Babayan begins her book with a moment of transition in Iranian history. A couple of years before the dawn of the seventeenth century, Shah Abbas I, the Safavi king, moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and with the help of Shaykh Baha’i, the Shi’i high-ranking cleric, and attempted to change Isfahan’s culture by converting its Sunni population to Shi’ism. In an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, Babayan guides us through the city in the seventeenth century with a series of verbal and visual texts, including murals, paintings on paper and walls, and what she calls family anthologies.
The first chapter, “Imperial Vision of Sovereignty,” describes how Shah Abbas I began his imperial building project, known as the “Image of the World Square,” intended to transform Isfahan into an urban paradise—an ideal city of beauty and desire. Large crowds of people watched the spectacle during its inauguration or read...