The “Minorsky Thesis”

The messianic poetry of Shah Ismāʿīl, the founder of the Ṣafavid dynasty of Persia, has fascinated the international scholarly community ever since the publication of the luminary Russian Orientalist Vladimir Minorsky’s Reference Minorsky1942 article about his dīvān, which Minorsky finished in September 1941. The timing of the appearance of the article was certainly not accidental. In 1942 both his original homeland, Russia, with its messianic ideology of Marxist-Leninist communism, and his chosen new homeland, Great Britain, were fighting against Germany and its messiah, Adolf Hitler, in a war that reached eschatological proportions, and both countries, together with the US, were occupying Iran. In the article Minorsky virtually spoon-fed scholars interested in Iran and Islam with the extremist notions of the founder of the Ṣafavid dynasty, Shah Ismāʿīl, presenting a sketchy description of the manuscript base he was working with; a short grammatical survey of the language the poet used; the main motifs, religious and non-religious, he gleaned from the poetry; and a handful of poems with their text and translation. The article, which appeared in a distinguished academic journal accessible in every major research library around the globe, has had a phenomenal career, and has ever since formed a highly important part of the common wisdom held in international scholarship about issues such as Islamic messianism in the Iranian and Turkic world, Ṣafavid religiosity and the status of Turkish/Turkic language and literature in the lands of the greater Iranian world in the sixteenth century. A single sentence of this article has had a disproportionately large influence on scholarship, which can serve as a good illustration that Turkic sources of the Ṣafavid period have not been comprehensively dealt with, and therefore a single sentence can generate a whole scholarly discourse, primarily because it is the sole voice addressing the subject for an extended period of time. To be fair, Minorsky does not develop this idea further anywhere else in the article, and gives just a handful of poems and one or two loci to support it. Here is the sentence: “As time wore on, many of the extravagances of the early Ṣafavid period looked too far-fetched and the earlier poems of Shah Isma'il had to be cut out from his dīvān.”Footnote ¹ The sentence proposes two hypotheses. On the one hand, it sets up a categorization of Shah Ismāʿīl’s oeuvre along biographical lines. Minorsky implies that Shah Ismāʿīl wrote those of his poems that carried putatively extravagant, heretical notions earlier in his career, while his poems that were on tamer subjects came later. As the Russian scholar does not specify it, it is unclear how he came to this conclusion, but he seems to refer to the dynasty’s gradual turning away from their original ghulāt (“exaggerating”) religious notions and/or to the disillusionment that overcame Shah Ismāʿīl after the defeat he suffered at the battle of Çaldıran in 1514. It is truly possible to break down the oeuvre into expressly religious poetry, poetry more in line with mystical cum love poetry of a more classicized form, and poetry of courtly love, the latter two types, in fact, constituting the majority of the corpus.Footnote ² Yet claiming that the tame poems were written after Shah Ismāʿīl’s defeat is circular argumentation along such lines as that Shah Ismāʿīl must have been disappointed in his messianic ambitions, so he must have written the tame poems later in his life, which, in turn, shows that he was disappointed. On the other hand, positing that he could not possibly believe in his own messianic mission afterwards and therefore must have written the “tame” poems later is purely conjectural.

An even greater problem with such views is that they consider Ṣafavid messianism as a wild, uncouth, fiery rupture that vanished once the initial heat was gone. While messianism in general and its Ṣafavid version in particular was certainly revolutionary, it was expressed in a space of mutually competing discourses which the Ṣafavids had to accommodate and to which, I argue, they had to adapt their messianistic discourse.Footnote ³ The increasing recent scholarship on the connected history of the so-called gunpowder empires of the early modern era also suggests that Ṣafavid messianism was not some unique, uncontrolled aberration, but actually very similar to and in competition with other messianic discourses that were also used by their political rivals, the Ottomans and the Mughals.Footnote ⁴

The other related implication of Minorsky’s sentence, i.e. that the Dīvān was later allegedly expurgated of the more extravagant poems, has been elaborated by several scholars. For example, Said Arjomand in his book entitled The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam connects this putative purge to Shah Ṭahmāsp’s reign and his policy of suppressing millenarian extremism amongst his Qizilbash followers—a view that has some resonance with my own findings, as we shall see below.Footnote ⁵ Hans-Robert Roemer’s reading of Minorsky in his chapter on the Ṣafavids in the Cambridge History of Iran goes even further:

The thesis is clear: the expurgation of the more messianic, self-aggrandizing poems from later copies was concomitant with the shift of Ṣafavid religiosity towards established, “orthodox” forms of Shiism and its parallel waning of the Qizilbash tribal element on the Ṣafavid cultural-political horizon. The alleged purge of later manuscripts of the Dīvān is widely used as a showcase for how early ghulāt “extremist” Shiism gave way to establishment Islam and religious views favored by the emerging Shiite clergy under the Ṣafavids. Minorsky was a formidable scholar, and he is clearly right that, on the one hand, the contents of the individual copies of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān are different from each other, and, on the other hand, that these differences might reflect cultural, religious or political processes, although, as we shall see, such processes and changes might not be of the kind that the luminary Russian and other scholars in his wake surmised. His views raise several problems; however, before addressing these, it is worthwhile listing first a few examples of how Shah Ismāʿīl, particularly his religious poetry, has been treated in scholarship since Minorsky’s article, highlighting some recent welcome developments.

Shah Ismāʿīl alone gets more scholarly attention from western scholars than all the other Ṣafavid Turkophone authors put together, except perhaps, for Fużūlī, though the bulk of the scholarship on the latter comes from Turkey and the Republic of Azerbaijan. The reasons for this importance attached to Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān include his prominent historical role and the patronage that produced several elegant manuscripts found today in western libraries and thus accessible to western scholars. His historical role has received increasingly complex treatments, and has departed from the simplistic views of considering him as the founder of the dynasty that resurrected an alleged Persian national ethos towards views that contextualize him in the early modern era of world history as well as the “Age of Confessionalization.”Footnote ⁷ In Republican Turkish nationalist historiography, he is presented as a representative of so-called folk Islam who on the one hand writes in simple, i.e. non-Ottoman, Turkish, and who, on the other hand, as a shaman surrogate in an allegedly semi-Islamic context, implicitly perpetuates the Turkish national ethos. There are somewhat similar views in Azerbaijani nationalist scholarship, which also emphasize the putative closeness of Shah Ismāʿīl to the nation’s heart.Footnote ⁸ Such frameworks operate with a rather blurred concept of what folk in this case means. In this regard, it might be helpful to use an insight put forth by Peter Burke in his seminal work on early modern European cultural history, according to which cultural space was shared by two traditions—elite and popular—but its division was asymmetric: the elite participated in popular culture, but commoners did not participate in the elite tradition.Footnote ⁹

We find a laudably fresh thesis in Kathryn Babayan’s works. She views the Ṣafavids as part of the wave of various other ghulāt movements, who were social revolutionaries and viewed time in a cyclical framework, perpetuating an “Iranian” view of history as opposed to mainstream Islam, which treats history as teleological linearity leading towards the Apocalypse at the end of time. Her presentation of the ghulāt in general and the Ṣafavids in particular seems to be greatly influenced by Norman Cohn’s vision of medieval and early modern (and by implication, modern) messianistic movements as instances of an ever-present revolutionary strand in history; for her, the power of the Ṣafavids was that, contrary to establishment Islam, which removed the eschaton to the end of time, i.e. beyond history, the Ṣafavids’ chiliastic version of the faith brought it near at hand, which lent messianism tremendous social potency.Footnote ¹⁰ It would be difficult to deny this, but inasmuch as Cohn’s vision of western messianism has been subject to criticism in European history,Footnote ¹¹ I will try to prove that Babayan’s thesis can also be elaborated on. Another important study is Rıza Yıldırım’s dissertation, which stresses the Turkic tribal origins of the Ṣafavids and views their emergence as part of the larger social conflict between nomad Türkmens and the centralizing Ottoman state. He studies not so much the Ṣafavids per se as the Qizilbash, emphasizing the emergence of the Ṣafavids in the Ottoman context. In a more recent article, he insightfully claims that the ghulāt ethos of the Ṣafavids, and therefore that of Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry, was connected to a Karbalā-centered popular narrative cycle that called for vengeance on Ḥusayn’s blood, intermixing social political and religious aspirations, couched in Shii-Sufi rhetoric.Footnote ¹²

