Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal History

Сборник статей по актуальным проблемам историографии и источниковедения средневекового Востока посвящен памяти выдающегося историка-востоковеда, Героя Советского Союза, академика
З.М. Буниятова (1923-1997), который внес весомый вклад в развитие советской и азербайджанской медиевистики. В сборнике принимают участие ученые из Азербайджана, России (Москвы, Дагестана), Грузии, Таджикистана, а также Канады и США.

Book Description The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501-1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.

Paintings titles: Folio 1 recto Shamsa, the opening folio of the manuscript includes a shamsa (sunburst), the symbol of the divine and the emperor signifying the kingly sovereignty and the divine mandate of heaven to rule. The shamsa includes the title of the manuscript, followed by folios of invocations, a sarlawh (folio 1 verso), and Qasvini's explanation on the format of the manuscript. Folio 27 verso, royal enthronement of hazrat-i jinat makan Jahangir Padshah and distribution of the gift of pearls to hazrat-i Shah Jahan which indicates the reign of Shah Jahan's father Jahangir Padshah. Hazrat translated as majesty and jenat makan as destined in heaven. Folio 33 verso: likeness of the hunt and stabbing the lion by hazrat-i sahib qaran-i sani Shah Jahan the warrior. Sahib qaran is the title used for kings beginning the Timurid rules of Persia. It has been used as a title for rulers with thirty or more years of rule or the rulers whose horoscope at birth coincided with times of happy fortunes. Thus, Sahib qaran meaning is similar to French Lamaitre de lafortune. Sahib qaran al-avval, the first, was considered to be Timur (Tamerlane) and Sahib qaran al-sani, the second, was the title of Shah Jahan, since the Mughals proudly traced their origin to Tamerlane; Shah Jahan was juxtaposed with Tamerlane. Folio 42 recto: likeness of hazrat-jinat makan Jahangir Padshah and presentation of Alam-makan the elephant of Rana Amar Singh. Elephant in Mughal court was considered the great beast that signified the splendor of the kingdom, thus, elephants defined the royal family's self-image and their presentations in royal memoirs indicate their importance as the symbol of power and royalty. The elephants also were given names like 'Placed in the Worldly Abode' or 'Mountain of Gold' etc. by the masters.

Birkenholz, F. (2017). Merchant-Kings and Lords of the World: Diplomatic Gift-Exchange between the Dutch East India Company and the Safavid and Mughal Empires in the Seventeenth Century. In T. A. Sowerby, & J. Hennings (Eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410-1800 (pp. 219-236). [12] (Routledge Research in Early Modern History). Routledge

One of the difficulties of topics related to Islamic architecture, especially lack of historical documents, architectural maps, and architecture theoretical dissertations. Although many Iranian paintings from this period remain, but little attention to them as historical documents has been and where the integrated, method and system are not suitable. The purpose of this research is to provide a method to use Iranian paintings that are illustrated the Iranian architectural monuments for understanding features of architectural space. Studied paintings are in the Iranian cultural range and between years 617-1000 AH/1220-1591 AD. Methodology of this research is discursive method. This Research first plans discursive framework based on three aspects: cognitive, aesthetic and historical aspect, then analyzes methods of understanding painting and architecture. Capabilities and shortcomings of each method are determined and finally a method is offered to understand the architectural spaces by Iranian paintings. That is based on four stages. The four stages are: 1) formal search; 2) typological and semiotic search; 3) symbological and phenomenological search 4) intuition thinking (wisdom). Refer to the first phase of the three layers of semantic postponed to the fourth stage. In the fourth step, there comes a semantic network. This meaning may confirm each other (convergence), denial (divergence) or they are impossible to time. In the last stage an intuitive semantic network is achieved. This method subsidiary include: historical documents method; monographic method; evolutionary method; conceptual approach; thematic approach; typological method. This research showed that by this method can understand from paintings some functional, formal structure, social - cultural, symbolic and Spiritual meaning of Iranian architectural space. Also, in some cases historical typology of spaces can be achieved approximation.

