The Formation of the Safavid Empire in Syria | Evrim Binbaş

The formation of the Safavid Empire in the second half of the 15th century and the early 16th century has puzzled generations of scholars. It was indeed an extraordinary event, almost unique in the early modern period: a Sufi order evolved into the form of an empire. The question of how this transformation happened has been answered in multiple contexts, such as the Ottomans’ evolution towards absolutism, transformation of Sufi ideas and their marriage with political Messianism of the period, or the persistence of Turco-Mongol principles of politics. In this presentation Professor Binbaş will suggest that what is missing in all these perspectives is the Safavid activities in Syria and argue that without clear understanding of the intellectual and political life in Syria and Jazira it is impossible to understand the formation of the Safavid Empire.

Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago in 2009. After seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century. His first book on the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) was published by Cambridge University Press (Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn 'Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters). It shared the 2017 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies and received the 2018 Association for Iranian Studies Said Sirjani Book Prize Honorable Mention Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2017 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society in Britain, and for the 2017-2018 Book of the Year Award in Iranian Studies by the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently he is working on three different book projects. Together with John E. Woods of the University of Chicago, he is preparing a critical edition of Yazdi’s Zayl-i Zafarnama, which is the second and so-far unpublished volume of the Zafarnama. He is also editing, again together with John E. Woods, a handbook on the Timurid dynasty titled The Timurid Dynasty: A Handbook. This book was commissioned by Brill in Leiden, and when it is published, it will include contributions from more than thirty scholars working on early modern Islamic history. Finally, he is preparing a monograph on the modalities of sovereignty. In his new monograph, Binbaş highlights the non-monarchical and divided forms of sovereignty in the early modern Islamic world. He is also managing a DFG-Funded research project on genealogical trees written in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic between 1500 and 1922.