REBIRTH 189Safavid creativity climaxed in architecture. For example, unlike the
monumental Ottoman mosques-those somber mounds of domes brack-
eted 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 choos-
ing 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" (their point being that if you hadn't seen Isfahan, you'd missed half
of all there was to see in the world).
The Ottoman and Safavid worlds had distinctive differences and yet,
for all the hostility between the governments, a sort of civilizational unity
ran between them. They were no more different than, say, England and
France, and perhaps less so. A traveler going from Istanbul to Isfahan or
vice versa would have felt on more or less familiar ground in either place.
It's quite remarkable that two such powerful and distinctive empires could
emerge in exactly the same period side by side. What's even more amazing
is that yet another enormous, distinctive, grandiose, and powerful Muslim
empire coalesced in just about this same period: the empire of the
Moghuls, which eventually stretched from Burma, across India, to the
middle of Afghanistan where it butted right up against the Safavid frontier.
THE MOGHULS (ROUGHLY 900 TO 1273 AH)
The Moghuls were every bit the equal of the Ottomans in wealth and
strength. About 20 percent of the world's current population lives in the
territory they once ruled, including all or part of five modern countries,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Burma. The man who
founded this gigantic empire was an almost exact contemporary of Shah