Giriş XVI. yüzyıl kültür, sanat ve idari açıdan değerlendirildiğinde "Türk Asrı" olarak bilinir. Bunun en önemli nedeni aynı dönemde farklı coğrafyalarda güçlü Türk devletlerinin, yaklaşık olarak dünyanın üçte ikisine hükmediyor olmalarıdır. Osmanlı devletinin kısa sürede fetihlerle çok hızlı bir şekilde Kuzey Afrika, Doğu Akdeniz ve Avrupa'ya kadar genişlettiği sınırları ile cihan imparatorluğuna dönüşmesi, bugünkü İran ve Azerbaycan topraklarında Safevi Devletinin hüküm sürme-si, Semerkant ve Horasan'a hâkim olan Timurlular ve Kuzey Hindistan'da hüküm süren Babürlülerin varlığı "Türk Asrı" tanımını ispatlar niteliktedir. XVI. ve XVII. yüzyıllar; Osmanlı İmparatorluğunun yükseliş dönemiyle, diğer bir deyişle "Klasik Çağı" ile paralel bir gelişme ve yükselme dönemi gösteren Babür İmparatorluğu için önemli yapıların ortaya konulduğu ortak bir zaman dilimini göstermektedir. Çağdaş olan bu iki büyük Türk devleti bulundukları zengin kültürel mirasa sahip coğrafyaları en iyi şekilde değerlendirerek, kendi güçlü mimari geleneklerine de bağlı kalarak özgün mimari eserler ortaya koymayı başarmışlardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı; Osmanlı ve Babürlü mimari ve sanatını mukayese etmek değil, tam aksine her iki büyük Türk devletinin prestij niteliğindeki önemli anıtsal yapılarını ortaya koymak, Türk-İslam sanatına kazandırmış oldukları bu eşsiz eserlerin özelliklerini ve gelişim seyirlerini dikkate alarak tanıtmaktır.  Arş.Gör. Erciyes Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Sanat Tarihi Bölümü.

Question: Discuss the relation between state and religion during the 17th century under the Mughal empire. Answer: The 17th century in the Mughal empire lay witness to three Emperors and the rise of a number of non­Islamic religious traditions all throughout the subcontinent with varying degrees of changes and incorporations into Islam itself. Post Akbar, the rulers had to not only fit themselves into the ideal of a just ruler but also attempt to make their own mark on the Mughal polity and empire. The role of the Ulama came to be questioned with different rulers adopting differing attitudes towards the clergy. We also deal with how much influence did religion as a whole have over the emperor's policies or his personal outlook. Beginning with the reign of Jahangir, we will analyze his policies and debate if he ever attempted to move away from his father's shadow. Then we go on to Shah Jahan's period, a time in which various religious movements like the rise of the Naqshbandi order was taking place and finally, after a tiring war of succession, we will look at the highly controversial figure, Aurangzeb's policies in detail and questioning if he was actually a religious bigot or just a political opportunist. I have also attempted to outline simultaneous happenings during this time period like the rise of the Bhakti movement to try and give a more comprehensive picture of the influence of religion during the seventeenth century. After Akbar, Jahangir takes over the throne and he more or less limits himself to the framework drawn upon by his father. While some scholars have argued that Jahangir was his own man who made his own policies, others have differed from the same viewpoint vehemently. If we compare policies of Jahangir and Akbar, we see sharp similarities in various policies. Lisa Balabanlilar also points out that Jahangir was a stringent follower of Timurid religious ethics, he followed Hedaya (The legal guide), and nurtured the poltical and social alliance with Naqshbandi order of sufis. He, like Akbar, 1 re­affirms his respect for the sun and adopted a title similar to his father, ​ Nur­ud­din Muhammad Jahangir Badshah Ghazi in which​ nur meant light, illumination to follow

This article analyses the changing trends of globalization and modernity that transform the social and individual
perceptions. In postcolonial era, globalization proves to be an impetus that precipitates the tension between tradition and modernity. This article studies the competing forces of tradition and modernity as dramatized in Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2000). The novel is a playful account of past memories revisited and preserved by family lore. It is also an appropriation of those traditional views in the modern scene by the members of new generation. Therefore, the novel becomes a microcosm of traditional versus modern values conceived by the family members of Dard-e-dil family. The novel is an effective display of past Muslim cultural and political glory yet it revisits the current issues of identity,
displacement and immigration. The article situates the story of Dard-e-dils within the theoretical context of globalization
and postcolonialism, and reads the flux and change that the Pakistani fiction reflects as it enters a new realm of changed
national, social and individual perception in the post–partition and postcolonial era.

