone for a collective sense of self, a specter and ideal, invasive as well as seductive, both the object of admiration and suspicion and in all cases irresistible. None of this existed in the Safiid period. One looks in vain for any references to Farang as a competitor, a threat or a mirror. Indeed, other than in the Europeanizing painterly genre known as Farang-e-Sausi, Europe nowhere in the Safiid sources figures other than in an occasional and fleeting reference. Safiid identity as it comes through in the court chronicles is above all dynastic. The two faith and family are of course connected. The faith butthressed the dynasty by providing it with legitimacy and the dynasty protected and bolstered the faith, especially against its Sunni foes surrounding the Safiid realm. Legitimacy and loyalty in the chronicle centers on the Shah and his entourage, more than on the divine order in which he operates and far more than on the land. This seems natural in conditions where administering a refractory, extremely diverse country with inherently fluid and fungible boundaries meant staying on top of a complex, perpetually competitive struggle with the other stakeholders in the enterprise, the chieftains of tribal clans and confederations. Even the clerical class followed this line of argumentation. Their writings couched the Safiid enterprise in religious terms as the embodiment and fulfillment of the divine order, but they invariably see the Shah and the dynasty as a necessary indispensable pillar of the divine order and as a protector of the entire edifice. Of course, territory was important if only as a source of taxable wealth. Landed property to be parceled out through pre-bends to use. So what about the land? What about Iran as territory? As is well known, the term Iran Shah and Iran Zamin disappeared from the sources or for a good half millennium following the Arab invasion to be revived by the Mongols, who famously united the two halves of classical Iran, the lands located west of the central desert and the region of Greater Horasan as it existed under the Sassanians. Once established in Iran Zamin, the Mongols also engage in extensive patronage of Iran's patrimony with the Shah Naameh as its Sinoshur. The development of the new Persian language as a dominant cultural tongue in his vast territory assisted in this process. All this is well known. One does encounter the terms Iran in the early Safavid sources. It takes over from classical terms such as Iraq-Ajam for Western Iran, but it does not occur frequently and that's already been mentioned, of course, today. Indeed, it is striking how little the chronicles refer to Iran as an overarching concept. The fourth and last volume of Khan Naameh's Tariqa Habibasiyah, an important chronicle that serves as a connective tissue between the pre-Safavids, between pre-Safavid and Safavid times, is a case in point. In its 700 pages, the way it's been published, the term Iran occurs seven times, once every 100 pages, twice in conjunction with Tehran, Iran or Tujah, Tehran, once as Padishah, Tehran, Tehran, and once independently as Iran and once as Mamaliki, Iran, and once again as Mamalakate-Khorasan, Sayyere Mamaliki, Iran. A similar picture emerges from another, from other 16th century chronicles such as Asana Tavoriq and the Kolausat Tavoriq. In the former, the name Iran appears all of three times and it occurs randomly, respectively as Belayat-e Iran, Belayat-e Iran, and Saltanat-e Iran. As reflected in the contemporary chronicles, which with Shah Abbas I, the notion of Iran is an integrated realm, having overcome its natural foes as much as its external enemies becomes firmly established. Yet the term itself, Iran, that is, still does not occur with great frequency in the written sources. The Tariq-e-Olam-e-Aboasi is interesting in this regard. The term Iran occurs only sporadically in this most important of all safari chronicles. When it does, it typically appears in conjunction with the Ottoman Empire and its aggression, especially the various attacks on Iran by Sultan Suleiman during the reign of Tahrmas beginning with the so-called War of the two Iraq's of 1534 and the damage done to the country as a result is articulated in clear geographical terms. In one instance, describing the Ottoman assault on Tahris, Ibrahim Beg connects the geography to the dynasty by referring to the steadfastness of the city's inhabitants who were devoted to the safari house and performed valiant deeds on behalf of the safari dynasty. The other contemporary chronicles consulted by me are similar in this regard. In all, the term Iran is an overarching concept that remains subdued, assumed, implicit rather than boldly presented in say an introductory chapter and throughout the text. One could argue, of course, that this very fact speaks to the supreme self-confidence among the Iranian elite, sure in the knowledge that their country was the envy of the world and its ruler the mightiest of all monarchs, self-evidently sovereign. He who knows himself great doesn't have to shout it from the rooftops, in other words. For more explicit manifestations of a sense of Iran yet, we have to turn away from the court chronicles, which, of course, are their own genre, have their own language and paradigms, and move to other sources, written sources. For example, the urban, those generated by the urban Persephone, 12 or she, elite, and to look for the ways in which they identify themselves. Now, we have outside observers, let me begin with those who allude to a high self-degree, high degree of self-confidence among Iranians, expressed in overblown notions about their country's size and importance, and I'll give you three. The French Capuchin Father Poulet d'Arminville, who spent years in Iran in the 1660s, insisted that it was an Iranian habit not to see to foreigners in anything but to show that they knew best. Petros Bidik, a Syrian Armenian, who resided in the Safarid realm between 1670 and 75, referred to a similar self-image when he stated, quote, they think that their people and their country surpass all other nations named above, and in accordance with the judgment of their astrologers, they call their territory the center of the world, unquote. The French Huguenot merchant traveler, Jean Chardin, in the same period, claimed that Iranians were convinced that they possessed everything that was necessary in life or that might make life agreeable. Most people in Iran, Evert, thought that it was because their continent had so little to offer that Europeans swarmed out over the globe in search of the nice and necessary things that they themselves lacked. There's also a very interesting, sort of a snapshot from real life recorded by the Dutch, and which conveys to my mind at least the same kind of self-view. It involves a series of stents and counters between Rainier Kazembrode, the director of the Dutch East India Company, and Safri Grand Vizier Sheikh Ali Khan in 1681. The meetings, which they had, and the strained atmosphere in which they were conducted had their origins in a controversy over the terms of the silk contract that the VOC had signed with Shah Abbas in 1623. Kazembrode refused to abide by the obligation stipulated in that arrangement to purchase a fixed amount of silk from the Shah each year, citing current conditions they thought were contrary to its terms. Sheikh Ali Khan demerred, making it clear that the Dutch should simply abide by the clauses of the original contract. At one point during the discussions, Kazembrode pointed out that the VOC was important for Iran's economic well-being. He reminded the Grand Vizier that the Dutch trade in spices had enriched the country, and that the activities of the company had helped turn Bandar Abbas from a sleepy village, fishing village into a thriving commercial port. Sheikh Ali Khan highly irritated at what he considered insolent, presumptuous Dutch behavior. Dismissively told his interlocutor that all that the VOC brought to Iran was worthless bark and leaves, referring to the costly spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg that formed the bulk of Dutch imports into Iran. The Iranian see-insisted did not need any of this stuff. Kazembrode was mistaken to think that the Shah was an ordinary merchant. And if the Dutch didn't like the contract they had signed with Shah Abbas, they could back up and leave. As these examples suggest, an idea of Iran was clearly present in the mind of the software elite. But its constituent parts, the provinces, the regions that until today play such a key role in any individual Iranian sense of self also figure prominently. And in a way, one could argue even more prominently in the written sources of the period.  Quite explicitly, all these received the bulk of attention in these chronicles. In fact, the chronicles are mostly about these provinces, the activities, the rebellions that take place, and yes, the Shah having to sort of subdue them and having to patrol and surveil his realm in order to keep all these places together. So in other words, we are faced with a far more complex and layered and compounded type of identity in the simple degree to which people identified with Iran. So let me talk a little bit about that. Nor is this surprising really. Courtesy of its forbidden physical environment, something that too few people pay attention to, I think, largely consisting of desolate deserts and formidable mountain ranges interspersed with scattered fertile oases, Iranian civilization has always been centered on its archipelago of urban centers. These were not just economically autonomous, each constituting a production and consumption center catering to and being supplied by its immediate hinterland, but also culturally and politically largely self-sufficient. And I'll give you now three examples from the Khajjar period, not having been able to find any direct ones that are as interesting and as pointed from the Safarid period, but they actually bring home the idea that this sort of regionalism and a lack of identification with a larger entity persisted far beyond the Safarids, because again, they're all three from the Khajjar period. The people of Mbalutistan, the British telegraph employee Ernest Floyer, observed in the 1870s, talked about Kherman, the way the English peasant talked about London, as a far away, inaccessible, largely imaginary place. A Khajjar official who visited Bbalutistan a few years later in circa 1880, claimed that the people in that remote part of the country had no idea about the central government in Tehran, and that some thought they were British subjects. The French explorer Gabriel Bonvalot, finally traveling through Iran a decade later, met someone in Kurdistan who carried Russian paper money, asked why he did not carry Iranian coinage.  When Bonvalot inquired if the man himself was not Iranian, he replied by saying, no, no, I am from Hamadan. So how do we resolve this tension between pride in Iran as an idea, but a rather abstract idea, and as an overarching concept as identified by foreigners and implicitly conveyed by the indigenous sources on the one hand and the intensely regional and local identification reflected in these three anecdotes, and we can induce many more, much more evidence for that. Now, one way to reconcile the two is to listen to Artur Kondegobino, a bit of an unlikely source, perhaps, in his observation about Iranian identity. Of course, writing again much later mid-19th century, Gobino is mostly known as the father of scientific racism, of course, and oftentimes simply dismissed on that count. But he also served as a consul in Iran in the 19th century, and he wrote very perceptively about the country and its people. Iranians, Gobino submitted, love their country very much. They forever sang the praises of Kharkh-Iruni, considering it the most agreeable, fertile, and healthy of all. But having suffered through an endless series of oppressive regimes, their allegiance was to their culture rather than to their political leaders. Sounds familiar. Their real practical allegiance, in other words, was first and foremost with their towns and regions. Now, the pride and prejudice that one detects here is often concentric, working its way out of one particular city, one's own. Abdi Beg-Shirazi, mid-16th century author of the Chronicle Takmila to Al-Arbar, I think it's been mentioned today, in one of his poems sings the praises of his hometown, Qasveen, and calls it superior to any city anywhere, domestic and foreign, whether in Egypt, Syria, the Ottoman lands, or Iraq. An excellent example of the same kind of sensibility is found in the Tofi Qarafiq, a recently edited mirror of Prince's type of work of advice and reflection on politics and morals, dating from the 1680s. Mohammed Ali Qasveen, his author, calls his hometown, Esfahan, the city with the smartest people for being located in the second climb. And Iran is to the world that Esfahan is to Iran, the center of civilization. And I'll give you a quote. Paradisical, what is the term? Something pertaining to paradise. Iran is most of whose territory is situated in the fourth and the third in the second climb, and which extends from the Oxis River to the River Euphrates, and from the Iron Gate, Darbant in the Caucasus, to the Sea of Oman, is the civilized center of the world, and the summation of the cream of humanity, the virtues, the conditions, the intelligence, and the profession of its inhabitants, of its population, populated regions, exceeds those of the inhabitants of other lands and regions by far. And anyone who looks into it will recognize that among those who have excelled or stood out in any of the rational and religious sciences and the arts, most are Iranians. Qasbini goes on to argue that since time immemorial, Iran has been known as a land of plenty, superior in its bravery of its people to Turkestan, wealthier than the Ottoman lands, and with a greater crop of outstanding artists and artisans than India with its tradition of arts and crafts. The Tophikarafi, Ivinzas's very strong sense of Irania, in other words. Yet Iran remains still an idea rather than a realm with clearly delineated parameters. For a full overview and celebration of that idea, of Iran as a geographical unit, we have to wait for Mohammed Mufid al-Mustofi, as Murtagh Sara Mufid, a rare geographical companion from the late Safavid period. Mufid al-Mustofi established a clear cultural link with the past in his work. He narrates the story found in Ferdowsi Shahnameh, according to which the mythical king Feridun, sensing his approaching death, gives Iran Shahr, the land between the Euphrates and the oxes the sinister of the world's inhabitable quarter, the Robomaskun, a vast land blessed by the divine, inhabited by learned and eloquent people to his oldest, wisest, and worthiest son, Hiraj. The term Iran only occurs sporadically in Mufid al-Mustofi's work. There, too. When it