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Reviews
Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran by Kathryn Babayan
brynhammond's review against another edition
5.0
A rich study, and too much was unfamiliar to me for me to review, on a first read. Suffice to say, if the (amorphous) subject area interests you, you want to make a beeline for this book.
I’m fascinated by heresies, whether in Christendom or Islamdom. I wandered here because I couldn’t find much about the messianic/social justice movements of eastern Iran or Central Asia, back to the 8th century -- Muqanna and friends -- beyond brief narrative accounts that left me with more questions than answers. I see now that those accounts were what the heresy-recorders had to tell us -- they were our main informants, hostile obviously, and I was never likely to get any deeper without such a study as this: that plunges into the contextual culture fore and aft, that consults oral epics (on heretic heroes, yes), storytellers and other street-history as far as she can resurrect it.
Her story arc is one of revolution betrayed. Familiar, no? Nor once betrayed, but three times: with the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Savafis. You wonder why they persist, but the thread she follows is an idea of cyclical history (with a Zoroastrian past), and in a cyclical history, hope never perishes.
I’m fascinated by heresies, whether in Christendom or Islamdom. I wandered here because I couldn’t find much about the messianic/social justice movements of eastern Iran or Central Asia, back to the 8th century -- Muqanna and friends -- beyond brief narrative accounts that left me with more questions than answers. I see now that those accounts were what the heresy-recorders had to tell us -- they were our main informants, hostile obviously, and I was never likely to get any deeper without such a study as this: that plunges into the contextual culture fore and aft, that consults oral epics (on heretic heroes, yes), storytellers and other street-history as far as she can resurrect it.
Her story arc is one of revolution betrayed. Familiar, no? Nor once betrayed, but three times: with the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Savafis. You wonder why they persist, but the thread she follows is an idea of cyclical history (with a Zoroastrian past), and in a cyclical history, hope never perishes.