The divinatory art of geomancy (ʿilm al-raml), Arabic answer to the I Ching, was third in popularity only to astrology and oneiromancy throughout the premodern Islamo-Christianate world, and is still widely practiced today from Iran and Yemen to west Africa and Madagascar. Despite its ubiquity among scholarly and ruling elites, however, the reflexive scholarly elision of occultism from Islamicate intellectual and cultural history means that this science has been very poorly studied beyond its reception by Europe. This holds especially true for the early modern Persianate world: in the wake of the occultist renaissance that swept the Islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, geomancers emerged as influential fixtures at Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman courts, and geomancy, offering detailed knowledge of past, present and future, was widely lionized as a means for controlling history—yet the subject remains almost untouched. And despite its status as a mathematical occult science predicated on a neoplatonic-neopythagorean system and animated by the twin principles of correspondence and secondary causation, its importance to the history of science has likewise only been recognized in its European context. Extending the work of Emilie Savage-Smith, Marion B. Smith and others, I therefore provide the first survey, necessarily tentative, of the development of geomantic theory and practice in the persophone world from the 7th/13th century onward, when Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) inaugurated a specifically Persianate geomantic tradition for the benefit of his Mongol patron Hülegü. With Ṭūsī as precedent, geomancy went on to exercise some of the best minds of the early modern Persianate world as a mainstream occult-scientific tradition, and enjoyed a crescendo of popularity in the 10th/16th century with the approach of the Islamic millennium. After sketching the development of the eastern geomantic tradition, then, I identify the philosophical-scientific reasons for its great vitality and cultural prestige down to the present, with particular attention to authors on geomancy like Luṭf Allāh Nīshāpūrī Samarqandī (fl. 812/1409), Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 942/1535) and Hidāyat Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī (fl. 1001/1593), court geomancer to Emperor Akbar at the turn of the millennium.

This article examines the architectural form and potential functions of two royal buildings: the Sher Mandal and the Guldasta pavilion. An octagonal tower located in the Purana Qilʿa in Delhi, the Sher Mandal was in all likelihood the library (kitāb-khāna) built by the Mughal emperor Humayun (r. 1530-56). Erected during the reign of the Safavid ruler Shah ʿAbbas I (r. 1587-1629), the now-vanished Guldasta pavilion was located south of the palace complex in Isfahan, Iran, and can be studied through drawings and photographs. A close examination of the formal structure of these two buildings reveals that they belong to a distinct type of polygonal pavilion that first emerged in the late fifteenth century in the works of architecture sponsored by the Timurid dynasty (c. 1370-1405). Moreover, this comparative study opens up new venues for investigating the physical setting of the royal kitāb-khāna in Persianate contexts.

Der Großmachtkonflikt zwischen dem Osmanischen Reich und dem safavidischen Iran bestimmte im 16. Jahrhundert weitgehend die Geschicke des Nahen Ostens und teilweise auch des Kaukasus. Dabei wurde die Konfrontation sowohl auf geostrategischer als auch auf ideologisch-konfessioneller Ebene geführt. Unter Ḳânûnî Sulṭân Süleymân unternahmen die Osmanen mehrere Feldzüge gegen die benachbarten Safaviden mit dem Ziel, Teile des Iran ihrem Reich einzugliedern. Dabei setzten die Osmanen auf die Spannungen innerhalb der Stämme der Ḳızılbaş und den Ehrgeiz safavidischer Prinzen. Um die Jahreswende 1546/47 schien es tatsächlich, als ob sich die osmanischen Hoffnungen erfüllen würden, als der Bruder des Schahs, Alḳâs Mîrzâ, sich in Schirwan erhob und nach dem Scheitern seines Aufstands nach Istanbul floh. Im anschließenden Feldzug von 1548/49 misslang jedoch der Versuch, Alḳâs Mîrzâ als Schah von Süleymâns Gnaden zu installieren. Dagegen gelang es Schah Ṭahmasb, durch seine Taktik der verbrannten Erde die Osmanen aus dem Land zu drängen und weite Teile Ostanatoliens zu verwüsten. Der erwartete osmanische Gegenangriff galt dann nicht mehr dem Schah, sondern richtete sich gegen die georgischen Fürsten. Mit der Ausnahme von Van, dessen Verlust allerdings äußerst schmerzlich war, konnten die Safaviden ihre Position im osmanisch-iranischen Grenzraum sogar noch stärken. Grundvoraussetzung dafür war neben dem militärischen Talent Ṭahmâsbs die Tatsache, dass die Stämme der Ḳızılbaş in Iran, die von den anatolischen Anhängern der Safaviden streng zu unterscheiden sind, zusammenhielten. Dieser Zusammenhalt wurde durch das politische Geschick Ṭahmasbs, der die tribalen Dynamiken sehr gut auszunutzen verstand, und die safavidische „Ideologie“ der Verehrung des Schahs als murşid-i kâmil gewährleistet.