does, however, it is mostly, and when it does, it mostly is in juxtaposition with Turan and Hindustan, which is a bit of a trope, or in conditions of being assaulted and invaded by its enemies. Yet the contours of Iran are clear, as is the hierarchy in its constituent parts. Pride of place is given to Iraq. That is, Iraq-Arab, of course, ground zero of the Shia faith that animates and legitimizes the Safavid polity. Iraq-Ajam follows, emphasizing the centrality of Isfahan at the time. Regions further are described with an eye to their inclusion or inclusion, exclusion or inclusion. Greater Armenia, for example, falls within the boundaries of Iran, according to the author. In the section on Qichin Macron, on the Gulf of Oman towards Pakistan today, towards India, barren territory, Mufid al-Mustofi, events its ambiguity. Classical geographical sources, he reminds us, consider these barren regions to be beyond Iran. Yet, he adds, its rulers currently pay the land tax, kharaj to Iran's authorities, and thus the region should be included, even if the people are Shafi Issunis who hardly have any notion of the outside world. Remarkably, Little Space finally is devoted to the Gamsirat, the Persian Gulf Coast, which figures so prominently in the Western trade-based sources and in the modern Iranian imagination. But here comes last. In keeping with the conspicuous absence of any interest in the sea among pre-modern Iranians, except as a source of danger, the Caspian sea isn't even mentioned in the Muhtasar al-Mufid. Now, we have a few. How much time do I have? Five minutes? OK. So we have a few local chronicles from the Salafi period, fortunately, that allow us to test the extent to which local or regional affinities prevail to exist in juxtaposition to more expansive identification with Iran as an overarching concept. The Salafi had the Sahifat al-Arshad is a late-sophomate chronicle depicting events in the Karaman. And it's an excellent example of regional pride. At the outset of the account, Muamin al-Karamani, the author, offers a rather precise delineation of the region of Karaman, combining historical genealogy with geography. Karamani insists of olden times consisted of seven regions, Belot. This he adds goes back to the Sasanian monarch, Ardeshir, who first brought prosperity to Karaman. The region of Karaman, he continues in rather trope-like fashion, is a grand and vast land, Zamin wa Velayat-e-Azim o-Vassi, that stretches from the deserts of Sistan and Khorasan, from Sindh and Multan in the east, and the farthest reaches of forests in the west. Towards the south, it extends all the way to Hormuz and Minab, on the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Daryay-e-Oman, as he calls it. And in the north, it borders on the deserts of Khorasan, Yazd and Abarku. No other territory of such expansiveness exists anywhere else, according to the author. Now, what do we conclude from all of this, from this overview? Well, a couple of things to my mind. The Safis managed to weld a disparate realm together by bringing the two halves, traditional halves of Iran, traditional Iran together in a process that, arguably, and by consensus, almost culminated with Shahaba, who stood tall against Iran's external enemies while reducing the autonomy of peripheral regions, such as the Caspian provinces and the Persian Gulf coast. These have been mentioned. Ideologically and rhetorically, the Safi project was and remained animated and legitimized by religion, of course. The Shah's mandate was to be the protector of the realm, the enforcer of God's will and the executive officer of the 12th Imam, so to speak. Yet the bulk of attention in the written sources go to the dynasty, suggesting that the will to power was secular in its makeup. Religious power cannot exist without worldly power, whereas worldly power can exist though perhaps not thrive and perpetuate itself without being sanctioned by faith. Iran, in other words, is mostly a dynastic enterprise. It is there all the time, but it seems too obviously a terrain of action to be mentioned with a great frequency. That is, I think, is one conclusion. It's a bit of a negative one, but I think it's arguable to say that. It is telling in this context that neither of the two main suffering manuals of statecraft, the Taskerat al-Muluk and the Dastur al-Muluk, both of which are written at the very end of the dynasty's reign to inform the Afghans, pretty much, of how to rule Iran, mentions the name Iran in this introduction or otherwise refers to it as part of the polity, of the polity that it purports to identify and inventory. The former, that is the Taskerat al-Muluk, lacks any geographical specificity and refers to the exalted court, Dargah al-Mu'ala, and the Safarid king, Salatina Safavieh. The latter uses the term ma-Mulika ma-Huseh, which is also a term that occurs occasionally, but by no means with great frequency in the sources, the protected realm. Yet Iran did live in people's hearts. I think that is also very true with pride and prejudice, a notion culturally rather than geographically defined and twined with the very strong local and regional sense of identity that was an inevitable outcome of Iran's centrifugal tendencies. By unifying Iran, the Safavids by no means ended the country's regional particularisms. Iran remained a country with as many centripetal tendencies as centrifugal ones, a land of unity within diversity. It's of course a cliche, but it's very true for Iran, as it's demonstrated by the flux and reflux of its dynasties, as well as the fact that the capital continued to move around until the early 19th century. Now towards the end of the period, the Safavids had managed to construct a nucleus of a national identity, one that operates in concentric circles with urbanites looking at their town and regions at the best, the most fertile, the most prosperous, and looking at Iran sort of abstractly, if you will, as the collective reservoir and culmination of all this cultural capital. Now the embodiment, I think, and the culmination really is the Mufid, the only real geographical manual that we have, which represents a rather mature and sophisticated sense of Iran, yeah, specific and precise in its geographical classification. Yet the Mufid remains singular, heir to a medieval tradition of Mamolikum Masolik literature, sort of traditional geographical literature, you know, describing towns and regions, but certainly unique for the Safavid period. It did not generate an urge to explore Iran in its constituent parts in any depth. Mufid Mustofi also wrote from exile, very important, from India, looking back on what he had lost, Iran, a sense of nostalgia suffuses to work. This sense of loss, of fate making its claims of decay and decline, emerges even more clearly from the works of Hazin and Lahijani. Hazin and Lahijani, a traveler in polymath who escaped the turmoil accompanying the fall of the Safavids in 1722 by escaping to India. By the time Lahijani lived and wrote to 1730s and 40s, the idea of Iran was receding into an idealized past, overtaking by the chaotic present. Hazin, having moved to India and acknowledging the mistake he had made doing so, looked back on Iran with a great deal of nostalgia, pining for his homeland from the swampy, fetid place he found India to be. He called Iran Zamin, the elevated paradise. It expands wider than Solomon's realm, and its majesty better than the gem on his ring. Iran's identity, finally, remained culturally rather than politically and territorially grounded for another two centuries. A real concern about territory as an integral part of Iran yet, with clearly defined and delineated boundaries, arguably only emerged in the early 19th century, most notably following the humiliating defeats, series of defeats at the hands of the Russians. And it would take another century and a constitutional revolution before the idea of Iran as a community defined by common borders as an assembly not of subjects, but of citizens tied together by civic rights and responsibilities would gain ground. Thank you very much. In today's talk, I want to take up some of the threads that have been left by many of the talks that we've already heard today. For instance, Ali Anoushar left us at the end of his talk with a sort of very tantalizing articulation of political theology, the way in which the body of the Safavid Shah came to be identified with the kingdom. And so it's in identifying how the various strains of political theology, whether they were neoplatonic in their origin, whether they're old Iranian or occultist, or Shi'i, or Sufi, whatever, were combined by theorists to articulate the king's relationship to his land, to his subjects, and to the broader world around him that I'd like to begin my talk today. The period about which I'll be speaking is one that's typically characterized by vastly contrasting forms of rule in the various parts of the Islamic world. Just to give a few examples, we've already heard from Colin about Abbas's so-called sovereignty showcase Purge as Abbas attempted to consolidate power in the aftermath of the Safavid really civil war, very famous for executing and purging forms of religious heterodoxy that were found throughout the kingdom in an effort to really solidify a kind of orthodox 12er Shi'i basis to his reign. Meanwhile, to the east in India, Abbas's contemporary, at least for the beginning of his rule, Akbar is portrayed as having instituted a period of social harmony and tolerance in which the various subjects of the realm, be they Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jain, or others were able to cooperate in such a way that notice was even taken by European observers of the Mughal court, very famously Sir Thomas Rowe, the ambassador to the court of Jahangir in a speech to British parliament actually praised the ability of the various classes of Indians to work together as being something which is good for business in which perhaps the British might adopt in relating to foreign labor in the British Isles. Of course, a problem that's still with us. Akbar is famous for instituting what in popular historiography is referred to as the Dine Elohi or the divine religion which is premised on a notion referred to as Solhe Kohl, universal harmony. And it's this idea that I really want to take up in my talk. Surprisingly, as I began to investigate the sort of history of this idea of Solhe Kohl, I found that the term actually developed initially within the Safavid realm used primarily to describe spiritual exercises associated with mystics in mid-century Shiraz. These exercises were based on a theory of macrocosm whereby practices relating to the human body, the body politic, and the celestial bodies were seen as closely interrelated to one another. Balancing the interests of members of diverse social and religious communities was seen to promote social harmony in the same way that dietary practices, specifically vegetarianism, produced a harmony of bodily humors and that theurgical practices of planetary veneration promoted the harmony of the heavenly spheres. While at the beginning of the 16th century, such ideas were particularly associated with the city of Shiraz in Safavid Iran. By the end of the century, many of the mystics associated with the idea of Solhe Kohl had been patronized by the Mughal Emperor Aqbar who crafted Solhe Kohl into one of the bases of his royal legitimacy. And yet, in spite of the consolidation of Tuval Rashid Orthodoxy and the eclipse of Sufism and Safavid Iran, the idea of Solhe Kohl continued to be invoked by Iranian thinkers well into the late Safavid period and beyond. And so in today's paper, really what I'm going to try to do is to understand the rise and fall of Solhe Kohl to better understand the contested nature of kingship and specifically Iranian kingship, the way that it's described within Safavid Iran. So in the first part of today's paper, I would like briefly to outline the connections drawn between bodily health, social welfare, and celestial harmony as they were understood by authors, primarily writing, I guess, within something we would broadly identify as philosophy or specifically ethical philosophy, ethical literature, aqlok literature in the years surrounding the rise of the Safavid dynasty. As I proceed, I'll examine how techniques to further the harmony of the body, society, and the cosmos were incorporated into the spiritual exercises of a particular occultist sort of quasi-Sufi group, the followers of a man called Azar Kevan, or the Azariyeh, who Azar Kevan, who famously claimed to be reviving the ancient practice of the ancient Iranian kings and indeed to be initiating a new Persian dispensation at the moment of the Islamic millennium. Well, Azar Kevan began his career in Shiraz under the reign of Tahmosp and attracted followers from the so-called School of Shiraz. Like many of his contemporaries, Azar Kevan emigrated to India by the late 16th century. And finally, in the third part of this paper, I will briefly examine a little bit of the correspondence between the Mughal Emperor Akbar and the newly crowned Safavid king Abbas to trace the complex role that the rhetoric of Sothec Kohl played in Safavid and Mughal understandings of kingship. In the letters of Abbas to Akbar, we can see really one of the first instances of an Iranian rejection of the notion of Sothec Kohl universal harmony and an articulation of an alternative form of Persian kingship, one which, in Abbas's view, perhaps more compatible with Tulfar Shi'ism. Finally, if I have time and I don't think I will, the paper will conclude with a brief survey of Sothec Kohl in the later history of the Safavid dynasty, which brings me to the first part of today's talk. The theory of macrocosm, the idea that the human body, the world and the universe are interconnected and directly correspond to one another was widely accepted in the medieval Islamic world. With its origins in Stoic and Pythagorean thought, the theory of macrocosm had particular importance for the development of ethics. The Echloch in Nasseri, composed by Nasiruddin Tusi, whom we've already been speaking about on the eve of the Mongol sack of Baghdad, had already compared the social ills of the world to the ailments of the human body. The role of the ideal king as the regulator Moldaber of the world is thus akin to that of a physician. In the years surrounding the rise of the Safavid dynasty, a great deal of ethical literature derived from Tusi was composed in Iran. The leading Shirazi scholar of his day, Jalaluddin Davoni, who died in 1502, the same year that the Safavid Esmail, the first declared himself Shah, dedicated his Echloch Jalaluddin to the Akhoyulu Sultan, one of the last great monarchs of pre-Safavid Iran. Expanding on Tusi's notion of the just ruler as physician, Davoni writes that the king is the physician of the world, just as there is no choice for the physician but to know about sickness, the causes of pain, and methods of cure. Likewise, it is necessary for the Sultan to know the sickness of the kingdom and the means of its cure. Since the term civilization, Tamaddon is given to a general assembly of different peoples, then as long as every one of those people sticks to its own position and remains in the task assigned to it and receives the share of riches and honors, a station and property which are appropriate to them, then the temperament of the civilization is in a state of equilibrium at the Dahl and its affairs are at the pinnacle of organization. For it is established that the source of every state is the consensus of a population who, in their cooperation, resemble the organs of a single body.  