Isfahan and its palaces : statecraft, Shi'ism and the architecture of conviviality in early modern Iran / Sussan Babaie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Babaie, Sussan.

Series:

Edinburgh studies in Islamic art

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture, Safavid--Iran--Iṣfahān.

Architecture, Safavid.

Iran--Iṣfahān.

Shiites--Iran--Iṣfahān.

Shiites.

Iṣfahān (Iran)--History.

Physical Description:

xvii, 302 pages : illustrations (some color), maps. ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Summary:

This beautifully illustrated history of Safavid Isfahan (1501-1722) explores the architectural and urban forms and networks of socio-cultural action that reflected a distinctly early modern and Perso-Shi'i practice of kingship.

An immense building campaign, initiated in 1590/1, transformed Isfahan from a provincial, medieval and largely Sunni city into an urban-centered representation of the first Imami Shi'i empire in the history of Islam. The historical process of Shi'ification of Safavid Iran, and the deployment of the arts in situating the shifts in the politico-religious agenda of the imperial household, informs Sussan Babaie's study of palatial architecture and urban environments of Isfahan and the earlier capitals of Tabriz and Qazvin.

Babaie argues that, since the Safavid claim presumed the inheritance both of the charisma of the Shi'i Imams and of the aura of royal splendor integral to ancient Persian notions of kingship, a ceremonial regime was gradually devised in which access and proximity to the shah assumed the contours of an institutionalized form of feasting. Talar-palaces, a new typology in Islamic palatial designs, and the urban-spatial articulation of access and proximity are the architectural anchors of this argument. Cast in the comparative light of urban spaces and palace complexes elsewhere and earlier - in the Timurid, Ottoman and Mughal realms as well as in the early modern European capitals - Safavid Isfahan emerges as the epitome of a new architectural-urban paradigm in the early modern age.

Contents:

Safavid Dynastic Chart xv

Timeline of Safavid Capital Cities and Major Structures xvi

Chapter 1 Introduction: Conviviality, Charismatic Absolutism, and the Persianization of Shi'ism 1

Chapter 2 Peripatetic Kings and Palaces: From Tabriz to Qazvin in the Sixteenth Century 30

Chapter 3 Dwelling in Paradise, or Isfahan "Half the World" 65

Chapter 4 "The Abode of Felicitous Rule" or the Daulatkhane Royal Precinct 113

Chapter 5 The Spatial Choreography ofConviviality: the Palaces of Isfahan 157

Chapter 6 Feasting and the Perso-Shi'i Etiquette of Kingship 224

Chapter 7 Epilogue: The Fall of Isfahan 267.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780748633753

0748633758

OCLC:

228574302