How to Cite

No Choice but to Travel: Safavid Travelogues Written in Persian, in Kiyanrad, Sarah, Sauer, Rebecca and Scholz, Jan (Eds.): Islamische Selbstbilder: Festschrift für Susanne Enderwitz, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2020, p. 273–297. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.531.c9261

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-947732-19-7 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-947732-18-0 (Hardcover)

Published

07/23/2020

Authors

Sarah Kiyanrad

No Choice but to Travel

Safavid Travelogues Written in Persian

Abstract This paper introduces twenty-two Persian travelogues dating from the Safavid era (1501–1722), which can roughly be divided into three categories; private travels, missions, and pilgrimages. It aims to show that Safavid travelogues, a hitherto somewhat neglected literary phenomenon, form part of a Persian travelogue tradition and that the accounts often comprise relevant autobiographical information. Since the travelogues’ contents, tropes and forms are however partly a result of (evolving) lit­erary standards of travel writing, it is often only through a close reading that we are able to uncover—or at least catch a glimpse of—the authors’ Selbstbilder.

Keywords Safavids, Travelogue, Mas̱navī, Diplomatic Mission, Pilgrimage