Just as Muslim physicians as heirs of the tradition of Galen understood illness to be caused by the disproportion of bodily humors and temperaments, likewise for ethical thinkers like Davani's social illnesses are caused by imbalance, by a lack of etadol. It is the duty of the king to promote an ideal, balanced, harmonious state. And despite the fact that society is comprised of diverse populations, it is the king's job to promote equilibrium and to harmoniously adjust for these differences so that different classes of society might serve one another just as the organs of a body do. For Davani then the ideal state functions as a united, single body politic whose combined power is greater than the sum of its parts. And at whose top stands the king. Bodily harmony parallels at the macro-cosmic level the notion of the harmony of the heavenly spheres, tanasub aflok. Just as Ibn Arabi had compared the universe to a great man, to insano kabir, mystics of Safavit times similarly saw the entirety of the universe as a human body. Thus, for instance, the 16th century dasotire osmani, regarded as the sacred texts of the Azad Kevani mystics whom I'll be speaking about at greater length in a moment, describes the universe as follows. The universe is the great man. When you examine a world as beautiful as this, I should point out that this text is composed originally in a sort of constructed and made up language and then translated into pure Persian that is Persian with no Arabic words. And so if the translation sounds a bit turgid, it's because the language is weird. But when you examine a world as beautiful as this, know that it is but a servant of his. If you look at it with open eyes and heart, you realize that the firmament is the skin of the great man. Saturn is his spleen. Jupiter, his liver. Mars is gallbladder. It's on his heart. Venus, his stomach, mercury, his brain, the moon, his lungs, and the planetary mansions, his veins and nerves. Living beings are the worms in his belly. He possesses a soul comprised of the souls of terrestrial and ethereal souls and a wisdom comprised of the consciousness of the inferior and superior beings.  The archetype for the human body in microcosm and society in mesocosm is therefore the harmonious universal macrocosm. The duty of mystics and also by extension the duty of sovereigns is to reject their inconsequential roles, individual roles in the universe and instead to realize their essential unity with the macrocosm. Philosophers of the Safavid period saw effects as a universal science. The ideal law giver, Sahab-e-Namus, regulates the world through the application of universal regulations, qavonine kolli. Such regulations made no distinction, at least in ethical texts, between Muslim and non-Muslim. Indeed, as the early Safavid philosopher and occultist kiosed in Mansur-dashdaki writes, the principles of ethics unfold from the universal idea of the original source that mapped that. For dashdaki sages of every religion and in every age are united in their investigation of the original source. He writes, thus there have been different peoples and opposing nations in every age and every era of every single religion, yet no sage has ever recorded opposition to the existence of the original source. On the contrary, the impossibility of its contradiction is precisely its state and its quality. Love pervades universally and its rule extends over all. The beginning proceeds from him, that is God, and the end is him, since everything is him. Just as divine love is universal since the entirety of existence is, in fact, God, here, of course, developing the notion of wahtar al-wujud, the ethical principles which dashdaki outlines are similarly universal. Thus briefly to review so far, writings on ethics of the early Safavid period offer a theory of direct correspondence between body, society, and the universe. The ideal state for each of these was the state of equilibrium, harmony. In the case of the body, a harmony of bodily humors and temperaments. In the case of society, a harmony of the interests of different classes of individuals. And in the case of the universe, a harmony of proportions which characterizes the orbital motions of the spheres. Moreover, early Safavid philosophers argued that such principles were universal, shared by ancients and by moderns, by non-Muslims and by Muslims. So I'd like now for a moment to move away from the realm of philosophy to discuss how the theory of macrocosm and harmony were taken up by mystics in the early Safavid period. To do that, I'm going to focus on a mystic and occultist whose career and legacy forms the core of the book project that I'm working on right now. A man called Azar Kevan who was born into the complex religious topography of the early Safavid period. Groups we today identify as Imam-i-Shis, Khruffis, Noctavis, Nur-Bakshis, and really a vast number of undifferentiated messianic forms of Sufism appear to have been competing for legitimacy and political capital in the nascent empire, some with better success than others. We know very little about the details of Azar Kevan's life, but what we can ascertain comes primarily from books associated with his followers. Kevan is said to have been born in the ancient capital of the early Sasanians, the city of Istachr in 1533, which you can see here on my map. He attracted a school of followers in mid-century Shiraz. According to the sources, many of them were classmates, perhaps at the Mansourai school in the city. In Shiraz, Azar Kevan composed a visionary treatise narrating an ascension through the heavens. After refusing a series of invitations from the Mughal Emperor Akbar to take up employment at the Mughal court, Kevan eventually left Iran during the chaos of the Safavid interregnum, traveling from Shiraz via Zabolistan in Bukhara, the capital of the Shebanid Uzbeks to Lahore. He died in Patna at the age of 85, Patna in Bahar in Northern India, in 1618. He was an ascetic, a vegetarian, a man who reportedly began to engage in fasting and staying awake for lengthy periods of time at the age of five. I have a four-year-old who stays awake for lengthy periods of time, but she doesn't fast. He was so no chance of her becoming a great Sufi Sheikh, I think, but he was reportedly able to reduce the amount of food that he ate to the weight of a single dirham per day. That's not very much food. And according to the hagiographies, he lived in an earthen vat for a period of 28 years, apparently mimicking the practice of the stoic philosopher diogenes. Like the term etadol in ethical literature within the literature associated with Azar Kevan, the term sol operates at microcosmic, mesocosmic, and macrocosmic levels. That is to say, within the body of the saint in his actions towards diverse members of society and in his practices of theorgy, the worship of the veneration of the celestial spheres. Azar Kevan's followers describe the state of solh, bahameh, or universal harmony to be a state achieved through a series of spiritual exercises related to dietary practice, social comportment, and the worship of the planets. The acquisition of solh, bahameh for the Kevani saint is a necessary step to allow a saint to achieve his ultimate goal. That is to apprehend truly the divine unity, ta'aloh, or perhaps we might use the neoplatonic term hainosis to translate this. I think I'm following such oddness practice. Now Kevani spiritual exercises are patterned on Azar Kevan's own experience of spiritual perfection, which he recorded in a reverse narrative entitled the Mokasha Fata Kevani or the Revelations of Kevan. In the text, which must have been composed during the 1560s or perhaps early 1570s, Kevan narrates his visions of celestial spheres and ultimately his apprehension of existential unity. Right first, I prepared my body and adorned it according to the physician's creed, kisheh, pezeshki. I abandoned my former religion, all my desires for rights and doctrines. Then I ceased to speak, neither good nor ill. Did I speak to anyone in a dark and narrow place? I sat and abided. I lessened my food, ceased to sleep. I proceeded exhausted. Never did I rest from cause memory. Besides him, my misfortune seemed all the same. Here we see how micro-mezzo and ultimately macro-cosmic harmony operate at the level of spiritual exercise. The passage describes Kevan preparing his body according to the physician's creed, which is kind of an interesting expression. Furthermore, he adjusts his diet and practices wakefulness. He abandons any form of religious partisanship, indeed, speech itself. Such bodily and societal practices thus prepare him to ascend through the celestial spheres and ultimately to the divine presence. Excellent commentaries on the Makasha Fath explain the text as follows. The traveler of the path must know the art of medicine so that he can bring whatever humors are dominant into harmony. Afterward, he must banish all beliefs of religion, customs, doctrines, and paths from himself. He must act in harmony with all. Bahameh solkirad must sit in a narrow and dark place and eat less by degrees. Here, then, the harmonization of the four bodily humors, eslohe echlot, is directly linked to the practice of civil harmony, solk bahameh. Thus, bodily practice is the key through which to remove sectarian belief. For the Kevanis, this practice entailed fasting, long periods of silence, particular breathing practices, and vegetarianism. Practices of vegetarianism amongst Iranian occultists were apparently widespread in the 16th century and often enjoined as prerequisites for the manipulation of the planetary spirits for performing operations of astral magic, for instance. For the followers of Kevan, the way to cultivate the harmony of spheres was to venerate them in their proper manner. The text of the Azar Kevani scripture, I suppose you would call it, the dasauteer contains individual liturgies dedicated to each of the seven planets and some details surrounding the correct ritual performance of these literatures is provided in various texts associated with the schools. In fact, much of the extant Azari literature is comprised of hymns dedicated to praise of the planets, which themselves are, in fact, Persian translations of the theological invocations of the 12th century philosopher Shabaddin Sauravardi, as found in his Kitab al-Waradat al-Taktisat. But indeed, recently discovered extant manuscripts of Azar Kevan's followers show that they collected planetary hymns in a variety of languages, not just in their sort of pure Persian, but also in Avestan and Arabic and Turkish and Sanskrit and Hindi for use in their celestial exercise. And this is because they held the idea that the esoteric practice of all religions of the world was essentially to venerate the planets. In highlighting the universality of religion, Kevan likened all the religions of the world to the branches of a single tree whose roots are one and whose fruits all taste the same. OK, so here are some pictures of what the planetary idols look like in Azar Kevani manuscripts. I'll just flip through those. They're weird, obviously. Thus far, we've discussed Azaray practices pertaining to the microcosm of the body, the macrocosm of the universe. At the Azaray texts are also replete with discussions of social comportment. In 1610, a follower of Azar Kevan named Bahram Ibn-e-Fadhad, who had studied in Shiraz before he began to follow Azar Kevan, completed a lengthy work, which is sometimes called Shor-Aston-i-Chor-Chaman, which he himself seems to have called the Shor-Aston-i-Danesh, or the Gul-Aston-i-Binesh, the region of knowledge and the garden of vision. The text which intermingles the retelling of the history of ancient Iran and the word Iran is actually using this text all the time, probably in hundreds of times, actually, with an account. So it intermingles the history of ancient Iran with an account of Azar Kevan and his followers, as well as the opinions of contemporary philosophers. Bahram records that Kevan, quote, used to say that the Sufi believes that one must not be partisan and that one should act alike with fellow travelers of different kinds. Just as one spends time with Muslims, one should also befriend Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians. Therefore, one cannot act according to the decrees of the jurists of the age for they are perpetrators of jihad and murder and thereby oppose what is, in fact, obligatory. Now, as state support of 12 Rashi, orthodoxy began to eclipse the forms of religious heterodoxy that had marked the early Safavid period. Interested parties from outside Iran, including the Shebanids and Uzbekistan, the Mughals in North India and the Adoshais in the Deccan, began to entice Iranian mystics like Azar Kevan to emigrate and to play a role in crafting their own ideals of sovereignty. From the surviving correspondence of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, as well as from contemporary Safavid histories, we know, for instance, that Akbar frequently corresponded with heterodox Iranian thinkers. In one letter to the Noctavi Ahmadikashi, who was later executed by Shalabosfer Heresy, Akbar writes, quote, that the love for the people of Iran is deeply embedded in his heart. And he invites Ahmad to come to India to enjoy the imperial presence. Apparently, Ahmad should have done that, but he didn't. Sorry. And likewise, several Azar resources relate. I anecdotes about contacts between Kevan and the court of Akbar, specifically, with regard to Kevan's ideas about planetary veneration. Thus, the Sharistan tells this, quote, we know the account of Sheikh Abul Fass because he requested a reference manual, a Dastur al-Amal from Azar Kevan, the Lord of the Sciences, about the worship of the stars and the like. And then when the friend of the divine religion here, Duskama Yazdani Kish, Yazdani Kish is a Persian translation of Dine al-Ahi, obviously. Azar Kevan came to India. And Sheikh Feizi and Abul Fass, that is the sort of prime viziers of the court of Akbar, learned from him the right of worshiping the sun and the other planets. So it seems likely, then, that the stream of migrants from Shiraz to India, men like Azar