IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts

Richard, Mr. Francis, Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, Cabinet Orientale, Paris, Fr. Aimé Chézaud - Controversialist

After a first attempt - which failed - to establish the Jesuits in Persia in 1646, the Fathers came to Persia again in 1653 and a house was bought in a suburb of Isfahan.  The first Superior was Alexandre de Rhodes, the famous Tonkin missionary, born in 1591, who died in Isfahan in 1660.  Because of many difficulties, partly related to the transfer of the whole Christian population of Isfahan outside the Muslim town, after 1661 a new house was built by the Jesuits near New Julfa on the other side of Zayanda Rud.  Assisting Fr. de Rhodes, and later his successor, the first Jesuit father to make a long stay (from 1653) in Isfahan after the establishment there of the Jesuits was Fr. Aimé Chézaud (1604-1664), from Lyons, formerly missionary in Aleppo, who had acquired a good knowledge of Arabic (he copied a dictionary, etc.).  He learnt Persian and it has recently been possible for us to identify in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris some Persian manuscripts copied or annotated by him (literature, Islamic law, history).  He was also interested in polemical writings.  Around 1655 he had to participate in sessions before the First Minister Muhammad Beg and defended Christianity and Catholicism against Islamic arguments.  Fr. Raphael du Mans tells us that he was not a talented orator.  But he did an enormous amount of work and wrote in 1656 a very large treatise in Persian in order to refute Sayyid Ahmad Alavi's refutation of Jerome Xavier's Christian apology.  A detailed examination of the refutation of Alavi by Fr. Chézaud is very instructive: he contests in particular some Hebrew Biblical citations by Alavi.  The BNF of Paris keeps a copy of the Misqal-Safa, annotated in Chézaud's hand; in St. Petersburg University there is a copy dated 1656 of a first volume of Chézaud's refutation, clearly written in Chézaud's hand, which may have been prepared for publication in Rome.  In Paris and Naples are two copies of the second part of the refutation (also dated 1656, though the copies are eighteenth-century). The work of Fr. Chézaud, last in a long series of Islamo-Christian controversial works, responding one to another, but seemingly later forgotten, was dedicated to the son of Sayyid Ahmad Alavi. But was it ever shown to the Persian I'timad al-dawla?   We have found no evidence of an answer to Fr. Chézaud by a Muslim scholar: maybe the diffusion of the work was too dangerous for the Christians living in Isfahan.

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