Safi-ad-din Ardabili


Safi-ad-din Is'haq Ardabili , was the Kurdish and Sunni Muslim eponym of the Safavid dynasty, founder of the Safaviyya order, and the spiritual heir and son in law of the Sufi master, Zahed Gilani, of Lahijan in Gilan province in northern Iran. Most of what we know about him comes from the Safvat as-safa, a hagiography written by one of his followers.

Lineage

Safi-ad-din was of Kurdish origins. According to Minorsky, Sheykh Safi al-Din's ancestor Firuz-shah was a rich man, lived in Gilan and then Kurdish kings gave him Ardabil and its dependencies. Minorsky refers to Sheykh Safi al-Din's claims tracing back his origins to Ali ibn Abu Talib, but expresses uncertainty about this.
The male lineage of the Safavid family given by the oldest manuscript of the Safwat as-Safa is:" Safi al-Din Abul-Fatah Ishaaq the son of Al-Shaykh Amin al-din Jebrail the son of al-Saaleh Qutb al-Din Abu Bakr the son of Salaah al-Din Rashid the son of Muhammad al-Hafiz al-Kalaam Allah the son of Javaad the son of Pirooz al-Kurdi al-Sanjani " similar to the ancestry of Sheykh Safi al-Din's father-in-law, Sheikh Zahed Gilani, who also hailed from Sanjan, in Greater Khorassan.
Shi'a sign of Panj-tan-e Āl-e Abā

Ascension as Murshid

Safi al-Din inherited Sheikh Zahed Gilani's Sufi order, the "Zahediyeh", which he later transformed into his own, the "Safaviyya". Zahed Gilani also gave his daughter Bibi Fatemeh in wedlock to his favorite disciple. Safi al-Din, in turn, gave a daughter from a previous marriage in wedlock to Zahed Gilani's second-born son. Over the following 170 years, the Safaviyya Order gained political and military power, finally culminating in the foundation of the Safavid dynasty which established control over parts of Greater Iran and reasserted the Iranian identity of the region, thus becoming the first native dynasty since the Sasanian Empire to establish a national state officially known as Iran.

Poetry

Safi al-Din has composed poems in the Iranian dialect of old Tati. He was a seventh-generation descendant of Firuz-Shah Zarrin-Kolah, a local Iranian dignitary.
Only a very few verses of Safi al-Din's poetry, called Dobaytis, have survived. Written in old Tati and Persian, they have linguistic importance today.

Literature