Kevan and others played an important role in the Mughal emperor, Akbar's 1583 decree, instituting the Dine al-Ahi and the adoption of Sol Heqqul. So thus far, to review, before I come to the last part of my talk, for the followers of Azar Kevan, the notion of Sol Bahameh comprised spiritual exercises, which operated at the micro, mezzo, and macro-cosmic level, through dietary practice, the humors of the saintly body were brought into harmony, through equitable comportment with members of diverse religious communities, the saint removed partisanship and promoted social harmony and through planetary worship and theological practices, the saint reinforced the harmony of the celestial spheres. This brings me to the final part of my talk. Prior to the rise of Shah Abbas, Safavid Iran was in the midst of a virtual civil war as contending factions among the religiously heterodox Kizlbosh tribes, who had previously provided the military support of the Safavid state. Sorry, I just used the word tribes. I even have it scratched out of my paper, but I still read it. Go to heterodox Kizlbosh, who had previously provided the military support of the Safavid state, vied for influence at the court of Mohammed Khudabande. With the accession of Khudabande's young son, Abbas, to the throne in 1588, Abbas began systematically to stamp out the bases of Kizlbosh support. Famously in 1592 and 1593, Abbas campaigned against the widespread Naqtavi movement, grew simply putting many of its leaders to death. A year later, the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was sympathetic to the Naqtavis, wrote a letter to Abbas to chide him for the massacre, among other things. Indeed, Akbar himself was secretly accused of the Naqtavi heresy by his courtier Abdul Qadir Badawni. In his letter to Abbas, Akbar writes today, quote, when the land of Iran is quite depleted of sages who look to the future, it behooves the man, who is the quintessence of his noble ancestors, to strive greatly to manage the kingdom and to cure the affairs of all mankind. And putting men to death and in destroying such divine structure, you must exercise complete caution. The sections of humanity, which are the wonders of the deposit to the divine treasury, must be regarded with the eye of compassion. And you must strive to unite their hearts. Realizing that the all-encompassing divine mercy comprises all nations and sects, you must strive as completely as possible to bring yourself into the eternal spring garden of universal harmony. In this short passage, which is drawn from a lengthy letter, we can see how many of the familiar elements from the ethical literature that I outlined at the beginning of this talk appear. The first sentence in this quotation likens the role of the king to that of a physician who is providing a cure and el te'am to the affairs of mankind. The role of the king is to unite the hearts of the diverse sections of humanity. Divine love and mercy are universal, reach all sects and nations. Thus Akbar's enjoyment of universal harmony is very much in keeping with the ethical notions of the duty of kings as they were understood by philosophers. While Akbar's letter to Shah Abbas has been well known to historians since the 19th century, Shah Abbas's response or actually response is, to it are considerably less well known. The years immediately following the noctave executions of 1593 were a period of great activity and did great success for the Safavids. Abbas transformed the Safavid army and in 1598 sent his newly reformed army in a campaign against the Uzbeks, successfully retaking Khorasan. In the same year, the royal capital shifted from Ghazvind to the more central Esfahan, where Abbas embarked on, of course, ambitious architectural programs. So perhaps emboldened by his success, Abbas chose to send a delegation to the court of Akbar in the same year. In the preparation for the delegation, Shah Abbas commissioned a draft of a letter in which he would finally respond to Akbar's chastisement and his invitation to practice Soheq Qul. In the draft, which is unpublished, but which exists in at least two copies in London and Tehran, Abbas boasts that his campaign against the Uzbeks will continue until the names of the 12 imams are minted on the coins of Bukhara and the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs is uttered in every sermon in the Uzbek realm. Abbas then lambasts the notions of Erfan, Gnosis, and universal harmony as being incompatible with religious law in Ashab, writing, quote, several inquiries were made regarding religion and sect with those of crooked conviction and turbid morality. Although Gnosis and universal harmony have little compatibility with religious law in Ashab, or perhaps just religion, even still, as has been confirmed in heavenly scriptures and well-attested reports, every single one of the prophets and possessors of divine resolve has commanded in endless injunctions that one should wage war against the damned, the Ashqiyah. And here, this obviously is a term with a lot of Shi'i resonance. You, the good followers of the assembly of the Lord of the nation, will be happy and forgiven by men of reason if you take up such a cause. And then very curiously, the text moves into Arabic and says, rulership and religion are twins. If it were not so, then the most beneficial security would not exist. No doubt about it. The conduct of the king is in strengthening the religion as both the ancients and the modern say. So instead of resting the justification of his rule on the notion of the duty of the king to promote harmony, here Abbas instead induces another aspect of kingly rule that we as scholars might identify as, quote unquote, Iranian. Here he is quoting an Arabic from the so-called Testament of Ardeshir, a text ascribed to the first of the Sasanian rulers and claiming that rulership and religion are twins. And it is therefore the duty of the king to strengthen religion. The text then goes on to provide a quotation from the shah na meh from the section on Ardeshir, quote, be the protector of religion and of wisdom if you don't want your days to go badly. Religion is in its place in the royal throne. Without religion, rulers unsound. They are each other's sentinels, as though they lie beneath a single tent. Here, as I move to my conclusion, it's interesting to compare Abbas's invocation of the shah na meh with shah na meh manuscripts that were prepared for the court during the same period. As art historian Kishwa Rizvi has recently argued, shah na meh illustrations produced under Abbas undertake a remarkable new artistic program. For the first time in the 400 year history of illustrating the shah na meh, the artists working on shah na meh is after Abbas's accession make great efforts to depict the piety of individual kings. Have a look at the illustration here. Here, purportedly, is the ancient Iranian ruler Goshtasp, shown just after he is slain a dragon. Of course, what's remarkable about the image is, first, that the image bears the likeness of Abbas himself down to his long mustache. But more notably, Goshtasp is shown in prayer. And of course, it's not just any old prayer, but by the presence, sorry, this is a bit of a tacky animation, but by the presence of the Moharin the Taspi on his prayer rug, obviously, specifically Shi'i prayer. As in his quotation from the Testament I've added this year in the letter under consideration, which I've just quoted, Abbas here is articulating a new understanding, I think, of Iranian kingship, one in which Shi'i piety, one should not just promote the religion, but one must also wage war against the damned, the enemies of Shi'ism, and just rule, go hand in hand. Now, the draft of the letter, which I've just shared, was not the one that was ultimately sent to Akbar. The London manuscript says that the letter was ultimately deemed to be too prideful and boastful. And instead, the letter which was eventually sent to Akbar thanked him for his advice before going on to justify the action taken against the Kizlbash as being a political exigency. Now, to conclude, we might read Abbas's rejection of Sol Hecol as another aspect of the solidification of Shi'i orthodoxy and the eclipse of Sufism, the subject of the recent book of Ahtar and Zali. But it is important to note on the one hand that the later 17th century separation of Erfan from Sufism, from Tasavov, is not evident in the letter which condemns both Erfan and Sol Hecol. Instead, perhaps we might read this letter as an attempt to define Iranian kingship in a world in which the foundations of Abbas's kingly rule were still fragile. Now, I know we're all eager to get to tea, so I'll just pass through my later sort of references to Sol Hecol in the later Safavid period. But needless to say, the Sol Hecol continues to be invoked by poets ranging from Sheikh Baha'i to the court poet of Shah Abbas II, Sa'eb, who had, of course, returned to Iran from Mughal India where you can see very clearly Sol Hecol referring to the macrocosm. And of course, the term Sol Hecol is also very much present in anti-Sufi polemics from the later Safavid period, such as this quotation from Muhammad Tahrir Qumi. So by way of conclusion, in this talk, I have argued that ethical texts which circulated in the early Safavid period based the ethics of rule on a theory of macrocosm in which harmony and body, society and cosmos represent the ideal state of being. Mystics like Azar Kevan in the early Safavid period put these ethics into practice in their spiritual exercises by promoting bodily harmony through dietary practice, social harmony through religious pluralism and finally celestial harmony through the veneration of planets. Such practices they described as universal harmony or harmony with all. While these practices developed in mid-century Iran, they attracted the interest instead of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who similarly in his Dine El-Lahi promoted vegetarianism, a kind of religious toleration and the worship of the sun. Distinguishing his own rule from that of his Mughal counterpart, Abbas rejected Akbar's invitation to universal harmony, instead put forth an argument that Iranian royal legitimacy was not based on simply harmony, but instead on the twin notions of rulership and religion, a notion that he deemed evidently to be more compatible with Shi'ism. Widespread across Iran in the early Safavid period, then the notion of sultek coal and universal harmony became an idea against which Iranian kingship came to be defined unlike in Mughal India, where at least under the reins of Akbar and his immediate successors was an idea whereby kingship was defined. Thank you very much for your attention. We'll take a break. Previous talk just set this scene for us to move on to look at the philosophy, religions, and the arts, and especially the next paper that will discuss a topic of philosophy, mysticism, very much rooted and fed by the wisdom of earlier sages of this land. I dare not call it anything by name anymore, or the traditions. And none more competent at the helm than Dr. Sajad Rezvi, who a colleague from nearer university to us in this country at Exeter. Dr. Rezvi is the associate professor of Islamic studies, Islamic intellectual history and director of the Center for the Study of Islam at the University of Exeter. He is a specialist on Safavid moral philosophy and the author of Mullah Sadra and Metaphysics and is currently completing his monograph on the philosophy in 18th century Iran and North India. And I will invite him without stealing his thunder anymore to take us on a journey to meet Mullah Sadra. Thank you, Nargis. And thank you to Charles, who originally invited me to Sarah and to Vincenzo. I don't think I was much trouble for Vincenzo because I live in London. And of course, thank you to the Sadra Foundation for this wonderful event, which it's always fun to be part of something like this. It's not terribly difficult for me to have accepted the kind invitation for the simple reason anyone who knows me knows that kind of philosophy in the Safavid period is who I am, at least in one sense. And although I would never call myself an Iranian, in our family we consider Iran to be home. So if you go to Iran, it's like you're going home and there's a whole kind of set of really strange ironies there because the modern system of visas doesn't necessarily recognize that belonging to that homeland. The Iranian consulate is not as gracious to me all the time as I would like to it to be. What I'm going to talk about, in some ways, nicely segues from what Dan was talking about quite simply because part of it is about Shiraz and part of it is about Shiraz as a space for philosophy. And part of it is also about the sort of practices which go into what I'm going to call philosophy. But let me start with some reflections on this notion which people have used and I don't have a problem using, which is this idea of a Safavid renaissance. And for me that renaissance, the active construction, the revival of the classics constitutes two sets of learning. One being the ancient wisdoms primarily of Hellenic Neoplatonism. And to a certain extent, Iranian, ancient Iranian wisdoms are sort of put into that although the actual content of that is very meagre or it certainly doesn't seem to be authentically Iranian in any recognizable sense. And the second one is the excavation of the early Shiite tradition. And for that, perhaps, the best example is the introduction to Majlisys Bihar Lanwar, which lists a series of fundamental texts which define the tradition. And if you read that, you get a sense of what he thinks the Shiite tradition is. And what I think is a good snapshot, which tells you how the Safavids, certainly in the 17th century, felt about who they were and what they were espousing. With respect to the philosophers in this period, in Shudas and later Esfahan, I've previously written about how I think this notion of the school of Esfahan is not terribly useful as a concept, partly because not all of them were from Esfahan or had much ties to it, and also because there's no such thing as a school with a set of school doctrines and practices. But it was Shudas, which was more important. But one thing which you could say united most of those thinkers in the 16th and the 17th century was a sense of how they saw philosophy and where they saw philosophy stemming from. And an important element of this was the conscious evocation of Saharavadi, who has already been mentioned by Dan, of the notions of philosophy as a universal, prophetically gifted inquiry of a transmission which is associated with a set of spiritual practices, including the 40 days of vegetarianism that we've mentioned already, and especially of the spiritual practices being guided and led by a sage who Saharavadi famously called Qayyim-Mil Kitab, the one who kind of establishes the book in some interesting ways. So