A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is

by John McHugo

  At the same time as the religious scholars had become a major force in the empire that was independent of government and beyond its control, Shi‘i piety had spread among ordinary people. The Shi‘i passion play became popular, the ta’ziyya, which told the story of the martyrdom of Hussein by the evil Caliph Yazid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was not liked by the religious scholars who tended to disapprove of folk piety that they could not control. But it was a sign that Twelver Shi‘ism had become the religion of most of the ordinary people of Iran.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Ottoman Empire, India and the Muslim Reformation

  I

  The relentless pressure of nomadic invasions from Central Asia did not just provide the environment that led to the birth of the Safavid Empire. The influx also provided the genesis of the mighty Ottoman Empire. We now need to look at the Turkish Ottomans and (to a lesser extent) the Indian Mughals. At their height, these two Sunni empires, together with the Shi‘i Safavids, contained the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world, and ruled from Algeria to the mouths of the Ganges. These empires would dominate the Muslim world from the sixteenth century until well into the eighteenth century, and the Ottomans would survive into the twentieth century. There were very few predominantly Muslim lands which were never under the sovereignty or suzerainty of one or other of them. Of the lands conquered by the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, only Morocco entirely escaped their control (the last parts of Andalusia in Spain had been finally reconquered by Spanish Christians in 1492). They also never penetrated the Malay peninsula and the archipelago that is today Indonesia, where Islam was being spread largely by traders and Sufis. The same applied to sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam had taken root in some regions, especially around the great bend in the River Niger.

  Although at its height the Mughal Empire ruled over many more people, the Ottoman Empire is generally considered the greatest of the three. It covered the largest area, was both a land and a maritime power, and was by far the most enduring. It was also the strong defender of Sunnism. It would never have come into existence but for the fact that, in 1071, the Seljuq sultan Alp-Arslan came upon the army of the Byzantine Emperor Romanus Diogenes at Manzikert, or Malazgirt, to the north of Lake Van. Neither army was expecting to meet the other, but the encounter was a resounding Seljuq victory, and Romanus Diogenes was taken prisoner. Turkish tribes now swept westward and, for the first time, settled in Anatolia. They established a sultanate at Konya, whose rulers were known as the Seljuqs of Rum. In time, it disintegrated into a number of smaller principalities, which disputed Anatolia with each other, as well as with local Greek and Armenian warlords, the weakened Byzantines and, from 1097 onwards, the Crusaders.

  The beginnings of the Ottomans are lost in legend. What we do know is that they came from one of the Turkish tribes that had swept over the eastern Islamic world in the days of the Seljuqs. They adopted Islam but, as with similar tribes, their Islam would have been mixed with many other elements: survivals of ancient shamanistic practices, unorthodox ideas learned from wandering Sufis, and Christian and other influences they would have picked up in Anatolia.

  The half-legendary founder of the Ottoman dynasty was Osman Gazi (d. 1326) who established an entity that successfully expanded against its rivals until it controlled western and central Anatolia. It even crossed into Europe in 1352 after Osman’s successor, Orkhan, was asked for military support by a contender to the Byzantine throne. That Byzantine invitation was foolish, and would lead to the Ottomans finally gobbling up the remnants of the Byzantine Empire itself a century later in 1453, when they used cannon to breach the land walls of Constantinople. By then, they already dominated the Balkans up to the river Danube and in some places beyond. They had also defeated numerous attempts to force them back by Balkan rulers such as the kings of Hungary and Serbia, as well as Crusaders and the forces of wealthy Italian merchant city states. They survived their crushing defeat at the hands of Timur, although it took them several decades to recover. But for that defeat, they might well have taken Constantinople half a century earlier than they did.

  After the seizure of Constantinople, the Ottomans were a great power – in fact, one of the superpowers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They would spread their control over Greater Syria and Egypt in 1516–17, besiege Vienna in 1529 and 1683, and establish their rule along the coast of North Africa as far west as Algeria, becoming a major naval force in the Mediterranean. They would simultaneously turn the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake and control the Crimea, Moldova and an area of southern Ukraine and Russia, as well as most of Arabia and the Red Sea. Less successfully, they would try to resist the Portuguese and other European maritime powers as they penetrated the Indian Ocean. We have also seen how they never managed to extend their rule to the Iranian plateau. Although they were the terror of Europe during the century and a half between the two sieges of Vienna, by the end of the seventeenth century they were in retreat before Austria and Russia.

