The goal, it suggested, was to weaken Sunni Arab states so as to realise "Safavid dreams" of Shia expansion, a reference to the 16th-century dynasty that enshrined Shiism as Iran's state religion.
And ever since the 17th century, when Iran's Safavid dynasty made the country irrevocably Shia, nearby Sunni states have fretted about Iran's influence on their Shia minorities.Mr Nasr ranges over these Sunni-majority countries to good effect.
It is an old bread, appearing in recipes from the Safavid era of the 16th-18th centuries, and used to be made in people's houses.
The 7th to 11th centuries (the creation of empire); the 11th to mid-13th centuries (threat, division and conquest); the mid-13th to early-16th centuries (definition of frontiers) and the 16th to late-18th centuries (the Moghul, Safavid and Ottoman empires).The first two segments occupy the transparent courtyard-level gallery; the later periods are below.
According to Mr Winter, the text alongside the photos reads: "The Special Security Forces of the Islamic State, upon receiving precise intelligence, were able to infiltrate this network of apostates who were working to help the Safavid [Iraqi] government.
In the early sixteenth century, the Safavid dynasty converted the country, en masse, from Sunni to Shiite Islam, in order to keep Persians distinct from the neighboring Ottomans.
In Christie's April 7 sale, the portrait of a lady attributed to "Safavid Iran, circa mid-17th century" was unlikely to be Iranian.
It is no accident that the two huge successes in the new "Islamic" galleries are the rooms respectively dealing with the art of Safavid Iran and of the Moghul empire in the 16th and 17th centuries.
"The orders were issued to our groups and to our people to complete all preparation to march into our beloved capital, Baghdad, and we will strike relentlessly and with an iron fist on the heads of the traitors, agents and Safavid enemies of Arabism and Islam," the group said in a statement posted on its Web site.
With greater irony, one of the most important rarities among Sotheby's "Treasures," a carpet from Moghul India interpreting in the Hindustani taste the animal carpets of Safavid Iran, sold for only £314,500.
He soon gravitated to Islamic pottery from the so-called missing period of 1350 to 1550, a historic blank that he was determined to fill in to support his thesis that Islamic pottery developed continuously from its beginnings through the Safavid period of the 16th to the early 18th century.
