A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  For our purposes, the most important thing to emphasize 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, religious mysticism, the design of splendid palaces and mosques, or the complexities of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, they bounced back from crisis after crisis, accommodated to their conquerors, made themselves indispensable again, and eventually reasserted something like control over them. In the process, they ensured (whether based in Baghdad, Balkh, Tabriz, or Herat) the survival of their language, their culture, and an unrivaled intellectual heritage. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena in world history. Behind the history described in 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 patronized 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 Mongolized 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. 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 AD 6801 a group of less than one hundred armed men, accompanied by their families, approached the town of Kufa, 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 travelers and their leader, Hosein, drew near the town, they were intercepted by a thousand mounted troops. The travelers 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, and the soldiers blocked their way to the river.

  After several days a new order arrived: Hosein and his followers should be compelled to submit by force. The soldiers formed up in battle order and bore down on Hosein’s smaller group. He 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 Hosein was the only one left alive, holding the body of his infant son, who had taken an arrow through the throat. The soldiers surrounded Hosein, who 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 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, and Hosein, Ali, and their partisans more like incompetent idealists. But the important thing 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 the historian Richard N. Frye and others,2 can be drawn between, on the one hand, the emphasis on law and tradition in Sunni Islam and Judaism and, on the other hand, the emphasis on humility, sacrifice, and the religious hierarchy in Christianity and Shi‘ism. The public grief of Ashura is similar in spirit to that which 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, that it is 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 Mohammad’s earliest converts. The Shi‘a (sometimes called Alids at this early phase) were simply those who favored rule by both 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—particularly in the history of Shi‘ism. Mohammad challenged the Meccans’ way of life, calling 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 was in turn resented by those around the caliph, bringing forth the authority/piety conflict within Islam itself for the first time. When Ali became caliph, this mutual hostility led to civil war (fitna). Then 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, Mu‘awiya 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 some of the forms of pre-Islamic Byzantine and Persian practices had taken hold. 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 Hosein went to his death at Karbala knowingly and willingly, in the belief that only by sacrificing himself could he bring about the renewal he desired (another point at which some have drawn comparisons with Christianity). The failure of Hosein’s Kufan supporters to help him 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, those always 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‘a 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 considerable pluralism of belief, and considerable diversity of opinion among the Alids or Shi‘a 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. This was partly the result of a broader hadith tradition, which included the sayings and doings of the Shi‘a Emams. Shi‘a theology also differed because it addressed problems that were specific to the Shi‘a, 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 for similar reasons by the Catholic church in the period of the Counter-Reformation, 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 the Shi‘a a similar reputation among some Sunni Muslims.

  Some commentators argue that the doctrines of Ja‘far al-Sadiq reflected a period of Shi‘a quietism—a retreat from politics, from confrontation, and from efforts to overturn the caliphate. This quietism, with its disposition to modesty and unpretentious virtue, was one thread of Shi‘ism in the following centuries (and still is). But there were Shi‘a movements that emphatically did not follow this pattern, including several major Shi‘a revolts in Ja‘far’s lifetime—the significant Shi‘a participation in the revolt of Abu Muslim that founded the Abbasid caliphate, for example. After Ja‘far al-Sadiq’s death (in 765) there was a further schism. One group of Shi‘a supported Ja‘far’s son Musa, while another group acclaimed his other son Ismail as the seventh Emam, giving rise to the Ismaili or “Sevener” branch of Shi‘ism espoused by the later Fatimid rulers of Egypt. The Ismaili sect also spawned the notorious movement known as the Assassins, a shadowy organization whose doings were much distorted by Western chroniclers. The Assassins established themselves as a power in the Alborz mountains in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and they were especially important in the period just before and after the Mongol invasions of the 1220s.