“Firangi, Zarbzan, and Rum Dasturi: The Ottomans and the Diffusion of Firearms in Asia,” in Pál Fodor, Nándor E. Kovács and Benedek Péri eds., Şerefe. Studies in Honour of Prof. Géza Dávid on His Seventieth Birthday, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Budapest: Research Center for the Humanities, 89–104.

This course, moving from the 10th to the 19th centuries C.E., will lead you through stylistically representative samples of inshā or Persian art prose by Sufis, Sultans, secretaries, physicians, astronomers, poets and philosophers. Though the term inshā in Arabic and Persian covers prefaces, different kinds of official proclamations and letters, we will focus only on letters because their relatively brief lengths will allow us to discuss each text as a whole within the space of a class or two.
The history of premodern Persian epistolary prose, like that of its Arabic counterpart, is not a developmental one and nor does it reflect geographically divisible tendencies. The sequence of topics in Persian official letters (dīwāniyāt, sultāniyāt) and the kinds of topics they addressed remained roughly constant from the 10th to the 19th centuries as did such external features as seals, paper quality and the coded use of differently coloured inks. Letters written in an unofficial capacity (ikhwāniyāt) were more fluid in their organization and less predictable in their topics but shared with official letters their predilection for rhymed prose and the inclusion of poetry, proverbs, Quranic verses and aḥādīth. What changed from ruler to ruler and sometimes dynasty to dynasty was style at the level of the clauses that made up a sentence, clauses variously incorporating tropes (ṣan‘āī u badā‘ī) originally formulated for the distiches of a qaṣīda or ghazal and cumulatively taxonomized in manuals of Persian tropes from the 11th century onwards. In this sense, the study of Persian epistolography is the study of the shifting relations between prose and verse. We will get at why these shifts occurred when and where they did by reading secondary literature for rhetorical and political contexts.
While I will try and provide glossaries of difficult Persian and Arabic phrases in advance of each class, you will be expected to work with dictionaries and come to each class having read the letter or letters for the week completely. For each week’s letter or letters I will prescribe a secondary reading or two from the second bibliography below, expecting you to come to class having read it. We will spend class time going over the letter or letters to ensure you have understood the text at least at the semantic level, thus opening up the conversation to topics beyond such immediate comprehension.

Undertaking a comparative examination of a particular decorative form in the architecture of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Persianate world, this paper briefly introduces the appearance of Chini-khana in the Timurid era before examining its subsequent use in Safavid and Mughal structures. Originally created by Timurid patrons as a specific building or room to display precious Chinese porcelains, how the Chini-khana underwent parallel evolutions in Safavid and Mughal architecture is examined. While the same, or similar, architectural forms and decorative devices were at times used in different areas of the Persianate World, their evolution of form and function sometimes altered; this was the case for chini-khana. While both the Safavids and Mughals derived their awareness of it from the first Timurid Chini-khanas, each then adopted and/or adapted the original idea for their own purposes.
In the architecture of both is present the continuation of an architectural device from a shared cultural history, but with differences in form, function and aesthetic desires.

