Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  The Ottoman’s eastward expansion did get blocked by another rising power, the Safavids (about whom more later), but the Ottomans simply headed south at that point and conquered the old Arab heartland from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, then conquered Egypt, eliminating the mamluk dynasty from history, and then went on expanding west along the North African coast.

  At their apogee, during the reign of the sixteenth century Suleiman the Magnificent (the title Europeans gave him—among his own he usually wore the honorific of Suleiman the Lawgiver) the Ottoman empire probably ranked as the world greatest power. It straddled Europe and Asia, it possessed both Rome (i.e., Constantinople) and Mecca, not to mention Cairo; and its monarch ruled over more people and more territory than any other. No wonder the Ottoman ruler began to call himself khalifa. No one disputed the title. Of course, that’s partly because no one thought it worth disputing. The title had only ceremonial significance by this time, but still it’s worth noting that the Ottoman emperor claimed the two most important titles of universal authority in Islam: for the first time in history khalifa and sultan were the same man. For the ordinary Muslim citizen, this meant that surely history was moving forward again: the Umma was back on track to becoming the global community.

  THE SAFAVIDS (906-1138 AH)

  “Khalifa” and “sultan” were not, however, the only titles of universal authority in Islam: there was also “imam,” as understood by that other sect of Muslims, the Shi’i—which brings us to the Safavids of Persia, the ones who blocked Ottoman expansion eastward.

  The Safavids came to power in a most unusual way. Their roots go back to a Sufi brotherhood that took shape just after the Mongol eruption. The order coalesced in northern Persia around a spiritual master named Sheikh Safi al-Din and came to be known as the Safavids.

  For three generations, this brotherhood functioned pretty much like any other Sufi order of the time: it was a peaceful, apolitical group that offered spiritual companionship and a refuge from the turmoil of the world. But then the order began to change. For one thing, when the third sheikh died, his son became the new sheikh, and when he died, his son, and after that his son, and so on. In short, leadership of the group became hereditary.

  Second, somewhere along the way, these sheikhs developed political ambitions. They enlisted chosen initiates into an elite corps who not only learned techniques for refining their spiritual devotions but also learned martial arts. They became the sheikh’s bodyguards, then his enforcers, and then they grew into a serious military caste.

  As an emblem of membership in the Safavid guard, these soldier-mystics wore special red hats, and so they were called the Qizilbash, Turkish for “the redheads.” The hat they wore had a distinctive twelve-fold design, which reflected the third and most important change in the Safavid order: their switch to Shi’ism.

  The twelve folds stood for the twelve imams of mainstream Shi’ism. As I mentioned earlier, Shi’i felt that absolute and hereditary religious authority belonged to a figure called the imam, who was God’s representative on Earth. There was always one imam in the world; there were never two; and the true imam of the age was always descended from Prophet Mohammed through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.

  Whenever an imam had more than one son, his death opened up the possibility of disagreement about which of his progeny was truly the next imam. Just such a disagreement over the fifth imam gave birth to a minority sect called the Zaidis (or Fivers.) Another disagreement over the seventh imam had spawned the Isma’ilis (or Seveners).

  The remaining Shi’i agreed on the imam all the way to the twelfth generation down from Ali, but the twelfth imam disappeared when he was a little boy. Non-Shi’i assume he was murdered. Shi’i, however, believe he never died but went into “occultation,” a concept peculiar to Shi’ism: occultation meant he could (can) no longer be seen by ordinary people.

  Mainstream Shi’i (or Twelvers) call this twelfth imam the “hidden imam.” Shi’ite doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam is and always will be alive, that he is still in direct communication with God and is still guiding the world in some unseen way. The doctrine doesn’t say exactly how the Hidden Imam remains hidden. It doesn’t say whether he has become invisible, donned a disguise, changed form, gone to ground in some cave, or what. Instrumental explanations like these belong to the world of science; occultation is a mystical concept to which instrumental explanations are irrelevant.

