Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  From 1380, the hopeful vassal dynasty-builders, the resurgent cities and peasants and the bold sarbedari were all alike submerged by the next invading surge of steppe nomads under Timur (Timur-e lang—Timur the Lame—Tamerlane or, in Marlowe, Tamburlaine). Timur was the son of a minor Turkic vassal in Transoxiana, who set up a following of warriors and built a tightly-disciplined army explicitly on the model of the great Mongol, Genghis Khan. He married a princess from the great Khan’s family and called himself Güregen, which means son-in-law, to draw on the prestige of his predecessor. He took Mongol precedent as a precedent for terror also. Timur established himself first in the cities of Transoxiana, with a base at Samarkand, and then invaded Persia. Cities were razed, their citizens massacred, and the plunder sent with any valuable survivors back to Samarkand, to adorn a new paradise of gardens and grand buildings. As he marched through the Persian provinces Timur raised up pillars of human heads (70,000 heads set in 120 pillars outside Isfahan alone, after the people had been foolish enough to attack the Timurid garrison) to intimidate his enemies, and in his wake (notably in Sistan) the desert again encroached on abandoned farmlands and irrigation works. Unlike the Mongols, Timur conquered in the name of orthodox Sunni Islam, but this in no way moderated his conduct of war. After taking Persia and defeating the Mongols of the Golden Horde in the steppe lands around Moscow, he moved into India and took Delhi, before turning west again, where he conquered Baghdad (another 90,000 heads), defeated the Ottoman Sultan, captured him and returned to Samarkand. He died in 1405 in the midst of preparations for an attack on China.

  There is a story that Timur met Hafez, but it is probably apocryphal. He did meet the Arab historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun however. No historian looking at the history of the Islamic world in the period covered by this chapter could avoid noticing the cyclical pattern of dynastic rise and decline, and nomad invasion; but Ibn Khaldun came up with a theory to explain it.61 His theory began with the asabiyya, the strong solidarity or group feeling of nomad warriors, fostered by the interdependence that was necessary in mobile tribal life in the harsh conditions of desert, mountain and steppe margins. This was the cohesive spirit that made the nomads such formidable warriors, that enabled them to invade and dominate areas of sedentary settlement, and conquer cities. But having done so their leaders had to consolidate their support. They had to protect themselves against being supplanted by other members of the tribe, and therefore gave patronage to other groups: city dwellers, bureaucratic officials, the ulema. They also used building projects and a magnificent court to impress their subjects with their prestige, and employed mercenaries as soldiers because they were more reliable. So the original asabiyya of the conquerors was diluted and lost. Eventually the ruling dynasty came to believe its own myth and spent increasingly on vain display, weakening its strength outside the capital city and within it. The ulema and ordinary citizens became disillusioned with the dynasty’s decadence and ready to welcome another wave of conquering nomads, who would start up a new dynasty and set the cycle off all over again.

  The theory does not address all the elements of the cycle of invasions as they affected Iran (though the above is a greatly simplified version of it). We have seen how the prosperity of the Silk Route encouraged plundering invasions as well as trade, and how the vulnerability of Iran (and particularly Khorasan) flowed from its central geographical position, just as geography gave it great economic and cultural advantages. The Abbasids and their successors were weakened repeatedly by the measures they used to try to overcome the difficulty of gathering taxes. Officials tended to become corrupt and siphon off tax revenue, so the rulers gave the responsibility to tax farmers instead; but they tended to plunder the peasant farmers, quickly running down the productivity of agriculture. The rulers could grant land holdings (iqta, soyurgal) to soldiers in return for military service, but this tended to mean in time that the soldiers came to think of themselves as farmers or landowners rather than soldiers. Or they could do a similar thing on a grander scale and grant whole provinces to trusted families in return for fiscal tribute and military support; but as we have seen the likelihood then was that the provincial governors would grow powerful enough to become independent and even take over the state themselves (as did the Buyids).

  Ibn Khaldun’s theory does not fully explain the history of this period on its own, and it may apply better to the Islamic states of North Africa, where the historian lived for most of his life. But it is a useful model nonetheless, and it also accounts for some deep attitudes among the people themselves: Ibn Khaldun did not invent those attitudes, he observed them. The nomads often were regarded (especially by themselves of course) as having a primitive martial virtue. The court was regarded as a decadent place that tended to corrupt its members. The ulema might often be regarded as authoritative arbitrators in a crisis. These were mental, social and cultural structures that in themselves helped to influence events.

  For our purposes, the most important thing to emphasise is the resilience and intellectual power of the small class of Persian scholar-bureaucrats, nostalgic for their heroic Sassanid ancestors, escaping from official duplicity and courtiership into either dreams of love and gardens, or religious mysticism, or the design of splendid palaces and mosques, or the complexities of mathematics, astronomy or medicine; who in crisis after crisis bounced back, accommodated to the service of their conquerors, and eventually reasserted something like control over them, ensuring in the process (whether based in Baghdad, Balkh, Tabriz or Herat) the survival of their language, their culture, and an unrivalled intellectual heritage. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena in world history. Behind the history of this chapter, the Arab conquest and the succession of empires, Abbasid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Mongol, Timurid, lies the story of what ultimately proved to be a more important empire: the Iranian Empire of the Mind.

