The Quality of Representing the IranShahri Thought in the Historiography Tradition of the Safavid Era (The Political Re-genesis Bases)

The Safavid era is an important period in the formulation of Iran’s sociopolitical identity discourse. In this era, after years of interregnum, an independent, pervasive, exclusive, powerful government with a special political ideology was formed and by using the hard and soft powers, it changed the society according to its will. The constitutive circuits of the politics and the political in the Safavid era were re-considered and re-articulated. In this era, the Iranian’s socio-political thought and practice got a hybrid and complex shape. In the authors’ viewpoints, the political thought and action of the Safavids was organized based on five components: Tasawwuf (Sufism), shiism, Iranianhood (retrieving the concept of Iran and the Iranian ideal kingship tradition), the tradition of Islamic caliphate, a newly emerged wave of modernity and the western culture. This article, through putting this new base of governance under question, tries to perceive the quality of reviving the Iranshahri tradition in the political thought of the Safavid era. So, according to the article’s hypothesis, in the Safavid era and in a hybrid paradigm, a special form of the political, the sociopolitical identity and a new base for political legitimation was founded which had a serious representation in its historiography tradition and guaranteed the revival and reproduction of the Iranshahri political thought or the ideal king of Iran. For more precision and finding a countable corpus, this work has concentrated on three important historical books of Tārīkh-i ʻālamʹārā-yi ʻAbbāsī, ʻĀlamʹārā-yi Shāh Ismāʻīl and Neghavat-ol Asar. The theoretical framework of this research is based on the (critical) discourse analysis especially the projection that Norman Fairclough presents.