The Occult Science of Empire

in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran

Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals

of Magic

With an Edition and Translation of Jalāl al-Dīn

Davānī’s A Spiritual Boon and Maḥmūd Dihdār’s
Choicest Talismans

MATTHEW MELVIN-KOUSHKI
University of South Carolina
Contents

Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Occult Science of Empire

1 Early Modern Islamicate Imperialism: Harnessing Walāya

2 The Islamic Science of Letters
3 “Here Art-Magick Was First Hatched”: Shiraz as Occult-Scientific
Capital of the Persian Cosmopolis

PART 1: Aqquyunlu Iran

4 A Shirazi Occultist in Aqquyunlu Iran: Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī

5 Political Philosopher and Propagandist-in-Chief
6 The Byzantine Prophecy (11th-16th c.)
7 Davānī and Lettrist Theory: R. Tahlīliyya
8 Davānī and Lettrist Practice: R. Tuḥfa-yi Rūḥānī

PART 2: Safavid Iran

9 A Shirazi Occultist in Safavid Iran: Maḥmūd Dihdār ʿIyānī

10 The Occult-Scientific Practice of Safavid Philosophy
11 The Letter Mage at Court: Dihdār and Shah Ismāʿīl II
12 An Imami Lettrism for an Imami Imperium: R. Zubdat al-Alvāḥ and
the Shiʿization of Iran
13 Dihdār’s Known and Attributed Works

Coda: How to Rule the World: Against an Insularist History of Western

Grimoires

Appendix 1: Davānī’s A Spiritual Boon

Note on the Edition and Translation

Edition
Translation

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Appendix 2: Dihdār’s Choicest Talismans

Note on the Edition and Translation

Edition
Translation

Bibliography
Index

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 Synopsis

The occult sciences (al-ʿulūm al-gharība) were perennially considered to be of obvious use
in the pursuit of empire, in the Islamicate world as elsewhere; forms of divination (astrology
and geomancy) and magic (talismans) promised ruling elites direct control of their political and
military fates. In the post-Mongol Persianate world, however, they became far more central to
that pursuit than they had ever been before: a reliable, scientific means of harnessing the sacral
power (walāya) of the Imams and the saints that a new breed of self-divinizing millennial sov-
ereigns and talismanic cosmocrators craved. This occultist turn began in Iran under the Ilkha-
nids in particular, then was rendered politically mainstream by intellectuals working for the
Mamluks, Timurids and Ottomans during the 15th century; the brands of occultist imperialism
they developed were adopted and adapted in turn by the ideologues of rival and successor
states, including the Aqquyunlu and Safavids in Iran and the Mughals (Indo-Timurids) in India.
Early modern Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic empire, in short, was scene to an occultist arms race,
and the patronage of specialists in these sciences boomed to an unprecedented degree during
Islamicate civilization’s greatest era of flourishing.
Due to persistent scholarly occultophobia, however, this distinguishing aspect of Islamicate
early modernity—one with striking parallels in the contemporary European Renaissance con-
text—is still systematically elided in the literature, and the vast majority of the hundreds of
thousands of surviving relevant texts have never been published, much less studied. The pre-
sent book therefore seeks to help remedy this massive lacuna by way of two representative case
studies from the 15th and and 16th centuries respectively:

1) Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502), influential Shirazi philosopher and ideological mainstay to
the Aqquyunlu Empire, who was responsible for adapting the imperial Timurid occultist
platform to rival Turkmen use—a seminal contribution never before analyzed in the lit-
erature on this otherwise celebrated thinker. This he did by focusing on the kabbalistic
science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), or lettrism, as a universal science, epistemologically supe-
rior to both Avicennan-illuminationist philosophy and sufi theory, and of great practical
benefit to rulers in its applications as letter divination (jafr) and letter magic (sīmiyāʾ).

