This public klecture is held in the framework of the Faculty Research Seminar.
The religious, political and consequently social and linguistic separation of Anatolia and Iran started in the 16th century, when centralized, bureaucratic empires held sway in most of the Islamic world. From 1501 to 1722 Iran was ruled by the Safavid dynasty, which had previously been one of the messianic, “heretic” movements of the 15th century, and which converted Iran to Shiism. Focusing on the various manuscript copies of the Turkish Divan, ‘collection of poetry’, of the founder of the dynasty, Shah Ismail I (r. 1501-1524), the paper tries to refute some of the received wisdom relating to messianism and ‘orthodox’ Islam in Safavid Persia on the one hand, and the relative place of Turkish and Persian as literary languages in that realm, on the other hand.
Ferenc Csirkés
Instructor at CEU, 2011-
PhD candidate, the University of Chicago, 2010-
MAs in Turkic Philology (1999), English Language and Literature (2003) and Iranian Studies (2006) at Eötvös Loránd University
