Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  One of Abbas’s successes was simply to survive and rule long enough for his various enterprises to bear fruit. But he had, or had created, a problem—the succession. Succession was a difficulty for many monarchs. In Europe, the problem was that every so often a prince could not get a son. This could create all sorts of difficulties—attempts at divorce (Henry VIII), attempts to get recognition for the succession of a daughter or more distant relative, disputes over the succession and war (for example, the War of the Spanish Succession 1701-1714 and the War of the Austrian Succession 1740-1748). In the Islamic world, the problem was different. Polygamy meant that kings did not normally have a problem getting a son—but they might, on the contrary, have too many sons. This could mean fighting between them and their supporters when the father died, to see who would succeed. In the Ottoman empire this was institutionalised: 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 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 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 had them blinded, and one of them killed. Eventually (after his death in 1629) he was succeeded by one of his grandsons. The unhappy practice of keeping royal heirs in the harem was kept up by the Safavid monarchs thereafter.

  Although he showed reverence for the shrines of his Sufi ancestors in Ardebil, Abbas’s deliberate weakening of the Qezelbash was matched, after signs of opposition from the Nuqtavi Sufis, by executions and other punishments that broke them too. Instead Abbas favoured the ulema and the endowments (awqaf) that supported them—especially in the shrine cities of Mashhad and Qom. On one occasion he went on foot to Mashhad from Isfahan as a pilgrim across the desert in twenty-eight days to show his devotion and set an example. 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, and more endowments followed the pilgrims. The ulema were grateful and 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 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, because religious property was exempt from tax.12

  Under Shah Abbas the Safavid dynasty achieved a more sophisticated, powerful and enduring governmental system than the traditional lands of Iran had seen for many centuries.13 The Safavid state, its administration and its institutionalising 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 accompanied by a period of creativity in Shi‘a thought too—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, but also Sufism. He was taught by two great thinkers of the age, Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and spent some time near Qom and travelling 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 neo-Platonism, but also on traditional Shi‘a thought, and on the Sufism of Sohravardi (Illuminationism) and Ibn Arabi; and have been called existentialist for their insistence that existence is prior to essence. His 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 programme of individual reflection and study,14 Molla Sadra was able to domesticate mysticism15 and, calling it erfan, make it acceptable to the madreseh tradition. 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. But it was the heritage of previous ages that sustained the influence, and the hostility of Sunni regimes on all her borders tended to have an isolating effect on Persia itself. Some poets and others emigrated to the fabulously wealthy Moghul court. Some have called the poetry of this period Safavid poetry; others, reflecting the fact that much of the poetry, even if composed 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, as did Browne, 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 favourable judgement 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. Whatever the judgements of taste, it is nonetheless true that there was a Persianate literary culture at this time that maintained itself from Istanbul to Delhi and Samarkand, which in turn had a strong influence on contemporary and later poetic compositions in Turkish and Urdu in addition, and reflected the wider intellectual, religious and court culture. But in some ways this culture was weakest in the Persian capital, where the court language was Turkic and mullahs tended to be more in favour than poets16.

  In previous centuries (notwithstanding the violent uncertainties of life in those times) there had been, by accident and as a consequence of political instability and the existence of competing polities within the cultural space of Iran zamin, conditions in Persia that permitted considerable, albeit erratic pluralism of religion and relative freedom of thought. Over the period of strong Safavid rule the central territorial core of the Iranian plateau was kept safe from invasion, which after the trauma of the preceding centuries must have seemed an invaluable blessing. But some previous freedoms wilted and narrowed.

