Beginning as a Sufi brotherhood which traced its lineage as...

Beginning as a Sufi brotherhood which traced its lineage as well as its name to the great saint Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardibili,[^3] the Safawids soon developed into a well organized political unity for the first time since the fall of the Sassanid Empire. The Sufi order continued under the spiritual direction of a series of descendants of Sheikh Safi, and its members in the ninth/15th century adopted a 12-sided red hat for which they became known as the qizil-bash (red heads).

The order grew in power in the politically disorganized Persia of the ninth/15th century and under Isma‘il (892/1487 – 930/1523 – 24) succeeded in defeating the local rulers and unifying the whole of Persia. Shah Isma‘il was crowned in Tabriz in 905/1499 marking the beginning of the reign of the Safawids which was to last over two centuries until in 1133/1720 the Afghans conquered Persia, sacked the Safawid capital at Ispahan and killed Shah Hussein, the last of the Safawid rulers.

During this wavering between these two orthodox perspectives of the Islamic revelation, became completely 12-Imam Shi‘ah and Shi‘ism, which had until now remained a minority creed, found itself as the official religio of an empire and had to face political and social issues it had never been forced to face before.[^4] No longer molested by an external force and face with a large number of practical social problems, Shi‘ah theology, Kalam , which had always served as the walls of the citadel of the faith,[^5] lost much of its earlier vigour while jurisprudence, Fiqh , having to face new situations, became highly developed.

More important for our purpose is the fact that the pre-dominantly Shi‘ah culture of Persia prepared the background for the flourishing of the doctrines of israqi gnosis (illuministic wisdom),[^6] philosophy, and the sciences.

The efforts of the chain of sages after Khuwaja Nasir al-Din Tusi, who had kept the study of these subjects alive suddenly found the necessary environment for the development of this form of wisdom.[^7] We have connected this wisdom symbolically with the school of Ispahan, which spread throughout Safawid Persia as well as in Iraq, Syria, and India with which the Persians had very close contacts.

The centres of its life were not only Ispahan, the Safawid capital, but also other cities like Shiraz, Kashan, Qazwin, and Tabriz.