Early modern Basra is often portrayed as the end of an Ottoman chain of command that grew successively weaker as it stretched from Istanbul to the Persian Gulf. This article complicates the picture of an imperial outpost over which the metropole was unable to impose effective control by discussing seventeenth-century Basra as the point of convergence of various regional and trans-regional spheres of influence and jurisdiction. Basra remained contested territory long after the city was supposedly incorporated into the Ottoman framework in 1546, and in its subsequent history we see multiple actors engaged in a fierce struggle over power and income. Local authorities, regional tribal forces, and outside elements—the Portuguese and the two imperial powers with claims on the region, the Ottomans and the Safavids—participated in this struggle through alliance building and mutual manipulation.

This essay examines the relationship between the Safavid ruling elite and the representatives of Christianity residing in Isfahan in the 17th century, with a focus on the small but influential group of Catholic missionaries active in the Safavid capital at the time. The relationship between the two was marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. Refutation and rejection on the part of the dominant culture alternated with cordial treatment and genuine interest in Christianity expressed by the shah and the country’s grandees, manifested as curiosity in the tenets and symbols of the faith as well as a willingness to engage in intellectual debate. Even instances of wine-fuelled conviviality are attested. This ambience of toleration can partly be explained by pragmatism, involving the role missionaries played in Safavid society as cultural brokers, diplomats, translators, and interpreters. They were also popular, admired for their erudition, and esteemed for their presumed medical skills. But underneath all of this, as it is claimed here, is the emotive power shared by Twelver Šīʿism and Catholicism: both ‘compromised’ monotheisms revolving around martyrdom, sainthood and redemptive justice entailing a similar eschatology and a comparable iconography. Šīʿism’s acceptance of continued revelation and its consequent openness to versatility played a role as well in the mutual fascination, as reflected in an inherent curiosity and a willingness to test one’s beliefs against those of others with rational arguments. To some extent all this reflects what Shahab Ahmed has called the dazzling diversity of a premodern Islamic world extending from the Balkans to Bengal. Such toleration and the ‘live and let live’-attitude that came with it had its limits, however. The shah and the ruling elite often acted as a protective buffer against clerical intolerance, but this could never become official policy. The shah remained the trustee of God, tasked to uphold the Šīʿī Muslim order. If he protected Christians and was fascinated by Christianity, this was personal, individually marked rather than structurally embedded.