Between Turkic and Persian: Sadiqi Beg and Literary Practices in Safavid Iran

The paper offers an attempt at a literary-sociological conceptualization of the level of prestige Turkic literacy and literature held in Safavid Iran in the 16th through the early 18th century against the background of early modern vernacularization, imperial state formation and confessionalization in the Middle East. It offers a case study through analyzing some of the literary works of Sadiqi Beg (1533?-1610), who, better known as a leading painter of his time, is one of the most important Turkophone litterateurs of the late 16th through the early 17th century, equally well versed and prolific in both Turkic and Persian. I endeavor to shed light on how Sadiqi and other members of the Safavid elite with a Turkophone Qizilbash background sought to refashion themselves as members of the imperial elite and its Persophone culture and how this may or may not have influenced their attitude to language use.
The language of the largely nomadic population of Iran and of the tribal aristocracy, Turkic was unable to compete with the high culture and bureaucratic use of Persian. And yet, it was a continuous literary tradition perpetuated up to our own age by the large Turkophone segment of Iran, albeit its practitioners often had an attitude of a veritable vernacular anxiety regarding their writings; they had to put up with an unstable, little developed orthographic tradition, a range of genres that was limited vis-à-vis Persian, and a much smaller literate audience, which seems to contribute to the largely oral nature of Turkic poetry in the age. While historiography has hitherto been largely characterized by either neglect or nationalist bias, the sociological status of Turkic literature in Safavid Iran has never been treated in a methodologically reflective manner. I offer to start filling this gap and use frameworks known from sociolinguistics, as well as cultural history, including Brian Spock’s textual communities and Sheldon Pollock’s views on vernacularization.