A Sociolinguistic Investigation of the influence of power in Ālam-ārā-ye Safawi

The works remaining from any period are definitive mirrors of the thought, culture and language of that era. The reflection of ideology, mentality, language, and the path and practice of the pillars of power have both direct and indirect effects on shaping the content and structure of the writings, which play a major role in giving identity to the ethnicity, language, and intellectual discourse. The ruling power in the Safavid period was composed of a triad of the Safavid kings, the military commanders, and the religious scholars, each of which used mystical, military and religious discourses, respectively. Therefore, they employed three different types of language appropriate to these three types of discourse to communicate with the people. Sharing the goals such as maintaining power and continuing political domination over the people often led to coping with the intellectual and cultural conflicts between mysticism, religion, and military service. In the same way that they used the three languages ​​of mystic self-centrism, religious spiritualism, and military violence to dominate the society, they also utilized the potentials of all the three discourses to produce literary and historical works appropriated to their style of governance, which is evident in the prose language of the era. From a sociolinguistic point of view, language is a tool for exercising power, which links human sciences to social sciences and linguistic. Accordingly, this research deals with the influence of power in Ālam-ārā-ye Safawi from the perspective of sociology of language, distinguishing the powers that have influenced the prose text of this book and determining the frequency and form of the power influence on its prose.