A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  After the account of Sufism and Sufi poetry in the previous chapter, the appearance of fervently warlike Sufis, intent on conquest, might be hard to reconcile. But Sufism was an extensive, diverse, and multifaceted phenomenon, and the school of love was only one manifestation of it. Some Sufi shaykhs were learned hermits, wedded to poverty and contemplation. But others were less contemplative and more proselytizing, more ghuluww (extreme), more inclined to the realization of divine purposes in the world through worldly acts, and more ambivalent about violence. The obedience of the Sufi postulant to his Sufi Master (pir) was an institution common to most Sufi brotherhoods, but it had an obvious military value in the more militant ones—like, for example, the Safavids. The military strength of the Safavids lay in the fighting prowess of the Turkic warriors they led, known collectively as the Qezelbash, after the red hats they wore (Qezelbash means “red heads”). Some of the Qezelbash went into battle on horseback without armor, believing that their faith made them invulnerable. The Sufism of most of the Qezelbash would have been unsophisticated, centering on some group rituals and a collective mutual loyalty—just as their Shi‘ism may initially have amounted to little more than a reverence for Ali as the archetype of a holy warrior. But it created a powerful group cohesion—asabiyah.

  It is uncertain just when the Safavids turned Shi‘a; in the religious context of that time and place, the question is somewhat artificial. Shi‘a notions were just one part of an eclectic mix. By the end of the fifteenth century a new Safavid leader, Esma‘il, was able to expand Safavid influence at the expense of the Aq-Qoyunlu, who had been weakened by disputes over the dynastic succession. Esma‘il was himself the grandson of Uzun Hasan, the great Aq-Qoyunlu chief of the 1460s and 1470s, and may have emulated some of his grandfather’s charismatic and messianic leadership style. In 1501 Esma‘il and his Qezelbash followers conquered Tabriz (the old Seljuk capital) in northwestern Iran, and Esma‘il declared himself shah. He was only fourteen years old. A contemporary Italian visitor described him as fair and handsome, not very tall, stout and strong with broad shoulders and reddish hair. He had long moustaches (a Qezelbash characteristic, prominent in many contemporary illustrations), was left-handed, and was skilled with the bow.5

  At the time of his conquest of Tabriz, Esma‘il proclaimed Twelver Shi‘ism as the new religion of his territories. Esma‘il’s Shi‘ism took an extreme form, which required the faithful to curse the memory of the first three caliphs that had preceded Ali. This was very offensive to Sunni Muslims, who venerated those caliphs, along with Ali, as the Rashidun or righteous caliphs. Esma‘il’s demand intensified the division between the Safavids and their enemies, especially the staunchly Sunni Ottomans to the west. Recent scholarship suggests that even if there was a pro-Shi‘a tendency among the Qezelbash earlier, Esma‘il’s declaration of Shi‘ism in 1501 was a deliberate political act.

  Within a further ten years Esma‘il conquered the rest of Iran and all the territories of the old Sassanid Empire, including Mesopotamia and the old Abbasid capital of Baghdad. He defeated the remnants of the Aq-Qoyunlu, as well as the Uzbeks in the northeast and various rebels. Two followers of one rebel leader were captured in 1504, taken to Isfahan, and roasted on spits as kebabs. Esma‘il ordered his companions to eat the kebab to show their loyalty (this is not the only example of cannibalism as a kind of extreme fetish among the Qezelbash).6

  Esma‘il attempted to consolidate his control by asserting Shi‘ism throughout his new domains (though the conventional view that this was achieved in a short time and that the import of Shi‘a scholars from outside Iran was significant in the process has been put into doubt7). He also did his best to suppress rival Sufi orders. It is important to stress that although there had been strong Shi‘a elements in Iran for centuries before 1501, and important Shi‘a shrines like Qom and Mashhad, Iran had been predominantly Sunni, like most of the rest of the Islamic world. The center of Shi‘ism had been the shrine cities of southern Iraq.8

  Esma‘il wrote some poetry (mostly in the Turkic dialect of Azerbaijan, which became the language of the Safavid court), and it is likely that his followers recited and sang his compositions as well as other religious songs. The following poem of Esma‘il’s gives a flavor of the religious intensity and militant confidence of the Qezelbash:

  My name is Shah Esma‘il.

