Download or read book Converting Persia written by Rula Jurdi Abisaab and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Converting Persia written by Rula Abisaab and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2004-02-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Converting Persia' explains how Iran was to acquire one of its defining characteristics: its Shi'ism. Under the Safavids (1501-1736 CE), Persia adopted Shi'ism as its official religion. Rula Abisaab explains how and why this specific brand of Shi'ism - urban and legally-based - was brought to the region by leading Arab 'Ulama from Ottoman Syria, and changed the face of the region till this day. These emigre scholars furnished distinct sources of legitimacy for the Safavid monarchs, and an ideological defense against the Ottomans. Just as important at the time was a conscious and vivid process of Persianization both at the state level and in society. Converting Persia is vital reading for anthropologists, historians and scholars of religion, and any interested in Safavid Persia, in Shi'ism, and in the wider history of the Middle East."Rula Abisaab has provided us with a remarkable study of Safavid Iran. Her work throws new light on the interplay of religion and society and will be a crucial work for all interested in the making of modern Iran." -Abbas Amanat, Professor of History, Yale University.
Download or read book Converting Persia written by Rula Abisaab and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Converting Persia' explains how Iran was to acquire one of its defining characteristics: its Shi'ism. Under the Safavids (1501-1736 CE), Persia adopted Shi'ism as its official religion. Rula Abisaab explains how and why this specific brand of Shi'ism - urban and legally-based - was brought to the region by leading Arab 'Ulama from Ottoman Syria, and changed the face of the region till this day. These emigre scholars furnished distinct sources of legitimacy for the Safavid monarchs, and an ideological defense against the Ottomans. Just as important at the time was a conscious and vivid process of Persianization both at the state level and in society. Converting Persia is vital reading for anthropologists, historians and scholars of religion, and any interested in Safavid Persia, in Shi'ism, and in the wider history of the Middle East.
Download or read book Missionaries in Persia written by Christian Windler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the true religion turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for a global history on a small scale, the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.
Download or read book Medieval Persia 1040 1797 written by David Morgan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Persia 1040-1797 charts the remarkable history of Persia from its conquest by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD to the modern period at the end of the eighteenth century, when the impact of the west became pervasive. David Morgan argues that understanding this complex period of Persia’s history is integral to understanding modern Iran and its significant role on the international scene. The book begins with a geographical introduction and briefly summarises Persian history during the early Islamic centuries to place the country’s Middle Ages in their historical context. It then charts the arrival of the Saljūq Turks in the eleventh century and discusses in turn the major political powers of the period: Mongols, Timurids, Türkmen and Safawids. The chronological narrative enables students to identify change and consistencies under each ruling dynasty, while Persia’s rich social, cultural, religious and economic history is also woven throughout to present a complete picture of life in Medieval Persia. Despite the turbulent backdrop, which saw Persia ruled by a succession of groups who had seized power by military force, arts, painting, poetry, literature and architecture all flourished in the period. This new edition contains a new epilogue which discusses the significant literature of the last 28 years to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the latest historiographical trends in Persian history. Concise and clear, this book is the perfect introduction for students of medieval Persia and the medieval Middle East.
Download or read book Persia in Crisis written by Rudi Matthee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation The decline and fall of Safavid Iran is traditionally seen as the natural outcome of the unrelieved political stagnation and moral degeneration which characterised late Safavid Iran. "Persia in Crisis" challenges this view. In this ground-breaking new book, Rudi Matthee revisits traditional sources and introduces new ones to take a fresh look at Safavid Iran in the century preceding the fall of Isfahan in 1722, which brought down the dynasty and ushered in a long period of turbulence in Iranian history. Inherently vulnerable because of the country's physical environment, its tribal makeup and a small economic base, the Safavid state was fatally weakened over the course of the seventeenth century. Matthee views Safavid Iran as a network of precarious alliances subject to perpetual negotiation and the society they ruled as an uneasy balance between conflicting forces. In the later seventeenth century this delicate balance shifted from cohesion to fragmentation. An increasingly detached, palace-bound shah; a weakening link between the capital and the outlying provinces; the regime's neglect of the military and its shortsighted monetary policies combined to exacerbate rather than redress existing problems, leaving the country with a ruler too feeble to hold factionalism and corruption in check and a military unable to defend its borders against outside attack by Ottomans and Afghans. The scene was set for the Crisis of 1722. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of Iranian history and the period that led to two hundred years of decline and eclipse for Iran.
