Isfahan and Its Palaces

Winner of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award 2009 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 1590-91 at the millennial threshold of the Islamic calendar (1000 A.H.), 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.

... provide(s) important insights into the over-five hundred year evolution of Twelver Shi'i Islam as the "official" variety of Perso-Iranian Islam. -- John Renard Religion and the Arts Course on Islamic art, history, and culture will find this study an important contribution on the increasingly important land of Iran. -- John Renard Religion and the Arts ... provide(s) important insights into the over-five hundred year evolution of Twelver Shi'i Islam as the "official" variety of Perso-Iranian Islam. Course on Islamic art, history, and culture will find this study an important contribution on the increasingly important land of Iran.

Sussan Babaie has taught in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Smith College, and New York University. She is co-author of Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004) and Persian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1989).