  I am on God’s side: I am the leader of these warriors.

  My mother is Fatima, my father Ali:

  I too am one of the twelve Emams.

  I took back my father’s blood from Yazid.

  Know for certain that I am the true coin of Haydar [i.e., Ali]

  Ever-living Khezr, Jesus son of Mary

  I am the Alexander of the people of this age9

  In addition to these great figures of the past, Esma‘il identified himself also with Abu Muslim, who had led the revolt that had overturned the rule of the Umayyads in 750 and established the Abbasid caliphate.

  But Esma‘il’s hopes of westward expansion, aiming to take advantage of the Shi‘a orientation of many more Turkic tribes in eastern Anatolia, were destroyed when the élan of the Qezelbash was blown away by Ottoman cannon at the Battle of Chaldiran, northwest of Tabriz, in 1514. A legend says that Esma‘il vented his frustration by slashing at a cannon with his sword, leaving a deep gash in the barrel.

  After this defeat Esma‘il could no longer sustain the loyalty of the Qezelbash at its previous high pitch, nor their belief in his divine mission. He went into mourning and took to drink. Wars between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shi‘a Safavids continued for many years, made more bitter by the religious schism. Tabriz, Baghdad, and the shrine towns of Iraq changed hands several times. Shi‘a were persecuted and killed within the Ottoman territories, particularly in eastern Anatolia where they were regarded as actual or potential traitors. The Safavids turned Iran into the predominantly Shi‘a state it is today, and there were spasmodic episodes of persecution there too, especially of Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews—despite the ostensible protected status of at least the latter two groups as “People of the Book.” One could make a parallel with the way that religious persecution intensified either side of the Roman/Persian border in the fourth century AD, in the reign of Shapur II, after Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

  The Safavid monarchs also turned against the Sufis, despite the Safavids’ Sufi heritage. The Sufis were persecuted to the point that the only surviving Sufi order was the Safavid one, and the others disappeared or went underground. In the long term, the main beneficiary of this were the Shi‘a ulema. This was important because the Sufis had previously had a dominant or almost dominant position in the religious life of Iran, especially in the countryside.

  The empire established by Esma‘il also created a series of problems for itself. Prime among these was the unruly militancy of the Qezelbash, the suspicion between Turks and Tajiks (the latter being a disparaging Turkic term for a Persian), and the division between the Sufi-inclined, eclectic Qezelbash and the shari‘a tradition of the urban Shi‘a ulema. Gradually all of these were resolved in favor of the Persians and the ulema, as Ibn Khaldun would have predicted. Esma‘il’s successor, Tahmasp (r. 1524–1576), lived through several years of civil war as a minor, losing territory over his reign to both the Ottomans in the west (including Baghdad in 1534) and to the Uzbeks in the east. He moved the capital from Tabriz to Qazvin, making it more secure, but after his death there was civil war again, and a troubled period that saw two shahs in succession—before Abbas, cleverly manipulating alliances with chosen Qezelbash tribes, took the throne in 1587.

  ABBAS THE GREAT

  Abbas’s achievements as shah ranged from military success to institutional reform to the building of spectacular architectural monuments—for all of which he is usually referred to as Abbas the Great. He was a talented administrator and military leader, and a ruthless autocrat. His reign was the outstanding creative period of the Safavid era. But the civil w
ars and troubles of his childhood (when many of his relatives were murdered) left him with a dark twist of suspicion and brutality at the center of his personality.

