CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Gevorgyan, Narine |
|---|---|
| Title | Jami'-i 'Abbasi: Baha al-Din al-'Amili's Manual of Religious Instruction in the Context of State- and Confession- Building in Seventeenth-century Safavid Iran and Beyond |
| Summary | In a general comparative framework of Ottoman and Safavid “connected histories,” this thesis studies the Safavid state-building project that ran parallel with the institutionalization of Twelver Shi‘ism and its (re)definition as a state doctrine during the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth. This study uses the paradigm of “confess ionalization&#x 201d; to create a framework for viewing the religious-political transformation in Iran in relation to similar developments in the Ottoman Empire. It reveals that the state- and confession- building processes in these rival empires were informed by an inter-imperial confrontation and followed highly similar trajectories. One of the main characteristics of these processes was the articulation and imposition of theological and practical “orthodoxies.” As a case study, the thesis focuses on one of the key developments in both states, the production of manuals of religious instruction as a means of articulating and crystallizing doctrinal and ritual differences between them and social disciplining of the population. A contextualized reading of two religious manuals produced in rival contexts on the polemical issue of religious visitation of shrines (ziyara), namely Chapter Seven (On the Religious Visitation of His Holiness the Refuge of Prophecy Muhammad and his family, The Commander of the Faithful Ali, the Infallible Imams, on the Times of Their Birth and Death) of a legal compendium titled Jami‘-i ‘Abbasi (“The [Legal] Compendium for Shah ‘Abbas”) commissioned by Shah ‘Abbas I Safavid (1571-1629) from one of the leading religious authorities of his time, Baha al-Din al-‘Amili (d. 1629), and of a religious manual, an ‘ilmihal, written by a member of the Ottoman learned establishment Birgivi Mehmed (d. 1573), titled Ziyâret&#x fc;’l-ku bûr (The Visitation of Shrines), demonstrates that these texts show striking similarities in their argumentation and denial of the precepts of one another, reflecting contemporary ideological challenges arising from the Ottoman-Safavid ideological confrontation. |
| Supervisor | Krstić, Tijana |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/gevorgyan_narine.pdf |
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