by John McHugo
The greatest Safavid ruler after Ismail was Abbas I, who came to the throne in 1588 at only a slightly less tender age than Ismail himself (Abbas was sixteen). Shah Abbas soon showed his mettle by ordering the death of the Kizilbash leader Murshid Quli Khan, who was meant to be his mentor and a kind of regent: in other words, someone who was intended to control the young shah. By the time of his death in 1629 he had won back virtually all the territories that had been lost to the Ottomans and Uzbeks in the years since the death of Shah Ismail. He also transferred the capital to Isfahan, even further away from the Ottomans than Qazvin, and gained a greater degree of control over the Kizilbash leaders. Determined to break his almost complete dependency on them, Abbas set up a permanent army of slave soldiers of Caucasian origin – especially from Armenia and Georgia – as a counterweight to the Kizilbash tribesmen. They were paid from the revenues from crown lands, including whole provinces that had formerly been in Kizilbash hands. He also attempted to disperse some of the tribes by settling them in different parts of the empire. The Kizilbash remained important, but they were no longer the only source of fighting men for the empire.
The shrine of the Imam Ali al-Rida at Mashhad had been destroyed by the Uzbeks, but Abbas made a pilgrimage there on foot from Isfahan, a journey he completed in twenty-eight days. He afterwards restored the shrine to its full glory. He also built a madrasa (school) and a hostel at Qumm, which once again became a major place for pilgrimage as well as a popular burial place for the sayyids, or descendants of the Prophet. At the same time, the empire enjoyed a cultural flowering. Isfahan was adorned with beautiful new buildings. Illuminated manuscripts, painting and ceramics all flourished. In fact, his reign is often described as the high point of Persian painting. A philosophical movement also appeared. This was known as the school of Isfahan. It combined Neo-platonism, Sufi illuminationist thought and Twelver theology. Among its achievements was to ensure that the logical tools and philosophical ideas that had taken root in the Islamic world as a result of translations into Arabic from ancient Greek would continue to develop in the Twelver world. In the early 1600s, Shah Abbas extended his empire to the island of Bahrain and its coastal hinterland. These were already predominantly Shi‘i areas. He then turned his attention westwards, and drove the Ottomans out of Iraq. This enabled him to visit the tomb of Hussein as a pilgrim and to restore the shrines of the other imams in Iraq. He also made his sectarian leanings clear. The Sunni shrines of Abu Hanifa, the great scholar of the Sharia and founder of the Hanafi doctrinal law school, and the Sunni mystic Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani were sacked, while much of the Sunni notable class of Baghdad was massacred or enslaved.
The era of Abbas was the highpoint of the Safavid Empire, but the empire would have virtually another century of existence. The governmental machine he set up served the empire well and kept it functioning for many years. He died in 1629. Without his forceful presence, a measure of decline was almost inevitable. In 1639, the Persians lost Iraq once again to the Ottomans. Nevertheless, the external threats to the empire were containable. Internal tensions brought about its end, possibly assisted by a period during which there were no major wars, which may have led to neglect of the armed forces.
VI
Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi was the Sheikh al-Islam, the most notable religious scholar in the Safavid Empire, during the second half of the seventeenth century. He enforced a strict interpretation of the Shi‘i form of the Sharia and produced a vast compendium of Shi‘i traditions attributed to the imams for use by scholars. He was a hammer of Sunnis and Sufis, as well as an important figure in completing the imposition of Shi‘ism as the national religion. He has been described as a kind of grand inquisitor who ‘led an operation to cleanse the Shi‘a in Iran of all trace of Sufism, philosophy and gnosis’.15 His excess of zeal may have been a factor that led to tensions in the early eighteenth century in parts of the empire that remained Sunni and which are today in Afghanistan. A rebellion occurred among the Ghilzai Afghans in Kandahar. They marched west, defeating the Safavid army and besieging Sultan Husayn, the last Safavid shah, in Isfahan. When the city surrendered, their leader, Ghilzai Mahmud, was proclaimed shah but was unable to gain control of large areas of the country, while the Russians and Ottomans took advantage of the disintegration of central authority to snatch provinces from the empire. The Safavid Empire had come to an inglorious end.
