Yusuf Ünal

This chapter examines works dedicated to princesses of the Safavid dynasty, finding that the authors and translators of these works regularly portrayed the princesses as religious and temporal authorities, supplementing their being cast—those who were unmarried, in any case—as brides of the Twelfth Imam in other contexts, connecting their own authority with that of the Imam of the Age while also allowing them to maintain an autonomy, being free of obligations to an ordinary husband, that their peers could enjoy. The writers repeatedly styled the princesses as modern incarnations of Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and furthermore granted them titles such as murawwij al-madhhab, “propagator of the sect,” which ordinarily were reserved for the Safavid kings. These perhaps surprising titles and epithets, which cannot be dismissed as frivolous hyperbole, indicate an acceptance of female members of the Safavid dynasty as participants in the divinely sanctioned sovereignty accorded to the Shahs.

Although many studies have explored the dissemination of Sayyid Quṭb’s thought and the impact of his works on the formation of Islamist ideology in the Sunni world, little attention has been paid to the influence of Quṭb on the Islamic revolution in Iran. This article argues that Sayyid Quṭb was an influential figure among the Iranian revolutionaries and his ideas played an instrumental role in shaping the discourse of Islamism in pre-revolutionary Iran and the Islamic Republic. The article starts by exploring the personal and ideological connections between Sayyid Quṭb and pre-revolutionary Iranian Islamists. Next, it examines how these connections led to an extensive translation movement that popularized Quṭb’s ideas in Iran. With this translation movement, all of Quṭb’s major works were rendered into Persian by prominent Islamists of the time, such as Iran’s future supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These works are still in print in the Islamic Republic of Iran today. Finally, the article discusses the legacy of Quṭb in contemporary Iran, where his writings are being reinterpreted in the light of contemporary political developments, such as the rise of Salafi jihadism. Toward this end, a conference on Sayyid Quṭb held in Tehran in 2015 attended by many prominent scholars and intellectuals. This conference is not only a good indicator of Quṭb’s continued importance in Iran but it also provides a view of the changes and continuities in the perception of Quṭb in Iranian intellectual circles.

The Safavid era (1501 -1736) saw the flowering of Shi'i literary culture and intellectual life supported by an ambitious translation movement. This movement resulted in Persian translation of almost all major Shi'i works written in Arabic before the Safavids as well as works from a diverse range of fields in other languages. This effort represented a collective and sustained societal effort, from Shahs to scholars, rather than an individual and ephemeral phenomenon. In this regard, as Iranian scholar Muhammad Riza Husayni has suggested in his short essay published in 2014, this translation movement can be considered analogous to the translation movement of the Abbasid era. Although some research, such as Rula J. Abisaab’s book, Converting Persia (2004) and the short essays of Muhsin Nasirabadi (2001) and Muhammad Riza Husayni (2014), has been published on Persian translations of Shi'ite works, the translations of non-Shi'ite religious, technical, and philosophical works have mostly remained unexplored. This paper will highlight the importance of non-Shi‘ite works among the host of significant works translated into Persian as a part of the Safavid translation movement. These include, Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, al-Shifa by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Tarikh al-Hukama by Ibn al-Qifti, from Arabic, and Badayi‘ al-handasa, a work on geometry from Latin. In addition to these works, the four gospels of the New Testament and linguistic works to instruct Persian for Turkish-speaking peoples were also translated into Persian in Safavid Iran. This paper uses the theoretical framework of translation studies the translators’ own accounts of their work, as well as numerous Persian catalogs, chronicles, and bibliographical works. Moreover, it seeks to discern the inner workings and motivations behind the translations of these sort of works and suggests that pragmatic considerations and religious motivations played important roles in the translation movement.