Safavid Iran in the South Asian political imagination

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At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Safavid Empire in Iran contained far fewer people than Mughal India and enjoyed considerably less wealth and power. The Iranian dynasty loomed large in the political imagination of early modern South Asia. The Safavids, with their empire located at the center of Muslim Asia, were the only dynasty to share borders with all three of the other Turkic empires of the time, the Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Timurids. An element of Safavid ‘international’ cultural prestige was their control over the premier urban centers of artistic, literary, and philosophical production of the post-Mongol era, namely Tabriz, Herat, Shiraz, and Isfahan. After suffering much humiliation at the Safavid court, Homayun managed to extract material and military aid from the Safavids, but not before he had made pilgrimage to their ancestral shrine in Ardabil. Sufis had begun to play a vital role in South Asian politics well before the advent of the Timurids.