you've got this dual heritage, the broadly Neoplatonic with certain texts such as the theology of Aristotle, the orthology of works which go back to Proclus, the golden verses of Pythagoras and the commentaries by Proclus and Yamblikus, echoes of the Hermetica, and other texts which were produced primarily in the Kindi circle in the early Islamic period. Now, the question is, how do we make sense of it and how do we locate Iran within this? Now, the idea that Iran is a space for philosophy or philosophizing is, of course, not new to the Safarid period at all. There are plenty of witnesses before the Safarid period which talk about some sort of privileged space for Iran and of Persians. I recognize throughout this paper I'll often be kind of conflating Iran and Persians which is perhaps a problem. It is a problem, but it's partly because sometimes the texts do that. There's a lot more talk about Persians and what Persians do necessarily always than Iran itself. So for example, we have the famous, I would say, infamous historian Ibn Khaldun writing in the Muqaddama that almost like in parentheses the problem of the Persians. The problem of the Persians was that they were very much attached to knowledge and particularly the intellectual sciences. If you know something about Ibn Khaldun, you actually know that he doesn't particularly like the intellectual sciences, things like logic and philosophy and not particular disciplines which he likes to promote. And alongside that, there are a number of people who have talked about how pretty much all the famous philosophers and theologians in the world of Islam have always been Persians. And this is the nice thing to always remind contemporary sectarians when they bring this thing up saying, well, you know, you wouldn't really have any Sunni theology if it wasn't for the Persians in the medieval period. And the fact that there is a certain memory of this place called Jundishapur in the late Sasanian period which was considered to be a primary site for philosophy, for the sciences, for medicine, which is then drawn upon when Baghdad is established and institutions of learning and translation are established in Baghdad with this very conscious sense in which they're trying to recreate Jundishapur. Alongside that, you have certain other witnesses like Said al-Andalusi who famously and perhaps slightly unusually when he's talking about the different climes, the seven climes, the cosmology of the world, places Iran at the first climb. It's unusual because most people don't do that. So for him, Iran lies at the center of the cosmos. And then as you go out, you get the Babylonians and the Greeks and the Indians and it goes out. And interestingly, the Arabs don't seem to figure in this at all, despite the fact that he is someone who's writing in Andalus further west and doesn't seem to be a Persian at all in any sense. And you have other accounts which place Iran at the center of intellectual inquiry, for example, Abul Fazil Beyhaqi's history of Sultan Masoud and when it evokes the example of someone like Biruni. Of course, there are other accounts which perhaps dissenter Iran and Persians, of which there are many as well. So apart from the fact that they point out that most of the areas of Iran are in the third and fourth climb, you have this very interesting and I think quite polemical citation by the Ballet-Rist Abu Hayyant or Haydi at the beginning of the 11th century who's citing Ibn al-Mukafa, which is very interesting because I suspect Ibn al-Mukafa would not have said this and the citation goes like this. He says, the Persians are masters of politics, civility, rules and protocols. The Greeks have science and philosophy. The Indians have thought, reflection, discernment, and magic. Magic's really important. And the Turks have courage and audacity. Interestingly, the clinching sentence is the Arabs have valour, hospitality, loyalty, heroism, generosity, humor, and eloquence. The Arabs seem to have a lot more virtues than anyone else does. Certain irony when you think that it is supposed to be Ibn al-Mukafa saying this. So there is a sense in which you've got witnesses which place Iran at the center of the pursuit of the sciences and Persians at the center of that and there are others which de-center that to a certain extent. But the main tradition which places Iran at the center afterwards, as I've already mentioned, is very much the Sahrawadi in one. I deliberately don't use the term ishraki or illuminationist tradition because I personally don't think there is such a thing. And we can discuss that later. There is Sahrawadi and maybe one other person who espouses his doctrines. Most other people who are described as ishraki's are not ishraki in any discernible sense because they disagree with Sahrawadi on key issues of metaphysics and other areas of philosophy. So Sahrawadi explicitly invokes the wisdom of the mystic orient. He has, as Dan's mentioned, these invocations to Hurach and other invocations to the celestial bodies as part of a spiritual practice. He has the vegetarianism. He has the following of the sage. Now, one element of making sense of what the Sahrawadi tradition is and the person who's perhaps done the most is the late Henri Corbin. And this morning when I was thinking about it, I thought, actually, what I probably should have presented was, what does Henri Corbin mean by Islam-Iranian? Because that kind of encapsulates in many ways the sorts of intellectual and spiritual practices of the Safavid period in itself. But as Corbin puts it, for him, his understanding of Sahrawadi Islam-Iranian, it's something which is primarily to do with esotericism. It's a deosophy oriental, although I would never use the word theosophy for all sorts of other reasons. It's linked to ancient Persian wisdoms as something which is somehow revealed. It's a way of orientation. And it's the source of certain key notions about the nature of existence, about the comparative qualities or levels or degrees of light and darkness which define different entities in the cosmos. It's a past notions of time and non-time. It's about the confluence of mysticism and philosophy. And it's about things like the confluence of angels and platonic forms. And we do know that, within the philosophical tradition, you have figures like Mullahsadra, who often described as being Isharakis, who explicitly say that some of their key metaphysical ideas, for example, as a notion of the modulation of existence, goes back to ancient Persian wisdoms via Sahuradhi. Although, of course, on many other points, he disagrees with Sahuradhi, including in his glosses on Sahuradhi's wisdom of the oriental wisdom of illumination, depending on how you translate Ishraq. Now, originally what I thought I would do was to talk about how the various texts in the Safavid period refer to Iran and conceptualize Iran. And then I suddenly realized that the word Iran is very rarely mentioned in those texts. So I'll come back to that and one particular text later. But let me say something which is much more consistent with what I do know something about, which is features of philosophy, and particularly philosophy as a way of life and a set of spiritual practices in this period and how that defines the philosophers who come from Shilas and also how that is then carried over into India. One of my more recent interests is how philosophy then travels from Iran to India and how some of those spaces in India are then redefined as being the Shilas and the Esfahan of Hent. Already in the earlier part of the 17th century, you have John Pur, which becomes an important place for the study of philosophy. And we have these famous accounts from the court of Shah Jahan referring to John Pur as Shilas Hent. So in terms of the basic assumptions about what the nature of philosophy is in this period and of how it's linked to a certain ethical living, you have this notion that the intellect defines a human and the intellect is the basic foundation of action. And so therefore inquiring into the nature of truth and reality are to a certain extent psychological motivations for action. It doesn't mean that they didn't necessarily understand that there could be a dissonance between what you know and what you do, but there was a sense in which the life of the intellect somehow defined how it is that you were supposed to comport yourselves. So sound reason was a good to be obtained and to be embraced and of course to be promoted. And within that the thinkers were relatively optimistic about the potential for the human intellect to understand reality. The second element is the notion that the intellect could be perfected and the perfection of the human intellect, the perfecting of the human intellect was very much the goal of philosophy. But this process was not purely about a disembodied set of contemplations, but rather carried with it sets of religious and ritual acts, theergic acts, which I mentioned before as well, which were supposed to then bolster the possibility. So there had to be a coming together of the life of the mind with the spiritual practices of the body, because the body was very much the way in which the activity of the intellect and the spirit was manifest. And the end of this practice was Theosist all, which again Dan mentioned, which becomes the absolute central point. So this is a point on which Mir Dhamad, Mullah Sadr, Sheikh Bahai, various other figures absolutely agree that the whole point of acquiring knowledge, the whole point of perfecting the self, the whole point of undergoing this disciplining of the self and the person is so that one becomes divine. What that meant, of course, was a reference back to Plato in the Temeis and also Thetetus, that the process of doing philosophy, practicing philosophy in order to become divine was a way in which you escape the vicissitudes and the particularities of this world. And you attain to a status, a divine status, whereby you could discern the rational order in the cosmos, so that you could really see where things are placed. It was, in a sense, a pursuit of cosmic justice. Insofar as cosmic justice is an understanding of things in their proper place and not in the way, perhaps, they might present themselves to us. And so alongside that, those practices which are then placed alongside the contemplation are, in a sense, a therapy of the soul with clear salvific soteriological ends, as well, and to, in a sense, to kind of vernacularize it. It was not just the idea that truth will set you free, but also doing the good will also set you free. The obvious problem, perhaps, with this understanding of philosophy, the communal living, the spiritual practice, the following of a sage or master, is that it's deeply elitist. It doesn't necessarily tell us what most people thought. It might also be one the reasons why you get a lot of popular sentiment expressed in poetry and other sources about philosophers as being somewhat aloof, difficult people and know that they probably were, unless they were dispersing patronage as they should do as members of the elite. And increasingly, we know much more about those circles, the madrasas, and other places where philosophy was practiced and what sort of things they might have done. But there's still a lot which we need to make sense of. Now I'm going to skip the stuff on theology, because I think Dan's pretty much done it. Let me just mention a few examples of how it is that this notion of philosophy as a way of life and a sort of spiritual practices in this period is then blended with a very explicit shi affiliation. One example, to give one example, an individual who's been mentioned earlier, Riyasuddin Dashdaki, has a short philosophical work which is known as Dalila al-Huda, in which he talks about the pursuit of philosophy, the desire to understand reality as issuing from the city of knowledge, of course, from Ali. And so a philosophy is not just a prophetic inheritance, but it's also something which is nurtured in, and this phrase comes up in so many texts, nurtured in the niche of prophecy, which is Walaya, the imams, the shi imams themselves. And so the practice of khikmah, the practice of wisdom, of philosophy is not distinct from trying to make sense of what the shi tradition is, what the teachings of the imams are in particular as well. And there are many examples of commentaries, for example, on shi hadith, works of exegesis, which deliberately do this, the mixing together of neoplatonism with the shi tradition to say that there are, in a sense, two paths from a singular truth which are entirely compatible and homologous. There are a number of other thinkers around the same time, the Shamsuddin Khafri, who dies in around 1535, who writes in this light and also brings, in the Safarid period, he's probably the first person who systematically is also incorporating the monizing of ibn Arabi into these schemes as well. And of course, his son and his grandson, the Tud de Hadar, who then add the occult, or the heavy dose of occult and magic into this process. And then they, of course, take it to India. So there's this interesting kind of historical problem of what happens from the time that the Hadar leaves for India and Mullah Sadr, what's going on in Shiraz, which also then begs the question of who is someone like Azar Kaivan studying with and what that means here is because also by this time, we're not entirely sure where Fatullah Shiraz is as well in this particular period in the middle of the 16th century. Another important figure, Amir Dharmad, does a very similar thing. He actually defines his philosophy as the Yemeni philosophy, Hekma-Yamania, and in that it's a very explicit way in which he says that his philosophy is, again, nurtured from the niche of prophecy and is superior to Greek philosophy precisely for that reason. Although, of course, when you look at the actual contents of the philosophy, there's not much explicit citation of, for example, scriptural texts which might explain how this actually happens. It seems to be primarily a rhetorical device to explain why what he's doing is very important. The prophetic inheritance of philosophy is something which was already established well before the Safrid period, but in a number of texts such as Mullah Sardar's Asfard and also his text on the Incipience of the Cosmos, he gives a certain genealogy which is an extremely well-known one. If, of course, if philosophy is a prophetic inheritance, it has to start with the first prophet, who, of course, is Adam. So, if philosophy starts with Adam and from there it goes to Seth and his successor Seth and his successor in this kind of she-sense of being his Wasi and his Wali, and from there it goes to Hermes, who's known in the Arabic tradition as Idris and then it goes to Noah and then from there it is disseminated to the different peoples of the earth. It goes to the Babylonians. It goes to the Persians. It goes