Friday, 16 February 2024 at 4:00 p.m. (EST)
Location: Victoria University Senior Common Room (rear of 91 Charles St. West).
As an Abrahamic religion, Islam recognizes and celebrates the prophets of the O.T. Particularly, the Israelite prophet-kings, David and his son Solomon, are recognized for establishing justice and pious kingship in their kingdom and its centrepiece, the city of Jerusalem. Invoked and referenced in the Qur’an, figures like David and Solomon were more roundly discussed and profiled thanks to the genre of qisas al-anbiya (“Tales of the Prophets”) which became massively popular in medieval and early modern Islamicate culture. This talk is dedicated to exploring the intersection of this popular dynamic of prophetography with the Safavid empire of Iran that co-existed with the Ottoman and Mughal empires in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Safavid kings were arguably one of the most eclectic dynasties ever encountered: they emerged in Azarbaijan as a mystical brotherhood of antinomian Sufis but subsequently transformed into Perso-Islamic emperors who promoted and established Twelver Shi`ism in their new empire that at times stretched from eastern Anatolia and Iraq to Afghanistan. This talk examines how the historical imagination of the Safavids – already populated with beloved heroes and iconic kings from the Turkic and Persian literary traditions – made space for figures like David and Solomon.
COLIN MITCHELL teaches in the Dalhousie History program, with a cross-appointment to Religious Studies. He is primarily a historian of Safavid Iran (1501–1722) but has also written on Mughal India and Timurid Iran/Central Asia. Mitchell has worked on the intersection of court politics, literature, and religion with an emphasis on chancellery practices and the Persian belletristic tradition. He is currently researching princely succession practices in the early modern Islamicate lands, as well as examining the iconography of Old Testament prophets in medieval and early modern Persianate literary and religious culture.