Fortress as a tool for the implementation of Ottoman military power was necessary for the upkeep and security of the Ottoman rule in Azerbaijan. Following its capture in 1588, Ganja was among the main towns of Azerbaijan fortified by the Ottomans. The primary aim of the fortification of Ganja was to maintain Ottoman rule in former Safavid beylerbeyi of Qarabagh, in the territories of which Ottomans established the vilâyet-i Gence Karabağ with seven sanjaks (districts). After fortifications, Ganja became one of the major garrison towns on the eastern frontier of the Ottomans. Apart from its military functions, the fortress served as the administrative seat of Ganja-Qarabagh province until it fell into the hands of the Safavids after the siege of 1606. In 1615, Ganja fortress, one of the examples of the late sixteenth century Ottoman military architecture in Azerbaijan, was subjected to destruction by the order of Shah Abbas I. Drawing mainly on primary sources, this article aims to explore the history of Ottoman fortifications of Ganja and examine some little-studied aspects of Ottoman provincial administration of Ganja-Qarabagh province in the late sixteenth century.

The imperial ideologies developed in the post-Mongol Persianate world represent both a break with Islamic precedent and a realization of the millenarian universalism inherent in Islam itself.  Early modern Muslim dynasts—styling themselves saint-philosopher-kings, millennial sovereigns and divine cosmocrators—combined Chinggisid, Persian and Islamic symbols of religiopolitical legitimacy in their quest for world domination, emblematized by Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan and Amir Temür.  During this profoundly messianic era, sultans and saints thus competed for sacral power (walaya); securing access to this power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether by way of sufism, occultism or Alidism, and often eclectic combinations of all three.  The present chapter surveys these new strategies of religiopolitical legitimation pursued between the 14th-17th centuries by the Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Uzbek, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, constituent members of the vast Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans and Anatolia in the west to China and India in the east.

This is the text of a lecture given at a conference on Safavid Isfahan, held at Arrabida in Portugal in July 2007 by the Fundação Oriente. The paper traces the evidence for European influences on the art and fashion of Isfahan in the seventeenth century.

This article explores the fashioning of a new discursive realm of Islamic kingship in thirteenth–fourteenth-century Mongol-ruled Iran (the Ilkhanate). It examines how literati, historians, and theologians ingeniously experimented at the Ilkhanid court with Persian and Islamic concepts and titles to translate and elaborate their Mongol patrons’ claims to govern through a unique affinity with heaven. The fusion of Mongol and Islamic elements formulated a new political vocabulary of auspicious, sacred, cosmic, and messianic rulership that Turco-Mongol Muslim courts, starting in the fifteenth century, extensively appropriated and expanded to construct new models of imperial authority. A comparison with Buddhist and Confucian assimilative approaches to the Mongol heaven-derived kingship points to a reciprocal process. Mongol rulers were not simply poured into preset Muslim and Persian molds; symbols and titles were selectively appropriated and refashioned into potent vessels that could convey a vision of Islamic kingship that addressed Chinggisid expectations. From their desire to collect and assume local religious and political traditions that could support and enhance their own legitimizing claims, the Mongols set in motion a process that led to their own integration into the Perso-Islamic world, and also facilitated the emergence of new political theologies that enabled models of divine kingship to inhabit the Islamic monotheistic world.

Liste simple de noms d'artistes ottomans, iraniens et indiens actifs entre le XVIIe et le XIXe siècle, relevés dans des catalogues de vente. Il manque les artistes iraniens du XVIIIe siècle.
Il s'agit d'un travail en cours, qui pourrait donner lieu à terme à une base de données plus complète. Commentaires bienvenus.
Ce travail est diffusé en licence Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0
http://creativecommons.fr/licences/

В этой статье рассмотрено современное состояние исследований по источниковедению истории государства Сефевидов в Азербайджане. Азербайджанские историки внесли свой вклад в переводе и изучение малоизвестных источников по истории государства Сефевидов. Публикация и введение в оборот ранее малоизвестных способствовало рост интереса к истории Сефевидов и появление нового поколения Сефевидских ученых в Азербайджане.

Summary
Azerbaijani historians have contributed to the critical editions and translations, as well. This article examines the present state of research in studies on Safavid sources in Azerbaijan. It aims to give an overview of the recent tendencies in studies on Safavid sources in Azerbaijan.