The most serious studies specifically dedicated to Shah Ismāʿīl and the role of self-glorification and apotheosis in the Dīvān since Minorsky have been written by Amelia Gallagher. Studying the reception of Shah Ismāʿīl among the Bektashis, she suggests, on the one hand, that in later manuscripts of the Dīvān a significant amount of the poet’s self-glorification is present and that this “indicates a higher degree of accommodation of such “heretical” expressions than previously thought.” On the other hand, she comes to the conclusion that later in Ottoman Bektashi circles it was not the text but the interpretative context of the individual poems that changed. Accordingly, the historic personality of Shah Ismāʿīl became separated from Khaṭāyī the poet, and the hero of these poems came to be regarded as the pīr of the order. Also importantly for our purposes here, in a recent article she draws attention to the possibility of reading Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān as literature, i.e. she emphasizes the inherent ambiguity in the tradition of Persianate poetry, which often makes it hard to decide and highly context-dependent whether a certain poem is addressed to God, the sheikh, a royal or noble patron, or the Beloved.Footnote ¹³ I have approached Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry from the direction of philology and cultural studies, pointing out that our understanding so far has been distorted by positivist philology and by only considering his poetry as written text. I suggested that instead of using the concept of the Urtext, the Dīvān is best to be treated as situated midway between written culture and orality, which can deprive poetic texts of stability and integrity, making it possible for poems to be attributed to different authors and for parts of poems to be modified, omitted, augmented, etc. as needed by the audience or the context. Inasmuch as Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry came from the same popular religious and courtly context that also produced Ottoman poetry, there is thus little to be surprised at in the fact that several of his verses ended up in Ottoman poetic anthologies. In a similar fashion, as suggested by Muhsin Macit, Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān contains pieces that were in fact written by Ottoman poets, due to either Shah Ismāʿīl’s familiarity with their dīvāns or some more indirect affinity between them, such as misattribution. Accordingly, Macit demonstrates that Shah Ismāʿīl imitated and even plagiarized Ottoman poets like Aḥmed Pasha or Şeyhī, and some of his poems were misattributed to Ḥitābī. More broadly, we can claim that Shah Ismāʿīl, his Turkophone court poets as well as their Ottoman colleagues were part of the same Oghuz Turkic poetic tradition that was in vogue in Anatolia and Iran and had both a courtly and a mystic aspect to it.Footnote ¹⁴ This literary and linguistic idiom constituted a continuum between Anatolia and Iran, from which the high Ottoman literature started to gradually split from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, a process that was corollary to the fundamental changes in the Ottoman imperial venture at the time.

The assertion that Shah Ismāʿīl never smiled again after his defeat at the battle of Çaldıran and the entire messianist project was discredited and discarded is problematic if we take into consideration certain analyses made in religious sociology. Accordingly, the disconfirmation of a prophecy or other central tenet in a messianic movement does not usually discredit the ideology itself in the minds of the devotees. Moreover, to overcome the cognitive dissonance deriving from a failure of the movement usually produces an increase in proselyting if there is a conviction, there is commitment to it, the conviction is amenable to unequivocal disconfirmation and there is such an unequivocal disconfirmation, and, finally, if there is social support available subsequent to the disconfirmation.Footnote ¹⁵ As to the tenacity of Qizilbash belief in the continued millennial mission of the Ṣafavid house, evidence is scant; further research needs to be done in this respect. We do know, nonetheless, that Ṭahmāsp I himself had to deal with this problem: in 938/1531‒32, he suppressed the supposedly extremist Sarulu tribe, in 1554/55 he punished the heresy of a group of Sufis for calling him Mahdī, and he had another allegedly irreligious (murtadd) Turkmen clan killed or imprisoned in Alamut.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, arguably, the death of the previous messianic leaders of the Ṣafavid movement before Shah Ismāʿīl, i.e. his grandfather Junayd and his father Ḥaydar, might also have been disconfirmations, which their community of adherents had to and apparently did overcome. Or we might mention the false pretenders claiming to be the by then dead Shah Ismāʿīl II, such as the one that occurred in 988/1580‒81, or the Nuqṭaviyya, which posed a grave danger to the dynasty as a rival messianic movement.Footnote ¹⁷ Finally, both Babayan and Andrew Newman’s works demonstrate that messianism and millenarian beliefs continued to recur in Persia down to the latter half of the tenure of the dynasty, even if with increasing frequency the subject of such beliefs were now not necessarily the Ṣafavids.Footnote ¹⁸

The great Russian orientalist’s thesis is problematic from a theoretical point of view as well. Accordingly, one might be tempted to question the absoluteness of central power in the early modern state in general and Ṣafavid Persia in particular. Such a framework evidently follows Max Weber about the routinization of charisma and the emergence of the bureaucratic centralized state. This is rightly criticized by Rudi Matthee, who, in the wake of Michael Mann, argues that the strict opposition between the all-powerful central state and society cannot be applied to the Ṣafavid context. On one hand, it is better to speak of a negotiation-based relation between them, where the center applies the carrot just as much as the stick. On the other hand, Matthee also follows Mann in his vision of pre-modern society as a network of multilayered relations headed and navigated by the center, with competition and cooperation from all levels.Footnote ¹⁹ He speaks of

Hence, there are serious doubts as to the ability of the Ṣafavid establishment to so closely monitor the contents of every individual copy of the Dīvān of Shah Ismāʿīl. Roemer’s vision of Shiite ulema control over poetic manuscript production is also problematic. While the fatvā of al-Karakī to ban the recitation of the Abū Muslimnāma, a heroic prose epic reflecting the messianic ġulāṭ ethos of the Qizilbash, certainly reflects the policies of some of the factions at court, more recent scholarship has shown that for much of the Ṣafavid period the Shiite ulema were only one of the competing status groups and their influence at court became superior only at the end of the dynasty in the early eighteenth century with the establishment of a hierocracy independent of the court. They were in competition, on the one hand, with the Iranian ‘ayān, the clerical notables whose families went back many a generation in the service of various polities ruled by Turkic nomadic aristocracies, and, on the other hand, with the Qizilbash notables, as well as the ġulām elite from the reign of Shah ‘Abbās I onwards.

But the alleged purge of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān on the part of Shiite scholars is also problematic from a philological point of view. A closer look at the manuscripts of the Dīvān that Minorsky had access to, complemented by a study of manuscripts that have been identified since the appearance of his article as well as by completely unstudied manuscripts, reveals that there was probably no purge of the nature Minorsky surmises, or even if there were attempts to “tame” the chiliastic, messianic content of Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry, they were by no means complete, and represent only one of the tendencies of the development of the manuscript copies. Minorsky’s is a greatly teleological thesis, with the more extremist copies at the beginning of the story and the tamed versions at the end of it. However, while the content as well as the codicology of the copies do reflect historical processes, they tell us a much more complex history. Based on new sources as well as revisiting the evidence Minorsky provides, I will try to show that later manuscripts did preserve most of the ġulāt ideas present in the early manuscripts.

The study of Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry has been tremendously facilitated by the publication of a critical edition of the Dīvān, a long overdue desideratum fulfilled by Muhsin Macit in 2017.Footnote ²² In addition to making use of more manuscripts than have hitherto been known, Macit tackles a number of textological problems that shed light on the broader literary context. He chooses as the base text for his edition a copy he found in the Şevket Rado Collection of the Istanbul Research Institute, which was executed in 1038/1628, and which is not only the bulkiest copy of the Dīvān, but also enables him to defocus from the copies (Paris1 and Tashkent) that were used in the earlier attempts of Tourkhan Gandjei and Azizağa Məmmədov at producing critical editions. Gandjei’s edition is the work of a superb philologist, but on the one hand, it is based on a limited textual base, and on the other hand, it is informed by Minorsky’s assertion of the Paris1 copy to be the Urtext of the Dīvān, which, as we shall see, has since turned out to be an error. Məmmədov’s edition was based on more manuscripts but its quality is marred by a number of errors, occasional oversights and cavalier handling of sources.Footnote ²³

Another important virtue of Macit’s work is that, greatly expanding and modifying the results of my own research, he comes up with a comprehensive categorization of the available manuscripts of the Dīvān. Relying on this, it is now easier to better situate and contextualize Shah Ismāʿīl’s messianic poetry within his oeuvre at large.

The Manuscripts of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān

The following list of the extant manuscripts of the Dīvān is a collation of Macit’s list of the copies he worked with and my own observations.Footnote ²⁴ He gives far more details about the text of the individual copies than is warranted here; his observations are particularly important for our present purposes concerning the contents of the copies and their relationship with each other.

Two of the manuscripts to be dealt with were illuminated and illustrated with miniatures. Moreover, these two have other features that help us date and contextualize them, which somewhat alleviates the difficulty arising from the fact that especially these two copies (i.e., Washington and London1, nos. 17-18 in the following list) are extremely defective. Indeed, it is a serious problem for the scholar studying these copies that several of the extant manuscripts are not intact, which makes assessing their content and drawing definite conclusions difficult. Only in rare cases, when one manuscript is obviously in close relation to another one, is it possible to fill such gaps.

1. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Supplément turc 1307 (Paris1). An elegant copy with an illuminated title-page (sar-lawḥ), it was executed in 948/1541‒42, and contains 254 ḳaṣīdas and ġazals, 3 masnavīs, 1 murabba‘ and 1 musaddas on 84 folios, the first 24 poems not following the usual alphabetical order.Footnote ²⁵ Minorsky, and in his wake Tourhan Gandjei, considered this the oldest copy of the Dīvān, the latter basing his edition on it.Footnote ²⁶ Script: nasta‘līḳ. The copy is different from the others in terms of not only its content but also its orthography. While most of the others are written in a western Oġuz, “Azeri” idiom, this manuscript has many Eastern Turkic, i.e. Chaghatay features, such as word initial b- in bol-, “to be.” Such a phenomenon is not surprising bearing in mind that the Timurid literary tradition, which espoused Chaghatay Turkic aside from Persian, continued to be greatly revered and emulated under the Ṣafavids, who employed many a scholar, litterateur and artist after the demise of who had formerly served the Timurids in Iran and Central Asia after the latter's demise.

2. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Supplément turc 995 (Paris2). 64 folios. The copy is undated, but, according to Blochet, it was copied in the early seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁷ Contents: 205 ġazals, 9 rubā‘īs, 2 masnavīs (one of which is the Naṣīḥatnāme), as well as a ghazal and a few couplets in Persian. Script: nasta‘līḳ. It ends in two Persian ghazals.

3. British Library, London Or. 3880 (London2).Footnote ²⁸ Another luxury copy of 83 folios (31.75 cm X 15.cm; 12 lines, 7 cm per page), which is undated, though Rieu thinks it is from the sixteenth century. The seals in it belong to later owners from the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ Several folios are missing after 47b as well as after fol. 62b; and there are missing or transferred folios after 69b. Fols. 1b‒8b have the Naṣīḥatnāme, a masnavī, while the Dīvān with 240 poems and fragments can be found on fols. 10b‒83a. 2a is decorated with a beautiful shams, “sun-shaped vignette,” which has the following legend: dīvān-i Sulṭān Khaṭā’ī a‘lá’llāhu maḳāmahu / ash‘ār-i fayż-āsār-i ḥażret-i firdevs-mekānī Abu’l-Muẓaffer Shāh İsmā‘īl Ḥüseynī navvara’llāhu marḳadahu, “The dīvān of Sultan Khaṭā’ī, may God elevate his position / the emanation-like poems of Abu’l-Muẓaffar Shāh Ismāʿīl the Ḥusaynid, whose place is in Paradise, may God illuminate his shrine,” which is reiterated in shikasta in the upper part of the folio as well as on 10a. The designation Sulṭān Khaṭā’ī is noteworthy and will be elaborated on further below. The dedication refers to Shah Ismāʿīl as already deceased, which gives 1524 as the terminus post quem for the copy date. Script: nasta‘līḳ. Some of the folios are mixed up, some of them are missing.

4. Ardabil (Ardabil). The manuscript was owned by Minorsky, who presented it to what is today the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg (B 4544). Measures: 70 fols., 20.5 × 15, 14.5 × 8 cm; 12 lines per page. Contents: 223 ġazals, 9 tuyuġs and the Nasīḥatnāme. It is dated 17 Rabī‘ II 1245/16 October 1829, but was copied by one Murtażāḳulı from a manuscript which bears the seal of Shah ‘Abbas I and which was presented to the Ardabil sanctuary in 1022/1613. In preparing his edition, Gandjei also consulted this copy but decided to omit its variants from the critical apparatus, because, as he puts it, its variants more or less agree with those of London2 and Paris2.Footnote ³⁰

5. Vatican, Turco 221 (Vatican).Footnote ³¹ An undated, defective copy of 32 fols. with missing beginning and end. The volume has been misbound; 27a should follow 31b. Contents: 178 ḳaṣīda-ġazals, 1 musaddas; script: nasta‘līḳ.

6. Tashkent (Tashkent). Al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, 1412. An elegant copy of 85 fols., measuring 14.5 × 23.5 cm with text on fols. 2b‒84a. Məmmədov thought it to be the oldest copy of the Dīvān and therefore he based his edition on it. It was copied in 942/1535‒36 in a fine nasta‘līḳ by Shah Maḥmūd al-Nishābūrī (d. 972/1564‒65?), a prominent calligrapher, most probably in Tabrīz, during the reign of Shah Ṭahmāsp. Shah Maḥmūd had been in the service of the Ṣafavids since the time of Shah Ismāʿīl, collaborating with such masters as Bihzād.Footnote ³² The manuscript bears no dedication, so we do not know if it was commissioned by Ṭahmāsp himself or some member of the Qizilbash aristocracy at court. Fols. 1b‒2a are gilded but left blank, possibly for miniatures the execution of which, however, did not materialize. On the margins down to fol. 72a can be found the text of Shah Ismāʿīl’s two narrative poems, the Dihnāma and the Naṣīḥatnāma.Footnote ³³

7. Qom, Kitābkhāna-yi Āyat Allāh Burūjirdī, 2009 (Qom).Footnote ³⁴ A copy of 110 folios measuring 25 × 15 cm, executed probably in the eighteenth century. According to a note on 109b, it was sold on 11 Ramażān 1118/31 January 1768, which gives us the terminus ante quem for its copy date.Footnote ³⁵ Not only its textual variants but also the distribution of the individual lines and poems on the pages are extremely similar to those found in the Gulistān copy, which suggests that they are very close to each other in the paper trail.Footnote ³⁶

8. Mazar-i Sharif, Bakhtar Museum (Institute of Manuscripts named after Muhammad Fuzuli, Baku, microfilm 234). Incomplete copy, 174 poems. According to Məmmədov, the binding of the manuscript indicates that it was executed by Mīr ‘Alī Tabrīzī, but the Azeri scholar thinks it was put there later and that the manuscript was in fact copied by the most famous calligrapher of the early seventeenth century, Mīr ‘Imād.Footnote ³⁷ The main reason for his doubt about the copyist being Mīr ‘Alī Tabrīzī is that it puts Mīr ‘Alī Tabrīzī’s active years in the early sixteenth century. However, I only know of a calligrapher Mīrzā ‘Alī Tabrīzī, the son of Sulṭān Muḥammad Tabrīzī, who worked in the library of Shah Ṭahmāsp. This makes him a perfect candidate for being the copyist of the manuscript and could date the manuscript to the mid-sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Macit uses a microfilm of the copy, and tentatively agrees with Məmmədov’s identification of the calligrapher.

9. Majlis Library, 4096, Tehran (Tehran2). Comprised of 69 fols. on Isfahan paper, this is an undated, defective copy, its beginning and end missing. Script: nasta‘līḳ. The headings and the pennames are gilded. Contents: 219 ghazal-ḳaṣīdas and 9 tuyughs.Footnote ³⁹

10. Gulistān Palace Library, 2194, Tehran (Gulistān). Even if some folios are missing, this is a large copy in terms of volume with 332 poetic pieces on 113 fols.Footnote ⁴⁰ The copyist is Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Abū Turāb-i Iṣfahānī (d. 1104/1693‒94), scion of a family of noteworthy calligraphers, who spent some of his early career on the staff of the royal library of Shah ‘Abbās I.Footnote ⁴¹ According to the colophon, he had a royal commission (ḥasb al-amr al-a‘lá “on the sublime command”) and executed the manuscript in the royal library of Shah Sulaymān (1666‒94) in 1088/1677‒78.Footnote ⁴²

11. Āyat Allāh Gulpāyagānī Library, Qom (Gulpāyagānī), 5/141. 65 fols. (21 × 15 cm). No date or copyist. There are some mistakes in this copy: e.g. 15b does not continue from 15a, but the last two verses of a poem (ey ṣabā bu ‘āşıḳ-ı dilkhastadan ol yāre var …) on 14b‒15a, and another poem (göreli zülfüngi ey meh başıma yüz sevdā düşer …) from 15a are also repeated on 15b; 38b is followed by the wrong folio or there is/are a folio/folios missing between 38b and 39a. The text of the legend of the possessorial seals on fols. 10, 57 and 60 (yā ‘azīz allāh 1284) dates the copy prior to 1867‒68.Footnote ⁴³

12. Millet Library, Ali Emiri Mnz. 131, Istanbul (I). An undated, probably relatively recent copy from Bektashi circles. 33 fols. Its material is incorporated in Ergun’s edition, and Məmmədov also used it.Footnote ⁴⁴ It contains a lot of material unknown from the copies commissioned under Ṣafavid aegis.

