by John McHugo
Outside Iran, the Usuli dominance of Twelver Shi‘ism also continued. Twelvers in the shrine cities of Iraq and in India would also recognise a leading scholar as their source of emulation. New technologies added to the importance of the shrine cities, since the telegraph enabled mujtahids there to disseminate their opinions much more rapidly to Twelvers everywhere.
The new hierarchical structure led to eminent mujtahids feeling themselves able to declare takfir against an individual – that is, to declare that that person should no longer be considered a believing Muslim. This meant that the individual was an apostate, worthy of death. Leading clerics sometimes pronounced takfir against each other, but victims also included the Akhbaris, that is to say those Twelvers who did not accept the role that the Usulis gave to reason and ijtihad, and who preferred a rather more literalist approach to the reading of texts. They still survived in Basra and would remain dominant in Bahrain, despite the best efforts of the Usulis.
Other targets for takfir were Sufis, the Babi movement and the Baha’is. The Babi movement appeared on the 1,000th anniversary of the occultation of the Twelfth Imam in 1844, when Ali Muhammad, a young man from Shiraz who was a descendant of the Prophet, declared that the Hidden Imam would reappear at Karbala on 1 January 1845. He also declared himself to be the bab, or gateway to the Hidden Imam. He was hauled before a panel of religious scholars who forced him to recant, but he subsequently went on to declare that he was the Hidden Imam himself, and announced that the Sharia was no longer applicable because the End Times had begun. He was imprisoned, tried for heresy, flogged and eventually executed in 1850 after his followers began rising up in rebellion. Among the rebels was Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri Baha’ullah, who would become the founder of the Baha’i religion. Although the Baha’is are Iran’s largest religious minority, they have frequently been subject to persecution as renegades who have abandoned Islam. This oppression has at times been very severe.9
The clergy thus attained great power in Iran. They used this to protect their position and hinder Qajar attempts at modernising reforms, which were aimed at strengthening the central government and might chip away at the clergy’s influence. This was a period of increased foreign commercial penetration of Iran. Trade agreements with Russia and Britain granted many privileges to the merchants from the empires these two countries had established. This led to the clergy adopting a populist role as protectors of the Iranian merchants of the markets or bazaars (often called the ‘bazaaris’), who tended to be devout. The clergy had close links with this class, into which they married, and from which many religious scholars were drawn.
In 1890, a monopoly over tobacco in Iran was granted to a British citizen. Clerical agitation was a key factor in a nationwide boycott of tobacco that continued until the concession was abolished. Not only did preachers thunder against the monopoly from the pulpit, but they also received strong support from leading clerics in the shrine cities of Iraq, who sent telegrams to the shah. One opinion was from Mirza Hasan Shirazi, a cleric in Samarra who was considered the highest source of emulation at the time. He denounced the consumption of tobacco while the boycott was in force as the equivalent of declaring war on the Hidden Imam. The government found itself forced to cancel the concession; only then would Shirazi send a telegram informing the populace that they could resume smoking.
The part the clergy played in fighting the tobacco monopoly has been described as a dress rehearsal for their role in the events that became known as Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in the period 1905–11.10 It began with protests among the bazaaris. They received clerical backing when the governor of Tehran had some merchants publicly whipped for allegedly profiteering from the price of sugar. The clergy thus played an important role in initiating the revolution. They also influenced the drafting of Iran’s first constitution, which declared Twelver Shi‘i Islam the state religion. The constitution also contained a provision that a committee of leading mujtahids would be established to vet legislation to ensure that it complied with Islam. However, this committee was never set up.
Although the clerics had given the constitutional project legitimacy at the very beginning, they soon lost out in terms of influence to intellectuals with a modern education, who also played a key role in the revolution. These intellectuals were at ease with the new language of constitutionalism, rights, and liberty used in the constitution, terminology that was unfamiliar to most clerics. Therefore the initiative in moving Iran forward would now pass to the intellectuals and their new ideas, and it would remain with them until the late 1970s. Some clergy soon noticed how the constitution limited the Sharia in many respects. They were also against secular measures such as the codification of laws, the creation of a new court system outside clerical control, and equality before the law, which abolished the old Sharia distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The revolution did not last, but the institution of parliament survived. The constitution was ‘well beyond the comprehension of most of the people it was intended to serve’.11 Yet even though new, secular ideas now seemed to be the way forward for Iran, the clergy retained their importance among the bazaaris and in the countryside. This would remain the case in the decades that followed, even though it was often overlooked at the time.