to the Indians. Interestingly, it goes to the Romans and the Greeks later. And explicitly he says that philosophy was not ancient in those places, but they needed Abraham to actually, in another count, they needed Solomon to take philosophy to them. And then, of course, the Arabs then brought it home after the Greek interlude. There is, of course, a lot more that could be said about notions of theosis, which I mentioned briefly, why it is that the acquisition of philosophy has to be about this resemblance to the creator, to the acquiring a resemblance to the creator. But let me just park some of those comments on the nature of philosophy to one side and look more specifically at this issue of the histories of philosophy. And in particular to one text, I don't think I'll be able to get to the second text. The second text is an interesting one because it's written in India. It's Maqsud Ali Tabriz's translation of Shahar-e-Zouzi's Nuzhat-e-Larwa, which was written for Akbar, although it was finished after Akbar died, just after he died. And Tabriz is an interesting person. He's described as being a Sufi master who turns up and gains the patronage of Abdu Rahim Khan Khanan. And from there he comes to the attention of Akbar and then later Jahangir. There's also a story that he might at some point have been appointed as a governor of Gujarat. But the people in Gujarat didn't particularly like him. So he never really took up his office. And in that you have a certain presentation of ancient wisdom in which there is particularly entry on Zoroaster, which is interesting. But I don't think I'll have time to discuss that. Let me just discuss another text, which is a later 17th century text by a student of Mir Dhamad, Qutbuddin Ashgivari, who is also known as Sharif el-Ahidji. So for example, there's a Persian, Quranic exegesis attributed to Sharif el-Ahidji which has been published and has been available since the 1950s. And for many years, people had no idea that this was the same guy. This is one of the problems when you have biographical dictionaries mentioning different names and titles for people. It can get quite confusing, especially if people don't really look at the manuscripts. But he clearly is the same person. He's a student of Mir Dhamad. We know that from internal evidence of his texts. So he's originally from Lahijan. Studies in Isfahan. And then he returns to Lahijan where he dies. He seems to have written this particular text, which is known as Mahbub al-Qulub. Towards the end of his life in Lahijan. And the text is remarkably interesting and in literary terms quite a polished work which is in the mixture of Arabic and Persian, which again becomes very much a feature of this period, divided up into three parts. In a sense, it's a history of learning or the history of the world. And also a history of Shiaism because those two are basically the same thing. They're three parts. The first part is on the ancient philosophers starting with Adam and Seth and so forth and including most of the famous Greek philosophers. The second part is on the philosophers and some Sufis of the Islamic period. And the third part, which is the part which has yet to be edited, is a biography of the Shia Imams and of key Shia figures, most of whom are Persians, including the last one, which is on Meir Damat. Now alongside that, he also had an interest in the occult. I'm not primarily interested in occult. We have colleagues who are far more interested in the occult and sometimes I think they kind of overdo their pushback against what they call occultophobia. But he has an interesting text which has been translated, which has been edited called the Latif al-Hesaab, which is a set of ideas around letterism and numerology, which has been published and many other works. Now with respect to the Mahbub, the one particular thing I want to talk about, apart from this historical construction of where philosophy comes, is this entry, which is quite long on Zoroaster. And part of that entry comes straight from Shahrazoori. But what he does in this text is he tries to find all sorts of other sources to understand who Zoroaster is. He has citations from Qutbuddin Shirazi. He has citations, as he calls it, from the Zend Vesta. And he tries to claim that certainly that his portrayal of Zoroaster is an authentic one, which goes back to early sources. And then alongside that, he mixes his portrayal of Zoroaster with Shi'i texts, for example, Hadith on how Zoroaster's teachings on God and on light and darkness are entirely compatible with these sayings of the Shi'i imams. The final section is on messianism and has Zoroaster's teachings on the messianic redeemer of the last days is basically the same as the Shi'i concept of the Mahdi. Now, what is quite clear here is that you're getting the emergence of all the portrayal of Zoroaster as this amalgamated figure, part ancient Persian, part Neoplatonist, and part Shi'i prophet. There's a certain ambiguity about whether he explicitly calls Zoroaster a prophet in the entry because they're two different places where he mentions prophethood. And in one case, he seems to suggest he is. Another case, he doesn't. But this, in many ways, I think, exemplifies the way in which philosophy and philosophers are seen in this period. A mixture of the ancient Iranian, a mixture of the Neoplatonic, and a mixture of the Shi'i, and to basically show how these three are entirely compatible. And that's perhaps where you have a real development in the Safavid period. So whereas before, you could say that there's plenty of evidence of the confluence of the Neoplatonic. And the ancient Iranian and other themes in the pre-Safavid period, the primary addition, in a sense, to the conception and the practice of philosophy in this period, which is exemplified by something like Mahbub al-Qalb, is the addition of the Shi'i element, which, of course, is, in a sense, what you would expect and certainly what you would expect in this late period. And that's, I guess, where I would like to stop, because it's precisely then raising this question of what do we understand by this notion of Shi'ism in this particular period. I, contrary to what a number of other people think, I don't think Shi'ism, as such, is defined by the Safavid period. I think that's a huge exaggeration, which is part of a polemical construction of how modern Iranian and modern other types of identities work out in the region. But in philosophical terms, you could say that it's really in the Safavid period where this very intimate link between philosophy and Shi'ism is made. So much so that nowadays, if you ask most people about the reception of Islamic philosophy, they always think of it as being something Shi'i or something which is associated with Safavid Iran. So if I say to people I work on later Islamic philosophy, they'll say to me, oh, you work on Shi'i philosophy. I kind of have to say, I don't think it's the same thing and I don't really know what Shi'i philosophy means. But that association is one which becomes very strong and there's plenty of evidence internal which suggests it. So the question of what Shi'ism is comes back again in there. And I think maybe if you're taking too much time. Thank you. Thank you. I want to say that there was a period of time between Charles's original invitation and my generation of an abstract and the actual writing of the paper. And in case we get cut off and I will move rather quickly in order to make sure that I don't take up too much time, I'm really interested in the idea of the idea of the Safavids. And my argument is that there are approximately three periods in which I think the Safavids have played a particular role in the last X number of years and I'll talk about that. And in the first two, they were colonized abstracted for particular purposes and it's only really been in the last, I think, 10 or so years as epitomized, I think, by some of the papers here today and some of the papers to which I will for another event just up the road a few weeks ago where we've demonstrated they've broken three of that kind of constraint. So that's kind of my argument there. And then I think in the last 10 years in particular, there's too much going on in both sheism and Safavids. So the study of sheism, 12 or sheism in particular in the study of the Safavids, both colonized pretty effectively, I think, up until 2005, 2010. And I think the shackles have been broken. And I'm going to hype a lot of British sorts of things being British that we're doing here, which I think we actually this is being taped much more effectively than those Americans. Now, if I can, again, master the technology, there's going to be a quiz. And the quiz is the best book on the Safavids. Now, this can be your book. Have you written a book on the Safavids? I doubt it will be any things that I've written. But there's a quiz, and it's going to come around slide 6 or 7 or so. So this talk is framed in two ways. One, I had to teach this course on sheism in the United States over the summer. And then a few weeks ago up north by the Institute, there was a paper conference, a three-eighth conference called the Renaissance of, if you can't see it, the Renaissance of Sheik Islam in 15th and 17th century. That is Safavids. And at that period, I said at that time that I gave up the talk, I asked for a show of hands of people who knew about this gathering. One hand went up. So I asked this question of you. Did you know about that gathering? OK, there was an online audience, and a lot of people living online. But I didn't perceive that there was a lot of interchange and said, John and I were kind of remarking about the most it seems that John, because we said, isn't this interesting? There wasn't a lot of cross attendance that's going on here. And I think this is interesting in that respect. Sheism can stand in for art, architecture, language, literature, whatever it is. Despite the efforts of at least four round tables, the first one in Paris and then Charles Goodself, my smaller self and Bert Frogner in Germany as well, we still are kind of separated from each other. And I think you can find this out by simply looking at bibliography and footnotes. And this is going on basically till the present. Leave around and see if people are talking about the Safavids, among the Shia, people who do Shia studies, there's not much and crossways as well. There's not much the other way around either. So we're still sort of operating in a vacuum. And I found that teaching this stuff to undergraduates in the liberal arts education was fascinating, because they didn't know, unlike the British system where you're teaching third or fourth years, where they've decided they're going to do this thing, so they kind of know where Iran was and they'd heard of Muhammad and Prophet and such. In an age today in a liberal arts education, they only knew that Shia and Sunni were killing each other. That's kind of what they grew up. There's a post-2003. That's what there was. That's the environment there. And I would suggest that that is a big problem. But nevertheless, it is the manner, it's the atmosphere, this age of sectarianism in which we're presently operating. I'm going to kind of morph to slides, and then I usually manage to forget my own text, but I wanted to try and keep in this. So I would contend that the Safavids and Shiaism kind of represent something like this, the proverbial blind man and the elephant. There is this kind of thing, but we're all working on our little bits and we really don't kind of talk to each other. And so if you look at that, I love this one down here. An elephant is a fan, a wall, a rope, a tree, a snake, a spear, and that's kind of what Safavids and Shiaism are. We're not talking to each other, and sometimes even within Shia studies, we're not talking to each other as well. We all come up with different kinds of conceptualizations about that. I think at the same time, too, you'll find that undergraduates and I perceive that most of the folks in this audience are not academics, which is interesting. I find that quite interesting. You get comments from students, master students, and I can try and find out where they're coming from, because we're talking to you, but maybe we're not talking to you, or we're talking at you and not with you. We're not having that kind of a conversation. So this is where I kind of think we are. But of course, this is the age of a lot of other kinds of challenges. So we have a 24-year-old daughter who has six windows. I'd like to say she has six windows open at any one time. Everything's online. And she's got, I hope I've had this in the right sequence, but I may not. There we go. She's got the internet with which to compete. You can see I don't have a subscription to either of these, so I represent some sort of purity. So there's these kinds of social kinds of things, too. And also, I think you will find that academics certainly would realize that students are reading less an awful lot. In my undergraduate example, as I read War and Peace for College in a week. And now, of course, you probably wouldn't read at all. So we all, not just students, but all of us have a lot of competing attention with which we're struggling. And here are we academics trying to make some sort of an impact. And that gets into this notion of the American versus the British Academy. And I think there's some interesting differences between this. One is this notion of interaction with the public. What are you paying your money for? If we can't talk to you somehow and move you from one place to another, then we've got to reformulate these kinds of things and look at these kinds of things in a different kind of a way. So the way I do this, and again, this is kind of a teaching-based discussion because it's based on the kinds of questions and perceptions I get from my own students, whether in the United States or here, what I try to say is, look what we're trying to do with the goal of academics is to come up with a new and original contribution to the field. That's what a PhD or to some extent a master's dissertation is. And it bespeaks a reference to something called and the conventional, what everybody says. And the priority then is to be looking at that kind of a discussion as the notion of making a contribution to the field. So it's not necessarily adding tons of new information that's useful. But what do we make of that information in order to push the field forward? That's kind of my teaching discussion here at the master's level, at the fourth year honors level, but especially at the PhD level at all. So we had this book. Everybody's got this book. OK, you've got this image of it. And you get air miles. OK, come see me later with your bank account details and such. And, well, transfer the air miles if you get this book. It actually I've been referred to very briefly in passing. And this is it. This is Sholey Quinn's