13. Tehran University, Central Library, 5160. According to the colophon on 75a, it was copied on 23 Muḥarram 1260/13 February 1844 in Tehran by Rıżā Ḳulı and Valī Ḳulı for one Sayyid Ḥāji Baba-yi Kirmānī. 86 folios of nasta‘līḳ, Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān followed by his Naṣīḥatnāme stopping on 75a. Folios 75b‒78b contain verses by Nesīmī, Köroġlu, Fuẓūlī, Mīrzā Ismāʿīl Afshār, Ḳaṣṣāb and Mīr-i Marāġa’ī in Persian and Turkish. The copy was used by the editors of a popular edition mentioned above.Footnote ⁴⁵

14. National Museum and Library, Tehran, 3705, microfilm no. 25. 76 fols. with some missing after 30a. This copy, written in a fine nasta‘līḳ, has the seal of the Ardabil Shrine Foundation with the date 1022/1613‒14, which means it was presented to or acquired by the Foundation at that time.Footnote ⁴⁶ Length: 76 fols. According to the colophon (75b), the copyist was ‘Ayshī (d. 980/1572‒73), who is probably identical to ‘Ayshī b. ‘Ishratī. He came from Herat but spent most of his career working in Mashhad at the court atelier of Sultan Ibrāhīm Mīrzā (d. 983/1575‒76), participating in the creation of the celebrated “Freer Jāmī,” and completing the section assigned to him in 968/1537‒38.Footnote ⁴⁷ The copy bears the title Dīvān-i Sulṭān Khaṭā’ī.

15. Sulṭān Ḳurrā’ī Library, private collection, Tabriz. Catalog number unknown. Copyist: Yārī Haravī (d. 980/1572‒73); copy date: 954/1547‒48. Unfortunately, I have not been able to access it. However, from the report and the photo of a folio illustrating it, it is clearly a finely executed copy which starts with the Naṣīḥatnāme. Nor did Muhsin Macit have access to it for his critical edition; therefore, he had to rely on information gleaned from the notes of two Iranian editions that claim to have used it.Footnote ⁴⁸ The patron who commissioned the manuscript was one Muḥammad Khan; he is most probably identical to Muḥammad Khan b. Sharaf al-Dīn Takkalū (d. 1557), who, fiercely loyal to Shah Ṭahmāsp, was the governor of Herat from 1536 to 964/1557 and tutor (lala) to Muḥammad Mīrzā, Ṭahmāsp’s eldest son, the future Shah Muḥammad Khudābanda (r. 1578‒87).Footnote ⁴⁹ The commission of the copy should probably be viewed in the context of an urban reconstruction program during the governorship of the latter, which was coupled by an influx of poets, litterateurs, artists and calligraphers, including the historian Amīr Maḥmūd b. Kh^wāndamīr and the painter Aḳa Ḥasan.Footnote ⁵⁰

16. Mīrzā Ismāʿīl Shāfi‘ī, personal possession. Copy date: 969/1561‒62. Unfortunately, I have not had access to this copy, and the article about it says but little about its contents.Footnote ⁵¹

The earliest copies. There are three defective copies with their beginnings and ends missing which, however, all date from the time when Shah Ismāʿīl was still alive. Two of them, Washington and London1, are illuminated manuscripts, decorated with exquisite miniatures.

• 17. Sackler Gallery, Vever Collection, S1986.60, Washington, DC (Washington). Measures: 50 fols, 21 × 14 cm.Footnote ⁵² A superbly executed, beautifully illustrated copy with miniatures, which is unfortunately defective. However, internal clues show that the copy must have been made when Shah Ismāʿīl was still alive. On one hand, the headings introducing the poems contain blessings for him: khallada’l-lāhu mulkahu wa salṭanatahu, “May God perpetuate his kingdom and sovereignty!”; on the other hand, a frieze in the miniature on 27b refers to Shah Ismāʿīl as the reigning sultan:

  Banī al-salṭana al-sulṭān al-a‘ẓam wa al-khāḳān al-a‘dal al-akram mawlā mulūk al-‘arab wa al-‘ajam mushayyid qawā’id al-‘adl wa al-iḥsān bāsiṭ bisāṭ al-amn wa’l-amān Abū al-Muẓaffar Ṣāh Ismāʿīl Bahādur Khān.

  Founder of the sultanate, the greatest sultan and most just, noblest emperor, liegelord of the kings of the Arabs and Persians, layer of the foundation of justice and beneficence, spreader of the carpet of safety and security, Abū al-Muẓaffar Shah Ismāʿīl Bahādur Khan.Footnote ⁵³

• 18. British Library, Or. 11388, London (London1). Another superbly executed but regrettably defective copy of 19 folios, measuring 6 by 10 inches (15.24 × 25.4 cm). The golden and blue headings introducing each of the poems refer to Shah Ismāʿīl as the reigning shah, which suggests that the manuscript was executed during his lifetime or perhaps copied from such a manuscript shortly after his death.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nora Titley claims that the miniatures are close to the Tabriz style of painting.Footnote ⁵⁵ Be that as it may, the first miniature might not come from the same atelier as the rest, since their style is remarkably different. Bound together with it is the last page from a different manuscript, which features a vignette from 1141/1728‒29, perhaps the date when the surviving folios of the copy were put together.

• 19. Majlis Library, 4077, Tehran (Tehran1). Similar to London1 and Washington, the golden ‘unvāns (‘headings) in it, such as wa la-hu lā zāla lisānuhu al-balīġ al-bayān mawrid al-ḥaḳā’iḳ al-‘irfān (“May his eloquently speaking tongue never come to an end about the realities of Gnostic knowledge”), or la-hu zīda dawlatuhu wa shawkatuhu wa salṭanatuhu (“May his polity, majesty and sovereignty increase”), suggest that the manuscript was executed during Shah Ismāʿīl’s lifetime or was copied from one shortly after his demise. A very defective copy, in fact a fragment of merely 11 folios, the last of which is actually taken from a manuscript of Jāmī’s Tuḥfat al-aḥrār. The manuscript must have been put together in the nineteenth century. The binding is Qajar; all the framing blue and red lines are new. There is also a new miniature in it, perhaps later than even the Qajar period, trying to imitate very late sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Ṣafavid style. There must have been a ragged copy of the Khaṭāyī Dīvān and a leaf with a poem by Jāmī in a loose state, which were bound together. Hence, the miniature has nothing to do with the actual leaves and does not affect their dating. On the other hand, the leaves of both the Khaṭāyī and the Jāmī poems seem genuine. The illumination may be genuine but not of great quality. The binding may have been done during the Qajar period or even at a later date but using a loose Qajar binding.Footnote ⁵⁶

Anthologies. This type of material can only be mentioned briefly, mainly because it has been very superficially studied, and because of the vast quantity of such manuscripts. A study of Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry as reflected in the popular anthologies is, nonetheless, an important research topic for future scholars.

• 20. Mnz. 631, Millet Library, Istanbul.Footnote ⁵⁷ The manuscript is undated, but a possessorial notice that refers to the enthronement of Selim III with the date 1203/1789 gives us the terminus post quem for its copy date. All the poets whose poetry it gives samples of are from the sixteenth century.

• 21. Divan-i Şah Hatayi, Berlin, Ms. Orient. Fol. 209, fols. 423a‒456a, 34 ghazals. In fact, this is not a full copy but a selection as part of an anthology of Persian and Turkish poetry. It was compiled in 1077/1666 by one Dāvūd Beg, who claims to have had the Turkic poems of his anthology copied by one Mawlānā Ibrāhīm Ḳazvīnī, and the Persian pieces by one Mawlānā Murād ‘Alī Tījānī or Tījī.Footnote ⁵⁸

Copies first seriously studied in the first critical edition by Muhsin Macit.

• 22. Tashkent, Academy of Sciences, Al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, 1340/1412 (Tashkent1). Copied by Mulla Muḥammad Ya‘ḳūb in 1325/1907‒8 on the order of the ruler of Khiva, Muḥammad Raḥīm Bahādur Khan (r. 1864‒1910).Footnote ⁵⁹

• 23. Egyptian National Archives, Cairo, Turkish manuscripts, 49 [MF54810].Footnote ⁶⁰ A defective copy calligraphed by Sulṭān ‘Alī Mashhadī (1476‒1544), who had served at the court of the Timurid Sultan Ḥusayn Bayḳara, before entering the service of Sām Mīrzā, likely while the latter was governor of Herat (between 1522 and 1544). According to Macit, its orthography was greatly influenced by Chaghatay Turkic.

