A curious footnote to the Mongol holocaust occurred in 653 AH (1256 CE), when Hulagu was passing through Persia. A Muslim jurist near Alamut complained to the Mongol khan that he had to wear armor under his clothes all the time for fear of the Assassins headquartered nearby. A short time later, two Fedayeen فدائيين (suicidal Assassin agents) disguised as monks tried to kill Hulagu—and failed. The cult that could kill anyone met the army that could kill everyone. Hulagu took time out from his westward drive to storm Alamut آلموت. He then did to the Assassins what the Mongols had done and would do to many others: he destroyed them physically; he destroyed their stronghold; he destroyed their records, libraries, and papers—in that moment, the menace of the Assassins came to an end.

— Destiny Disrupted

المغول والحشاشين
Feels like a video game crossover

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."


(The Picture of Dorian Gray 📖)

Safavid creativity climaxed in architecture. For example, unlike the monumental Ottoman mosques—those somber mounds of domes bracketed by minarets—the Safavids built airy structures that shimmered with glazed mosaic tiles and seemed almost to float, so that even gigantic mosques looked like they were made of lace and light. And if architecture was the highest art form of Safavid Persia, then city building was its meta-art. The Safavids kept moving their capital (seeking safety from the ever-looming Ottomans) and every time they adopted a new city as their home, they remade it aesthetically. In 1598, after choosing Isfahan as his new capital, Shah Abbas launched a building program that transformed the entire city into a single integrated jewel: by the time he was done, it abounded in public squares, gardens, mosques, mansions, pools, palaces, and public buildings interlaced with handsome boulevards. Awestruck visitors coined the phrase Isfahan Nisfi-Jahan, “Isfahan, half the world” اصفهان نصف جهان (their point being that if you hadn’t seen Isfahan, you’d missed half of all there was to see in the world).

— Destiny Disrupted

The art of painting, and particularly of the “Persian miniature”—exquisitely detailed scenes surrounded by floral and geometric borders—climaxed in Safavid Persia. Calligraphy, regarded as a major art form in the Islamic world due to Muslim reverence for the written Qur’an, also reached perfection here. The two arts came together in illuminated books, the highest artistic products of the age, and the culminating work in this form was a Book of Kings شاهنامه, Firdausi’s epic, produced for a Safavid monarch: it had 258 paintings and sixty thousand lines of calligraphy by various artists—essentially, an entire museum between two covers.

— Destiny Disrupted