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.
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 yearsold.
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 righ -teous 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 fol-lowers 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 age 9
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.
( Michael Axworthy-A; History of Iran_ Empire of the Mind-Basic (2008), pp 130-134)