THE BACKGROUND

The Safavid period is one of the outstanding epochs in the intellectual and spiritual history of Islamic Iran, although its artistic and political life is much better known to the outside world than what it created in the domains of sufism, philosophy and theology. Particularly in Hikmat – that combination of philosophy and gnosis which should be translated as theosophy rather than philosophy as currently understood in the Occident – the Safavid period is the apogee of a long development which reaches back to the 6th/12th century and the introduction of new intellectual perspectives into Islamic civilisation by Suhravardī and Ibn 'Arabī. Likewise, in sufism and the religious sciences the sudden flowering of activity in the 10th/16th century is based on the important but little studied transformation that was taking place in Persia since the Mongol invasion.

Persia did not become Shī'ī through a sudden process. Ever since the 7th/13th century Shi'ism was spreading in Persia through certain of the sūfī orders which were outwardly Sunnī – that is, in their madhhab they followed one of the Sunnī schools, usually the Shāfi'ī. But they were particularly devoted to 'Alī and some even accepted wilāya (or valāyat, in its Persian pronunciation), that is, the power of spiritual direction and initiation which Shī'īs believe was bestowed upon 'Alī by the Prophet of Islam. It was particularly this belief that made the transformation of Persia from a predominantly Sunnī land to a Shī'ī one possible. The Shī'īs consider Safī al-Dīn Ardabīlī, the founder of the Safavid order, as a Shī'ī, whereas the research of modern historians has revealed him to be a Sunnī.