by John McHugo
The key relationship in Sufism was between a teacher and his disciples. As has already been mentioned in the last chapter, this led eventually to the appearance of brotherhoods or orders. These were known as tariqas (literally: ‘pathways’), which often had a considerable degree of formal organisation. The tariqas claimed a spiritual lineage that they traced back through the great teaching masters to the greatest of them all, Junayd of Baghdad, who had died in 910. Beyond him, they continued their spiritual pedigree through the first generations that had adopted the epithet of Sufi and, beyond them, to eminent Companions of the Prophet, and ultimately the Prophet himself.
Here, as in many other contexts, Ali is a key figure. His memory was venerated by many tariqas which claimed him, in some sense, as their first teacher after the Prophet. He was seen as the great exemplar to be followed. This was not just because of his many outstanding qualities but, above all else, because of his closeness to the Prophet. At the same time, he was revered by groups of urban young men who were often craftsmen carrying on a particular trade together, and who shared many bonds in common. They set up organisations that had something in common with the guilds of medieval Europe. Ali was seen as the exemplar of all the manly qualities to which their members should aspire.
None of this emphasis on Ali implies a link with Shi‘ism. Reverence for Ali was natural –indeed, essential – for Sunnis, even though they did not see Ali as the First Imam. But looking to Ali as a great exemplar could open the door to the propagation of Shi‘i teachings and ideas. Some tariqas also listed the Shi‘i imams as figures in their spiritual pedigrees. This might, perhaps, be said to have made that door to Shi‘ism even easier to open. At the same time, the belief among Sufis that there are higher forms of religious knowledge, known only to the adepts, could also be said to have parallels in Shi‘ism.
It is probably wrong to see the divide between Sunnism and Shi‘ism as clearly understood by the Turkmen tribes. One major Turkmen ruler, Jahan Shah (who died in 1438), produced coins with Shi‘i formulae on one side and the names of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman on the other. Was this confusion, or was he just hedging his bets? Sufism is generally considered to have been a Sunni rather than a Shi‘i phenomenon, but once again the distinction was not always clear-cut. The great Nasir al-Din al-Tusi could compose a treatise on the Sufi mystical path and dedicate it to his contemporary the Sunni vizier and historian Juvayni, while still being a major teacher of Twelver doctrine. This treatise retained the esteem of Twelvers after his death.8
The martial prowess of the Turkmen tribes made them the most formidable soldiers in Iran and the surrounding areas at that time. Their reverence for the figure of Ali, their indifference to formulations of religious doctrine, their attraction towards preachers who worked miracles and taught doctrines known only to a few, and the natural pull nomadic tribesmen can feel towards a charismatic leader – these were all factors that would make the tribes ripe for recruitment by a Gnostic Shi‘i warrior who claimed that he was, in some sense, a God-King.
IV
The political power of the Safavids, the dynasty that was to make Iran a predominantly Shi‘i country, really began during the rule of Uzun Hasan, who was the leader of the Ak Koyunlu, ‘White Sheep’, confederation. The Ak Koyunlu dominated eastern Anatolia and the areas further east after the Timurid Empire fell apart. Uzun Hasan took power after triumphing in a lengthy period of dynastic civil wars and defeating his main rival in 1457. He moved his capital to Tabriz a few years later. He was an empire builder, and went on to defeat Abu Said, the last of the Timurids, in 1469. He then gained control of Iraq and most of what is now Iran as far east as Fars and Kirman.
The Safavids, as a political force, can thus be traced back only to the second half of the 1400s. Their empire came to an end in 1722. It did not spread over such a vast expanse of territories as their Ottoman neighbours, nor did it last as long (the Ottoman Empire ended only after its defeat in the First World War). Another contrast with the Ottomans is that the Safavids did not become a maritime power, although they took control of the predominantly Shi‘i island of Bahrain in 1602. Being centred on the arid Iranian plateau, the empire’s agricultural base was relatively small, and it was heavily dependent financially on a single commodity: silk. But it is very important for our story. This is because the Safavids made Twelver Shi‘ism their state religion. During their rule, Twelver Shi‘ism became the predominant Muslim sect in Iran, and has remained so ever since. If this had not happened, Twelver Shi‘ism might today be the majority sect only in relatively small areas such as the Jebel Amil region of south Lebanon, the shrine cities of Kufa and Najaf in Iraq, and Bahrain and its hinterland on the Arabian coast. The significance of Twelver Shi‘ism in terms of the demographics of the Muslim world as a whole might not be much greater than that of Zaydism in Yemen, the Alawis in Syria, or the Ismaili sects and their offshoots such as the Druze. The story of how Iran became a predominantly Shi‘i rather than a Sunni nation therefore requires some explanation.