book. OK, historical writing during the reign of Shah, a boss. I actually read it over on Christmas holidays one time when it originally came out. So year 2000, I think. Is that right, Charles? It's about the year 2000. Fascinating book from a variety of different kinds of reasons. The most important reason of which is, in my view, the way it struck me then and still strikes me today, is what she tried to do in the latter part of the book was look at the same incident. OK, the fall from power and death of Kizilbash officer Yakub Khan in the Shah, a boss period, from the viewpoint of several different chronicles. And long behold, she found out they all thought about it in a very different way. And her answer to this was, let's look at the background, the agenda of each one of these writers, and think about why it is. I mean, part of her argument is, we'll never know what happened about Yakub Khan. We want to ask a different kind of a question. Let's ask a question about how they got there, the why of it. Why are they emphasizing certain things or ignoring certain things in particular? And this gets, again, back to this notion of ways of looking at things. And in fact, her writers, and there's Yakub Khan, trying to figure out what the heck happened. And she's saying, let's step back and look at that and figure out what the agenda is there. There's some more material in this genre. A woman called Sonia Brentes edited a volume of the journal Bertam on the History of 2009. And then she has this collection of articles from 2010. And she's talking about travel logs. So we have a lot of, we have court chronicles. And then we move to travel logs, saying kinds of important sources for what is it going on in this period. And Sonia, there's a juicy quote from Page 80 of that particular bond. It's never sufficient to measure the trustworthiness of the narrative by scrutinizing the facts. It's the take. There's a point to be made. And you really want to tuck into that. And you may not always be able to answer the question with which you commence. You may have to shift your question. And you have to shift it than what Sholay is talking about. And here also, what Sonia is talking about, based on what you can say. And sometimes you can't do that. There were a number of papers. Edmund was here earlier that he and Willem put together from the conference in 2002. You can't see that. This was here in this room, 2002. Finally came out in 2012. And if you want to look in that same genre, you can look in papers in there by McCabe, although Sonia again has a paper there. How do we know what we know and don't we need to in effect be careful? And I would argue that we take it to the next step and we need to be careful of ourselves. So we're asking the question as well. Just as the court chronicler or the traveler in a sense, we ourselves, in the way we, in the questions which we ask and the way in which we approach them, then have our own kind of part in this process. And so therefore, when I talk to students about this, the way I answer this problem is I teach the history of the field. So they can know where they are at any given moment or at least think about that and then understand what they might conceptualize as being what is new and original as a contribution to the field. Know where you're at. There's a bazaar of ideas there. Insert yourself at a point and know where you're kind of figuring to the larger narrative. And as part of this then, I talk about the colonization or the abstraction of Safavid studies from its earliest years in the last century on up until, I think about 2010. And against that context then, I like to talk to them about three important dates. One is pre-78, 79. Here's a picture from the, that's the picture I found in the revolution, the one that's always stuck in my mind in the early, early days, the flower being handwritten to the soldier. There's the collapse of the wall and there's 9-11. These are the kinds of things which some of the students, 9-11 at least, have been brought at the wall. What was that? The Cold War? What was that? They have no idea what that is. Bridge of spies not withstanding. They don't get that mentality whatsoever. So I'd like to suggest quickly that prior to 1979, there was a certain take on both sheism and Safavids. And my argument is that at 79, there was a moment where we could have realized where some of these issues were coming from, taken in a different direction, but we didn't. We went in terms of historiography, we kind of went back. So you had two groups of scholars looking at sheism, the classicists who did up to the south of the period, mainly dealt in Arabic, and the modernists who did the 16th century after, who mainly did Persian. And they mainly didn't speak to each other. They mainly kind of did things here and did things there. No kinds of roundtables or anything like that marked that period to my knowledge. So there wasn't recognition that there maybe even was a problem for which a possible roundtable was a potential solution. The classicists were Madeline, who's still around, Elias, who's not. It's on Colbert, who will be in town at the Ismaili Institute. I understand on Monday, which I'm going to sadly miss. Corbett has been mentioned. And that formulation of that idea that there was an affinity between sinism and sheism. An affinity, an association. They asked the same kinds of questions we're interested in the same kinds of things. And there's Corbett and there's Mass. The modernists did mainly, post, did mainly Persian. Lantern, Binder, the famous Kedi Algar debate. But both sets of scholars, I think, that is the classicists and the modernists all agreed that sheism, that is to say religion was going to go away anyway. So you didn't really need to pay much attention to it. I was going to follow this mythological understanding of the way religion went in the West and kind of become disappeared. Nobody pays any attention to it whatsoever. And modernization then would do that. Everybody would have lots of sliced bread or many different kinds of toothpaste and French fries and hamburgers.  And there was a certain anti-nationalist dimension to that when I got to Scotland where I saw because the Scots of course are interested in these kinds of nationalists and non-nationalists and anti-nationalists sorts of things. And here again, if you want to look at the basic text provided that period, here's Brown's literary history of Persia, originally 1924 but republished in 53 and of course Lockhart's 1958, the fall of the Safavid dynasty or dynasty and epitomized, I think by Roger Savry's work in 1980 where you can see that really very little progress has taken place. The Brown narrative and the Savry narrative are not really that different. Now of course all this is taking place in the Iranian states, Middle Eastern studies in general, against the background of the Cold War and modernization theory. And modernization theory is epitomized by works such as Daniel Ler, Walt Rostel, Manfred Halbert and such published in 1963 for the Rand Corporation of Big Tank in California. We're looking at countering the Soviet polemic. And so they came up with this notion of stages of economic growth for which any society would want to go in order not to be Soviet. And with Halbert and others, they were looking at a sense of a strong secular figure, a strong leader. Usually an army officer of some sort, most often trained in the West who would be that vehicle for the anti-Soviet pro-capitalist, pro-Western sort of development. In Iranian studies this was epitomized, I think in the modern period anyway, such scholars as Colin, Peter, Avery and even Fred Halliday, who of course famously missed homemade. And I'd love to quote to my students, I could quote out and put it on the board of the famous passage, oh don't pay any attention to religion, never mind, it's not serious. And this is 78, 79. He later came to Edinburgh, I'm kind of explaining why he'd do that, which I'd be happy to talk to somebody else about later. But it was an interesting agenda. He had his agenda. He had his reasons for why he asked what he asked and the answer is that he'd gone. So you end up with this epitomization in 1980. That's Shah of Oslo first and that's Muhammad Reza Shah, both modernizers. They liked the Europeans, well we'd like to be liked, but concerning now myself, is it European? Modernizers, sponsored philosophy, did all these kinds of things and didn't really get along with religion. Religion was kind of in its place. And so there was this equation either overtly or covertly or implicitly that these two individuals were kind of the same. Now there were other ideas at the time. Al-Ghar of course had his ideas there and again in the debate between Al-Ghar and Niki Kedi who was on my PhD committee. And then Afave comes along in 1980 and he talks about debates that are going on in the aftermath of the death of Borno Jurdi which should have been in the books that were being written about Iran in the 1960s. All the people who were part of, many of the people who participated in those debates in those years turned up in the cabinet post-79. And yet we didn't know of the audience on who they were, but we didn't know who they were. And lastly, which you can't see, I was on the PhD committee in 1997 of a guy called Michael Patrick Donovan related to the Donovan, while Bill Donovan, who was of course the founder of the OSS, which was the CIA. And Donovan said of this material on which he was looking, the national security stuff, he said, you know, the American security services knew that the Shah was becoming increasingly unpopular. They didn't have to figure out where it was headed. But they said, this is a pyramid. We're getting to the top of it. This is not gonna last very much. He passed PhD 5 and doesn't seem to have done anything that he's told anybody about. I don't know what he could possibly be doing now and maybe I'm not allowed to comment on it anyway. But the 70s also in the Middle Eastern studies was a period of time when a lot of self-questioning going on in the United States and particularly UCLA when I was doing my PhDs too. We don't think of Orientalism in 1978. Of course Edward Said was not in Middle Eastern studies. He was a professor of comparative literature. Wasn't he? At Columbia University. Pro-Gal is coming out. This is a long time, finally it gets translated. As long as it's in English, it's okay. Americans don't do French and you know other strange languages. So that comes out in 72, 73. Sameer Amin talking about underdevelopment theory. Again came out in French, his article originally in 74. And again a whole discussion of the influence of politics in Middle Eastern studies in 1970s. Merup reports issue number 35. I don't think it was in any way. In 73 it comes out in 75. We're asking ourselves, PhD students asking themselves what are we doing here? What's the implications of this modernization theory? And how can we look at other disciplines to begin to talk about where we should go at this point. Let me see if I'm getting on the right, all right. And at the same time, however, again the notion is that around the same time. So, Safer is finishing up 78, 79. Right in those years I expect, no problem here. In fact, here's my favorite page from Lawrence Lockhart, 1970, where Lockhart talks about Alamea Magnessy, Mohamed Abokair as a rigid and fanatical, sorry, extremely bigoted, much to head to fanatical foreigners. I teach my students this page. Cause I say, wow, that's a really big statement to make. Let's have a really good footnote. There's no footnote at all, you can see it. Well, he's fanatical son, Mohamed Abokair talked about dad. And oh yeah, see this little essay by Abokair Magnessy. That proves the point. It's not to say this was bad scholarship, it was the sense of, this is what's accepted. This was a narrative in 58 and it's still hanging on there in 1980. So 1960 to 1980 is 20 years, plus two is 22 years. Really no change in the field on such a figure as Magnessy. What about post-79? I'll go through this very quickly. Again, in immediate aftermath, my argument is the two groups of scholars were there, but there was no significant change. Middle Eastern studies not to say, Iranian studies were the precipice of making a, gosh, we got this all wrong in 1970, no. We had no idea what we were talking about. And what happens? You have that moment and then they step back. Modernists and classicists, they repeat the whole thing. So you get this notion then, especially in the immediate aftermath of the classicists parrying on this kind of way. Shiism is esoteric, that has political implications because real Shiism as esoteric, then what's going on there now is not real Shiism. If real Shiism is esoteric, Sufi saw, then what's going on in Iran has to be known as not genuine Shiism. You had some other classicists, again, Norman Calder, Dressor Madeline again, Hossein Mouradarisi, Kevin Stewart, Sajafina and Colbert, again doing this kind of thing, but again staying mainly in the background in that sense. Modernists, the standard ones, I think the most famous, is Saeed Arjanman, Shadow of God, which basically took Corvana and Nasser's notion and put it up in lights. This is it. This proves that you need to look at it in this way. Real Shiism is not what we have now. This is not the real thing. And you get a series of discussions about this as well, in those works as well. And again, here's the standard books. Here's Arjanman's book in 84. Again, Divine God in the DVD, 1992, but doesn't really hit the market, goes to the paper I've been on before. And there's Moja Momen, who encapsulates a lot of that traditional narrative, but does put out an interesting delimit, because in effect he argues that while it is true that most Iranians are Shi'a, hope I get this part right, most Shi'a are not Iranians. Momen said that in 1985. It's a big book, you've got to weigh through it, but that's what he says. So in effect what he's saying is, if you want to look at Shi'ism, you've got to look at something else, other kinds of things going on, because Iranian Shi'ism is Iranian Shi'ism. It's contextual, things are going on in Iran with Shi'ism that are particularly true Iran, which don't necessarily translate elsewhere. What about the modernist response on Shi'ism? Begins to go interesting places, taking up that kind of theme for a moment. I could list a whole bunch of other ones, but these are the ones that strike me as being quite interesting. Itzi Nakash, who was at Brandeis for a number of years, wrote this book on the Shi'is of Iraq, and basically said, but Shi'ism in Iraq is a kind of new thing, really, the last century, so it's like a niche. I can tell you how that's true, the Shi'ism that we took hold of got legs really in the early part of the year. Fouad Jammar talked about the Shi'a in the Iraq as being of different classes, different persuasions, tribes. That's okay, whatever they are, okay, the Marsh Arabs, different classes, some Shi'a affiliation with the Communist Party, because they saw that as a way to get going, and of course the Shi'a of Lebanon as well. You also had some interesting work being done by other, what I call other modernists, and here's a couple of the standard names, of Laura Dieb's book in particular, which is quite interesting, looking at Asharam Haram, ceremonies from the viewpoints of what's going on in Lebanon. And then you have the anthropologists. You don't need to know these names or anything, I guess the slides will all go up. Boy, there's a whole lot of interesting anthropological stuff following on from Momen's idea that while it's true that most Iranians are Shi'a, most Shi'a are not Iranians. And let's look at practices and such. Across the Shi'i world, and talk about them as having importance too. They have their own dynamics, their own contextualization. Same notion of Bahram, but vastly different celebration ways, again based on local context. You can't see all of those, I apologize, but anyway, there's a good listing of them there. Let me make sure I finish up.  