Seventeenth-century travellers newly acquainted Europeans with Shi’ah Islam as Persia’s state religion

Evidence

On one subject a big increase of knowledge was brought home by travellers: this was the shi’ah faith, which most mediaevals had known only as the religion of obscure and eccentric sectaries, but which in the seventeenth century was the state religion of Persia, made most famous by Shah ‘Abbas, whose renown in his day was unparalleled.? Naturally enough, the division between Shi’ah and Sunni was seen to have a Christian parallel — ‘no lesse zealous and divided in their profession, than wee and the Papalins’, said the Welsh Protestant, Thomas Herbert; its importance was inevitably political: ‘whereby is sown such mortall hatred between these two potent Monarchs (the Turk and the Persian) that (to Europs good) they abominate each other with implacable hatred’. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1569

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier material in the book on mediæval European knowledge of Islam and Christian heresy parallels. — connects to: Travellers introduced Shi’ism to Europe only after it became Persia’s state religion