Shaykh Ali Khan Zanganeh

Shaykh Ali Khan Zanganeh (Persian: شیخ‌علی‌خان زنگنه, died 1689), was an Iranian statesman of Kurdish origin, who served as the grand vizier of the Safavid king (shah) Suleiman I (r. 1666–1694) from 1669 to 1689. Due to his efforts in reforming the declining Iranian economy, he has been called the "Safavid Amir Kabir" in modern historiography.

Family

A native of the Kermanshah Province, Shaykh Ali Khan was the son of Ali Beg Zanganeh, and belonged to the Zanganeh tribe, a Sunni Kurdish tribe, which was part of the Qizilbash. Shaykh Ali Khan had two brothers named Najaf Qoli Beg Zanganeh and Shahrokh Sultan Zanganeh and also had several sons, whom were: Hossein Ali Khan Zanganeh, Suleiman Khan Zanganeh, Ismail Beg Zanganeh, Abbas Beg Zanganeh, Abbas Qoli Beg Zanganeh, and the most prominent one being Shahqoli Khan Zanganeh, who would also later serve as grand vizier of the country.

Biography

Shaykh Ali Khan's destiny is similar to that of many other Iranian grand viziers—from Hasanak under the Ghaznavids to Amir Kabir under the Qajars—and is owing, in an established sense, to the ambivalence of the grand vizier's position in the Iranian bureaucratic practice.

Shaykh Ali Khan served as the commander of the empire's musketeer corps (tofangchi-aghasi) from 1668 till June 1669.

Sources

• Floor, Willem (2001). Safavid Government Institutions. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers. ISBN 978-1568591353.
• Newman, Andrew J. (2008). Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. I.B.Tauris. pp. 1–281. ISBN 9780857716613.
• Matthee, Rudi (2011). Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. I.B.Tauris. pp. 1–371. ISBN 978-0857731814.
• Lambton, A.K.S. (1954). "Kirmānshāh". The Encyclopaedia of Islam. BRILL. pp. 167–171. ISBN 9789004060562.
• Matthee, Rudi (1999). The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–290. ISBN 0521641314.
• Matthee, Rudi. "ŠAYḴ-ʿALI KHAN ZANGANA". Encyclopaedia Iranica.
• Floor, Willem (2005), "A Note on The Grand Vizierate in Seventeenth Century Persia", Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 155 (2), Harrassowitz Verlag: 435–481, JSTOR 43382107
• Matthee, Rudi (1994). "Administrative Stability and Change in Late-17th-Century Iran: The Case of Shaykh Ali Khan Zanganah (1669-89)". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 26 (1): 77–98. doi:10.1017/S0020743800059778. JSTOR 164053.
• Yamaguchi, Akihiko (2023). "Mediating between the Royal Court and the Periphery: The Zangana Family's Brokerage in Safavid Iran (1501–1722)". Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. doi:10.1080/05786967.2023.2170814.