• 24. Istanbul Research Institute, Istanbul, Şevket Rado Collection, 51. Copied in 1038/1628, 107 fols. With fifteen poems unique to it, this is the bulkiest copy of the Dīvān.Footnote ⁶¹

• 25. Tabriz Central Library, 1251 (TZ). Copied in 1237/1822.Footnote ⁶²

• 26. İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Atatürk Kitaplığı Osman Ergin Yazmaları 226/2.Footnote ⁶³

Minorsky’s Evidence

Now we can turn to the evidence Minorsky provides and discuss it in light of comparing it with the accessible extant copies of the Dīvān. As we might recall, he considered Paris1 as the oldest copy, comparing it to Paris2, London2 and Ardabil, though he knew of other copies, which, however, he could not consult. Table 1 shows the occurrence of the seventeen “Minorsky poems” in the available manuscripts, marked with an asterisk. This is complemented by a list of the distribution of thirty-five other messianic poems in the extant copies. The selection of the latter is admittedly somewhat subjective on my part, because—as we shall see further below—on the one hand, some of Shah Ismāʿīl’s “mainstream” Sufi religious poems in general have the potential to be read in a messianic sense and, on the other hand, the barrier between courtly love poetry and mystical poetry is often blurred. Nonetheless, the conclusions would not really change even if we included further poems in the list. The poems selected on top of Minorsky’s evidence can be characterized by ġulāt motifs, heavy emphasis on eschatology, and importance given to the Ṣafavids and Shah Ismāʿīl as political and eschatological actors. Excluded from Table 1 are Tashkent1, which is a twentieth-century copy of the sixteenth-century Tashkent manuscript; the Ali Emiri and Osman Ergi copies, which most certainly come from an Anatolian Bektashi context and constitute a textual tradition very different from the ones originating in Ṣafavid circles; and the Sulṭān Ḳurrā’ī copy, which neither Muhsin Macit, the editor of the text, nor I have had direct access to.

Table 1. Distribution of messianic poems in the known copies of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān

Table 2 is essentially a summary of Table 1. It provides the number of the “Minorsky poems” in each copy, that of the other messianic poems, and their sum.

Table 2. Number of messianic poems in the known copies of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān

In order to better demonstrate the relationship between the individual copies of the Dīvān and to see the position of messianic poems in them, Figure 1, based on Muhsin Macit’s analysis, shows how the copies can be grouped. Unfortunately, in most cases it is difficult to see direct relationship between the individual manuscripts and establish that one was copied from the other. Based on the available evidence, what Macit has been able to ascertain is that certain copies are closer to each other than to others and constitute groups of texts coming from identical textual traditions, as it is not possible at this point to provide an exact stemma describing to the relationship between the majority of the copies.Footnote ⁶⁴ Straight lines represent direct relationship between individual copies, dotted lines represent indirect, likely affiliation.

Figure 1. Relationship between copies of Shah Ismāʿīl’s divan, based on Macit’s edition of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān.

Accordingly, there are the following textual groups, which I name after the most prominent manuscript in them: the “Tashkent Group” (Tashkent and Tashkent1), the “Paris Group” (Paris1 and Tabriz), the “Nuclear Group” (London2, Paris2, Tehran National Museum, Tehran2, and Tehran University), the “Şevket Rado Group” (Şevket Rado, which is affiliated with Mazar-i Sharif, the latter likely being one of the antecedents of Gulpāyagānī), the “Gulistān Group” (Gulistān and Qom), which is affiliated with the “Paris Group” and the Sulṭān Ḳurrā’ī copy. In addition to these, there are solo copies, i.e. ones that cannot be connected to any of these groups. As demonstrated by Macit about the three extant copies executed during the lifetime of Shah Ismāʿīl, the Washington and Tehran1 copies both seem to come from different paper trails, as does the third such copy, London1. It is difficult to connect these copies to the ones coming after them, because all of them are defective. None of them contains poems that are unique to them. A similar difficulty do we encounter with the later defective copies, i.e. with the Cairo copy from the first half of the sixteenth century or the undated Vatican copy.

How can we account for these different groups of manuscripts and their messianic content? According to the table, it seems that the number of the messianic “Minorsky poems” is smaller in the “Tashkent group,” which comes from the time of Ṭahmāsp. The case is similar to the group called nuclear (çekirdek) by Macit, which comprises late sixteenth-century copies, such as London2, Paris2, Tehran National Museum and Tehran2, as well as their late affiliate, the Tehran University copy from the nineteenth century; and in the group comprised of the Mazar-i Sharif copy, either from the sixteenth or the early seventeenth century, and its descendant, the Şevket Rado copy, and their late affiliate, the Gulpāyagānī copy. On the other hand, the Gulistān copy and its copy, the Qom copy, contain merely 3‒4 fewer of the “Minorsky poems” than Paris1. According to Macit, the copyist Abū Turāb had access to several previous copies, including the Sulṭān Ḳurrā’ī copy, and he clearly knew the manuscript tradition to which Paris1 belonged.

In addition, if we add to this equation the additional messianic poems that I have identified, we can see that only the Tashkent group has significantly fewer such poems (twelve as opposed to twenty-nine in Paris1), and the “Nuclear Group” has approximately the same or slightly fewer (between twenty and twenty-six), while the “Gulistān Group” has far more, forty-two! The irony with this is that only the Tashkent group suits the Minorsky thesis relatively well, i.e. two manuscripts—Tashkent and Tabriz—that Minorsky himself was not even aware of, while the other textual groups do not quite fit the bill.

As can also be seen in Macit, there were diverse textual traditions from the time we first encounter the Dīvān; copies with differing contents were already floating around during the reign of Shah Ismāʿīl. The Tashkent copy produced in 1535 might reflect a more mainstream and less messianic discourse and is perhaps in line with Ṭahmāsp’s assertion of his authority at his court and the end of the Qizilbash interregnum, marked by the execution of Ḥusayn Khan Shāmlū in 1533 and appointing a Persian, Qadi Jahān Ḳazvīnī to the post of vakīl.

The “Nuclear Group” of manuscripts, i.e. London2, Paris2, Tehran National Library, Tehran 2, as well as their nineteenth-century descendant, the Tehran University copy, constitutes a different tradition. These were all likely produced between the mid-sixteenth through the early seventeenth century. Their messianic content is somewhere between Tashkent and Paris1, which neither confirms nor refutes the “Minorsky thesis.” For twenty years until 1596, i.e. eight years into the reign of Shah ‘Abbās, the Qizilbash continued to wield great influence and be dominant, particularly after the death of Ṭahmāsp in 1576.

It is more difficult to politically contextualize the group comprised of, according to Macit, the Mazar-i Sharif copy, likely executed in the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century, the Şevket Rado copy, and their descendant, the Gulpāyagānī copy from the nineteenth century. It is certainly interesting that the Şevket Rado copy from 1038/1628, i.e. the penultimate year of ‘Abbās I, who greatly marginalized the Qizilbash, is the bulkiest of all the extant copies, with fifteen poems unique to it. One should not forget that the relative marginalization of the Qizilbash did not mean their disappearance or the extinction of Turkic as a literary idiom from Ṣafavid Iran. On the contrary, Turkic continued to retain its importance for the Ṣafavids in their competition with the Ottomans. It is enough to refer to Ayfer Karakaya-Stump’s abovementioned findings about the dynasty and their Anatolian disciples, whose relationship continued into the seventeenth century; or a summary of Twelver Shiite theology written in Turkic in the 1620s for a Crimean prince, Shāhin Girāy, who took refuge at the court of ‘Abbās.Footnote ⁶⁵ The cultivation of the image of Shah Ismāʿīl in the form of producing extensive copies of his Dīvān might have been part of such a geopolitical competition.

Perhaps the most interesting group is the “Gulistān Group.” As we can see further below, such an exquisite, finely executed copy can very well correspond to the historical context of heightened interest in the early days of the dynasty. Why would the Gulistān copy from 1688 have so many of the messianic poems of the founder of the dynasty?

Another cause for surprise is that if we add up the occurrences of the “Minorskian” poems in the copies other than Paris1, we find that except for one, all the messianic poems of the Paris1 copy can be found in them, and there is only one that can only be found in the Paris1 and Şevket Rado copies. Now let us look at the first poem, which is exclusive to the Paris manuscript and cannot be found even in the other groups.