  After Timur, the process followed its usual pattern. The conquerors took on the characteristics of the conquered. Timur’s son Shahrokh ruled from Herat and patronised the beginnings of another Persianate cultural flowering that continued under his successors and produced great architecture, manuscript illustrations and painted miniatures, prefiguring later cultural developments in the Moghul and Safavid empires. As others before, the Timurid empire gradually fragmented into a patchwork of dynastic successor-states. In the latter part of the fifteenth century two of them, two great confederations of Mongolised Turkic tribes, the Aq-Qoyunlu and the Qara-Qoyunlu (White Sheep and Black Sheep Turks respectively) slugged it out for hegemony over the war-ravaged Iranian plateau. The White Sheep came out on top, but were then overwhelmed by a new dynasty from Turkic Anatolia, the Safavids; and their followers, the Qezelbash. But to understand the Safavids it is necessary first to go right back to the seventh century again for a deeper understanding of the history and development of Shi‘ism.

  4

  SHI‘ISM AND THE SAFAVIDS

  Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalisations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognise in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next. The thoughts of men may flow into the channels which lead to disaster and barbarism.

  H. A. L. Fisher

  The Origins of Shi‘ism

  Early in October 680 AD1 a group of under one hundred armed men, accompanied by their families, approached the town of Kufa, some way south of the present-day site of Baghdad, on the river Euphrates. They had come from Mecca, hundreds of miles away across the Arabian desert.

  As the travellers and their leader Ho
sein drew near the town, they were intercepted by a thousand mounted troops. The travellers agreed to move on to the north, away from Kufa, escorted by the troops. The following day a further four thousand men arrived, with orders to make Hosein swear allegiance to the Caliph Yazid. Hosein refused. By now his people were running out of water, but the soldiers blocked their way to the river.

  After several days new orders arrived, that Hosein and his followers should be compelled to submit by force. The soldiers formed up in battle order and bore down on the smaller group. Hosein tried to persuade his people to save themselves and let him face their enemies alone, but they would not leave him. He spoke to the troops confronting him, reproaching them. But his enemies were obdurate, and soon after began to shoot arrows into Hosein’s camp. Completely outnumbered, Hosein’s men were killed one by one as the arrows rained down among the tents and tethered animals. Some of them fought back against their tormentors, charging in ones and twos into the serried ranks that surrounded them, but they were soon killed. At last only Hosein himself was left of the fighting men, holding the body of his infant son, who had taken an arrow through the throat. The soldiers surrounded him, but he fought hard until at last he was struck to the ground, and one of them finished him off.

  Of Hosein’s male relatives only one of his sons survived (having lain ill in the camp through the fighting). In Kufa, Hosein’s head was brought before Yazid’s deputy, who struck the dead man’s face. A bystander reproached him for striking the lips that the Prophet of God had once kissed.

  Hosein was the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, through the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and his cousin Ali. This account of the massacre at Karbala of the Prophet’s closest family has been passed down in this form by generations of Shi‘a Muslims. As always, there must have been another side to the story. From another perspective the Umayyad caliphs might look less wicked, more like pragmatists struggling to hold a disparate empire together; the Alids more like incompetent idealists. But the important thing for our purposes is to understand how the Shi‘a themselves later understood the story. Karbala was the central, defining event in the early history of Shi‘a Islam. The shrine of Hosein at Karbala, on the site where it happened, is one of the most important Shi‘a holy places. Each year the anniversary (Ashura) is still marked with deep mourning, by mass religious demonstrations and outpourings of pious grief. Ever since Karbala, Shi‘a Muslims have brooded over the martyrdom of Hosein and its symbolism, and have nursed a sense of grievance, betrayal and shame.

  The great schisms of the Christian church, between east and west, and later between Catholic and Protestant, came centuries after the time of Christ. But the great schism in Islam that still divides Muslims today, between Sunni and Shi‘a, originated in the earliest days of the faith, even before Karbala, in the time of the Prophet Mohammad himself. Comparisons with the Christian schisms do not really work. A more apposite analogy, as noted by Richard N. Frye and others,2 can be drawn between the emphasis on law and tradition in Sunni Islam and Judaism on the one hand, and the emphasis on humility, sacrifice and the religious hierarchy in Christianity and Shi‘ism, on the other. The public grief of Ashura is similar in spirit to that one can still see on Good Friday in some Catholic countries. The purpose in making comparisons between Shi‘ism and various aspects of Christianity is not to suggest that they are somehow the same (they are not), nor to encourage some kind of happy joining-hands ecumenism (naïve) but rather to try to illuminate something that initially looks unfamiliar, and to suggest by analogy that it may not be so strange or unfamiliar after all (or at least, no more strange than Christian Catholicism).

  The term Shi‘a signifies Shi‘a Ali; the party of Ali. Ali was the Prophet’s cousin, and one of his earliest converts. The Shi‘a (sometimes called Alids at this early phase) were simply those who favoured rule by the blood descendants of Ali and the Prophet. Other characteristics and doctrines only developed later.

