Shah Ismail I
The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time just had an episode
on the Safavid dynasty
. If you want to understand how Iran as we understand it came to be, and you know nothing about the Safavids, this program is essential. Because of its outsized role in Western antiquity the pre-Christian Achaemenids
are well known, while Iranian nationalists may look to the pre-Islamic Sassanians
immortalized in the Shahnameh
. Obviously these dynasties are important, just as the House of Wessex
and the Plantagenets
are essential in understanding how Britain came to be. But to truly comprehend England as a Protestant nation with a distinctive identity in relation to the continent the England of the Tudors and Stuarts, who happen to be contemporaneous with the Safavids, are much more important. For example, it is routinely unknown that before the Safavids Iran was a predominantly Sunni domain. This ...
