IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts 

Babayan, Prof. Kathryn, University of Michigan, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Ann Arbor, Situating the Self Around Something Lost and Foreign: A Safavi Widow's Pilgrimage to Mecca

The paper interprets a widow's pilgrimage from Isfahan northward through the Ottoman domains to Mecca and Medina on the basis of a travelogue she herself writes toward the end of the seventeenth century.  The journey entails travel through challenging foreign landscapes, mountains, highlands, rivers and deserts, in territories held by the Ottomans who were the hosts of the Hajj.  I will discuss the ways in which she senses this foreignness, and relates her nostalgia for Iran and Isfahan.  Although she represents herself as travelling alone until she joins the caravan of Persian pilgrims in Erevan (Eastern Anatolia) she must have been travelling with at least one of her slaves.  A feeling of familiarity and kinship with people as she journeys through Safavid Iran creates an image of the security she feels in what she terms the 'protected domains of the Safavid monarchs'. This is something that will be lost once she leaves Iran and enters the land of the unknown Ottomans.  Her riveting verse is narrated so that the audience moves with her following the rhythms of her camel litter as she crosses lush prairies and mountains, as she stops in villages and cities, or strolls through rose gardens - all of which she draws with colour and detail. 

Our anonymous widow must have been born into a privileged circle.  Her decision to write about her travels provides us with an example of the ways in which piety and personal experience kindled the desire to circumambulate the Ka'ba.  It is this female voice that will be explored - a lonely one, not only in the way she experiences grief, but also as a historical source written by a woman dealing with her 'self', her melancholy and freedom in pre-modern Iran.

  
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