  Shi’ite doctrine declares that the twelfth imam will reveal himself at the end of history, sparking the perfection of Allah’s community and inaugurating the final Age of Justice, the endpoint sought by all good Muslims. Upon reaching its endpoint, history will end, the dead will be resurrected, and Allah’s judgment will sort all who have ever lived into heaven or hell according to their just desserts. Because of this expectation that the Hidden Imam will appear again at the end of days, Shi’i sometimes refer to him as the Mahdi “the expected one” (a concept that exists in Sunni Islam too, but less vividly.) Most of today’s Iranians adhere to this branch of Shi’ism, making the Twelvers the mainstream Shi’i of modern times.

  In the mid-fifteenth century, the Safavids embraced this complex of beliefs. The twelve folds on the red hats worn by the Qizilbash symbolized the twelve imams. By this time the Safavids were a cultlike group headed by an ambitious sheikh with a growing army of soldiers at his command. The soldiers saw him not just as their commander in chief but as their lifeline to heaven.

  These politicized Safavids were operating in a context of social chaos. The Persian world, smashed once by Genghis Khan and smashed again by Timur-i-lang, was fragmented into many little principalities ruled by diverse Turkish chieftains. The Turkish chieftains were all resolute Sunnis. Shi’ism, by contrast, had long been identified with Persian resistance to invasive aliens, a pattern that began in the days of Arab dominance and picked up again once Turks took over. Now, in the wake of the Mongol catastrophe, this militant Shi’ite cult known as the Safavids easily linked up with all the antistate, revolutionary activity going on. No wonder the Safavids made local princes uneasy.

  In 1488, one of these princes decided to take action. He had the head of the Safavid order killed. Then for good measure he had the man’s eldest son murdered as well. He probably would have done away with his younger son too, a two-year-old boy by the name of Ismail, except that the Qizilbash whisked this little fellow into hiding, just a few steps ahead of the state-paid killers.

  Over the next ten years, the Safavids hardened into a formidable secret society. Ismail grew up in hiding, hustled constantly from safe house to safe house. The whole time, the Qizilbash regarded him as the head of their order, and not just a figurehead. They revered the boy and believed he had the spark of divinity in him. Imagine how he must have seen the world (and himself) by the time he reached adolescence, having spent his whole life in secrecy, imbued with a sense of mortal danger, and surrounded, even in his earliest memories, by a shadowy corps of men in red hats who bowed to him, hung on his words, and obeyed his every whim. By chance, the boy bred to such a sense of self-importance, happened to be brilliant and tough.

  Around the age of twelve, Ismail came out of hiding with his force of Qizilbash. He disposed quickly of the prince who had killed his father. Other princes rushed to smash him, thinking, how hard could it be to defeat a twelve-year-old boy? Very hard, it turned out.

  In 1502, at the age of fifteen, Ismail declared himself Shahanshah of Iran. Shahanshah meant “king of kings.” It was the title the Sassanid monarchs had used, and the ancient Persian monarchs before them. In rejecting the titles of “khalifa” and “sultan,” Ismail was rejecting Arab and Turkish historical tradition in favor of a nativist Persian identity. In calling his realm Iran, he was invoking the ancestral king named in Firdausi’s epic of the Persian people, The Book of Kings. In fact, Ismail’s propagandists said he was related by blood to the Sassanid kings of yore.

  Ismail also separated himself from his neighbor
by declaring Twelver Shi’ism the state religion. He had his henchman publicly curse the first three khalifas of Islam: Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman. The state declared that Ali was the Prophet’s only legitimate successor and the imams descended from him the only religious authorities. Ismail’s propagandists spread the news that in addition to being descended from the Sassanids, Ismail was also descended from Ali. They suggested that he was even in direct communication with the Hidden Imam (who was, of course, in direct communication with God). In fact, Ismail came pretty close to declaring that he himself was the Hidden Imam and may well have believed this of himself—how could he not, given his upbringing? Some people say he even thought he was God.

  Fortified by his sense of destiny, Ismail sent preachers into the Ottoman Empire to spread his religious message. His agents called upon Ottoman subjects to convert to Shi’ism and accept Ismail as their sole divinely guided leader. He also set to work vigorously persecuting Sunnis under his power. Some saw signs of madness in the king’s conduct and immigrated hastily into the Ottoman empire. Of those who stayed, many were imprisoned or killed.