The shah in the refrain refers to the author, Shah Ismāʿīl, and it is also a common epithet of ‘Alī. Presenting himself as a manifestation of ‘Alī, the poet calls upon his adepts to prostrate themselves before him, invoking prayer, which in mainstream Islam is due only to God. He is both a parrot, i.e. a transmitter of divine guidance, as well as military commander and Sufi master. Strophe 3 is a reference to the twelfth-century Arab mystic philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī’s notion of vaḥdat al-vujūd, “the unity of being,” according to which the world is an emanation of God and every being is His manifestation. Strophe 4 implicitly identifies the speaker with God, referring to Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), an emblematic figure of antinomian Islam. Al-Ḥallāj was executed for statements that were considered heretic, the most famous of which is anā’l-ḥaḳḳ “I am God,” a motto of unio mystica in Islamic mystical thought. According to the Koran (21:68‒9), Abraham was to be burnt on a pyre for smashing idols, but God rescued him from the fire; and God revealed his power to Moses, when He destroyed Mt. Sinai. In an eschatological sense, Shah Ismāʿīl’s reign is the beginning of the reign of the Messiah, the Mahdī, who has been in occultation and is now coming at the end of time. Implicitly, the sharia is therefore to be suspended, because God reveals himself in Khaṭā’ī; the coming of the New Year in strophe 5 marks perhaps the beginning of this new dispensation.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the next strophe we encounter Shah Ismāʿīl’s red-capped Turkmen followers, the Qizilbash, who are likened to Joseph, the manifestation of God’s beauty—and, implicitly, His power—in Islamic lore. In the end, the poet announces his identity with ‘Alī, which has a concrete reference in that the Ṣafavids presented themselves as Sayyids, descendants of Muhammad through ‘Alī and Mūsá al-Kāẓim, the seventh Imam; however, the image of the advent of an Alid descendant is definitely part of the eschatological message of the poem, too.

The fact that this highly messianic poem can only be found in Paris1 would support Minorsky’s thesis, even if there is only one such instance. On closer examination, however, one can see that, in contrast to all the other poems in the divan, this piece is not a ghazal, i.e. a short poem in couplets that follows the Arabo-Persian metrical system of the arūż, but a koşma, a folk-Turkish genre, which has a strophic structure and a syllabic meter. (I have broken the lines accordingly, although, as is usual, in the manuscript it looks as if it were made up of couplets.) Since all the other messianic poems, which follow the prestigious arūż system, can be found in the manuscripts that were produced after the Paris1 copy, most likely it was not at all the messianic content of the poem that made, for example, even Abū Turāb in 1688 exclude it from the Gulistān copy, which he penned, but its versification, considered substandard.Footnote ⁶⁸

We can also look at a ghazal from Minorsky’s list which occurs in but one manuscript other than Paris1, the Şevket Rado copy:Footnote ⁶⁹

The only verse that can be considered as belonging to a ġulāt ethos is number 3. In an excommunicative zeal, the poet declares that those who do not acknowledge ‘Alī’s divinity are not Muslims. If taken together with verse 1, where the Beloved is declared sultan in the world, the message of uniting spiritual and political authority under a Shii banner is clear.

If we recall, Minorsky claims that even if a poem was not purged from the later copies, its text was altered to reflect the new religiosity of the dynasty. For example, the variant of the next poem as contained in Paris1 is also different from the one in later manuscripts:

The poem can be found not only in Paris1 but also in the “Nuclear Group” (Paris2, London2, Tehran2 and Tehran University) and the “Gulistān Group” (Gulistān and Qom), as well the early copy London1 and the Vatican copy. Drawing attention to the last verse, Minorsky suggests that it was also tampered with by ideologically minded later copyists. Paris1 has velī Shah Isma‘īl, the poet identifying with ‘Alī, one of whose commonly known titles is velī Allāh “guardian of God” but also posing as a Sufi saint. The later manuscripts, as pointed out by Minorsky, give the following variation of this line:

Minorsky argues that the ambiguity of velī Shah İsma‘īl, which can mean either “but Shah Isma‘īl” or “Shah Isma‘īl the Saint,” was intentionally lifted from the later copies. One must accept that he is right that the ambiguity and the identification of Shah Ismāʿīl as an ‘Alid is stronger in Paris1. Of course, velī is an extremely loaded term in Shiism, where it designates someone who holds sanctified power and is therefore the sole human source of religious authority. However, I would argue that an equally “heretical” verse in the poem is the first one, where the speaker claims to be of divine nature, which, notably, is present in all the manuscripts. If later manuscripts were indeed affected by censorship, would it not have been logical to alter the first verse as well?Footnote ⁷² Further, the “Gulistān Group” also has a ghazal with a similar last verse:

Play with the ambiguity of the word velī, if indeed this is an ambiguity, is apparently not alien to later manuscripts, either.

The next poem also has a strong self-aggrandizing tone. Here it is as it can be found in Paris1:

Amy Gallagher suggests that the difference between the last line as it appears in Paris1 and as it appears in the other known manuscripts is also an example of later copyists’ efforts to rid the Dīvān of notions of Shah Ismāʿīl’s divinity,Footnote ⁷⁴ such as the last verse, which appears, for example, in Tehran2 as follows:

Gallagher thinks that while Paris1 presents the poet’s apotheosis, in the other manuscripts we find shah, which she thinks is more fluid. But is not the presentation of a different ġulāt idea, namely, the deification of ‘Alī, also implying that the poet himself is ‘Alī/God?

However, all the other poems in Minorsky can be found in either of the manuscripts he or Məmmədov were working with, or in Tehran2, and especially Gulistān and Qom. I have not found any other major textual variety that would make the versions in later copies less ecstatic or messianic. Here is the next poem:

All the other manuscripts have a similar text, except that the version in Tehran2 is two verses shorter.

The following poem can be found in Paris1 and the “Gulistān Group” in slightly different versions:

Here is a modified version of Minorsky’s translation:

Both Minorsky and Gallagher argue that this poem is unique to Paris1, but in fact it is also contained in the copies of the “Gulistān Group” with almost the same text, except for two differences in the last verses 6‒7:Footnote ⁷⁸

The meaning of these two variants is problematic and awaits further research. Nevertheless, it seems clear that verse 6 in Paris1 refers either to God’s revealing Himself in the letter mīm, which perhaps refers to Muḥammad, or to one of the mysterious letters in the Koran, while the version in the “Gulistān Group” invokes the moment of the mystic’s union with God. However, these are minor changes and the most expressly messianic verses carrying ġulāt notions are the same in both manuscript groups.

The problem of versification leads us to another group of manuscripts. This is a topic that cannot be dealt with extensively here because of the vastness of primary sources hitherto neglected and the elementariness of research on the topic. These mecmū‘as, “private anthologies,” belong primarily to Anatolian Alevi-Bektashi communities, which, though Ottoman subjects, shared much of the Shiite leanings and ġulāt ideology of the Ṣafavids and continued to consider themselves their spiritual followers, as suggested by Ayfer Karakaya-Stump.Footnote ⁸⁰ One such manuscript is Millet Library Mnz. 631, mentioned above. Even the outlook of these manuscripts reveals that we should not seek a rich patron behind them but a simple Bektashi dervish intent on collecting poetry from the major poets whose poems he could use in Bektashi rituals. This copy differs from the Ṣafavid-sponsored manuscript tradition, because it is full of syllabic and strophic poems, similar to the one I adduced previously. Interestingly, in the Bektashi tradition there were several poets writing under the poetic pen-name Khaṭāyī, i.e. Shah Ismāʿīl’s pen-name. Or they used pen-names that referenced Shah Ismāʿīl’s nom de plume, such as Shah Khaṭāyī, Dervish Khaṭāyī, Can Khaṭāyī, Derdimend Khaṭāyī, Pir Khaṭāyī, Sultan Khaṭāyīor Shah Khaṭāyī.Footnote ⁸¹ These poets, whose oeuvre forms an important part of Alevi rituals, used the same imagery and produced both genres of high culture, ġazals, ḳaṣīdas, masnavīs, murabba‘s, etc., and low-register koşmas and nefes, varsaġıs, etc., a feature understood by scholars as an intentional appeal to the Qizilbash followers. According to Amy Gallagher, these poems are different from the ones preserved in the Ṣafavid-sponsored copies; Khaṭāyī features no more as the historical figure claiming to be the incarnation of the divine but as the sheikh of the order who has attained mystical union with God.Footnote ⁸² It seems, therefore, that the two manuscript traditions, i.e. the Ṣafavid-sponsored Shah Ismāʿīl copies and the Alevi Bektashi popular anthologies, bifurcated at some point in history. To date, Shah Ismāʿīl “Khaṭāyī” and the pseudo-Khaṭāyīs form an essential part of Alevi-Bektashi rituals. The story of this bifurcation is not entirely clear, especially because recent research by Ayfer Karakaya-Stump reveals that many of the Bektashi groups continued to have contacts with the Ṣafavid shahs into the seventeenth century. She also suggests that “[T]he Qizilbash movement should be conceived as a union of various mystical formations and antinomian dervish groups which flourished in Anatolia from the late medieval period.”Footnote ⁸³ I have demonstrated elsewhere how some poems by Nesīmī, the greatest Ḥurūfī poet, were plagiarized by Shah Ismāʿīl or misattributed by the copyists of his Dīvān, and vice versa, when Shah Ismāʿīl poems were presented as though they had been written by Nesīmī, a phenomenon that, I suggest, can best be understood against the background of a larger popular Sufi context that carried features of both oral and literary culture. While this is all true, one might also use the designation in the vignette in the Paris2 copy, which refers to Sultan Khaṭāyī, or certain of the poems in Dīvān copies with the same appellation. Would it not be possible that at least some of these poems might come from the Ṣafavid “propaganda machine” or the court itself?

