page 141 of A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind
Alcohol seems to have played a significant part in the poor showing of later Safavid monarchs. From the time of Shah Esma’il and before, drinking sessions had been a part of the group rituals of the Qezelbash [religious order which conquered iran under shah esmai'l], building probably on the ancient practices of the Mongols and the Turkic tribes in Central Asia, but also on ghuluww Sufi practice and the Persian tradition of razm o bazm - fighting and feasting….
when i was younger i had a rather simple view of religion. in short, i viewed religion as the straightforward working out of inferences from axioms of belief. when i would read about things like this my own assumption was that this was just deviation from ‘correct’ inferences.
in hindsight i think i turned religion simply into an inverse of my atheism, a spare set of assertions about the nature of the world as an objective entity. today i think i truly did not understand how religion was lived, in large part because i have never evinced much interest in the religious sensibility myself. instead of a mathematical formalism i now believe that religion as it is lived resembles art more than a science. this does not mean that i do not believe it is futile to analyze religion as a natural phenomenon, but art is a very difficult thing to get a tractable grasp on….
