Iran After the Mongols

Sussan Babaie, Sussan Babaie

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786725974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia islamica

Following the devastating Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, the domination of the Abbasids declined leading to successor polities, chiefly among them the Ilkhanate in Greater Iran, Iraq and the Caucasus. Iranian cultural identities were reinstated within the lands that make up today's Iran, including the area of greater Khorasan. The Persian language gained unprecedented currency over Arabic and new buildings and manuscripts were produced for princely patrons with aspirations to don the Iranian crown of kingship. This new volume in "The Idea of Iran" series follows the complexities surrounding the cultural reinvention of Iran after the Mongol invasions, but the book is unique capturing not only the effects of Mongol rule but also the period following the collapse of Mongol-based Ilkhanid rule. By the mid-1330s the Ilkhanate in Iran was succeeded by alternative models of authority and local Iranian dynasties. This led to the proliferation of diverse and competing cultural, religious and political practices but so far scholarship has neglected to produce an analysis of this multifaceted history in any depth. Iran After the Mongols offers new and cutting-edge perspectives on what happened. Analysing the fourteenth century in its own right, Sussan Babaie and her fellow contributors capture the cultural complexity of an era that produced some of the most luminous masterpieces in Persian literature and the most significant new building work in Tabriz, Yazd, Herat and Shiraz. Featuring contributions by leading scholars, this is a wide-ranging treatment of an under-researched period and the volume will be essential reading for scholars of Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern History.

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A Glimpse into the Unique Manuscript, the Safineh from Tabriz^*

Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

(Leiden University)

Scholarly activities flourished in the Persianate cultural area in the Ilkhanid period, accompanied by advances in the arts of book production and the illustrated manuscript. One lucid example is a unique miscellaneous manuscript, the Safineh, consisting in its present form of 209 titles. The manuscript contains 367 folios (734 pages in the facsimile edition), and is preserved under number 14590 in the library of the Majles-e Showrā-ye Eslāmi in Tehran. Most of the texts were copied between 1321 and 1323. Three treatises were copied at a later date (1323, 1324 and 1335).¹ The miscellany contains a wide range of themes including ethics, mysticism, jurisprudence, scholastic theology (kalām), exegetics, history, lexicography, grammar, literary criticism, philosophy, literary texts in prose and verse, ‘religions and sects’ (milal va’l-nihal), astronomy and astrology, geomancy, mineralogy, mathematics, medicine, epistles and testaments, administrative texts, complete collections of poetry (divāns), music, cosmography and geography, and lectures by the copyist’s teachers.²

While this is only one of the many surviving examples of cultural production in this period, the manuscript is noteworthy for both its scope and the picture it offers of how a cultured individual would collect texts for his own use. Moreover, part of the material collected in this manuscript is the copyist’s personal notes, which contain invaluable information about his time, his teachers and the city of Tabriz – the cultural centre of the Ilkhanids. It is very rare to have such a manuscript copied by a single person.

What makes the Safineh miscellany unique is that it was probably compiled for personal use, showing the taste of the compiler and his own personal canon of learning. The compiler’s full name is Abu ‘l-Majd Mohammad ibn Sadr al-Din Abi ‘l-Fath Mas ‘ud ibn Mozaffar ibn Abu ‘l-Ma ‘āli Mohammad ibn ‘Abd al-Majid Tabrizi Malekāni Qorashi. Although biographical information is scanty, the miscellany offers us valuable data about his family and their scholarly activities.³ Several members of his family were men of letters. His father, Malek Mas’ud ibn Mozaffar (d. 1343), was a clerk in the Ilkhanid administration, and also composed poetry. Abu ‘l-Majd cites several specimens of his poetry in the Safineh (pp. 593–612). His uncle Malek Mahmud ibn Mozaffar (d. 1296) was also a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The idea of Iran
• Concepts of government and state formation in Mongol Iran
• Beyond history: Rashid Al-Din and Iranian kingship
• A glimpse into the unique manuscript, the Safineh from Tabriz
• Images of Iranian kingship on secular Ilkhanid tiles
• Applying a diachronic perspective in reconstructing precedents for the illustrations in the Great Mongol Shahnameh
• The mausoleum of Oljeitu and the citadel of Sulṭaniyya
• The Marāgheh School and its impact on post‐Mongol science in the
• The Iranian interlude: From Mongol decline to Timur’s invasion
• Sufism in late Mongol and early Timurid Persia, from ‘Ala’ al-Dawla Simnānī (d. 736/1326) to Shāh Qāsim Anvār (d. 837/1434)
• Architecture in the interregnum: The Mozaffarid, Jalayerid and Kartid contributions
• Persian narrative poetry in the eighth/fourteenth to early ninth/fifteenth centuries and the legacy of Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh
• Bibliography
• eCopyright