Although the empire was destroyed by what was essentially an insurrection by an ethnic group who were Sunni, the territories that became Shi‘i during the Safavid period largely remained so. After a period of chaos and an Ottoman invasion, order was restored again when a new strong leader appeared. This was Nadir Shah, who ruled at first through members of the Safavid dynasty, but proclaimed himself Shah in 1736. He was a great conqueror, although few of his conquests would be permanent. He marched east through Afghanistan and large areas of northern India, sacking Delhi and taking the Mughal peacock throne and Koh-i-noor diamond back with him as loot. To the north, he re-established Iranian control up to the River Oxus. He also drove the Ottomans out of parts of western Iran that they had occupied, and invaded Iraq and eastern Anatolia.
He was from the Afshar tribe, one of the tribes that had made up the Kizilbash confederation. This meant that his background was Twelver Shi‘i, but he inclined to Sunnism and made the last serious attempt to reinstate Sunnism in Iran. Many of the soldiers in his army were Afghan Sunnis, and there may therefore have been a political aspect to this; but it has also sometimes been suggested that he had megalomaniac ambitions of establishing his rule over the entire Islamic world, and that this was the real reason he favoured Sunnism. Nevertheless, his army also contained many Shi‘is, and he made his capital at Mashhad, the shrine city that contained the tomb of the Imam Ali al-Rida. As he had made the Oxus once again the boundary of the Persian Empire, and even made Bukhara which lay on the far side of it a vassal state, there may have been sound geographical reasons for this.
Nadir Shah attempted to close the gap between Shi‘is and Sunnis. There would be tangible political benefits for him if he could achieve this. It would increase his prestige throughout the Muslim world. It would also put an end to a source of discord within his dominions, and would deprive the Sunni Ottomans of an important pretext for invading Iran: the grounds that they were fighting heresy.
The Ottoman fears about the spread of Gnostic Shi‘i and subsequently Twelver ideas by the Kizilbash tribes in their eastern provinces, were deep-rooted. Moreover, the Safavids had practised sabb, the cursing of the first three caliphs. This was an affront to all Sunni Muslims, especially to Ottoman sultans who had themselves sometimes adopted the title of caliph, and it was something the Ottomans never forgave or forgot. They already considered the Safavids and their followers to be infidels at the time of the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Whenever they were at war with Iran, decrees and fatwas would be produced to remind the people (and the army) of this.
According to one decree issued by Ebussuud Efendi – the sixteenth-century Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, who was the most senior religious dignitary in the empire – Twelvers were like the false prophet Musaylimah, sowing corruption and discord among Muslims. Ebussuud Efendi reminded his flock for good measure that ‘killing this group is more important than killing other groups’, and that no less an authority than Ahmad ibn Hanbal had declared the blood of anyone who cursed the first three caliphs to be lawful – that is, fit for of execution – even if he subsequently repented.16 A similar example is contained in an opinion of Ibn Kemal Pasha-Zade, another sixteenth-century Sheikh al-Islam, who wrote that the Kizilbash are ‘a ta’ife [i.e. sect] of the Shi‘ah whose men must be killed, whose wealth and women are allowed to any Sunnis who wish to usurp them and against whom holy war is incumbent’.17 Much more recently, while the last Safavids were reeling under the attacks from Sunnis in Afghanistan, the Ottomans invaded from the west in order ‘to fight unbelief’. Their propaganda described Safavid soldiers as infidels who could legit
imately be killed in battle, and whose property could be lawfully seized.18
Nadir Shah’s idea was that Twelver Shi‘ism would be considered as an additional madhhab, or doctrinal law school, alongside the four great doctrinal law schools of Sunnism. For Shi‘is, this would have meant acceptance of the first three caliphs as legitimate, and an end to the practice of ritually cursing them. The suggestion was received coldly by the Shi‘i scholars in his dominions. In fairness to them, Nadir Shah was not quite asking for mutual acceptance of each other by Sunnis and Twelvers, but was attempting something rather different: to find a place for Twelver Islam within the framework of Sunnism. His idea was also treated disdainfully in the Sunni world, and he eventually dropped his idea of the fifth, ‘Ja‘fari’ madhhab. The name of the school itself would have appeared an insult to Twelvers. From their point of view, Ja‘far al-Sadiq was the Sixth Imam – a status that was much more exalted than that of the founder of a doctrinal law school like Abu Hanifa or Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
He also made other moves towards Sunnism, or at least to a position of neutrality between Sunnism and Shi‘ism. The Kizilbash headdress with twelve gussets symbolising the twelve imams was abolished and replaced with a new one with four points – which might be taken to indicate the first four caliphs. He also had Shi‘i formulae removed from his coins. When he visited Iraq, he endowed both Sunni and Shi‘i shrines. In an attempt to placate his Twelver subjects, he encouraged Shi‘i practices – such as pilgrimage to the shrines of the imams – that were potentially compatible with Sunni Islam.
