Winter 2009

AAPTIS - 591.002

The Politics of Friendship and Love in Early Modern Iran (1501-1722)

This seminar will explore the social and cultural world of Safavi Iran through the frames of friendship. Friendship was a social and religious institution that rivaled and competed with matrimony and kinship. It involved a set of duties and ethics that fashioned the figure of the friend. We will focus on the idioms of friendship expressed in a variety of circles, from confraternities to the Safavi court, to begin distinguishing the meanings and protocols of intimacy and the ethical contours of a practice that tied men together in amity. What were the mutual obligations that legitimated such bonds? We will speak about the practices of social elites once we contextualize homosocial relations within the complex web of affiliations in early modern Tabriz or Isfahan. How were loyalty and enmity inscribed in various genres, such as mirrors for princes, memoirs, manuals of chivalry ritualizing sworn friendships, and court chronicles delineating cabals or the affiliations between the sovereign and his court favorite?