Historical Writing During the Reign of Shah Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles.

• Author: Meisami, Julie Scott
• Position: Reviews of Books

Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah [Abbas.sup.[subset]]: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles. By SHOLEH A. QUINN. Salt Lake City: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS, 2000. Pp. xiv + 197.

The study of Persian historiography (as opposed to the mining for information of historical texts) is still in its infancy. Sholeh Quinn's analysis of Safavid chronicles makes a major contribution to the growing field of interest, not merely in what historians wrote, but in how and why they wrote. Quinn describes her project as "discovering the chroniclers' models, outlining the conventions of historical writing to which they adhered, isolating examples of imitative writing, and reaching conclusions about the ideological concerns of the chroniclers by analyzing the rewriting that took place," through the study of selected texts (p. 3).

In her introduction Quinn provides a brief sketch of the Safavid dynasty and of Safavid historical writing, which she sees as a continual process of rewriting that reflects the "key ideological transformations experienced by the dynasty" (p. 5). Although her main focus is on the reign of Shah [Abbas.sup.[subset]], which saw an unprecedented florescence of historical writing, she also takes into account earlier Safavid and Timurid histories. After briefly outlining "the dynasty's best-known chronicle," Iskandar Beg Munshi's [Alam.sup.[subset]]-ara-yi [Abbasi.sup.[subset]], Quinn describes pre-Safavid works to which Safavid historians referred (chiefly the Safvat al-safa a hagiographical account of the dynasty's founder Shaykh Safi al-Din, and the late Timurid Rawzat al-safa), and goes on to consider early Safavid histories written in the reigns of Shah [Isma.sup.[subset]] and Shah Tahmasb, before turning (chapter two) to those written under Shah [Abbas.sup.[contains]].

The concluding sections of this chapter address, first, the issue of genre, with regard to which Quinn sagely prefers to be guided by the "categories employed by the historians of the time" rather than to impose "late-twentieth-century classifications on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts" (p. 24); and second, the "evolution of Safavid chronicles" away from the universal or general histories that dominated the early Safavid period towards dynastic history, a movement to which "political and dynastic stability certainly must have contributed." Whereas universal histories had functioned "to establish broader contours of political legitimacy," and "may reflect Turko-Mongol claims to universal rule," by Shah [Abbas's.sup.[contains]] time this claim was "no longer possible.., since the Islamic world was divided under Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman rule" (p. 28). This may be too simplistic; "universal rule" seems more a hyperbolic topos (Witness its recurrence in panegyrics) than a claim based on political realities. To assess motivations, we need to look at individual examples, case by case.

Quinn devotes chapter three (certainly one of the book's most important, and most interesting, chapters)...