  Most of Abbas’s innovations and reforms centered on the military. He deliberately sidelined the Qezelbash tribes, establishing instead the core of a new standing army based in the new capital, Isfahan. The new army was largely organized around the introduction—on a significant scale for the first time—of gunpowder weapons, including up-to-date cannon and a corps of musketeers. Many features of it echoed Ottoman practice—the musketeers were designed to be the equals of the redoubtable Ottoman janissaries. Troops were recruited from among the Qezelbash and from the Persian population of the towns and villages. But Georgians, Armenians, and others were also brought to Isfahan for the army in large numbers—at least nominally as slaves, or ghulams—and the loyalty of such soldiers, far from home and in a more or less alien environment, wholly dependent on the shah, was much more reliable. Many Georgian and Armenian ghulams also served as commanders, bureaucrats, and regional governors. But despite the improvements, when the shah went to war the central core of the army was augmented by provincial Qezelbash troops, who were usually in a majority in the field.10

  As with any pre-industrial state, policy on land and taxation was closely tied to military necessities. The Qezelbash tribal leaders lost out here, too. Abbas took over many of the lands they had previously enjoyed and either gave them over to be administered centrally by his bureaucrats or distributed them as tuyul—lands apportioned not to individuals but to state offices, from which office holders drew an income as long as they held the office. Usually the income was only a proportion of the total yield of the land holding. The idea was to maximize the loyalty of the office holders to the state and to minimize the likelihood that land would be permanently alienated away from the crown to ambitious magnates. State revenue was also boosted by the tightening of the government’s grip on trade, especially the silk trade, based on silk production in Gilan. Most Persian trade in this period went east, to India, but some silk was exported west to Europe, especially by Armenian merchants. To the same end, Abbas used the English East India Company (that acquired the right to trade in Persia in 1616) to take back control of the Strait of Hormuz from the Portuguese, and to reestablish the Persian presence in the Persian Gulf.11

  A weaker monarch would not have lasted long with the Qezelbash if he had attempted these reforms. But Abbas cunningly played the tribes against one another, and his success in war gave him huge prestige, making almost everything possible. With his new army he defeated the Uzbeks in the east—restoring the border on the Oxus river—and the Ottomans in the west. He took Baghdad twice. To consolidate his victories, especially in the northeast, he sent large numbers of Kurds, along with Qezelbash tribesmen like the Qajars and Afshars, to serve as protectors of the new borders. This resettlement policy served also to reinforce his authority over the tribes, while weakening their independent power by fragmenting them. He moved provincial governors from post to new post regularly to prevent any of them from creating regional power bases for themselves. He also resettled many Armenians from the northwest to a suburb south of Isfahan, New Julfa, where Christian Armenians and their bishop still live today.

  The new capital, Isfahan, had been a significant place even in the time of the Sassanids, containing important monuments and mosques from later periods. But today it stands as perhaps the most splendid and impressive gallery of Islamic architecture in the world, and it is substantially a creation of the Safavid period. The central structures, the soaring blue iwans of the shah mosque, the beautiful Allahvardi Khan bridge, the Ali Qapu and Chehel Sotoun palaces, the Shaykh Lotfallah mosque, and the great Meidan-e Shah—all were built or at least begun in the time of Shah Abbas, though others were added later. The buildings assert Safavid power and prestige and their identification with Shi‘a Islam, resulting in a magnificence that has rarely been surpassed.

  One of Abbas’s great successes was simply surviving and ruling long enough for his various enterprises to bear fruit. But in the process he created a problem—the succession. Succession was a common difficulty for many monarchs. In Europe, the problem was that every so often a ruler could not produce a son. This could create all sorts of difficulties—attempts at divorce (Henry VIII, for example), attempts to secure recognition for the succession of a daughter or more distant relative, disputes over succession resulting in war. In the Islamic world, the problem was different. Polygamy meant that kings did not normally have a problem producing a son, but they might, on the contrary, have too many sons. This could mean fierce fighting among potential heirs and their supporters when the father died. In the Ottoman Empire such battles were institutionalized—rival sons who had served their father as provincial governors would, on hearing of his death, race for the capital to claim the throne. The winner would get the support of the janissaries, and would then have the other sons put to death. Later, the Ottomans adopted a more dignified arrangement, keeping the possible heirs in the Sultan’s harem palace until their father died. But this meant they would have little understanding of or aptitude for government, and the new practice helped to increase the power of the chief minister, the vizier, so that the vizier ruled effectively as viceroy. It was a conundrum.

