Shirazi scholars and the political culture of the sixteenth-century Indo-Persian world

Abstract

This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the most prominent scholars of the age, and subsequently moved to India as his specific network lost political power in Safavid Iran during the reign of Shah Tahmasp. Fath Allah found employment at the Bijapur Sultanate and finally went to Mughal India and contributed to a number of administrative, intellectual and ‘ideological’ movements at the Mughal court. Shirazi’s career is significant as it sheds light on the significance (and dangers) of personal networks that facilitated the political prospects of the elites in the Indo-Persian world. It also demonstrates the importance of the Deccan in elite circulations between Iran and Mughal India in this period. Finally, it shows how such individuals had to constantly modify their learning in order to meet the varying needs of the centres of patronage in which they served.