JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. British Institute of Persian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Iran. I During the seventeenth century there was a large influx of poets from Safawid Iran to Mughal India and the Deccan. Persian poetry throve in India rather than in its natural homeland, Iran. The theory so far held is best summed up in Mirzi Muhammad Qazwini's communication to E. G. Browne:The chief reason for this [i.e. lack of patronage by the Safawids] seems to have been that these kings, by reason of their political aims and strong antagonism to the Ottoman Empire, devoted the greater part of their energies to the propagation of the Shi'a doctrine and the encouragement of divines learned in its principles and laws.Browne subscribed to this theory fully, as have all his successors, including Rypka more recently, who asserts that the " cultural " interest of the Safawids was confined to the consolidation of Shi'ism, and that in the Safawid Iran there was a " palpable lack of interest in the poets, their works and their burial-places "; though he does concede some development of, and interest in, non-religious poetry in the Safawid Iran as exemplified by Ismd'il I's Turki diwdn and Sam Mirzd's tadhkira.1The theory can be traced to a pious anecdote narrated in the Ta'rikh-i '.lam-drd'i 'Abbdsi that Tahm~sp (1524-76) was not pleased with the two panegyrics sent by Muhtasham Kashi from Kashan in praise of the Safawid monarch and the Princess Pari Khan Khanum, and observed that eulogies should be written only in the honour of the Prophet and the Imams, which would earn reward in the hereafter and from himself. On this, Muhtasham composed and sent him his famous devotional haft-band.2Even if this hagiological anecdote has a kernel of truth, it is relevant only to a particular occasion, and one has to weigh against it the evidence that a great deal of non-religious poetry was written in the age of Tahmasp. One cannot easily rule out the possibility that the anecdote may have had its origin as a legend to extol Tahmdsp's piety and to provide an apocryphal genesis for Muhtasham's haft-band. One has also to take into account the fact that Muhtasham had written earlier several panegyrics in honour of Tahmdsp and much erotic verse. There is no doubt that in the age of Tahmasp painting and calligraphy became the major arts, and a certain poet complained of the better opportunities of advancement for the " calligraphist, the painter, the Qazwini and the donkey "; but it does not follow that poetry had necessarily become a minor art, as Browne has asserted.3Minorsky advanced the view that the decline of poetry under the Safawids might be explained as due to the decline of mysticism...
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I have borrowed the term “frontier” from the late Professor Joseph Schacht for the Islamic marches where Islamic political power and Islam were once firmly entrenched. Unlike him I would apply this term also to the Islamic marches in Europe: Spain and Sicily. Division of Islamic lands into geographical categories “The Central Islamic Lands” and the “Further Islamic Lands,” has also been adopted in the recently publishedCambridge History of Islam.
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