  Many fathers have disagreements and clashes with their sons, and history is full of feuds between kings and their crown princes. Abbas was no exception; he had come to power himself by deposing his father. Following the Ottoman precedent again, he imprisoned his sons in the harem for fear that they would attempt to dethrone him. But he still feared that they might plot against him, so he had them blinded, and he had one of them killed. Eventually, he was succeeded by one of his grandsons. The unhappy practice of keeping royal heirs in the harem was kept up thereafter by the Safavid monarchs.

  Although Abbas showed reverence for the shrines of his Sufi ancestors in Ardebil, his deliberate weakening of the Qezelbash was matched, after signs of opposition from the Nuqtavi Sufis, by executions and other punishments that broke them too. Abbas favored instead the ulema and the endowments (awqaf) that supported them—especially in the shrine cities of Mashhad and Qom. On one occasion he spent twenty-eight days walking as a pilgrim across the desert from Isfahan to Mashhad—to show his devotion and to set an example. Since the continuing hostilities with the Ottomans made access to the shrines of southern Iraq difficult and uncertain, the shah’s example helped to swing ordinary Persian Shi‘as toward the Persian shrine cities. More endowments followed the pilgrims, and the grateful ulema aligned themselves ever more closely with the Safavid regime. These developments were also significant for the future. Abbas had been astute in his construction of a governmental system that protected state revenue, and his was more successful than most previous dynasties had been. But over the century that followed, more and more land was given over to religious endowments, sometimes merely as a kind of tax dodge, since religious property was exempt from tax.12

  Under Shah Abbas the Safavid dynasty achieved a more sophisticated, more powerful, and more enduring governmental system than the traditional lands of Iran had seen for many centuries.13 The Safavid state, its administration, and its institutionalizing of Shi‘ism set the parameters for the modern shape of Iran. In its material culture—in metalwork, textiles, carpet making, miniature painting, ceramics, and above all in its architecture—the period was one of surpassing creativity in the making of beautiful things. The dominance of Shi‘ism and the Shi‘a ulema was also accompanied by a period of creativity in Shi‘a thought—notably among the thinkers who have been called the School of Isfahan (Mir Damad, Mir Fendereski, and Shaykh Baha’i), and the religious philosophy of the great Molla Sadra.

  Molla Sadra was born in Shiraz in 1571 or 1572. He studied in Qazvin and Isfahan as a young man, being interested in philosophy and the usual religious studies as well as Sufism. He was taught by two great thinkers of the age, Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and spent some
time living near Qom and traveling before finally settling as a teacher in Shiraz again. His ideas (most notably expressed in the book known as al-Afsar al-arba‘a—Four Journeys) drew upon the philosophy of Avicenna and Neoplatonism, but also on traditional Shi‘a thought and on the Sufism of Sohravardi (Illuminationism), and Ibn Arabi. Molla Sadra’s thought was controversial at the time for its leaning toward mysticism, which the ulema had traditionally opposed. But in explaining a way that philosophical rationalism and personal mystical insight should be combined in a program of individual reflection and study,14 Molla Sadra was able to domesticate mysticism and, calling it erfan, make it acceptable to the madreseh tradition.15 His thinking has been central in Islamic philosophy in the centuries since his time.

  Persian cultural influence in the eastern part of the Islamic world was still strong, and it was in these centuries that it flowered outside Persia with the greatest brilliance—in Ottoman Turkey (where Persian was used for diplomatic correspondence, and Turkish poetry followed Persian forms), in the Khanates of Central Asia, and above all in Moghul India, where Persian was the language of the court and a whole new Persianate culture of poetry, music, and religious thought flourished. Some have called the poetry of this period Safavid poetry; others, reflecting the fact that much of it, even if written in Persian, was composed in India, have labelled it the Indian period. Opinion has also divided over its quality; the great Iranian critic Bahar disliked it, and the general view from the mid-nineteenth century was negative—the poetry was held to have been insipid, making use of rather stale imagery and lacking in real insight. To a degree, this view reflected the more favorable judgment of the same critics on the movement of poetry that supplanted the Safavid style from the 1760s onward (in Persia, though not elsewhere), and others have found more merit in the Safavid poets.