  The Shi‘ism of the Safavids and the ulema under their rule had from the beginning more than a streak of extremism and intolerance within it, which was intensified by the religious conflict with the Ottomans. The Safavids from the outset tended to be more earnestly religious than many previous Sunni rulers had been. This is a delicate subject, but it is important to look at it squarely. The Sufis were increasingly out of favour and intellectual life was channelled into the madresehs. There were always hangers-on and pseudo-mullahs who could attract a following among the luti (unruly youths) of the towns by being more extreme than their more reflective, educated rivals; and the perceived history of persecution suffered by the Shi‘a did not always prompt a sensitivity to the vulnerability of other minorities onc
e the Shi‘a became the dominant sect. Notions of the religious impurity (najes) of unbelievers, especially Jews, contributed to a general worsening in the condition of minorities, and there was a particularly grim period after 1642 of persecution and forced conversions. Orders were issued (going further than older codes that originated in part in pre-Islamic Byzantine analogues) that Jews should wear distinguishing red patches on their clothing to identify themselves, that their word at law was near-worthless, that they must not wear matching shoes, fine clothes or waist-sashes, that they must not walk in the middle of the street or walk past a Muslim, that they must not enter a shop and touch things, that their weddings must be held in secret, that if they were cursed by a Muslim they must stay silent… and so on.17 Many of these would-be rules (running directly contrary to the spirit of proper tolerance accorded to People of the Book in Islam, and reminiscent of similar ugly rulings imposed in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and at other times) probably reflect the aspirations of a few extremist mullahs rather than the reality as lived, and conditions would have varied greatly from town to town and changed over time, but they were still indicative of the attitudes of some, and appeared to legitimate the actions of others. As authority figures in villages and towns, humane, educated mullahs were often the most important protectors of the Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.18 But other, lesser mullahs frequently agitated against these vulnerable groups.

  Some have suggested that even among the ulema the close relationship between the Safavid state and the Shi‘a clergy was not a healthy phenomenon. The over-close relationship led some mullahs to overlook the strong distrust of politics, kingship and secular authority that is deeply entrenched in Shi‘ism (and is perhaps one of its most attractive characteristics) in their scramble for the good things that the Safavid Shahs had on offer: appointments, endowments and a chance to wield some political authority.19 As is often the case with unchecked processes that involve greed, this one brought some of the senior Shi‘a clergy to shipwreck at the end of the Safavid period.

  After the death of Abbas the Great in 1629 the Safavid dynasty endured for almost a century, but except for an interlude in the reign of Shah Abbas II (1642-66) it was a period of stagnation. Baghdad was lost to the Ottomans again in 1638 and the Treaty of Zohab in 1639 fixed the Ottoman/Persian boundary in its present-day position between Iran and Iraq. Abbas II took Kandahar from the Moghuls in 1648 but thereafter there was peace in the east also.

  Militarily, the Safavid State probably reached its apogee under Shah Abbas the Great and Abbas II. But there is good reason to judge that, despite its classification with Ottoman Turkey and Moghul India as one of the Gunpowder Empires (by Marshall G. Hodgson), the practices and structures of the Safavid Empire were transformed to a lesser extent by the introduction of gunpowder weapons than those other empires were. Cannon and muskets were present in Persian armies, but as an add-on to previous patterns of warfare rather than transforming the conduct of war as happened elsewhere. The mounted tradition of Persian lance-and bow warfare, harking back culturally to Ferdowsi, was resistant to the introduction of awkward and noisy firearms. Their cavalry usually outclassed that of their enemies, but Persians did not take to heavy cannon and the greater technical demands of siege warfare as the Ottomans and Moghuls did. The great distances, lack of navigable rivers, rugged terrain and poor roads of the Iranian plateau did not favour the transport of heavy cannon. Most Iranian cities were either unwalled or were protected by crumbling walls centuries old—at a time when huge, sophisticated and highly expensive fortifications were being constructed in Europe and elsewhere to deal with the challenge of heavy cannon. Persia’s Military Revolution was left incomplete.20

  Alcohol seems to have played a significant part in the poor showing of the later Safavid monarchs. From the time of Shah Esma‘il and before, drinking sessions had been a part of the group rituals of the Qezelbash, building probably on the ancient practices of the Mongols and the Turkic tribes in Central Asia, but also on ghuluww Sufi practice and the Persian tradition of razm o bazm. There is a story that Esmail drank wine in a boat on the Tigris while watching the execution of his defeated enemies after he conquered Baghdad in 1508,21 but as we have seen his drinking accelerated after his defeat at the battle of Chaldiran, and some accounts suggest that alcohol was instrumental in his early death in 1524. Within the wider Islamic culture that was hostile to alcohol, it seems that in court circles wine had all the added allure of the forbidden (one could draw a crude parallel with the way in which binge drinking is a feature of British and other traditionally Protestant societies whose religious authorities tended in the past to frown on alcohol consumption). Shah Tahmasp appears to have stopped drinking in 1532/33 and maintained his pledge until his death in 1576, but alcohol was blamed by contemporaries as a cause or a contributory factor in the deaths of his successor Shah Esma‘il II, Shah Safi(reigned 1629-1642) and Shah Abbas II (1642-1666).22

  Some of this can perhaps be attributed to a moralising judgement on rulers who were thought to have failed more generally; for writers who disapproved of alcohol, wine-drinking was a sufficient explanation for (or at least a sign of) incompetence, indolence, or general moral weakness and bad character (Shah Abbas I drank too, without damaging his reputation). But there is too much evidence for the drinking to be dismissed as the invention of chroniclers. The reign of Shah Soleiman represents the apotheosis of the phenomenon.