Audience and Ambiguity

And now we can come back to the Minorsky thesis and critique it from a literary point of view. Already the great Muslim thinker of the twelfth century, al-Ġazālī (d. 1111), who harmonized Sufism with mainstream Islam, touches on the issue of the so-called shaṭḥiyāt, which are

al-Ġazālī maintains that such exclamations are dangerous for the ignorant but they are therefore permissible for the initiated. Moreover, Minorsky forgets about an essential feature of the Persianate ghazal, ambiguity, which had been classicized from the twelfth century on and by Shah Ismāʿīl’s time formed part of the poetic convention. As has already been emphasized in Amelia Gallagher’s article mentioned above, in the classical ghazal the language of love poetry, the courtly setting and the language of mystical intoxication are inextricably intertwined.Footnote ⁸⁵ The reader often does not know whether what they are reading is the depiction of a wine gathering with dancing boys and musicians or an ecstatic gathering of Sufis. Accordingly, the poems cited above can also be interpreted as elaborations of the idea of vaḥdat al-vujūd, “the unity of being,” which was an acceptable part of religious discourse as well as poetry. Many of the messianic poems of Shah Ismāʿīl could therefore easily avoid the putative censorship of later, pious readers. It is probable that the copies of the Dīvān that were commissioned by those members of the dynasty, such as Ṭahmāsp I or ‘Abbās I, who at one point or another actively suppressed millenarian groups, could have been subjected to closer scrutiny and possible censorship. However, the space of ambiguity in which literary texts operated left the copyists of the Dīvān with a considerable amount of freedom.

The question of audience can take us back to the Persian sources about the religiosity of the early Ṣafavids and Shah Ismāʿīl. A well-known account can be found in the staunchly Sunni Fażlullāh b. Rūzbihān Khunjī’s Tārīkh-i ‘ālamārā-yi amīnī, written in 1480, in which he criticizes in vitriolic language the heretical ideas of Shah Ismāʿīl, his grandfather Junayd and father Ḥaydar.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is in stark contrast with the accounts found in the court historians of the next generation, Kh^wāndmīr (d. 1535‒36) or Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū (d. 1539‒40), who are virtually silent about the “heretical” leanings of the founder of the dynasty. We should also mention Amīnī Haravī’s Futūḥāt-i shāhī from 1521, which, as analyzed by Ali Anooshahr, presents the Ṣafavids’ rise to power not as a revolution but as a carefully planned political and military campaign.Footnote ⁸⁷ The reason for such a balanced image might be that these historians belonged to the Tajik segment of the Ṣafavid elite. To them, the ġulāt ideas of the early Ṣafavids and Shah Ismāʿīl were alien and embarrassing, something they felt it was best to keep silent about.Footnote ⁸⁸ That this was a conscious attitude on the part of important segments of the Ṣafavid elite can be illustrated by the example of Sām Mīrzā (d. 974/1566‒67). The learned prince, Shah Ismāʿīl’s second son, composed a biographical dictionary of poets entitled Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī in imitation of the great Timurid litterateurs, Mīr ‘Alī Şīr Navā’ī’s Majālis al-Nafā’is and Dawlatshāh’s Tazkirat al-shu‘arā. Remarkably, in his work Sām Mīrzā does not quote from the Turkic poetry of his own father, Shah Ismāʿīl I, but quotes instead a few Persian verses from him and only mentions that Shah Ismāʿīl used the pen-name Khaṭā’ī in both his Persian and his Turkic poems.Footnote ⁸⁹ Perhaps this was due to some personal predilection on the part of Sām Mīrzā for Persians, as evidenced, for example, by his entry on a certain Yūsuf Beg of the Çāvuşlū branch of the Ustājlū tribe: “Although he is a Turk, he has humane manners,” and “nowadays there are few Turks and even Tajiks like him.”Footnote ⁹⁰ But more important than Sām Mīrzā’s personal preferences, the omission and suppression of the ġulāt discourse was very much in line with the official Ṣafavid stance under Shah Ṭahmāsp, who, as has already been noted, tried to eliminate the ġulāt tendencies of the Qizilbash, or at least tried to establish a court profile along the lines of Iranian kingship. As is well known, this policy became fully developed under Shah ‘Abbās I (1588‒1629), who as part of his centralizing efforts tried to weaken the Qizilbash emirs and destroy messianic groups and tendencies that they and other discontented groups could have relied on.

Related to the issue of the “Tajik” audience and courtly context of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān is the question of the miniatures illustrating two of the manuscript copies, London1 and Washington. If we look at the illustrations we see that they do not pertain to the poems with religious themes, let alone the poems with a fervently messianic content. All of them depict more conventional scenes, such as the hunt, court scenes, a dervish, or birds. The single exception is a mace appearing in two miniatures in the Washington copy, and in one in the London1 copy, which bears the well-known Shiite formula written on it: lā fatā illá ‘Alī lā sayfa illá Ẕū al-fiḳār, “There is no warrior but ‘Alī, there is no sword but Ẕū al-fiḳār (‘Alī’s sword).” The mace is carried by a figure who might be a tabarrā’ī, ‘disavower’ or ‘dissociater,’ i.e. a public curser of the first three caliphs. The tabarrā’ī was a group officially in charge of enforcing adherence to the official Twelver Shiite crede by monitoring the public cursing of the first three caliphs and by spying on the population.Footnote ⁹¹ Of course, these are defective copies and may have had miniatures depicting themes that are perhaps more eschatological. However, the lack of such topics in the miniatures might also have to do with the question of audience. The painters who made the period so famous for book illustration, Bihzād, Mīr Muṣavvir, Sulṭān Muḥammad, etc., all came from an urban Persian background. In fact, before the ascent of Shah Ismāʿīl to the throne and his forced conversion of his domains to Shiism they had likely been at least nominally Sunnis themselves, serving Sunni patrons. For such masters the depiction of eschatological topics, let alone illustrating such heretic ideas as, for example, the divinity of the ruler, would probably have been inappropriate. Moreover, only a relatively small portion of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān is made up of eschatological, messianic poems. Most of them are conventional ghazals, with a setting of courtly love and mystical overtones. The illustrators had plenty of poems of a more conventional character to look to.

Therefore it seems that the poetry in the Dīvān was addressed to diverse segments of the Ṣafavid venture. Its intended audience included mainly but not at all exclusively the Turkophone Qizilbash and Anatolian adepts of the Ṣafavid movement with whom the messianic message could resonate especially well, as well as connoisseurs of a broad courtly culture with mystical leanings. Its language and style was therefore very familiar on both sides of the Ottoman‒Ṣafavid borderland.

Connections of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān with Persian Literature

We must not think, however, that the chiliastic tone in poetry was in any way peculiar to the Ṣafavid period. We find it, for example, in perhaps the greatest Persian mystical poet, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (604‒72/1207‒73), who used the motif of the Day of Judgment in a number of his ghazals as a highly elaborate conceit for depicting the gathering of mystics or the mystical experience of union with God.Footnote ⁹² Further, we find a similar strategy in a Persian ghazal by the noted Ṣafavid dā‘ī or propagandist, Ḳāsim-i Anvār (757‒837/1356‒1433), too:

Although addressed to the Qizilbash Turkmen community of adepts and thus written entirely in Turkic, the Dīvān of Shah Ismāʿīl, as has been astutely observed by Michael Glünz, can also be connected to the Persian poetic production of other ġulāt religious movements, notably the Nūrbakhshiyya and the Ni‘matullāhiyya.Footnote ⁹⁴ In particular, some features of both Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Asīrī Lāhījī and Shah Ni‘matullāh Valī’s poetry, such as simplicity of meter and syntax, the high frequency of repetition, the emphatically homiletic style appropriate for a dervish community, and the unbound ecstatic tone revealing the mystical experience, are also highly characteristic of the style in Shah Ismāʿīl’s religious poems.Footnote ⁹⁵ The connection is not at all surprising; all three of these movements came from the post-Mongol socio-religious fermentation and espoused a chiliastic, mystical form of Shiism at some point during their career, and there was even personal acquaintance between Shah Ismāʿīl and Lāhijī. The Ṣafavids clearly saw all other messianic movements as rivals; as argued by Shahzad Bashir, the Nūrbakkhshiyya ended as an independent intellectual movement a couple of decades after the Ṣafavid takeover, and the Ni‘matullāhīs could only survive because they had by then shed their independent messianic agenda.Footnote ⁹⁶

Rediscovery of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān in the Seventeenth Century

There is a surprising turn in this story in the second half of the seventeenth century, for which we have to return to the “Gulistān Group” of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān and try to find a contemporary context for it. As we might recall, the manuscripts of this group were almost as large as the Şevket Rado copy, and their messianic content exceeded even that of the Paris1 copy.

