In the last decade of the seventeenth century, the Catholic missions in Isfahan were struck by the news of the apostasy of two Portuguese clerics from the Augustinian Order. The first case was that of Padre Manuel de Santa Maria, who embraced Islam in 1691 and adopted the name of Hasan Quli Beg. It was, however, the second case that proved more scandalous. As the Bishop of Isfahan Louis Marie Pidou de Saint Olon (d. 1717) explained in a letter dated on 25 October 1697, the most troubling aspect of the case of this latter convert was that: ‘having made himself a doctor of the Qurʾan, it [was] said that he [was] writing a book against the Christian Religion (ayant se fait docteur de l’Alcoran, on dit qu’il compose un livre contre la religion chrétienne)’. This second apostate was Padre António de Jesus, who the scholarly consensus has identified with the late ʿAli Quli Jadid al-Islam (d. 1734). The identification, although not completely uncontestable, rests on a reasonable deduction: Padre António is the only one of the two who is said to have written polemics after his conversion and ʿAli Quli Jadid al-Islam is the only polemicist from the period who presents himself as a former priest, as we will later see in more detail. Past scholarship worked under the assumption that he could have died during the 1722 Afghan invasion. However, Willem Floor has recently discovered a document from the Dutch East India Company, which says that the renegade ʿAlie Coelie Beek’ died on 10 March 1734. As we will see shortly, the circumstances surrounding his conversion are not entirely clear. In the absence of clarity about the conditions in which he converted and his motives for doing so, the next relevant task is to ask what his case reveals about larger societal and epochal trends.

As we will also see, the confessionalisation paradigm applied to the Muslim world appears to be inadequate or insufficient for this late period of Safavid history. f we were to accept the idea of there having been a process of confessionalisation in Safavid Iran, the obvious thing would be to look at the early years of the empire and its ‘conversion’ to Twelver Shiʿism.