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Rituals of Commemoration, Rituals of Self-Invention: Safavid Religious Colleges and the Collective Memory of the Shi‘a

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Maryam Moazzen
Maryam Moazzen*
Affiliation:
University of Louisville
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Abstract

Shi‘ism, perhaps more than any other current of Islam, places emphasis on numerous forms of commemorative culture. Throughout the history of Shi‘ism, commemorative rituals have provided a comprehensive framework for interpreting a wide array of historical encounters between the Shi‘a and the dominant Sunni culture, thereby allowing Shi‘ism to construct itself as a community of learning and remembering. This self-construction required both a high degree of institutionalization as well as specialists to preserve the religious identity of the Shi‘a and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation. Madrasas (Islamic institutions of higher learning) as well as the shrines of the Shi‘i Imams and their progeny served as the best institutions to achieve these goals. This paper argues that Safavid madrasas were not only centers for disseminating religious knowledge and preserving Shi’a intellectual heritage. They also rearticulated and contemporized the community’s past through the active memorializing of pivotal events in the religious calendar of the Shi‘a. More specifically, the paper delineates the nature and scope of religious rituals and rites carried out in the Madrasa-ye Sultānī and a number of other madrasa-mosque complexes of Safavid Isfahan in order to explore the process by which the Shi‘i past was contextualized or contemporized as salient to suit the needs of Safavid power and society.

Keywords

Shi‘i Commemorative RitualsSafavid MadrasasShi‘i IdentitySafavid Ruling ElitesSafavid ‘UlamaShi‘i Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy
Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , July 2016 , pp. 555 - 575
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2015

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Footnotes

Maryam Moazzen would like to express her gratitude to Dr. Andrew J. Newman and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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