Babayan begins her book with a moment of transition in Iranian history. A couple of years before the dawn of the seventeenth century, Shah Abbas I, the Safavi king, moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and with the help of Shaykh Baha’i, the Shi’i high-ranking cleric, and attempted to change Isfahan’s culture by converting its Sunni population to Shi’ism. In an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, Babayan guides us through the city in the seventeenth century with a series of verbal and visual texts, including murals, paintings on paper and walls, and what she calls family anthologies.The first chapter, “Imperial Vision of Sovereignty,” describes how Shah Abbas I began his imperial building project, known as the “Image of the World Square,” intended to transform Isfahan into an urban paradise—an ideal city of beauty and desire. Large crowds of people watched the spectacle during its inauguration or read oral accounts of the celebration as recorded in “household anthologies” (36). In this chapter, Babayan provides detailed interpretive readings of verses from the Quran and epigraphic poetry inscribed on minarets and the walls of the king’s new Friday Prayer Mosque, which, in her words, “can be read as a book” (43). She writes that “the city of God” envisioned by Shah Abbas was founded “on the promise of material delight and homoerotic pleasure that awaited pious Muslims in paradise” according to the Quran (61, 113).In the second chapter, “Collecting, Self-Fashioning, and Community,” Babayan engages in a close reading of anthologies by a religious scholar and a painter, arguing that “both men mark[ed] their urbanity” through the idioms of love and etiquettes of sociability, “[writing] themselves into their idealized city” (106). The title of the third chapter, “Disturbing the City,” based on the Persian poetic genre of sharashub or “city disturber,” explores how a cleric and poet’s popular literary guidebook to Isfahan challenged the imperial vision of the city as paradise. According to Babayan, that book represents Isfahan “as a masculine space where friends are educated in the adab [etiquette] of erotic love” (27); it “sees Isfahan as a copy of beauty and draws its image in the figure of a beautiful male youth” (136).The fourth chapter, “Cultivating and Disciplining Friendship Letters,” examines letters in household anthologies that provided models of friendship to be emulated, using the “mystic tropes and conventions” that characterized the “modes of reading and debating homoerotic love” at the time (163). Babayan argues, however, that “the dynamic of erotic love and its denial, so central to the conventions of Sufi love, was mobilized by the Safavi court to discipline male-male desire, which was perceived as a threat to rule and maintenance of stability in Isfahan” (163). The fifth chapter, “Family Archives and Female Space of Intimacy,” analyzes the anthology of a prominent family of bureaucrats and literati, especially a female member’s autobiographical verses about a pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as paintings depicting women. Babayan’s skillful commentary vividly demonstrates the psychological and spiritual inner conflict of women at the time regarding the stigmas and other consequences that attended intimate friendships between females.As Babayan closely examines the verbal and visual texts that she chose to portray the culture of Isfahan during the seventeenth century, Babayan weaves throughout her chapters the theme of “gazing,” a term borrowed from the Sufi tradition, as in the etiquette of gazing at beautiful male youth “in playfulness, bantering, and coquetry, one lovelier than the other, well-built and tall, each one ready to be desired” (125–126). The City as Anthology is a well-researched, theoretically informed, and elegantly presented work. Babayan’s close readings of paintings and her literary analyses of texts are always creative and often brilliant.
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Nov 9, 2022
Colin Jager 
Open Access