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Falnama refers to the book of omens used in the ancient Islamic world to aid in predicting the future. Individuals seeking insight into the future would engage in a series of purification rituals, turn to a random page in the Falnama, and interpret the text and drawings thereon for good or ill. Falnama were primarily created during the 16th and 17th centuries as the approach of the Islamic millennium inspired concern about the future. During this time, the Falnama was likely a common object, used by fortune tellers throughout modern day Iran and Turkey. The book was also appended to copies of the Koran commissioned by rulers and wealthy individuals. Despite its apparent popularity in the ancient world, only four copies of the large 'folio' Falnama are known to remain in existence. Of these, one is in such delicate condition that it is permanently housed in the university library at Dresden, Germany.
Six dervishes or Sufi adepts are depicted in varying states of dizziness and collapse after whirling to induce a mystical state. Two bearded figures stand with the aid of young novices, while two others are seated on the ground. At the lower left, a youth holds a book, while at the right, another plays the tambourine.<br/><br/> The artist is unknown but may well have been Muhammad Herati, a painter with wide influence in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.
Ismail I (July 17, 1487 – May 23, 1524), known in Persian as Shāh Ismāʿil (Persian: شاه اسماعیل‎; full name: Abū l-Muzaffar bin Haydar as-Safavī), was Shah of Iran (1501-1524) and the founder of the Safavid dynasty which survived until 1736. Isma'il started his campaign in Iranian Azerbaijan in 1500 as the leader of the Safaviyya, a Twelver Shia militant religious order, and unified all of Iran by 1509.<br/><br/> The dynasty founded by Ismail I would rule for two centuries, it was one of the greatest Persian empires after the Muslim conquest of Persia. It also reasserted the Iranian identity in Greater Iran, the revival of Persia as an economic power, the establishment of an efficient state and bureaucracy, architectural innovation and their patronage for the fine arts.<br/><br/> Ismail played a key role in the rise of Twelver Islam; he converted much of Iran from Sunni to Shi'a Islam, importing religious authorities from the Levant. In Alevism, Shah Ismail remains revered as a spiritual guide.<br/><br/> Ismail was also a prolific poet who, under the pen name Khatā'ī (which means 'sinner' in Arabic) contributed greatly to the literary development of the Azerbaijani language. He also contributed to the literary development in Persian, though only a few specimens of his Persian verse have survived.
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama (Persian: شاهنامه Šāhnāmeh, "The Book of Kings") is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Iran and related Perso-Iranian cultures. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells the mythical and to some extent the historical past of Greater Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.<br/><br/> The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion with the death of the last Zoroastrian ruler of Persia during the Muslim conquest.
The Safavid dynasty (Persian: سلسلهٔ صفويان; Azerbaijani: صفویلر) was one of the most significant ruling dynasties of Iran. They ruled one of the greatest Persian empires since the Muslim conquest of Persia and established the Twelver school of Shi'a Islam as the official religion of their empire, marking one of the most important turning points in Muslim history. The Safavids ruled from 1501 to 1722 (experiencing a brief restoration from 1729 to 1736) and at their height, they controlled all of modern Islamic Republic of Iran, Republic of Azerbaijan and Republic of Armenia, most of Iraq, Georgia, Afghanistan, and the Caucasus, as well as parts of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey. Safavid Iran was one of the Islamic 'gunpowder empires', along with its neighbours, the Ottoman and Mughal empires.<br/><br/> The Safavid dynasty had its origin in the Safaviyya Sufi order, which was established in the city of Ardabil in the Azerbaijan region. It was of mixed ancestry (Kurdish and Azerbaijani, which included intermarriages with Georgian and Pontic Greek dignitaries). From their base in Ardabil, the Safavids established control over all of Greater Iran and reasserted the Iranian identity of the region, thus becoming the first native dynasty since the Sassanid Empire to establish a unified Iranian state.<br/><br/> Despite their demise in 1736, the legacy that they left behind was the revival of Persia as an economic stronghold between East and West, the establishment of an efficient state and bureaucracy based upon 'checks and balances', their architectural innovations and their patronage for fine arts. The Safavids have also left their mark down to the present era by spreading Shi'a Islam in Iran, as well as major parts of the Caucasus, South Asia, Central Asia, and Anatolia.
Sati (Devanagari: सती, the feminine of sat 'true'; also called suttee) was a social funeral practice among some Indian communities in which a recently widowed woman would immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. The practice was banned several times, with the current ban dating to 1829 by the British.<br/><br/> The term is derived from the original name of the goddess Sati, also known as Dakshayani, who self-immolated because she was unable to bear her father Daksha's humiliation of her (living) husband Shiva. The term may also be used to refer to the widow. The term sati is now sometimes interpreted as 'chaste woman'. Sati appears in both Hindi and Sanskrit texts, where it is synonymous with 'good wife'; the spelling suttee was commonly used by Anglo-Indian English writers.