  Well, wouldn’t you know it: the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim retaliated by locking up or executing Shi’is living in his realm. Inevitably, as Sunnis fled west into Anatolia, Shi’is fled east into Persia. The whole process led to an ever greater concentration of Shi’ism in the Safavid empire (and Sunnism in the Ottoman) and the Safavids did everything they could to promote this trend as well as to fuse Shi’ism with Persian culture. This fusion of Shi’ism and Persian nationalism became the ideological foundation of their new empire, the core of which later became the modern nation of Iran.

  As part of this campaign, the Safavids elevated the Tazieh into a national ritual drama. The Tazieh was a cycle of Shi’ite passion plays recounting the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala. The plays came out of a mourning ritual conducted in special buildings called takiah khanas. Traditionally, on the tenth day of the month of Muharam (the day of Hussein’s martyrdom) Shi’i got together in these places to mourn communally: the custom had been going on for centuries. During the mourning, anyone who felt an urge to tell a piece of the story would jump up and do so in order to arouse and stoke the grief. Shi’i became thoroughly familiar with every detail of the martyrdom and every story that could possibly be told about it. For the telling of these plays they developed a distinctive style of oration designed to trigger lamentation. The collection of all these stories constituted the Tazieh (many pieces were written down, but there was no single written version) and every year, on the Tenth of Muharram, now that the Safavids held power, Shi’i through the empire took to the streets (not just to takiah khanas) for a cathartic outburst of public lamentation and then made their way to state-funded theaters where government-funded professionals enacted the ritual on stage.

  When Ismail was twenty-seven years old, he discovered that he wasn’t God after all. The Ottomans dealt him this lesson by invading his realm. Spoiling for a fight, Ismail rushed to meet them. The two armies clashed on the plains of Chaldiran, near the city of Tabrez. The Ottomans had firearms, but the Safavids thought they had something better: old-fashioned religious fervor and a divinely guided leader. This time, firearms proved more useful. Selim crushed Ismail’s forces, almost killed Ismail, and took his capital of Tabrez.

  The battle of Chaldiran was as seminal as the Battle of Hastings, which marked the birth of England as a nation-state. Historians usually score Chaldiran as a victory for the Ottomans, but overall it was more of a draw, because Selim could not hold Tabrez. With winter coming, he fell back to more secure bases deeper inside Anatolia, and by the following year the Persians had reoccupied Tabrez and inoculated it with a scorched-earth campaign that left nothing for invaders to feed on if they wanted to attack again. So the battle of Chaldiran actually ended up defining the frontier between the Ottoman and Safavid realms, which hardened eventually into the border between the successor states, Iran and Turkey, and remains the border between those countries to this day.

  Ismail went home from Chaldiran a sad and broken man. Losing a battle made him rethink his identity. He spent his remaining years more or less in seclusion, pondering the cosmos and writing religious poetry. Ismail’s empire not only survived his dejection but prospered, in part because it enjoyed a succession of gifted and long-lived rulers.

  With the border more or less firmed up, hostilities between the Ottoman and Safavid empires went into remission and trade began flowing in both directions to the benefit of both societies. The Safavid Empire was always smaller than the Ottomans’ and never quite as powerful, but with its single state religion and its single dominant ethnic group, it was culturally more unified.

  This no-doubt-about-it Persian Empire peaked under Ismail’s great grandson Shah Abbas the Great, who died in 1629 after a forty-two-year reign. Abbas equipped his armies with firearms and cannons, and in his era Iran developed booming state-supported textile, ceramics, garment, and carpet industries, which exported goods to places as distant as western Europe, Africa, and India.

  The art of painting, and particularly of the “Persian miniature”—exquisitely detailed scenes surrounded by floral and geometric borders—climaxed in Safavid Persia. Calligraphy, regarded as a major art form in the Islamic world due to Muslim reverence for the written Qur’an, also reached perfection here. The two arts came together in illuminated books, the highest artistic products of the age, and the culminating work in this form was a Book of Kings, Firdausi’s epic, produced for a Safavid monarch: it had 258 paintings and sixty thousand lines of calligraphy by various artists—essentially, an entire museum between two covers.

