Dust jackets always make big claims, in this case, “a complete re-evaluation” “the definitive single volume”, for which the author is not responsible. Andrew Newman states his aims, on the basis of a commission in 2000 to write “a new general history of the Safavid period” with a reappraisal of the success and longevity rather than decadence of the Safavid state. The book is aimed “in particular at the non-specialist interested in Iran and the region generally”. The author's very wide reading and assiduous attendance at Iranian conferences have made the notes and bibliography a very useful guide to recent decades of research in Safavid society, politics, trade, art and religion. The Appendix of contemporary sources, both foreign travellers and local chroniclers, arranged by date within each reign, is also a useful guide to further reading. The author must be congratulated on having cast his net wide and dredged up many interesting nuggets of information. The book is good on marriage politics and tribal alliances and contains abbreviated summaries of art historical research, useful for some of the buildings still to be seen in Iran. Iran's foreign relations, especially with the Uzbeks of Central Asia, get rather short shrift.
I would have appreciated some more on the actual inheritance from the Safavid Sufi lineage, and from the Aq Qoyunlu and Timurid predecessors; more on ethno-genesis and the shifting alliances of tribes which coalesced and dissolved across borders; more on the violence of the Safavid take-over, and the Sunni out-migrations to India; more on the nature of the post-Safavid state and the roots of modern Iran and the nature of Iranian historical memory.
However the need to compress all this information into a smallish volume of a size and price to suit undergraduate pockets leads to a main text of inelegant prose.
A few examples: (p.11) “In 1471 Uzun Hasan married his daughter, herself the daughter of the last Christian emperor of Trabzond [sic] and thus of noble Greek descent, to Junayd's . . . son . . . Haydar” – the girl thus being credited with 2 fathers, a Greek and a Turk – unless the “his” refers to the only proper name in the preceding sentence, Junayd, in which case we deserve to know more about the Safavid practice of incest! The faddish insistence on avoiding common terms that have long been in general use leads to less rather than more clarity or precision – e.g. “the discourse surrounding Ismail . . . projected both his abject status . . . in relation to and as the transcendent embodiment of the spirituo[sic]-cultural traditions of the region's key discourses” and another on p. 123, “the project was dominated by the military-political power of the Turk and the administrative expertise and broader cultural discourse of the Tajik united in loyalty under, by and to, the heterodox spiritual and Persian cultural discourse with which Isma'il projected his own identification”. A passing reference in Shah Isma'il's “Divan” to “Jesus, son of Mary” (the standard Muslim appellation for the Christian Jesus, son of God) is taken as evidence, not of a slightly tired Sufi literary topos, but of a direct political appeal to the Christians of Iran – who are supposed to have read, marked and inwardly digested the young monarch's mostly Turkish poems; p. 19 has the poet Hafiz influencing the later Jami by writing “masnavis”, not the best known productions of the famous ghazal-writer; on p. 79 the commissioning of a manuscript copy of Nizami's “Khusraw va Shirin” is taken as being a prime political move to secure “Tajik” loyalty - with miniature paintings!
The “Qazvin shrine” is left with no further definition (e.g. p. 36, p. 47, p. 58, p. 75 etc.) than what had been alluded to on p. 17 “the Qazvin branch of the Mar'ashi sayyids, administrators of the shrine in the city which house the mausoleum of a son of the same Imam” (Riza) – this is probably the shrine known as the Imamzadeh Husain; Shah ‘Abbas’ purported burial in the shrine of the Imamzadeh Habib ibn Musa in Kashan needs further discussion; Allahverdi Khan on p. 53 and p. 65 is referred to without further ado as Armenian, whereas his lineal descendants today claim to be of Georgian origin, and the contemporary seventeenth-century traveller Sir Thomas Herbert also refers to the family as being Georgian: it would have been worth going to the trouble of citing sources for this statement; the Allahverdi Khan bridge in Isfahan –popularly known as “siyoseh pol” i.e. 33 arched bridge - is (p. 65) referred to as 40-vaulted without further explanation. Perhaps the writer's brief residence in Iran in the mid-1970s has left him with only vague memories of that city; as is evident in his description of the tilework spandrels of the Hasht Behesht palace (in the south west of the royal demesne, not the north east) as consisting in “depictions of . . . insects” (p. 101), whereas what I saw there on my recent visits was animals and birds, some mythical, in delightful almost “Fauve” colours.
As it is, the author has not mastered fully the modish “discourse” theory of power, nor the mass of detail that he has dredged or gleaned from his wide reading, and so fails to give a clear narrative sense of the main lines of historical development and socio-cultural context. The book therefore cannot stand as a “definitive” synthesis and re-evaluation of the Safavid period in Iran.
Nevertheless, it is useful as an item on an expanded reading list and as such can be recommended to undergraduates studying Persian history and art of the period between 1500 and 1750. It is the result of obvious hard work sustained over several years of detailed reading. The general non-specialist reader may well find it rather hard going.
