"Turkic Literary Practices and Political Theology in Safavid Iran"
by Ferenc Csirkés
Speaker Bio
Dr. Ferenc Csirkés holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. He is an assistant professor of history at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey, currently spending a sabbatical year at Simon Fraser University as the Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Scholar of History. His research interests include Iranian history, Ottoman history, Ottoman Turkish literature, Persian literature, cultural history, Central Asian history, and Central Asian literature. He is completing a book manuscript with the working title "Sons of Japheth and Ali: Turkic Language and Ideology in the Medieval and Early Modern Persianate World," which focuses on the politics of language in Safavid Iran, discussing such topics as vernacularization, confessionalization, and state building.
Abstract
The Politics of Turkic in Safavid Iran
As is well known, Shah Ismail I (r. 1501-24), the founder of the Safavid dynasty (ca. 1501-1722) of Iran, wrote primarily in Turkic, as did Qansu al-Ghawri (r. 1501-16), the penultimate Mamluk Sultan, whereas their common nemesis, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512-20), was a prominent Persian poet. And yet, today, Iran is associated with Persian, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey with Turkish, and Egypt with Arabic. The early modern period saw the emergence of confessionally defined empires in both the West and the Islamicate East, and it also witnessed a closer association between language and state, though not necessarily between language and society. Accordingly, Safavid Iran converted to Shiism, and Persian took over in domains that had hitherto been reserved for Arabic, which, however, did not mean the loss of vernaculars like Turkic, which continued as the heritage of the post-Mongol age, as an important vehicle for Sufism—a key mode of piety at the time with profound implications for political theology— and as a constant of Persianate court culture in various Turko-Iranian polities. Through a select number of examples, the paper offers ways how to broach the political and social role of Turkic literary production and literary practices in early modern Iran without the distorting lens of modern ethnonationalism.