  Soleiman came to the throne in 1666 and reigned for the next 28 years. A contemporary reported –

  He was tall, strong and active, a little too effeminate for a monarch—with a Roman nose, very well proportioned to other parts, very large blue eyes and a middling mouth, a beard dyed black, shaved round and well turned back, even to his ears. His manner was affable but nevertheless majestic. He had a masculine and agreeable voice, a gentle way of speaking and was so very engaging that, when you had bowed to him he seemed in some measure to return it by a courteous inclination of his head, and this he always did smiling.23

  Fig. 7. Shah Soleiman, attended by musicians, eunuchs, other courtiers and a rather ungainly European supplicant. The Safavid government machine continued to function, but drifted into neglect over the period of his reign and that of his son.

  Soleiman’s reign was for the most part quiet (with the exception, at the beginning, of the out-of-the-blue incursion into Mazanderan of the robber king Stenka Razin and his Don Cossacks in 1668-69). Some fine mosques and palaces were built, but one could take those as material symbols of the growing diversion of economic resources into religious endowments, and of the blinkered, inward-looking tendency of the monarch and his court; both of which were to prove damaging in the long run. Soleiman showed little interest in governing, and left state business to his officials. Sometimes he would amuse himself by forcing them (especially the most pious ones) to drink to the dregs a specially huge goblet of wine (called the hazar pishah). Sometimes they collapsed and had to be carried out. If they stayed on their feet, the Shah might, for a joke, order them to explain their views of important matters of government.24

  Shah Soleiman himself drank heavily, despite occasional outbreaks of temperance induced by health worries and religious conscience.25 His pleasure-loving insouciance was the natural outcome of his upbringing in the harem. He had little sense of the world beyond the court and little interest in it. He merely wanted to continue the lazy life he had enjoyed before, augmented by the luxuries he had formerly been denied. But some contemporary accounts say that when drunk he could turn nasty; that on one occasion he had his brother blinded, and that at other times he ordered executions.

  It is a testament to the strength and sophistication of the Safavid state and its bureaucracy that it continued to function despite the lack of a strong monarch. In other Islamic states this situation often permitted the emergence of a vizier or chief minister as the effective ruler; it seems that in Isfahan the influence of other important office-holders (and that of Maryam Begum, the Shah�
��s aunt, who came to dominate the harem) was enough to prevent any single personality achieving dominance. But as time went on the officials acted more and more in their own private and factional interests, and against the interests of their rivals; less and less in the interest of the state. Bureaucracies are not of themselves virtuous institutions—they need firm masters and periodic reform to reinforce an ethic of service if they are not to go wrong; and if they see their masters acting irresponsibly, the officials imitate their vices.

  The influence of the politically-inclined ulema at court strengthened as the Shah’s involvement in business slumped, and one leading cleric, Mohammad Baqer Majlesi, has been associated with a deliberate policy of targeting minorities for persecution (at least in the case of Hindu Indian merchants) to appeal to the worst instincts among the people and thereby enhance the popularity of the regime.26 Persecution was episodic and unpredictable, sometimes concentrating on the Indians or Jews, sometimes on the Armenians, sometimes on the Sufis, or the Zoroastrians or Sunni Muslims in the provinces. But in general, despite the protection the Jews and Christians at least should have enjoyed as People of the Book, the minorities were disadvantaged at law, subject to everyday humiliations, and vulnerable to the ambitions of akhund (rabble-rousing preachers) who might seek greater fame for themselves by inciting urban mobs against Jews, Christians or others. The responsibility of Majlesi personally for a worsening of the situation from the reign of Shah Soleiman onwards has been disputed (for example, his treatise Lightning Bolts Against the Jews turns out on examination to be rather more moderate in setting out the provisions of Islamic law on the minorities than its title might suggest27) but he was an influential figure and was briefly to become dominant in the following reign. His voluminous writings also included strong blasts against Sunnis and Sufis. The movement was broader than just Majlesi (whom it may have suited to appear radical to one constituency and moderate to another) but it is important to remember that it represented only one strand of Shi‘ism at the time; other Shi‘a ulema were critical of Majlesi’s repressive policy.28