In 1743, after he had temporarily seized much of Iraq from the Ottomans, Nadir Shah held a kind of religious council at Najaf, the location of the shrine containing the tomb of Ali – and therefore a potential focal point for Sunni-Shi‘i reconciliation. In reality it was a public-relations exercise aimed at preserving the unity of the Sunnis and Shi‘is in his armies, where he was concerned at anti-Shi‘i feeling among some of his Sunni troops. It was therefore only the legitimacy of Shi‘ism that was in question.19 Little if any serious theological disputation took place. Sheikh Abdullah al-Suwaidi, a Shafi‘i jurist from Baghdad whom the Ottomans had cajoled into taking part, was unimpressed. When told by the Ottoman governor’s deputy that he had been chosen to represent the Sunnis, he was shocked. His reaction included a succinct summary of the practical differences between the theological reasoning used by Sunnis and Shi‘is, as seen from a firmly Sunni standpoint:
You know that the Shi‘a are people of deceit. How can they accept what I say when they are in their element and there are a great number of them, and this shah [Nadir Shah] is a tyrannical oppressor? How do I dare adduce proofs of the falseness of their madhhab and declare its opinion void? We can talk with them, and they will deny every hadith quoted by us, because they do not accept the soundness of the Six Books of hadith. For every Qur’anic verse that I rely on, they will make an esoteric interpretation of it, and they will say that when proof reaches the level of conjecture, it is futile to adduce any proofs at all. They will also say that the condition of proof is that the two sides must agree that in affairs involving the use of ijtihad, it is permissible to follow individual opinion.20
Al-Suwaidi was greatly lacking in trust towards the Twelver scholars, and assumed that they would distort his arguments when they repeated them to others. So suspicious was he that he even asked for a neutral religious scholar – a Christian or a Jew – to be appointed arbitrator:
We need an ‘alim [a scholar] who is Christian or Jewish or of some other faith, who is neither Sunni nor Shi‘i. We will say to him, ‘We are pleased with you. You will be arbiter between us, and God will hold you accountable on the Day of Resurrection. Listen to what we have to say until the truth becomes clear to you.’ I reckoned that if [this arbiter] favoured the other side’s position, I would argue with him and discuss the affair further, even if this led to me being put to death.21
Needless to say, this suggestion was rejected and al-Suwaidi did take part. The Twelver scholars who spoke claimed that they had abolished sabb (which Nadir Shah wrongly, but cleverly, asserted to have been an innovation of the Safavids). They also asserted that they had ended their tolerance of the practice of temporary marriage, which is allowed by the Twelver interpretation of the Sharia but is generally viewed by Sunnis with horror as a form of prostitution. Al-Suwaidi doubted their sincerity. He suspected it was just an exercise in taqiyya, deliberate dissimulation to placate the Ottomans and pull the wool over their eyes for a naked, political end.
As Nadir Shah aged, he became crueller and more capricious, and some doubt whether he retained his sanity. Discontent at excessive taxation and the increasing arbitrariness of his rule led to revolts. He was eventually murdered by Kizilbash tribesmen in 1747. With his towering personality gone, his army and realm soon fell apart. It would be a further half century before Iran was reconstituted in the 1790s under another dynasty which stemmed from another old Kizilbash tribe, the Qajars.