In the late seventeenth century there were several popular prose romances or popular histories about Shah Ismāʿīl, bearing the title ‘Ālamārā-yi Ṣafavī, Jahāngushā-yi khāḳān and ‘Ālamārā-yi Shah Ismāʿīl. One of them was for a long time known to scholarship as a source contemporary with Shah Ismāʿīl; it is Andrew Morton who clarified that it belonged to the late seventeenth century along with the other similar prose romances.Footnote ⁹⁷ In a recent paper based on these late seventeenth-century popular romances and Ṣafavid political advice literature, Sholeh Quinn has found that there was a discourse claiming that Shah Ismāʿīl fulfilled some hadith and prophecies.Footnote ⁹⁸ Moreover, in an article, Amy Gallagher studies a copy of a late seventeenth-century official hagiography entitled the Silsilat al-Ṣafaviyya, which contains four poems by Shah Ismāʿīl. Though these poems do not contain Shah Ismāʿīl’s claims to divine incarnation, which, as we have seen, can well be read in a metaphorical sense anyway, they do contain ġulāt elements. To Gallagher this suggests that there might have been an Ardabil-based millenarian strand well into late Ṣafavid times.Footnote ⁹⁹ To Quinn and Gallagher’s claims we can add that the existence of such a complete, finely executed and embellished, extensive copy of Shah Ismāʿīl as the Gulistān manuscript, commissioned and produced in Isfahan, the Ṣafavid capital, may well tie in with the possibility of a millenarian discourse in late Ṣafavid times or at least a milieu of heightened interest in the early days of the dynasty. It might also be relevant in this regard to refer to the anthology preserved at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, which contains Persian and Turkic poetry, including a selection from Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān, copied only a month after Shah Sulaymān’s first enthronement (as Shah Ṣafī II) on 12 Jumādā I 1077/10 November 1666 and dedicated to him.

Indeed, as Said Arjomand has argued, Ṣafavid ideology tried to preserve the “Mahdistic tenet.” He adduces the Takmilat al-akhbār, a world chronicle written by ‘Abdī Beg Shīrāzī (921‒88/1515‒65), who reserves a key place for the Ṣafavid monarch as a sayyid in the grand chiliastic scheme of history:

In other words, the Ṣafavid ruler, by virtue of his sacred descent from ‘Alī, is a placeholder for the Mahdī until the latter’s Parousia at the end of time, and as such, he unites political and spiritual authority. Although at variance with what Shiite theological doctors would have preferred them to say, the Ṣafavid rulers seem to have continued to profess millenarian charisma, albeit in a modified version, perhaps to the very end of the tenure of the dynasty.

The same attitude to the dynasty’s chiliastic charisma, i.e. one that considers the Ṣafavids as precursors to the advent of the Mahdī, can be seen in a ḳaṣīda written by Ṣādiḳī Beg (ca. 1533‒1610), the prominent painter and poet of Qizilbash origins.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The poem starts out with the Mahdī depicted as the Beloved; after the transitory couplet to be cited below, however, it turns into praise of Shah ‘Abbās I, whose persona as the Beloved apparently metamorphoses into being depicted as the Mahdī; or at least, this playfulness is certainly there: “He is the guiding Mahdī, the just king whose justice / Issues a fatwā [even] to Anūshirvān to suppress injustice.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Aside from this single couplet, I have found no other traces in Ṣādiḳī’s oeuvre that could be related to the “Mahdistic tenet.” We cannot date the poem with precision; it could originally have been written for Ṭahmāsp or Ismāʿīl II, too, and then refashioned later into a panegyric for ‘Abbās. What seems probable, however, is that the language of Messianism continued to inform certain registers of literary discourse well into the seventeenth century. This is also borne out by the following couplet in a panegyric ḳaṣīda written for ‘Abbās II (1052‒77/1642‒66) by Ṣā’ib (b. Tabriz, ca. 1000‒86/1592‒1676), the most prominent representative of the so-called Indian style in Ṣafavid Persia: “May the times of his fortunate reign [dawlat-ash], through God’s graces, / Extend to the reign of the Mahdī, the Lord of the Time!”Footnote ¹⁰³

This is not unlike how Muḥtasham-i Kāshānī (d. 996/1587‒88) extols ‘Abbās in a panegyric: “May the sun make its rays every day into a broom / For the blessed chamberlain who spreads carpet on the path of the Lord of the Time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Of course, one can argue that there is a huge difference between claiming to be the godhead or an incarnation thereof, as Shah Ismāʿīl did, and claiming to be the placeholder or precursor of the last imam. However, the fact that the dynasty itself maintained an aura of eschatological significance and that messianic movements repeatedly occurred during its tenure, suggests that there was a niche for the continuation of messianic discourse in various segments of cultural life, including literature.

Conversion, Orality and Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān

The textological conundrum of the individual manuscripts of Shah Ismāʿīl’s Dīvān is far from being solved. However, I have been trying to show that Minorsky’s thesis, which claims that the extreme, “heretical” views present in the old Paris copy were purged from later manuscripts, is an oversimplification. It would not be surprising if this thesis were grounded in the discourse of the Urtext, which posits that the work of philology is to go back to the author’s original version. There certainly are theoretical arguments against such a positivist approach, but the Dīvān of Shah Ismāʿīl and its different versions seem to resist such treatments particularly easily. We know for certain that the Dīvān was used in Ṣafavid propaganda efforts. It may well be that already during Shah Ismāʿīl’s lifetime there were many textual variations circulating. The mostly very simple language of the poetry and the great variability of the texts suggests a context on the cusp between orality and the written form.

The oral nature of this poetry is confirmed by the following account. It is from a certain Ġarībī, a poet of Anatolian origins who ended up in the service of Shah Ismāʿīl and Ṭahmāsp, producing a divan of poetry and prose pieces. One of the latter is a biographical dictionary of Anatolian poets, whom the author presents as heavily Alid or Shiite, in true fashion of confessional ambiguity. His account of Shah Ismāʿīl contains the following passage:

From this account we learn that the poetry of Shah Ismāʿīl was part of Ṣafavid rituals and that it was used for proselytization. This context was very likely such that shifts and modifications occurred easily in the text of the poems that were chanted. The poem was an open text that was modified, completed, shortened as the moment demanded. This is confirmed by the fact that several poems have variants that clearly did not come from the later copyists and had already been known in several different variations early on. Indeed, as I demonstrate elsewhere, Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry was on the margin between literary and oral culture; in other words, although it was written down, features of orality continued to inform it, making the text of the poems highly flexible and malleable.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The non-literate nature of this poetry is extremely significant. As can be seen in the case of misattributed poems of Nesīmī and Shah Ismāʿīl, such non-literate aspects of poetry were the function of its communal, homiletic nature. Included in the communal rites of Qizilbah/Alevi-Bektashi communities, such poems provided and continue to provide today a space for members of the congregation to encounter the divine and reenact, in a way, their own conversion.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Therefore, just as much as such conversion narratives as the Oġuznāma, a well-known popular narrative about the origins of the Türkmen, articulate “notions of sacred origins, in particular the notions of sacred communal origins that typically provide the basis for assertions of communal integrity and legitimacy,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ the religious poetry of Shah Ismāʿīl as well as the pseudo-Khaṭāyīs and other poets in Qizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi communities were symbolic reenactments of the conversion and creation of these communities. In a highly insightful recent article referred to above, Rıza Yıldırım suggests that the ġulāṭ ethos of the Qizilbash found expression in Anatolian Karbala-oriented narrative traditions that centered on the mission to avenge the blood of the first and most important martyr of Shiism, Ḥusayn, who was massacred along with his family and followers at Karbala in 680 CE, marking the beginning date of Shiism’s eternal struggle against oppression. Ṣafavid propaganda in general and Shah Ismāʿīl’s poetry in particular, sought to tie in with this ethos, which conceived of its social and political struggle as a reenactment of the struggle against Yazīd and the Umayyads who had murdered Ḥusayn.Footnote ¹⁰⁹