  Safavid creativity climaxed in architecture. For example, unlike the monumental Ottoman mosques—those somber mounds of domes bracketed by minarets—the Safavids built airy structures that shimmered with glazed mosaic tiles and seemed almost to float, so that even gigantic mosques looked like they were made of lace and light.

  And if architecture was the highest art form of Safavid Persia, then city building was its meta-art. The Safavids kept moving their capital (seeking safety from the ever-looming Ottomans) and every time they adopted a new city as their home, they remade it aesthetically. In 1598, after choosing Isfahan as his new capital, Shah Abbas launched a building program that transformed the entire city into a single integrated jewel: by the time he was done, it abounded in public squares, gardens, mosques, mansions, pools, palaces, and public buildings interlaced with handsome boulevards. Awestruck visitors coined the phrase Isfahan Nisfi-Jahan, “Isfahan, half the world” (their point being that if you hadn’t seen Isfahan, you’d missed half of all there was to see in the world).

  The Ottoman and Safavid worlds had distinctive differences and yet, for all the hostility between the governments, a sort of civilizational unity ran between them. They were no more different than, say, England and France, and perhaps less so. A traveler going from Istanbul to Isfahan or vice versa would have felt on more or less familiar ground in either place. It’s quite remarkable that two such powerful and distinctive empires could emerge in exactly the same period side by side. What’s even more amazing is that yet another enormous, distinctive, grandiose, and powerful Muslim empire coalesced in just about this same period: the empire of the Moghuls, which eventually stretched from Burma, across India, to the middle of Afghanistan where it butted right up against the Safavid frontier.

  THE MOGHULS (ROUGHLY 900 TO 1273 AH)

  The Moghuls were every bit the equal of the Ottomans in wealth and strength. About 20 percent of the world’s current population lives in the territory they once ruled, including all or part of five modern countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Burma. The man who founded this gigantic empire was an almost exact contemporary of Shah Ismail’s named Babur, which means “tiger,” and in some ways, he was even more remarkable than the prodigious Safavid teenager.

  Babur claimed descent from both Timur-i-lang and Chengez Khan. What the blood ties
really were, who knows, but Babur took his genealogy seriously; it give him a lifelong sense of mission. His father ruled a little kingdom called Farghana, just north of today’s Afghanistan, and when he died in 1495, Babur inherited this throne. He was twelve years old.

  Within a year he had lost his kingdom, which is hardly surprising: he was only twelve, after all! But he regrouped and conquered legendary Samarqand, Timur’s one-time capital—then lost it. He went back to Farghana and took that again. But his enemies won it back. Then he conquered Samarqand a second time, this time with just 240 men—but could not hold it. By the time he was eighteen, Babur had gained and lost two kingdoms twice apiece and found himself on the run through the mountains of Afghanistan with his mother and sisters and a few hundred followers. For three years, he and his band roamed the wilds, looking for a new kingdom: kinging was all he knew, and king was the only job title he was seeking.

  I dare say any teenager who holds together a band of adult warriors over many years of homeless exile must have something going for him; and Babur was certainly an intimidating physical specimen. The stories say he could jump across a stream holding a full-grown man tucked under each arm. (They don’t say what the full-grown men thought of this exercise.) Unlike most tough guys, however, Babur was sensitive, artistic, and romantic. He kept a diary throughout his adventures, and late in life penned an autobiography that became a classic of Turkish literature. After his grandson had it translated into the more prestigious Persian, the book achieved a high place in that canon as well. In his book, Babur reveals himself with extraordinary honesty. After a crucial military loss, for example, he tells us he could not help “crying a great deal.” What kind of tough guy admits such a thing? Later he reports on his arranged marriage and his failure to work up any enthusiasm for his wife, despite his earnest efforts. He visits her only every week or two, he says, and then only because his mother nags at him. Then he falls in love—with a boy he sees in the bazaar. “In that frothing up of desire and passions and under the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander bare-headed, bare-footed, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard; I showed civility neither to friend nor stranger, took no care for myself or others. . . .”7 Thus does the future emperor expose his vulnerable adolescent passions to us—and yet this is the fellow who has, twice already, conquered and lost Samarqand.