V
Islam found itself on the defensive almost everywhere against the apostles of Western rationalism, as well as unprecedented attempts by Christian missionaries to win Muslim converts. These challenges applied equally to Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims. The Western onslaught reduced the significance of the differences between the two sects when Muslims tried to defend their faith. Yet the long nineteenth century still saw some friction between Sunnis and Shi‘is, as well as attempts to minimise their differences and to promote reconciliation. Many reforms carried out in the Ottoman Empire were aimed at producing a unified concept of citizenship on European lines; in theory these should have benefited all minorities, including Twelvers. Nevertheless, by and large, the Ottoman Twelvers ‘occupied the more backward sectors of the empire’s economy’, as Juan Cole, the academic and commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, puts it.12 The result was that the gap actually widened between urban Sunnis and the rural Twelvers in areas like the marshes of southern Iraq.13
The Ottoman authorities had cause to worry about the spread of Shi‘ism in their empire, in much the same way as they fretted about the activities of Christian missionaries. Among illiterate populations, folk religion was intimately bound up with superstition, and heterodox ideas could easily acquire a dangerous resonance. The Ottomans had long had to cope with Gnostic Shi‘i beliefs among the Alawis of Syria and the Alevis of Anatolia. Now another development took place: the spread of Twelver Shism among the tribes of southern Iraq, which led to most of the inhabitants of that area converting to Shi‘ism.
Iraq was the location of four major Shi‘i shrines: Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn and Samarra. Najaf and Karbala were also homes of Shi‘i scholarship, as was the town of Hilla. Iraq had therefore always been important to Twelver Shi‘is. Given that Sunni and Shi‘i Islam were the defining characteristics of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires respectively, and that Iraq lay at the edge of each of those empires, it is no surprise that historically it had been bitterly contested between them. After the conversion of Iran to Twelver Shi‘ism, Iranian scholars and pilgrims came to live and study in these Iraqi cities.
When Sunni Afghans captured Isfahan in 1722, they expropriated much property belonging to Shi‘i foundations. Many Shi‘i clergy fled to Iraq, especially to Najaf and Karbala. The Iranians put down roots, which helped the Usuli school of Twelver Shi‘ism to gain dominance in Iraq over its Akhbari rivals, while Persian was spoken alongside Arabic in Karbala, which had a majority Persian population for a while. The military and political weakness of the Ottoman Empire was reflected in its acceptance that Iran had a special status in Karbala and Najaf, which were at times virtually independent city states. But it was not only Iran that posed a problem for the O
ttomans in Iraq. The weakness of their authority meant that, in the eighty-or-so years up to the 1830s, their rule was only indirect, and was subcontracted to Mamluks in Baghdad and Basra.
From the late eighteenth century, many tribes in southern Iraq – including new arrivals from Arabia – were converted to Twelver Shi‘ism. Although this had already begun before the Wahhabi raids into Iraq which were mentioned in the last chapter,14 there is no doubt that those raids encouraged this process. The Wahhabis saw Shi‘is as idolators, and they besieged Najaf twice and stormed and pillaged Karbala in 1802. Lacking a local base of support against the Wahhabis (and also seeking local support with which to put pressure on the Ottomans), the Iranian religious scholars in Karbala set out to convert the tribes to Shi‘ism. Karbala, Najaf and Hilla were important market towns for the tribes, which provided natural opportunities for preaching on market day. New irrigation works were also significant, including those financed by the chief minister of the Shi‘i state of Awadh (Oudh) in India in order to secure the water supply for Najaf. Tribes began to settle on reclaimed land near Najaf and Karbala, exposing them to proselytisation from the sacred cities.
Later in the nineteenth century, as a result of Ottoman reforms and the push to integrate the Ottoman Empire into a globalised capitalist economy, other major irrigation schemes were carried out, with the intention of encouraging the tribes to settle. A new land law and system of land registration led to the splitting up of communal land into plots registered in the names of individual owners. This was all part of a nineteenth-century civilising mission – Ottoman style. The Ottomans hoped to reduce the power of the paramount tribal sheikhs. They succeeded in this to a considerable extent, and tribes themselves began to fragment. The nomads had always been ignorant of their religion and lax in observing it, and often preferred their own unwritten codes of law to the Sharia. The Ottomans intended to make them into better Sunni Muslims by persuading them to take up farming. Yet what they did was give the Shi‘i preachers a golden opportunity to spread their message, since Sunni scholars who could counteract their activities were few in remote, southern Iraq. Despite this, Shi‘ism seems to have stopped at the edge of the cultivated area. None of the tribes that remained desert nomads converted.
The Ottomans were aware of what was happening, and tried to think of ways to slow down or reverse the process of conversion. In 1894, Ali Galip Bey, the Ottoman ambassador in Tehran, wrote a report suggesting that the movements of Iranian religious scholars who entered Ottoman territory should be restricted, especially if they went to rural areas and moved among nomads, when they might spread sedition. He also advocated a ban on teaching religion by non-Ottomans and the expulsion of any Shi‘is who proposed ‘religious separation’. Another unsigned and undated report suggested that the government should set out to reconcile Sunnis and Shi‘is, since ‘now it is time for all Islamic peoples to perform their religious duty by uniting against the Christian powers’.15 This was, after all, the policy of Sultan Abdul Hamid II himself who thus, whether consciously or not, recognised a certain legitimacy in Shi‘ism.