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AT ITS MAXIMUM EXTENT

  The Ottomans established order, which allowed agriculture, industry and commerce to flourish. Their sultan presided over an empire of many faiths in which Christians may have been at least as numerous as Muslims – or actually more numerous. The Ottomans recognised this reality. For this reason, in their heyday they received widespread support from many non-Muslims. Most of their Christian subjects were Orthodox, who generally preferred Ottoman rule to that of the Latin Christian powers of Western Europe. The elite troops of the army were the Janissaries, Christian boys taken in a levy called the devshirme, ordered to convert to Islam and brought up in special military schools. Separated from their family ties, they became well-trained professional soldiers with a strong esprit de corps – a combination that probably made them some of the best soldiers in the world. Despite their Christian birth, they sometimes achieved very high office, as did some other converts to Islam, many of them from leading families. At least two nephews of the last Byzantine emperor became Muslims, and one of them was made the governor of Rumelia, the generic name for the Ottoman provinces in Europe. The fact that this put him in charge of roughly half the Ottoman army shows the degree of trust in which the Ottomans held him.

  It has been suggested that the important role given to such converts would have helped the Ottomans absorb the conquered areas. As the Ottomans required at least the passive acquiescence of the conquered Christians to their rule, it could also indicate that the conversion to Islam of such eminent individuals did not alienate them altogether from the Christian communities from which they came. Some Christians who did not convert fought voluntarily in the service of the Ottomans, although this became rarer as time passed. As the historian and political advisor Douglas Streusand has put it, ‘Ottoman expansion clearly meant something other than the simple triumph of Muslim over Christian.’1

  Following the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans saw themselves as the heirs to Ancient Rome as well as to the imperial sovereignty of the pre-Islamic Sasanian shahs of Persia and the Turkish khans of the steppes. Yet of greatest importance to them was their preeminence among Sunni Muslim rulers. When, after their conquest of Greater Syria and Egypt, they became the guardians of Mecca and Medina, they adopted old caliphal titles such as Khadim al-Haramain al-Sharifain, ‘the Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries’. Indeed, on an emotional level their conquest of Syria and Egypt and control of the Holy Cities meant more to them than the taking of Constantinople, even though the European provinces of their empire were the richest. The Ottomans had become the leading Sunni Muslim power west of India. They were intensely jealous of this position. In 1578, when the Mughal Emperor Akbar made large donations to Mecca and Medina, the Ottoman Sultan Selim II responded by forbidding the receipt of any further donations from him.2

  II

  Sunni Islam was thus at the cornerstone of the Ottomans’ sense of identity. The concept of ‘the Peoples of the Book’ provided the framework w
ithin which they viewed their numerous Jewish communities, as well as the Christians who made up something like half the population of their empire. Indeed, the Ottomans frequently encouraged inward Jewish migration and supported Hungarian Protestants against the Catholic Habsburgs. But what about their attitude to Shi‘is? This was a more complex question, since for Sunni Muslims Shi‘is do not fit into the framework for the ‘Peoples of the Book’. They are still Muslims, but misguided heretics.

  The Ottoman rulers were pragmatic men. When at war with the Safavids, the most extreme language would be used in religious opinions to justify attacking Shi‘is. In the last chapter, we saw two examples of this in the opinions of Ebussuud Efendi and Ibn Kemal Pasha-Zade, who each filled the highest religious office in the empire as Sheikh al-Islam. The Shi‘is who really scared the Ottomans were the Kizilbash tribes, which threatened their hold on eastern Anatolia. They were numerous. It looks like an exaggeration, but according to a Venetian source 80 per cent of the population of Anatolia was Shi‘i.3 The Kizilbash could easily provide a fifth column for the Safavid emperor if he ever decided to march westwards towards the Aegean, as Persian emperors had done before the coming of Islam. The Ottoman reaction could be drastic. In 1501, Sultan Bayezid forced 30,000 Kizilbash to migrate to the Peloponnese, while Selim the Grim ordered the massacre of 40,000 in eastern Anatolia as he marched east to Chaldiran. But it was their political support for the Safavids, rather than their doctrines, that caused such extreme measures.4 The Ottomans also retaliated when they retook Iraq from the Safavids in 1638. Sunnis had been persecuted during the Iranian occupation, and the Sunni shrine of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani had been damaged. The Ottomans extracted revenge, and killed all known persons of Persian descent.5 This was a striking contrast with the earlier campaign of Suleyman the Magnificent, who had retaken Baghdad from the Safavids in 1533. He had restored the Sunni shrines of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and Abu Hanifa, but also visited the shrines of the Imams, thus gaining himself the respect of his Shi‘i subjects.6 Different rhetoric was deployed by the Ottomans when there was peace. At such times the Shi‘i Safavids were greeted as brother Muslims.7 The Ottomans had no scruples about alliances with Shi‘is when convenient.8