But two long-lasting consequences flowed from Nadir Shah’s religious policy. The first was that his efforts at dialogue with the Sunni Ottomans (if it was, indeed, genuine dialogue) led to a new approach in the relations between the two mighty empires. The 1746 Treaty of Kurdan, which Nadir Shah and an Ottoman ambassador put in place shortly before Nadir Shah was murdered, set out a framework for relations between Ottoman Turkey and Iran that would endure. It established peace and also the frontiers between the two states that have survived more or less to this day. While it appeared to promise that Iran would convert to Sunni Islam, this has been described as entailing no more than ‘what might be considered a superficial reorientation of practice’.22 Iranians would refrain from sabb, but were formally granted the right to continue to make pilgrimages to the shrines of the tombs of the imams in Iraq where they could be expected to practise only their specifically Shi‘i religious rites. This would lead, incidentally, to a long line of dissident Iranian religious scholars being able to take refuge in Najaf from the Iranian authorities. Very importantly, it also made obsolete the religious justifications that the Ottomans had used for war against Iran.
The other consequence was internal to Iran and concerned the relationship between the rulers and the religious leaders. Under the Safavids, it could be said that Mosque and State were united, and that the scholars who converted the population to Twelver Shi‘ism were an arm of the State. Under Nadir Shah, and subsequently, this ceased to be the case. Some scholars left Iran in high dudgeon, many of them settling in India while others went to the shrines of Iraq. The resistance to Nadir Shah’s attempt to convert Twelver Shi‘ism into a fifth Sunni law school demonstrates how deeply entrenched Twelver Shi‘ism had now become in Iran. But, following the end of the Safavids, religion was no longer ‘almost a department of state’.23 Whoever ruled the land could not take for granted the support of the religious leaders. These leaders were not under the control of the government, or even necessarily beholden to it. Moreover, for Twelver Shi‘is, during the occultation of the Hidden Imam there was always a question mark over the legitimacy of any government. There was thus an inherent tension between the rulers and the religious leaders that would not go away. The scholars became those who collected and distributed religious alms and taxes that were the entitlement of the Hidden Imam. This enabled them, for instance, to fund institutions of learning such as madrasas without needing the involvement of the state.
But those religious leaders disagreed among themselves. They became divided into two main factions. One was known as the Akhbaris or ‘traditionists’. In a methodology similar to their Sunni contemporaries, they saw the task of the scholar as being to discern the Sharia from study of the traditions of the Prophet and the twelve imams. The difference was that the source material for their scholarship was substantially different from that of Sunnis. As we have already seen, while both shared the Qur’an, Sunnis looked at the traditions of the Prophet, the first four caliphs and the Prophet’s Companions and their succe
ssors. Shi‘is rejected the sayings and practice of the first three caliphs and of those of the Prophet’s Companions who had supported them. Instead, of those sources, they looked to the traditions attributed to the twelve imams.
The other trend or tendency was that of the Usulis. The Usulis followed the methodology originally developed by Allamah al-Hilli so that, where there were no clear teachings in the text of the Qur’an or hadith, learned scholars could use ijtihad to supply the believers with certainty in living the holy law and, where appropriate, apply it to new circumstances. This increased the authority of the scholars, thereby adding to their ability to influence social developments and, ultimately, political ones. The school had originally been brought to Iran during the days of Shah Ismail and his son Tahmasp. It had taken root and flourished. Over time, the position of the Usulis had been strengthened as the endowments supporting them grew, and they married into landowning and merchant families from which many of the next generations of scholars were drawn. This had the consequence that religious scholars could often be found who would take up the interests of these classes in disputes with the government.
The Akhbari tradition continued, but increasingly lost out to the Usulis. The main battlegrounds were the communities of scholars in the Iraqi shrine cities. The decisive figure was Agha Muhammad Baqir Wahid Bihbihani, a scholar from Isfahan who lived virtually his entire adult life in Karbala where he had originally gone to study. By the time of his death in 1793, he had driven the Akhbaris, whom he denounced as heretical innovators, from the shrine cities. He fatefully pronounced unbelief, takfir, against his opponents and was not above the use of violence, which was meted out by ‘the masters of anger’ (mir-ghadab). These were men armed with cudgels who patrolled the streets on his behalf. This domination of the Usulis spread to Iran and elsewhere, although the Akhbaris would continue to survive in Basra and Bahrain.