One consequence was that the Ottoman authorities exempted students in Shi‘i madrasas (religious schools) from conscription, leading to a fall in the number of recruits to the army from the district of Karbala. There was a positive Shi‘i response to Abdul Hamid’s policy. Sometimes, at least, Shi‘i scholars silenced criticism of the Ottomans. They also considered appealing to Abdul Hamid as ‘the strongest Muslim ruler’ to ask the Shah of Iran to be less subservient to the Russians. One letter to him from the three most senior mujtahids in Karbala addressed him with the caliphal title of ‘Commander of the Faithful’, which Shi‘is traditionally reserve for Ali, the first Imam and the figure they regard as the Prophet’s appointed successor.16
The motivations behind the conversions to Shi‘ism in Iraq are hard to unravel at this distance in time. However, Yitzhak Nakash (associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts) has probably done this to the greatest extent that is still possible. Factors he lists include: the hope that conversion would remove the fear of conscription into the Ottoman army; a bitter reaction against the transformation of some of their tribal sheikhs into Sunni landed aristocrats as the tribal system broke down; a convenient vehicle to express anti-government solidarity; and the opportunity to feel, as Nakash puts it, that they were better Muslims than their oppressors. It may also have seemed advantageous to convert to Shi‘ism because of the influence of the shrine cities, which would have been local economic magnets.
The stories of the martyrdom of Ali and, even more so, of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and, for Shi‘is, the Third Imam, resonated deeply with the tribes. Tribal poetry remained vibrant even as the population became agriculturalists. The Shi‘i martyrs began to be celebrated in heroic poetry in a way similar to the veneration of distant tribal ancestors. Shi‘ism thus began to become ingrained at a popular level. When five leading scholars were sent to establish Sunni education in rural southern Iraq in 1905, they were unable to counteract the Shi‘i preaching. Perhaps by then it was too late, although Istanbul lacked the funds to pay the scholars’ salaries, and their endeavours may therefore have been halfhearted. The Shi‘i clergy of the shrine cities were able to outspend them. Yet many tribes were still split between the two sects, and the process of conversion to Shi‘ism continued well into the twentieth century. As with tribal Bedouin nomads throughout the history of Islam (and it is important to remember that the tribes of southern Iraq were Bedouin before they became settled), the extent to which they could really be considered to be Muslims in anything more than the most nominal sense was open to discussion. As Rashid Rida, the important Sunni scholar whom we shall meet in the next chapter, wrote in 1908:
If those [Shi‘i] emissaries preach [religion] among the [tribesmen], and teach them the Islamic duties, as well as what is permissible and what is prohibited, then, from the point of view of their religion, the current position of the tribesmen is better than their former status.17
Shi‘is may have been seen as Muslims who had rejected the true Sunni faith, or had defected from it. But Rashid Rida still saw them as Muslims. One of his key motivations throughout his long career was to help Muslim states and societies resist Western penetration. It is therefore unsurprising that he could sometimes be conciliatory towards Shi‘is.
The Young Turk Revolution and the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in 1908 brought a considerable degree of freedom of the press. The years leading up to the First World War saw many Sunnis and Shi‘is call for the unity of Islam against the West, and to argue that Islam was compatible with the modern world and could be reconciled with the new scientific discoveries. At the same time, Shi‘i scholars in Iraq took full advantage of this to reach wider audiences, and to promote their own position. They also established a few modern schools for Shi‘i youth alongside traditional madrasas teaching a religious curriculum. The new schools included the teaching of French and English in their curricula, and were intended to enable their pupils to acquire the modern, Western knowledge that was now so prized.
At times, the leading mujtahids were seen to be acting almost as though they were heads of state. Some of them felt free to support ideas such as the right or duty of the scholars to depose a sovereign ruler if this was necessary in order to defend Islam.18 They also felt empowered to issue calls for a defensive jihad – something that the Ottomans permitted because it suited their own policies. Such a call was potentially controversial among Twelvers, because the declaration of jihad was a prerogative of the Hidden Imam. Yet, just as other functions of the Hidden Imam had been deemed to be delegated to religious scholars, so too in 1805 Sheikh Ja‘far Kashif al-Ghita categorised the Wahhabis who had besieged Najaf as ‘enemies of Islam’ and proclaimed a jihad against them. This provided a precedent. In December 1910 a group of respected mujtahids called for the unity of Islam and a jihad to oust Russian troops from territories
in northern Iran. It seems to have been welcomed by the Ottomans and by Rashid Rida in Cairo, who saw it as the first tangible sign that the Sunni and Shi‘i religious scholars were prepared to act together to promote Muslim unity.
Other examples would follow. Shortly thereafter, Italy invaded the Ottoman territories we now think of as Libya, and the Iraqi Shi‘is joined the Sunnis of the Ottoman empire in responding with calls to arms to defend Islam. This was also the case when, simultaneously, Britain and Russia colluded to occupy parts of Iran. But the greatest example was after the outbreak of the First World War. A British expeditionary force landed at the mouth of the Tigris and began to fight its way up river. The Shi‘i mujtahids rallied the tribes of the south of Iraq to the Ottoman cause. The Shi‘i tribes fought as auxiliaries alongside their Sunni comrades and the Ottoman army at the Battle of Shu‘ayba in April 1915 in a forlorn attempt to throw the British back.