  Ottoman fears that Twelver Shi‘is were sympathetic to the Safavid cause could be fatal for Twelvers in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. One instance saw the execution of Qur’an reciters, living in the shrine cities of Iraq, who took a secret stipend from Shah Tahmasp of Iran.9 In another, a governor of Baalbek who came from the local Twelver Harfush clan was executed for suspected Safavid sympathies. But perhaps what is most interesting here is that, off and on, this Twelver clan provided Ottoman governors for the town from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It seems that the Ottomans did not care overmuch what the Twelvers, Alawis and Druze of Greater Syria believed, so long as taxes were paid and they posed no threat. Twelver Shi‘is in what is now Lebanon were listed in the tax registers as Muslims, without a mention of their sect.10 Very often, sect played little part. Nevertheless, there was an inherent insecurity for Shi‘is in that their distinctiveness was not officially recognised. Merit could lead to Shi‘i poets being present at the Ottoman court, but Shi‘is did not have the opportunities open to their Sunni counterparts for advancement as religious scholars and bureaucrats. This meant that patronage received by Sunnis was often denied to them. Shi‘is tended to be careful and reticent about their beliefs, an option that was open to them because of taqiyya. In the 1770s, Sayyid Mihdi Tabataba’i, a senior Usuli scholar from Karbala who was also a descendant of the Prophet, made the pilgrimage to Mecca. While there, he felt it necessary to evade questions about the doctrinal law school to which he belonged.11

  It has been suggested that the Ottomans, both rulers and religious scholars, became more aware of their identity as Sunnis as a result of their confrontation with the Safavids. The Safavid practice of sabb, the cursing of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Aisha and most of the Prophet’s Companions, which horrified Sunni Muslims, was a capital offence under the Ottomans.12 ‘Turk’ and ‘Persian’ were sometimes used as synonyms for Sunni and Shi‘i respectively, a conflation of sect and ethnicity that would continue into the modern era.

  III

  As the Arab conquerors rode east during the Umayyad period, their armies reached the river Indus and Sind in 711 during the reign of the Caliph Walid I. This was the same year in which a Muslim army first crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and entered Spain. From Sind, they conquered as far north as Multan in the southern Punjab. Some of the Arab soldiers settled in these areas, where Islam spread. Muslim rule penetrated further as a result of the conquests of the Turkish-speaking Ghaznavid dynasty in north India around the year 1000. Other Muslim armies came southwards through the Khyber Pass, and a sultanate was established in Delhi in 1206, but overthrown in 1398 by Babur, a descendant of Timur on his father’s side and of Genghis Khan on his mother’s. He was the grandfather of the emperor Akbar who is today considered to be the real founder of the Mughal Empire.13

  The Mughal Empire had many more inhabitants than the Ottoman Empire and was considerably wealthier.14 At its height, it covered almost all the Indian subcontinent. This was the achievement of Akbar, who came to the throne in 1556. By the time of his death in 1598, he had extended his dominions almost to the southern tip of India. He was followed by three energetic successors, Jahangir (r. 1598–1627), Shah Jahan (r. 1627–59) and Aurangzeb (r. 1659–1707), before decline set in during the eighteenth century as provincial governors increasingly asserted their autonomy and became practically independent. Nevertheless, the empire would survive, in attenuated form, until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1857, the last Mughal emperor was chosen as the symbolic alternative to British rule by the traditional rulers who took part in the great uprising known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny.