Download or read book The Turn of the Soul written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their rich variety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing religious issues, this volume demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning. Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo, and Federico Zuliani.
Download or read book Tribeswomen of Iran written by Julia Huang and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted very few Western scholars to conduct research in the country. Foreign travellers and media persons have limited access and much Iranian scholarship tends to focus on the realms of politics and government. Here Julia Huang provides a remarkable account of local tribal Iranian life, offering a rare glimpse into the daily rhythms and social richness beyond the capital city of Tehran. The Qashqa'i are a confederation of nomadic tribes, of which the Qermezi ('Red Ones') are one, migrating semiannually between winter pastures near the Persian Gulf and summer pastures southwest of the city of Isfahan. Huang has visited and traveled with the Qermezi for extended periods across fourteen years. Drawing on her experiences, participation and observation, she offers an intimate window onto their life. She focuses on a small group of women spanning four generations who are part of a large extended family, and describes their ways of life, their activities and interactions, and their distinctive sociocultural and ecological setting. Like other nomadic peoples around the world, the Qashqa'i increasingly face pressures that threaten their livelihoods, lifestyles and culture. Huang shows us how women negotiate compromises between customary tribal values and external influences, and sketches their efforts to resist the influences of an Islamizing, modernizing and centralizing government. With shadows and resonances that rebound across the stories of these women, Huang is able to present multiple perspectives on events and contentious issues, for instance the politicized issue of women's state-mandated modest dress. Huang also explains how the Turkic-speaking Qashqa'i relate to the wider Iranian society and the Islamic Republic of Iran, adapting to a rapidly changing world while retaining tribal values and a distinctive ethnolinguistic identity as one of Iran's national minorities. In describing life at the local level in Iran, Huang depicts a community largely beyond the scope and reach of foreign travellers and the Western media. With rich ethnographic description and analysis, intimate portraits of the private lives and spaces of women and children, and diverse perspectives, this engagingly written account documents a disappearing way of life. 'Tribeswomen of Iran' is essential reading for all those interested in Iran, the Middle East, anthropology, nomadism and gender.
Download or read book Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires written by Charles Melville and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.
Download or read book Iran in the 20th Century written by Touraj Atabaki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political upheaval has marked Iran's history throughout the twentieth century. Wars, revolutions, coups and the impact of modernism have shaped Iran's historiography, as they have the country's history. Originally based on oral and written sources, which underpinned traditional genealogical and dynastic history, Iran's historiography was transformed in the early 20th century with the development of a 'new' school of presenting history. Here emphasis shifted from the anecdotal story-telling genre to social, political, economic, cultural and religious history-writing. A new understanding of the nation state and the importance of identity and foreign relations in defining Iran's place in the modern world all served to transform the perspective of Iranian historiography. Touraj Atabaki here brings together a range of rich contributions from international scholars who cover the leading themes of the historiography of 20th-century Iran, including constitutional reform and revolution, literature and architecture, identity, women and gender, nationalism, modernism, Orientalism, Marxism and Islamism.
Download or read book Making and Remaking Empire in Early Qajar Iran written by Assef Ashraf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses political practices and a socially-oriented approach to explain imperial formation under the Qajars in early nineteenth-century Iran.
Download or read book Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry written by Reza Taher-Kermani and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the wealth of meanings that 'Persia' - real or imagined - held for Victorian poetryTakes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to a significant strand in the 'Oriental' texture of Victorian poetry Contributes to a growing body of research on the process of cultural exchange between the West and the 'Orient' Provides the first systematic index of nineteenth-century 'Persianised' poemsOffers a distinctive mix of history and literature, dealing with an array of texts, ranging from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century British travel writings The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry surveys the variety of ways in which Persia, and the multitude of ideological, historical, cultural and political notions that it embodied, were received, circulated and appropriated. Providing the first systematic index of nineteenth-century poems that were in any way involved with Persia, the book explores its presence across a broad range of works incorporating literary, historical and cultural material.