  From the beginning, Mohammad’s followers, the earliest Muslims, had run into conflict with temporal authority. Mohammad, Ali and the others had been forced to flee from Mecca to Medina when their relationship with the rulers of Mecca deteriorated into open hostility. This situation recurs again and again in Islamic history: and particularly in the history of Shi‘ism. Mohammad challenged the Meccans’ way of life, and called for more moral and pious forms of conduct, based on the revelation of God’s will in the Qor’an. The Meccan authorities responded with derision and persecution. The conflict between arrogant, worldly, corrupt authority and earnest, pious austerity was established as a cultural model for centuries, down to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and to the present day.

  Shi‘a Muslims believe that Mohammad nominated Ali as his successor, as caliph, after his death, but that the rightful succession was usurped by others. By the time Ali became the fourth caliph in AD 656 the rulers of Islam had conquered huge territories, from Egypt to Persia, as we saw in the previous chapter. This meant great new power for some of the leading families of the Arab tribes (notably for some members of the Quraysh family, many of whom had opposed Mohammad himself before Mecca submitted and converted), but also required the Arab conquerors to adopt new patterns of rule and power relationships.

  Many Muslims did not approve of the changes, political deals and pragmatic compromises involved. Ali, for example, held himself aloof, maintaining a pious life of austerity and prayer. He became a natural focus for dissent, and in turn was resented by those around the Caliph: bringing forth the authority/piety conflict within Islam itself for the first time. When Ali himself became caliph this mutual hostility led to civil war (fitna). When Ali tried to make peace in 661, some of his more radical Kharijite supporters felt betrayed and murdered him, whereupon the leader of his former opponents (Mu’awiya) took power as the first Umayyad caliph. In time he died and was succeeded by his son: the Caliph Yazid that was Hosein’s enemy at the time of Karbala in 680.

  Hosein’s rebellion in defiance of Yazid’s authority was, as Shi‘a believe, a bid to purify Islam and return it to its original principles. It drew force from Hosein’s own blood link to the Prophet, but also from the perceived impiety of Yazid and his court, where wine-drinking was common and the court had taken on some of the forms of pre-Islamic Byzantine and Persian practices. Hosein hoped for support from Kufa, but Yazid’s troops got there first, and bullied the Kufans into passivity. Some Shi‘a historians believe that Hossein went to his death at Karbala knowingly, believing he could only bring about the renewal he desired by sacrificing himself (another point at which some have drawn comparisons with Catholic Christianity). The failure of his Kufan supporters to help Hosein added a strong sense of guilt to the Shi‘a memory of Karbala.

  After Karbala, the Umayyad dynasty of Yazid and his successors continued to rule at the head of Islam, and the conquest of new territory continued. To give an idea of the sense of shame and grievance felt by the Shi‘a, one might try to imagine how Christians would have felt if the leadership of the church after the death of Christ had fallen to Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, and their successors. The Shi‘a saw themselves as the underdogs, the dispossessed, always those betrayed and humiliated by the powerful and the unrighteous (notwithstanding that powerful Shi‘a dynasties arose later, dominating extensive territories). A deep inclination to sympathy and compassion for the oppressed, and a tendency to see them as naturally more righteous than the rich and powerful, has persisted in popular Shi‘ism right through to the present day. The early Shi‘as regarded the Umayyad caliphs as illegitimate usurpers, and hoped for a revolt that would bring to power the descendants of Mohammad, Ali and Hosein. These descendants were the Shi‘a Emams, the sidelined but legitimate leaders of Islam, an alternative line of descent to rival that of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs. Shi‘a Muslims saw themselves as a more or less persecuted minority within states run by and for Sunni Muslims.

  Despite the schism, in the early centuries there was a fairly free interchange of ideas, a con
siderable pluralism of belief, and considerable diversity of opinion among the Alids or Shi‘as themselves. Overall, Shi‘a theology and law tended to be looser than in Sunni Islam, more open to the application of reason in theology, more inclined to a free will position than a determinist one, and more open to some of the more heterodox ideas circulating in the Islamic world; partly as a result of a broader hadith tradition, which included traditions of the sayings and doings of the Shi‘a Emams. Shi‘a theology also differed because it addressed problems that were specific to Shi‘as, such as conduct under persecution.

  The sixth Shi‘a Emam, Ja‘far al-Sadiq, developed a strategy for the evasion of persecution that was to prove controversial. The doctrine of taqiyeh or dissimulation permitted Shi‘a Muslims to deny their faith if necessary to avoid persecution—a special dispensation that has striking similarities with the doctrine of ‘mental reservation’ granted by the Catholic church in the period of the Counter-Reformation for similar reasons, and associated with the Jesuits (though it originated before their time). Just as the Jesuits acquired a reputation for deviousness and terminological trickery among Protestants (whence in English we have the adjective ‘Jesuitical’), so the doctrine of taqiyeh earned Shi‘as a similar reputation among some Sunni Muslims.