An Investigation of Two Safavid Tiles in the Jami’ Mosque in Kouhpayeh adopting Extremist and Moderate Religious Approaches

The preparation of two memorial tiles in the early Safavid era for a tiled minbar in the Jami’ Mosque in Kuhpayeh, a small town near Isfahan, has raised questions and leads into ambiguities. One of these tiles is a lustre ceramic plaque which was produced in Muharram 935/September in 1528 in Kashan; the other is a blue-and-white tile that was produced eight months later in Ramadan in 1528in Qomsheh. The content of the first tile depicts radical (Ghulat) Shiism, and the second indicates a moderate Islamic tendency about Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Prophet’s Houshold. This article through an introduction of architectural and artistic elements of the Jami’ Mosque of Kuhpayeh, based on a field study, seeks to analyze the content of the tiles installed in the minbar and mihrab of the mosque. Based on the cultural and religious setting of central Iran during the reign of Shah Tahmasb, this paper proposes a new theory about the reason for the preparation of two memorial tiles for a single minbar. The findings show that the main reason for ordering the second tile is the customer’s anxiety about the phrase “Hu al-A’li al-a’la” --used for Imam Ali and some leaders of the Hurufi movement-- at the top of Kashan’s lustre tile Since it was considered an extremist and illegitimate slogan. Therefore, in Kuhpayeh, which was one of the Nuqtavi centers, and some of its elders such as Abu al-Qasim Amri were blinded by this accusation, the patron of the minbar, Haj Iskandar, ordered another tile with a moderate content. Also, these two tiles reveal the industrial and artistic relations of several cities such as Kashan, Qomsheh, and Kuhpayeh in the center of Iran that are influenced by Shiite beliefs of that time.