Safi-ad-din Ardabili

Safi-ad-Din Esḥāq Ardabili was a poet, mystic, teacher and Sufi master. He was the son-in-law and spiritual heir of the Sufi master Zahed Gilani, whose order—the Zahediyeh—he reformed and renamed the Safaviyya, which he led from 1301 to 1334. The oldest extant book on the genealogy of the Safavid family and the only one that is pre-1501 is titled Safwat as-Safa and was written by Ibn Bazzaz, a disciple of Sheikh Sadr-al-Din Ardabili, the son of the Sheikh Safi-ad-din Ardabili. According Ibn Bazzaz, the Sheikh was a descendant of a Kurdish noble man named Firuz Shah Zarin Kolah the Kurd of Sanjan.