This is my Latin American phase, and you're talking about interactions between Catholics and Shi'a, for example. Christian-Muslim dialogue, if you will, on the back of the President Khatami's dialogue of civilizations. Mahoney, all in response really to Huntington's kind of throwback to this notion that there's something fundamental between Islam and the West, if not Christianity. But by and large, for the Safavids, the old paradigms sort of shelled. And the way you can test that is to see if on general works about the Safavids, that same paradigm held in just two kinds of examples, Storesons, 2010 work, and Stephen Dale, Stephen Dale is really a mogul of this, if this is a term writing in 2009, but doing a chapter on the Safavids, and basically replays the kind of savory, brown, lockhart sort of memory paradigm. So what you have then around 2010 is you have this. Shah Abbas, the first, is Mohamed Reza-Pathavi, and Barker-Mexus, he is coming. That's the kind of implicit, if not explicit, paradigm. When religion gets out of the box, you have trouble. Things begin to happen, and that's kind of the Safavid period narrative. Now, what about since then? Since then, I think things have began to take off in a really very big way in the field of Shi'i studies, and I think, again, Safavid studies as well. So Shi'i studies since 2010-ish. Three major journals, this is a new one, somebody sent me a note about this, so I posted something about that. This is here, out of the Islamic College, and this is out of Princeton, from Brill, but it's basically being run by Sabina Shrikha and Hassan Ansari. So you have three big journals, I think. You have, and here goes my self-play for the others in the field, lots of interesting going down in Shi'i studies and a place called Exeter, which I think is in England. Is that right? We're living in Scotland, you know, we're not too sure about coming down here. I only have a three-day visa, so we have to get an early train back. Birmingham, some recent hires, talking about contemporary Shi'ism. Shi'ism in Europe, Shi'ism in the diaspora, as it will, both in the UK and in Europe as well. And then some place up in Scotland, there's some people who are wandering around doing stuff there as well. You also have a lot of Shi'i research and teaching NGOs across the world, but I'm just gonna highlight these. The Islamic Studies Center for Islamic Sheet Studies, Muhammadi Trust, Center for Academic Affairs, all these people are running conferences, sponsoring translations of books. There's a huge amount of material in that, out in English, that wasn't around. My date was only Ian Howard's translation of Shaykh Mu'fiq, it's out in a shop. Now you need like that much of a bookshelf to be able to hold on to this material. And conferences and goings-on, and again I refer back to the, it's the history of my studies, one from a couple weeks ago, just up in their new building up there, talking about what was going on there. And there is this conference, and again, if you're interested in Shi'ism, then you want to have taken some notice of that. If they were interested in some of it, they would want to have taken some notice of that, and they didn't. They kind of went past each other, despite all these efforts and such. And why a contention is, it's actually harder now to track the stuff because there's so much more of it. There was an illusion that Rudy made, I think, to this interested Persian and Iran and such like that. And of course, this is a very interesting discussion that's going on today, the nature of impact, and the understanding of Persian and Iran. And here's Davos Shi' 2011 book, Religion, sorry, Shi'ism, Religion and Protest versus John MacCugo. Looking at the sectarianism, I think kind of adhering to it in MacCugo, not himself an academic, and this is where I think we academics have not been successful in reaching out to people and saying, hey, these paradigms don't work. We have failed. And that's why an impact is interesting. So it takes a lot of academics, I think, to kind of make this point here, that actually there isn't this, as Obama himself said, a primordial thing between Xi'an and Sunim and the President of the United States says it, it must be true. It couldn't be fake news or anything like that. And Obama, in particular, himself making this speech in the State of the Union address, then I think there was a big problem, credibility given to that. But again, going back to the point about Persian versus Iran, Linda Walbridge, John Walbridge's husband, and again, a chap called Resil, a woman who would not meet, but I'd really like to meet him, talking about this sense, especially in the West, of how there's this unease with religion. And now you have a lot of money and pretty good in the United States. Again, we talked about these things in the 70s. We don't talk so much about them now. But in the United States in the last, what, five, 10 years ago, there's a massive interest in Akhameyans and Sasanians. At the undergraduate level, not so much. This is part of an argument. It's part of a discourse, part of a dialogue. It's no different to what was going on when I studied Arabic and Persian at UCLA from Uncle Sugar. No different. It's part of a discussion. I've got two more slides to go and then I'm out of here. Three, I think it is actually. Talking about progress today, again, I'm talking about trade. Talking about Figueroa's recent discussion, this came out. This is the Spanish ambassador to Shalboss in 2017. Where in, I think, again, you want to go back to look at Brentier's and you want to go back and look at Quinn, Nile, whose work show up in the very long index. A labor of love for that thing to come on. But again, a sense of we're going to take this at face value, where maybe I think you need to be an awful lot more careful. Then, especially because Charles is here, I want to thank the British Institute of Persian Studies for funding my subalterns conference, which is available online, that you can access via my Sheet News website, where you're kind of inverting the whole pyramid, getting away from the written text and looking at the bottom up. Because that's what I think the chattering classes have missed. We're not looking at the bottom up. This is what I find, Alex, take your surgery. You're actually looking at this and interrogating real people. What did they really think? And there's a sense that possibly here in the UK or in Europe, in the United States, if the chattering classes have been more engaged with that, we might not have had the kinds of surprises we've had in the last five years. And again, this is part of an idea to try and do the same thing for the Safavids. Varenche was there, Cullen was there, so it was a really good conference. Then I want to highlight the work of Antonin Zalli. This whole notion of the fixation with Mohamed Balker of Madzela City. Actually, I can say that at this, this is my early studies conference, I was mentioning this to Satjad in my corroborate. Somebody came out of Seniors' Dollar, you can see the paper tonight, and I said, you know, I said to him, he was working in the Harlem War, and I said, you know, would you agree with me that Madzela City wasn't such a bad guy? And he said, yeah, Madzela City wasn't such a bad guy. If you want to look at the person who's anti-Sufi and anti-Shi'i in particular, you really want to look at Ta here, call me. He's the guy who really railed, and ranted, and raved about philosophy, and Suf's not Balker of Madzela City. This is an edition of the text, and this is Atta's book, and bang. So in both senses, I think we're still kind of looking at Shi'ism and Sufism like this, but post-2010, we've broken free from those kinds of agendas. And again, the junior scholars here who are really, really well represented at this gathering, and also the junior scholars and Shi'ism who are really well represented at the Ismaili Studies gathering are showing that that's the case. They're free of this kind of notion of these older paradigms, I think. And again, finally, I conclude, I'm looking forward very much to the next one, because while I think the Safavids have been extremely good to me, so much so that there's gonna be another one of the Ismaili gathering, I think really the challenge is gonna become for the 18th century. How are we gonna come and look at this? And here's Michael Axworthy's book, following up on the conference that was held with Exeter not so many years ago, beginning to say, look, this is gonna be interesting, and that one I will most definitely come to, because I'd like to know kind of what's going on there. And that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm going to talk about the so-called Farangassozi paintings, which literally means making the European manner. And these paintings are one of, probably, the remarkable outcomes of Euro-Safavid Mercantile and diplomatic exchanges. This new variant in Persian painting first appears under the reign of Shah Abbas II, who reigned between 1642 and 1666, but establishes itself under Shah Suleiman, who reigned between 1666 and 1904. The topics of these paintings adopt a wide array of subject matter, ranging from traditional and Iranian sense, including portraits of kings and nobles, to European portraits and landscapes, biblical or mythological sense. Farangassozi paintings denote a syncretic style that blends Safavid artistic traditions with European pictorial techniques, such as watercolor or au pointillie, and with European iconographic adaptations. The examples of the famous Dutch prints and French engravings, such as five scents or four seasons, are especially visible in the works of Ali Holi Jabadar and Muhammad Zaman, both active in the second half of the 17th century. However, we know little about the circulation of European objects in this farang's artistic milieu, and even less about the artistic interactions between the Persian and European artists. We may suppose, though, that these images reach Iran by way of European missionaries, ambassadors, merchants, artists, or simple travelers. The paintings associated with Farangassozi style are often annotated with repetitive formal egg notes, which do indicate the date and name of artists, and sometimes the honorific title of patrons. These clues suggest that the paintings were mainly made for or under the patronage of a member of the royal court, household, or a king himself. European sources report the presence of various European items in the royal treasury or in the novel houses. Shardan, for instance, gives a vivid image of different Western treasures, is one of the sections of Khazane, or the royal treasury, where the stores were filled with gold chains, precious boxes, bracelets, and other kinds of jewelry, weapons, mirror, cloths, et cetera. Surprisingly, however, there is almost no reference to these artworks and gifts in Persian contemporary chronicles. A rare Iranian record by Khatun Abadi, around 1683, evokes that the king of Farang, that we do not know if it's France or England, sending to Shasuleiman six books with exotic and strange images, or Ajib al-Qadi. However, these European objects received by the royal court. Iranian chronicles discuss this object in broad terms, probably due to their general opinion of Europeans. Indeed, Safavid historic sources gave almost no importance to the Farangies, as Rudy just told it. And I just repeat what Suzan Wabai reiterates, that until late in the 17th century, when some substantive written commentaries on Christians appear in Soviet sources, Europeans feature rarely, often in passing and invariably with little or no commentary on the specifics of their character or social conduct. Concerning European arts, we may only perceive repetitive formulae, ADMs, such as Ahmad Sheyfarangi or Western text size, among other variety diplomatic gifts from the Indian, Ottoman, and European envoys. Following the rituals of Safavid king's receptions, European texts provide detailed accounts of the ceremonies in which the offerings were presented to the court and king. Raphael Dumont, for instance, mentions in his Etadolapère written in 1660, that the court is not so much concerned about the diplomatic business as with the gifts, which are led before the king, one after the other. He describes a long line of officers, day to day like messenger horses, each holding his item displayed on plain wood for more radiance. Kemfer, visiting in Iran in 1684, also confirms that the presents brought by the envoys were shown in a long line. A chief of Yassavos or the attendants or vanguards sought to eat at the porters, walked slowly and very station at the interest of the hall so that the king might look at the presents. Kemfer continues by remarking that, I quote, as the viewing took place at a distance of 70 paces, it could only be superficial, but I don't add the king who very much appreciates presents will have inspected them thoroughly later. In effect, Kemfer recalls that in Prince of the Ambassadors, the king indiscriminately dignified everything that was brought to him from afar with a friendly face. When they had been dismissed after the banquet, he examined with the greatest attention. After having rejected the rest, the really well-constructed things that he praised, but he set aside only those that were of gold or of precious metal and kept this himself. Rafael Juma also mentions this by describing how, in the court, the best accepted presents were silver coins, jewels, and pearls since the Iranians considered other materials as trubecaton or linen wood. The machines demonstrating a high mechanical quality were, according to Kemfer, sent to Qal'e, or Castle of Tabarak. I believe that this castle, as well as other parts of the royal treasury, might b