The Safavids were originally Sunni. Their name comes from a Sufi brotherhood founded by a certain Sheikh Safi, who died in 1334. The brotherhood was probably influential in the Ak Koyonlu Empire at an earlier stage, but there is little that attracts the attention of historians to it until Junayd, the son of its fourth leader, was exiled and spent twelve years wandering in eastern Anatolia and northern Syria during the period 1447–59.9 On these travels he picked up some obscure, unorthodox beliefs. He may well have learned them from Gnostic Shi‘is. It is perfectly possible, for instance, that he encountered Alawi teachings while wandering through northern Syria.
He declared that he was a descendant of Ali, gathering a large number of followers from Turkmen tribes who passionately devoted themselves to him and saw him virtually as a God-King. They believed that Junayd, together with Ali himself, shared in the divine nature. Whatever the origin of the beliefs that Junayd had adopted, and which essentially led him to consider himself to be divine, on his return Uzun Hasan offered him his sister as a wife. A son, Haydar, was born of the union, but Junayd was killed in battle soon afterwards by a Muslim ruler whose territory he was seeking to cross so as to attack the Christians of Georgia on a campaign of jihad.
Haydar was brought up at the court of Uzun Hasan, who subsequently gave him a daughter in marriage, just as he had given his sister to the boy’s father. These two marriages brought the Safavid brotherhood into the heart of Ak Koyunlu politics at a time when the confederation was turning in on itself and was greatly weakened by the almost inevitable round of civil wars that followed the death of Uzun Hasan in 1472. Haydar is said to have devised a red or crimson headgear for his followers, who now became known as the Kizilbash, or ‘redheads’. The headgear had twelve gussets, each of which, it would be said, represented one of the twelve imams. Haydar’s son Sultan Ali succeeded his father as head of the Safavid brotherhood, but was imprisoned and killed in 1494. Another son, Ibrahim, replaced him, but a militant faction followed his younger brother Ismail, who was then only seven. Ismail had to flee for his life from the Ak Koyunlu dominions.
The story of this boy is truly extraordinary. In 1499, when he was still only twelve years old, he appeared leading an army of Kizilbash tribesmen against the Ak Koyunlu. Two years later, in 1501, when he was about fourteen, he defeated the last effective Ak Koyunlu ruler, Alwand, at the Battle of Sharur, and took Tabriz. This is traditionally seen as the starting point of the Safavid Empire. Ismail immediately embarked on a dizzying campaign of conquest. He took Hamadan from another Ak Koyunlu prince, then turned west into the parts of eastern Anatolia around Diyarbakir and Mardin. He then marched into Baghdad in 1508, before extending his control all the way down to the Persian Gulf.
As we have seen, Ismail was a grandson of Uzun Hasan and was followed by men who gave him a semi-divine status. Their religion was essentially a Turkmen paganism, ‘which Safavid propaganda merely provided with a thin Islamic varnish and “rendered Sufi and Shi‘ite”�
��, as one scholar has put it.10 It may well be that at this stage Ismail envisaged establishing an empire for himself like that of the Ak Koyunlu, and he should certainly be seen as their successor. But he also conquered territories that the Ak Koyunlu had never taken. To the east, he was faced by another aggressive Turkish tribal confederation, the Uzbeks. Ismail marched into Khorasan, and defeated and killed the Uzbek leader, Muhammad Shaybani, near Marv. He established the River Oxus as his eastern boundary. Following a Mongol tradition, he had Muhammad Shaybani’s skull mounted in gold as a drinking cup, which he sent as a present to the man who was his greatest and most powerful enemy: the Ottoman sultan.