2) Maḥmūd Dihdār ʿIyānī (fl. 1576), also a Shirazi, the most prolific Persian writer on lettrism
of the 16th century and teacher in the occult sciences to the leading scholarly architects of
the new Safavid imperial culture. Most significantly, he is responsible for creating a new
brand of Imami lettrism—yet one firmly pegged to Sunni Timurid-Mamluk precedent—
to magically aid in the shiʿization of Iran, and dedicated several lettrist treatises to Shah
Ismāʿīl II (r. 1576-77) in an attempt to fashion him sovereign of the millennium. Despite
Dihdār’s importance for understanding the development of both Safavid imperialism and
Persianate occultism, however, not a single study to date has treated of him even in pass-
ing, and none of his influential lettrist manuals—some of which have remained in regular
use to the present—have been published.

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That both men were products of Shiraz is likewise significant: that city functioned as the capital
of Persianate occultism during the 15th and 16th centuries, such that a disproportionate per-
centage of professional occultists working at the neighboring Mughal and Ottoman courts were
Shirazi émigrés. And Davānī’s and Dihdār’s lettrist works themselves freely circulated from An-
atolia to India, as the manuscript record attests. From the example of these two Shirazi lettrists,
in other words, the imperial applications of the occult sciences in general and lettrism in par-
ticular throughout the early modern Persianate world as a whole may be extrapolated.
To provide specialists and nonspecialists alike direct access to both scholars’ treatments of
the subject, moreover, an appendix features critical editions and translations of a popular
lettrist treatise by each: Davānī’s A Spiritual Boon (R. Tuḥfa-yi Rūḥānī), written for a Khaljī sul-
tan of central India and including an intellectual history of the science from Solomon and the
Greek ancients to the Timurid-Aqquyunlu present; and Dihdār’s Choicest Talismans (R. Zubdat
al-Alvāḥ), featuring an unprecedentedly (according to the author) precise and effective form of
letter-magical invocation of the Fourteen Infallibles.
This book, more broadly, is conceived of as a contribution to the intellectual history of em-
pire—or better, the physics-metaphysics of empire. While not comparative in approach (that
would be premature), this preliminary study will provide much-needed grist for the compara-
tivist’s mill. Its investigation of the occult-scientific framework of Islamicate universalist cos-
mopolitics as it developed in the post-Mongol Persianate world supplements the work of four
revisionist historians in particular: Cornell Fleischer, on the Ottoman context; Kathryn Ba-
bayan, on the Safavid; Azfar Moin, on the Mughal; and Evrim Binbaş, on the Timurid. Each has
shown millenarian forms of occultism to be integral to these early modern Islamicate imperial
projects; but given the extreme paucity of research into the individual occult sciences patron-
ized by various dynasts over many centuries, the intellectual content, and hence genealogy, of
such occultist imperial discourses remains obscure. I here undertake to supply some of that
content. Thematically and structurally, furthermore, this study was inspired in the first place by
John Woods’s The Aqquyunlu (rev. ed. 1999); in effect, it represents an unpacking of a few cru-
cial passages in that historiographical masterpiece, which likewise posits a high degree of
Aqquyunlu-Safavid imperial-intellectual continuity.
Within the context of my larger project to help establish Islamicate occultism as a viable
field of study, this book also stands as supplement to my forthcoming two-volume investigation
of the life, times and oeuvre of Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432), the most influential occult philos-
opher of 15th-century Iran, and first architect of the Timurid occultist imperial model adopted
and adapted by Davānī and Dihdār, among a number of other heirs throughout the early mod-
ern Persianate world. Where the present book limits itself to the intellectual history of imperi-
alism in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran, that is, with little attention to its contemporary sociopolitical
contexts, that broader study pursues both the intellectual and the social history of Timurid oc-
cult-scientific imperialism as it was constructed between the Mamluk, Timurid and Ottoman
realms during the pivotal first decades of the 15th century; this distinctively Timurid model then
remained in regular use throughout the Persianate world, including in Iran itself, through at
least the 17th century, and in some cases the late 19th. The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyun-

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lu-Safavid Iran thus constitutes but a chapter in this larger—and as yet largely unwritten—
history of Islamicate early modernity, a rallying call to further, less occultophobic study.