  In the ninth century a further period of confusion followed the death of the eleventh Emam (it was the dome of the shrine of the eleventh Emam, at Samarra in Iraq, that was blown up by Sunni extremists in February 2006, precipitating a new phase of serious Sunni/Shi‘a intercommunal violence) because it seemed he had no living heir. The main, non-Ismaili strand of Shi‘ism divided into many different sects with different theological solutions to this problem. Eventually the faith coalesced again around the explanation that the eleventh Emam had had an heir, a son, but that this boy had been concealed or “occluded” shortly after the death of his father, in order to avoid persecution. At the right time, a time of chaos and crisis, this hidden twelfth Emam would reappear to reestablish the righteous rule of God on earth. The parallels with the Christian doctrine of the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ are obvious (in fact, many Shi‘a believe that Jesus will accompany the Hidden Emam on his return). But the doctrine also compares with the Zoroastrian belief in a Messiah to come—the Saoshyant.

  This development added a further, messianic, millenarian element to Shi‘ism. But it also added a new instability, a self doubt, a kind of permanent question mark to the problem of the relation of Shi‘a Muslims to both secular and religious authority. If the Emam was the only legitimate authority, then what of a world without the active presence of the Emam? Shi‘ism already had a problem with temporal power, but now it had a further problem about authority within Shi‘ism itself.

  The Hidden Emam was the twelfth and last in succession to Ali, and those who awaited his return were called Twelver Shi‘as. The largest Shi‘a community, the Twelver Shi‘as, were a scattered sect, perhaps better regarded as a tendency, with elements in southern Mesopotamia, in central Iran around Qom, in northeastern Iran and Central Asia, in Lebanon, along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere (today there are Shi‘a in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India also). But after a phase of powerful Ismaili and other Shi‘a dynasties like the Fatimids, Buyids, Qarmatians, and others from the tenth century, Sunni Muslim rulers predominated. Following the Mongol invasions the staunchly orthodox Sunni Ottomans rose inexorably to control the western part of the Islamic world.

  THE SAFAVIDS

  By the end of the fifteenth century a militant brotherhood from northwest Iran and eastern Anatolia, made up of Turkic horsemen and based initially at Ardebil, had grown to military and political importance, and had begun to look to expansion on a grander scale.
Eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan at this time contained many such brotherhoods, more or less militant, more or less exaggerated or extreme (ghuluww) in their beliefs (as perceived by their neighbors), often incorporating elements of Sufism, millenarianism, Shi‘ism, and saint-worship. The beliefs of these brotherhoods have been traced back to pre-Islamic, Mazdaean roots, through the Khorramites of the eighth and ninth centuries.3 They attracted the flotsam and jetsam of warrior society after the destruction and dislocation of the Mongol and Timurid invasions—the dispossessed, the fugitives, the opponents of powerful tribal chiefs, and others. They created an alternative center of power, comparable in that way to the rebel sarbedari in Khorasan under the Mongol Il-Khans. Further west, in the fourteenth century, a not dissimilar group of Turkish warriors had established the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire through the prestige of successful fighting against the Byzantines.

  The brotherhood in Ardebil were the Safavids, named after one of their early leaders, Shaykh Safi (1252–1334), a Sunni and a Sufi, who had preached a purified and restored Islam and a new religious order on earth. It is possible that he was of Kurdish descent. The early history of the Safavids is an uncertain and complex subject, but it seems his successor Sadr al-Din (1334–1391) organized the movement and created a hierarchy and the arrangements for it to own property. This turned it from a loose association into a more disciplined organization, one that started to create a wider network of tribal alliances through favors and marriages. Under the later Safavid shaykhs new groupings or tribes (oymaq) coalesced, held together by these alliances, and by religious fervor4 (in which devotion to the spiritual and military example of the Emam Ali was also an element). Under the leadership of Shaykh Junayd (1447–1460), the Safavids and their followers allied themselves with the Aq-Qoyunlu (White Sheep Turks, referred to in the preceding chapter), then the dominant power in the ancient territories of Iran. The Safavids made successful raids into Christian Georgian territory and developed into a significant military force, later fighting other local Muslim tribal groups.