This may not have been wise. His victory over the Uzbeks marked the high watermark of his conquests. Soon afterwards, a Safavid army was defeated at Ghujduwan by Uzbek forces that had crossed the Oxus. Although the Uzbeks retreated when Ismail approached in person, he was about to suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of the Ottomans. The Ottoman Sultan Yavuz Selim, best known in English as Selim the Grim, was worried by the spread of Kizilbash sentiment among tribes in Anatolia. When revolts broke out in 1511–12, they received encouragement from Ismail. The sultan had real grounds to fear that the tribes would abandon the Ottomans for Ismail, and marched east with a formidable army after massacring the Kizilbash in eastern Anatolia. Ismail at first adopted a scorched-earth policy and withdrew, but he accepted battle at Chaldiran in 1514, even though he was outnumbered. His army was composed of mounted archers, while the Ottomans were fielding artillery and musket-bearing Janissaries, as well as cavalry. Ismail suffered a devastating defeat in which many of his senior officers, as well as the highest Twelver religious dignitary in his empire, were killed. Selim the Grim even took Ismail’s capital, Tabriz, but the Ottoman army was now too far from its bases for him to annex the city, and he decided to withdraw. Nevertheless, the defeat at Chaldiran seems to have ended Ismail’s expansion for good. He lived for another ten years, but he would never lead an army into battle again.
Proof that Ismail posed to the Kizilbash as a semi-divine figure can be found in the poetry he composed under a pseudonym in his native language, Azeri Turkish. He considered himself to be the long-awaited Mahdi who will usher in the End Times, as well as a physical manifestation of Muhammad, Ali and the twelve imams. They, like him, are veils in which the divine light has clothed itself:
I am identical to God...
Come, look now at the divine truth, thou erring blind man:
I am the Absolute Primal Moving Cause of whom men speak.11
Before Chaldiran, Ismail had never lost a battle. It would seem reasonable to suppose that the defeat might have dented this belief in his semi-divine status. Nevertheless, as has been pointed out by David Morgan, a historian of medieval Iran and the Mongols, his father and grandfather had also enjoyed a semi-divine status but had been defeated and killed in battle without this diminishing the Kizilbash movement’s fervour. What Ismail’s survival after Chaldiran does show is that the tribes were not the only basis of his regime’s support, although by being their messianic leader Ismail skilfully harnessed their feelings of alienation from oppressive rulers. Yet he was also aware that, as a Chinese observer put it, ‘the empire has been conquered on horseback, but it cannot be governed on horseback’.12 He received support and assistance from Persian-speaking bureaucrats who had administered the area under previous regimes, including the Ak Koyunlu. In fact, during Ismail’s rise the vizier at the Ak Koyunlu court had defected to him and encouraged him to attack his masters.13 For the ten years that remained to him after Chaldiran (he died in 1524 at the age of only thirty-seven), he set about establishing effective administration over the territories he ruled. He also forged ahead with the project to turn his dominions into a Twelver empire.
Historians speculate over why he did this. The most likely reason is that it was a logical response to a crucial dilemma. On the one hand, he was the ruler of a large, predominantly Sunni empire. On the other, his powerbase consisted of fanatical Turkmen tribesmen who saw him as a God-King. We should remember that an adolescent boy who claims that, in some sense, he is God and who is followed by hosts of fiercely loyal tribesmen who are prepared to die for him in battle, does not look like a Muslim of either the Sunni or Shi‘i persuasion. In fact, he does not look like a Muslim at all. The phenomenon of the young Ismail can only be understood against the backdrop of the epic story of the coming of the Turkmen tribes to the lands of Islam and their assimilation into that world, which we have sketched out above. Rule by a man who claimed some kind of divinity would have been anathema to the predominantly Sunni, Persian-speaking bureaucrats on whom he relied to collect taxes and administer the cities, as well as to the sedentary populations under their control.
