The breath of the Imam: on the Safavid Christ of Mullā Muḥsin Fayż-i Kāshānī (1599-1679)

I present here the first results of a philological excavation in Safavid literary culture, looking for the traces of Christian imagery in the lyrical verses of an important Persian intellectual figure of the 1600s, the philosopher Mullā Muḥsin Fayż-i Kāshānī. More in detail, I collect the occurences of a basic vocabulary relating to the figure of Jesus Christ in the dīvān of one of the most outstanding disciples of the main intellectual figure of the Safavid 1600s, the philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn Shirāzī, d. 1641), in order to get a glimpse of the handling of a canonical set of imagery by a key figure of the renewed context of Persianate early modernity, at the crossroads of Sadrian philosophy, speculative Sufism, Shiite devotion and poetic innovation. As a matter of fact, while the relevance and nature of Christian imagery in Persian poetry has been repeatedly observed as far as “classical” pre-Timurid authors are concerned, from Niẓāmī Ganjavī to Rūmī to, especially, the “Byzantine” Khāqānī Shirvanī, the interaction of the codified Christology of Persian literary culture with the renewed religious, political, and socio-cultural conditions of the Safavid-Mughal koiné remains largely unexplored.