  India was far too vast and populous to be permanently conquered and settled by Muslim invaders. There were many conversions to Islam, especially through the work of the Chishti order of Sufis, but over the subcontinent as a whole Muslims were a minority. Although the emperor Akbar was a Sunni Muslim, he devised a novel solution to this problem of ruling a vast empire in which the majority of the inhabitants were not Muslim. Instead of Islam being the cornerstone of his legitimacy, he claimed a special spiritual status of his own and propagated what was known as sulh-i kull, which meant ‘peace with all’ or universal toleration.15 Loyalty to him flowed from this special spiritual status and the dynastic principle of his descent from Timur (who had conquered northern India but had not remained there) and his grandfather Babur, who had been a great conqueror in his own right. He certainly never abandoned Islam but, very unusually for a Muslim ruler, he followed Hindu court rituals that were designed to demonstrate that he enjoyed the same sovereignty as a Hindu king. He abolished the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslim males; Muslims and Hindus alike could enter his service at the highest level, and he made no distinction between them. This also applied to Shi‘is, and there is no indication that either they or Hindus were less loyal to Akbar than Sunnis.16 As a system, sulh-i kull seems for a while to have been very successful.

  Albar’s successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan backtracked from some aspects of sulh-i kull, but it was Aurungzeb, the last great Mughal emperor, who reversed the policy and made Islam, and the upholding of the Sharia, the basis of his legitimacy, as was the case with other Sunni rulers. When he won a dynastic civil war against his brother Dara Shikoh over who should succeed his father, Aurungzeb had his brother executed as an apostate. Yet even though Aurungzeb began to enforce the Sharia by such measures as reinstituting the jizya poll tax on non-Muslims and reimposing a Sharia ban on the construction of new places of worship by them, he retained the support of many Shi‘is and Hindus. Nevertheless, he had altered the tone of Islam in the subcontinent and this would be permanent. What has been called the universalist strain of Akbar and the Chishtis was eclipsed.17

  Sunnism would dominate the Islam of the Indian
subcontinent, but Shi‘ism was also present, although generally as a minority of a minority. Shi‘is fleeing the Mongol invasions settled in the territory of the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan, which was founded in 1347. Some of these refugees became soldiers in the sultanate’s armies. It split into a number of different sultanates, which came under strong Safavid influence, and Shi‘ism remained strong locally after the area was absorbed by the Mughals. There is still a sizeable Shi‘i minority there today. Shi‘ism became fashionable at the court of Emperor Akbar during his later years, and remained so under his successor Jahangir.18 It was Jahangir who constructed the famous Taj Mahal as the mausoleum for his beloved Shi‘i wife, Nur Jahan. Another stronghold of Indian Shi‘ism is the area around Lucknow, the capital of the principality of Awadh (also often spelled Oudh), which became a separate Mughal province when a Shi‘i who was a descendant of the Seventh Imam was appointed its governor in 1722. It subsequently became an independent kingdom. From the the late eighteenth century onwards there were links between Awadh and Najaf, which received much financial assistance from Awadh including the construction of a canal to give it a reliable water supply in the late 1700s. When direct rule by Britain was imposed in Awadh in the late 1850s, the Shi‘is who had been the elite suddenly went to being merely a minority of the Muslim population, which was itself outnumbered by Hindus.

  The Mughals looked to their Turkic ancestry as a major foundation for their legitimacy. By contrast, Mughal provincial governors from Shi‘i families who became virtually independent rulers sought their own legitimacy by modelling themselves on the Shi‘i Safavids. This happened not just in Awadh and the Deccan but also in Bengal and Sind. Their kingdoms became magnets for merchants and religious scholars from Iran. Shi‘i devotional poetry was popular at the courts of Awadh and in the Deccan. In fact, in the eighteenth century Shi‘i devotional poetry at the court in Lucknow played a role in the early development of Urdu as a written language.19 Another significant Twelver Shi‘i community in the Indian subcontinent is in Kashmir. This dates from the Chak dynasty in the sixteenth century, which converted to Shi‘ism under the influence of a Sufi order that had many Shi‘i elements. The Chak dynasty propagated Shi‘ism vigorously, and much of the peasantry converted. A Shi‘i community in Kashmir has since survived, despite persecution during a period of Afghan rule in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries.20