Download or read book The Hijaz written by Malik Dahlan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dahlan offers an alternative vision of Islamic governance through the history and promise of the Hijaz, the first state of Islam. The Hijaz, in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia, was the first Islamic state in Mecca and Medina. This new interpretative history offers a fresh vision of Islamic governance and law as a positive force for political reform in the Middle East and beyond. Applying key Islamic principles of public good to contemporary life, Malik Dahlan challenges two dominant narratives. He reclaims the development of Islamic statecraft as the wellspring of collective identity and statesmanship in the Arab world, simultaneously influenced and disrupted by Westphalian statehood models and Enlightenment notions of self-determination. He equally rejects the appropriation of Islamic governance and the Caliphate concept by both the post-modern, non-territorial Al-Qaeda and the neo-medievalist ISIS. Celebrating the history and untapped potential of a region where Arab leaders built the ideological foundations of an emerging polity, The Hijaz is a compelling alternative analysis of governance in the Arabian Peninsula and the global Islamic community, and of its interaction with the wider world.
Download or read book Contested Conversions to Islam written by Tijana Krstic and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of conversion to Islam in the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, its imperial ideology and Sunni identity, and its relationship with its Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, in the context of the early modern Mediterranean.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics written by Mehran Kamrava and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Persian Gulf politics, history, economics, and society. The volume begins its examination of Ottoman rule in the Arabian Peninsula, exploring other dimensions of the region’s history up until and after independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring scholars from a range of disciplines, the book demonstrates how the Persian Gulf’s current, complex politics is a product of interwoven dynamics rooted in historical developments and memories, profound social, cultural, and economic changes underway since the 1980s and the 1990s, and inter-state and international relations among both regional actors and between them and the rest of the world. The book comprises a total of 36 individual chapters divided into the following six sections: Historical Context Society and Culture Economic Development Domestic Politics Regional Security Dynamics The Persian Gulf and the World Examining the Persian Gulf’s increasing importance in regional politics, diplomacy, economics, and security issues, the volume is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and policy makers interested in political science, history, Gulf studies, and the Middle East.
Download or read book The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran written by Colin P. Mitchell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Safavid dynasty originated as a fledgling apocalyptic mystical movement based in Iranian Azarbaijan, and grew into a large, cosmopolitan Irano-Islamic empire stretching from Baghdad to Herat. Here, Colin P. Mitchell examines how the Safavid state introduced and moulded a unique and vibrant political discourse, reflecting the social and religious heterogeneity of sixteenth-century Iran. Beginning with the millenarian-minded Shah Isma'il and concluding with the autocrat par excellence, Shah Abbas, Mitchell explores the phenomenon of state-sponsored rhetoric. A thorough investigation of the Safavid state and the significance of rhetoric, power and religion in its functioning, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran is indispensable for all those interested in Iranian history and politics and Middle East studies.
Download or read book Safavid Iran written by Andrew J. Newman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Safavid dynasty, which reigned from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century, links medieval with modern Iran. The Safavids witnessed wide-ranging developments in politics, warfare, science, philosophy, religion, art and architecture. But how did this dynasty manage to produce the longest lasting and most glorious of Iran's Islamic-period eras?Andrew Newman offers a complete re-evaluation of the Safavid place in history as they presided over these extraordinary developments and the wondrous flowering of Iranian culture. In the process, he dissects the Safavid story, from before the 1501 capture of Tabriz by Shah Ismail (1488-1524), the point at which Shiism became the realm's established faith; on to the sixteenth and early seventeenth century dominated by Shah Abbas (1587-1629), whose patronage of art and architecture from his capital of Isfahan embodied the Safavid spirit; and culminating with the reign of Sultan Husayn (reg. 1694-1722).Based on meticulous scholarship, Newman offers a valuable new interpretation of the rise of the Safavids and their eventual demise in the eighteenth century. "Safavid Iran," with its fresh insights and new research, is the definitive single volume work on the subject.