At the same time, like any other ruler, he would have had to tend his powerbase. Attempts to impose or enforce the regulations of the Sharia had often been made by rulers with the aim to transform the basis of their rule. A taxation-based machinery of government was preferable to relying on the support of fickle tribes in search of opportunities for plunder. Ismail would have been very conscious that, when rulers attempted to impose the Sharia on tribes, this frequently led to revolts. Could it be that he saw adopting Twelver Shi‘ism as a neat solution, a middle way between the Sunnism of the cities and agricultural areas, and the Gnostic ideas of the nomadic Turkmen? He would cease to behave as a God-King, but he could still claim a status superior to other rulers as a descendant of Ali and the imams. In fact, he still went beyond the tenets of Twelver Shi‘ism. He saw himself as the political representative of the Hidden Imam, and forced his subjects to adopt this view. Nevertheless, the old ideas of the Kizilbash took a while to die. In 1555, Ismail’s successor, Tahmasp, had to reject the attempt by some enthusiasts to proclaim him the Mahdi in succession to his father. The men who publicly advocated this were executed.
The imposition of Twelver Shi‘ism was a top-down process. Ismail began by declaring it the compulsory form of Islam in his dominions as soon as he took Tabriz in 1501. For good measure, he also adopted the ancient Iranian title of Shahanshah, ‘King of kings’. He ordered the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs, and this was followed up with persecutions of Sunnis – including burnings at the stake and other grisly executions when necessary – in areas over which his armies gained control. A genealogical table was produced that showed that Ismail was descended from the Seventh Imam, Musa al-Kazim. If Ismail was no longer portrayed as the Mahdi, he had become instead the representative of the Hidden Imam during his occultation – a role that claimed a universal jurisdiction over all Muslims. It may have been in response to this that the Ottoman Sultan began assertively to describe himself as the Caliph, as well as the Sultan, after the conquest of Egypt in 1517.14
No doubt many Muslim religious scholars in Ismail’s empire would have been like the legendary Vicar of Bray: they bowed with the prevailing wind and happily changed their religious allegiance to Twelver Shi‘ism so as to win preferment. Those who were willing to teach the new doctrine retained their posts; those who were not prepared to do so faced active persecution. But how could they learn the Twelver Shi‘i interpretation of Islam and the Sharia? There were few scholars in Ismail’s dominions with the knowledge to impart it to them. His answer was to invite learned scholars from the existing strongholds of Twelver Shi‘ism: Jebel Amil in what is now Lebanon, Greater Bahrain, and the colleges at Hilla in Iraq. This was continued by his son and successor, Tahmasp, and would be the start of a long-lasting process of scholarly interchange between Twelvers in the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds that continues to this day. It must have taken some time for Shi‘ism to percolate down through society, but the Shi‘i-fication of the Safavid Empire seems to have been irrevocable, if incomplete, by the time the Safavids collapsed in 1722. Only one Safavid, Ismail II, tried to revert to Sunnism in 1576–77, but he did not succeed.
The leading scholar Ismail persuaded to come to his empire was Sheikh Ali al-Muhaqq
iq al-Karaki, who was from the Beqaa valley in what is now Lebanon. He had also studied at the school of Hilla in Iraq. He followed Allamah al-Hilli’s teaching on ijtihad, and brought to the Safavid Empire the vision that the qualified religious scholars could perform many functions of the Hidden Imam during his absence. Twelvers had found the congregational prayers on Fridays problematic during the imam’s absence, since only the imam was entitled to lead them. Now, al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki taught that it was not just permissible for a qualified scholar to lead them, but a duty incumbent on him. The Twelver clergy were fast becoming a vital element in the Safavid state. They were to develop a hold over Safavid society.
V
An important lesson the Safavids learned from Chaldiran was the danger of offering battle to an invader. Although the Safavid Empire was much smaller than that of the Russian tsars, it presented some of the same challenges for an invader. Problems of logistics made it difficult to conquer if an invader was met with a scorched-earth policy and the defenders withdrew without offering battle. Although the Ottomans won back Iraq from Ismail’s successor, Tahmasp, repeated Ottoman invasions of Azerbaijan often merely led to the occupation of Tabriz for the remainder of the campaigning season, since the Ottoman troops needed to return home for the winter. The Safavid capital was moved east to Qazvin, which was harder for the Ottomans to reach. There was a similar but less formidable threat from the Uzbeks to the east and north east of the Safavid Empire. Against these enemies, too, strategic withdrawal generally worked.