By and large, Subaltern Studies has been an overlooked method of inquiry in the subfield of Safavid studies. With the new set of research questions engendered by developments in early modern studies since the late twentieth century, the question of subaltern and challenges in representing its standpoint have seen scant attention in scholarly works on the Safavids. There are three reasons for this.

First, scholarly research on the Safavids has mostly relied on the elite culture of court chronicles, jurisprudence texts or literary works with an “Isfahani-centeric perspective” that tends to represent history from the perspective of literate male subjects with the privilege of self-representation through cultural capital and network ties. With few exceptions, the focus on elite cultural sources has mainly contributed to bypassing the question of subalternity of displaced social groups positioned on the margins of power relations with the ruling class(es) who maintain a dominant role. Second, and yet connected with the first reason, the focus on (male) elites, in particular the royal household, court officials, merchants, military figures and more importantly the clerics, has served as a normative way to expand on the contested notion of “Safavid polity,” its civic and religious institutions, state bureaucracies and military organizations across the vast Iranian landmass that nominally identified the Safavid imperium. The elitecentric bias has been justified in the assumption that the advent or the breakdown of politics revolves around elite interaction, and that those in the margins with diverse social backgrounds are precisely as such: shadowy backgrounds to elite histories who are in control over the competing forces to shape or maintain political order.

The third reason is inherently tied to the production of academic knowledge. Since its inception during the inter-war period, when joint efforts between state and corporate Foundations gave rise to area studies, academic discourses of various disciplines have given rise, to use Michel Foucault's term, a “corpus of knowledge” that has presupposed a way of looking at history marked by certain organization of concepts and types of enunciations in the exclusion of subalternity.