The Relations between Religious Storytellers and Political Rulers: A Comparative Case Study of the Umayyads and the Safavids
Document Type : pajoohesh
Author
10.22081/jap.2025.78369
Abstract
Throughout Islamic history, rulers have been compelled to formulate policies regarding religious storytellers, employing strategies such as imprisonment, exile, anathematization, and financial inducement. The interaction between rulers and religious storytellers is especially significant in two dynasties that claimed religious legitimacy for themselves: the Umayyads and the Safavids. The Umayyads cultivated state-sponsored storytellers, granting official recognition to the office of qāṣṣ al-jamā‛a and the wider network of religious narrators, while enforcing severe punishments against independent preachers. Nevertheless, non-governmental storytelling ultimately undermined their social standing. The Safavids, by contrast, shared common roots with itinerant storytellers. By intervening in the guild network of the ahl al-futuwwa and the dūda-ye ‛ajam, they appointed naqīb al-mamālik for the nuqabāʾ in order to subordinate them to state authority. They organized storytellers within guild-like institutions and succeeded in reintroducing them into mosques—places they had been excluded from since the 3rd/9th century—thereby establishing a vast network of religious storytellers under governmental supervision. Consequently, the Safavids achieved greater success than the Umayyads in institutionalizing religious storytelling and disseminating beliefs necessary for their political order.
Keywords
- storytelling
- storytellers
- religious storytellers
- Umayyads
- mudhakkir
- qāṣṣ
- Companions
- jurists
- ayyām al-‛Arab
- awābid al-‛Arab
- Ṣūfīs
- qāṣṣ al-jamā‛a
- Safavids
- religious government
- popular literature
- institution-building
- naqīb al-nuqabāʾ
- ahl al-futuwwa
- dūda-ye ‛ajam
- rawḍi-khwānī
- ḥamli-khwānī
- Ḥamli-yi Ḥeydarī
)