Chapter 79. Gunpowder Empires: the Safavid Twelver State, the Ottomans, the Mughals and the End of the Caliphate

Between 1500 and 1700 three Muslim states used firearms and centralised bureaucracies to rule more tightly than any earlier Islamic polity. Karen Armstrong calls the period “Imperial Islam (1500-1700)”. She argues that these empires, unlike the Abbasid court, “all had a strongly Islamic orientation, promoted by the rulers themselves. In Safavid Iran, Shiism became the state religion; Falsafah and Sufism were dominant influences on Moghul policy; while the Ottoman Empire was run entirely on Shariah lines” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “Imperial Islam”, pp. 115-116]. In her account the Shii empire caused “a new and decisive rift between Sunnis and Shiis, leading to an intolerance and an aggressive sectarianism that was unprecedented in the Islamic world”, comparable to Europe’s Catholic-Protestant wars [Armstrong, #53062, p. 116]. This chapter follows the three empires, the frontier between them, the Western intrusion, and the contested abolition of the caliphate in 1924.

The Safavid revolution: Isma’il, the Qizilbash and forced conversion

According to Armstrong, the Safavid Sufi order of Azerbaijan had converted to Twelver Shiism and was raiding the Christians of Georgia and the Caucasus. In 1500 the sixteen-year-old Isma’il became its pir. In 1501 he took Tabriz, subdued Iran within a decade, and “declared that Twelver Shiism would be the official religion of his new empire” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Safavid Empire”, p. 117]. His troops were the Qizilbash (“red heads”, named for crimson caps of twelve gores honouring the Twelve Imams), “a diverse array of mainly Turkoman Shia militant groups that flourished in Iranian Azerbaijan, Anatolia, the Armenian highlands, and the Caucasus”. They “regarded their rulers as divine figures”, and “when Tabriz was taken, there was not a single book on Twelverism among the Qizilbash leaders” [Wikipedia: Qizilbash]. Armstrong agrees that Isma’il “probably knew very little about Twelver orthodoxy” and “may even have told his followers that he was the Hidden Imam” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 118].

Most Iranians were then Sunni. Isma’il suppressed the Sufi orders, executed or deported the Sunni ulama, and required officials to curse the first three caliphs [Armstrong, #53062, p. 117]. The reference article adds a royal order to insult Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman publicly (“Whoever disobeys, he is to be beheaded”). It also records “thousands, maybe even 20,000” Sunnis killed at Tabriz and 4,000 members of the Kazeruni order killed in Fars, and it concludes that the campaign “merged the political and religious spheres in Iran, a combination that is still present today” [Wikipedia: Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam]. Armstrong states the outcome: “By the late seventeenth century most Iranians were solidly Shii, and have remained so to the present day” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 118].

Abbas I, Isfahan and the clerical estate

Shah Abbas I (1588-1629), Armstrong writes, “rid his bureaucracy of those who held ghuluww views, imported Arab Shii ulama from abroad to teach the people a more orthodox form of Twelver Shiism, built madrasahs for them and gave them generous financial support”. Under him Isfahan enjoyed a renaissance that drew on “the old pre-Islamic Persian culture” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 118-120]. Her “Key Figures” entry summarises: Abbas “presided over the zenith of the Safavid Empire in Iran, building a magnificent court at Isfahan and importing Shii ulama from abroad to instruct Iranians in Twelver Orthodoxy” [Armstrong, Islam, #68695, “Key Figures”].

The imported clergy became an independent estate, because “according to Twelver orthodoxy, the ulama and not the shahs were the only legitimate representatives of the Hidden Imam”. Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1700) persecuted Sufis, suppressed philosophy, and promoted the Muharram mourning rites for Husain. The Usuli doctrine, that believers must follow a living mujtahid, and the ulama’s later move to Najaf and Kerbala gave the Iranian clergy “a power unparalleled anywhere else in the Muslim world” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 120-124]. A late-Safavid convert shows the polemical climate. The Portuguese Augustinian friar António de Jesus converted in Isfahan between 1694 and 1697 and became Aliqoli Jadid-ol-Eslam. As court dragoman he was “a major polemicist against Christianity, Sufism, Judaism, Sunnism, philosophers and antinomians”, author of Sayf ol-mo’menin (“The sword of the faithful in the fight against the associators”), and one of the converts who “helped reaffirm the Majlesi brand of conservatism” [Wikipedia: Aliqoli Jadid-ol-Eslam]. Afghan tribes took Isfahan in 1722 [Armstrong, #53062, p. 123].

The Ottoman Shariah state

Armstrong describes the Ottoman Empire, built on the Janissaries and a ghazi ideal of frontier jihad, as the “most successful and enduring” of the three. “To the west they faced Christendom, and to the east were the Shii Safavids. The Ottomans became as murderously sectarian as the Safavids, and there were massacres of Shiis living in Ottoman domains” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Ottoman Empire”, pp. 130-131]. Under Suleiman al-Qanuni (“the Lawgiver”, 1520-66), “known as Suleiman the Magnificent in the West”, the empire reached its limits. The architect Sinan Pasha (d. 1578) defined mosques “spacious, filled with light, [with] low domes and high minarets” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 132; Armstrong, #68695]. The Shariah became the official law, and qadis, muftis and teachers became a salaried corps. Armstrong judges the result double-edged. Abu al-Suud made the qadis subordinate to the sultan, so “the Shariah was made to endorse the system of absolute monarchy … which it had been originally designed to oppose”, and the Ottoman ulama, unlike Iran’s, “would become emasculated” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 133-134].

The frontier as sectarian border

Philip’s Atlas of World History maps the period on its plate “Ottoman and Safavid Empires 1500-1683”. The plate covers the growth of the Ottoman Empire to 1683 and “the making of the Ottoman-Safavid frontier 1514-1639”. Its text calls the Safavid shahs, “most notably Abbas I”, “deliberate propagandists of Shiite culture”, and describes how, when “Shah Ismail and his Qizilbash forces began to infiltrate eastern Anatolia from Tabriz”, the Ottoman artillery won “a dramatic victory over the lightly-armed Persians at Chaldiran in 1514”, which “led to more than 120 years of intermittent Ottoman-Safavid conflict over land occupied by Azeris, Kurds and Mesopotamian Arabs”. The standard pattern was “an Ottoman offensive countered by Persian ‘scorched earth’ and guerrilla tactics” [Philip’s Atlas of World History, #5213, “The Ottoman and Safavid Empires 1500-1683”]. The frontier opened at Chaldiran on 23 August 1514. Selim I’s artillery defeated Isma’il, who “never again participated in a military campaign”. War ran until the Peace of Amasya (1555), and the Treaty of Zuhab (1639) left Mesopotamia permanently Ottoman [Wikipedia: Battle of Chaldiran]. Selim’s anti-Safavid campaign, Armstrong adds, became “a victorious war of conquest which brought the whole of Syria and Egypt under Ottoman rule” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 131-132]. The 1639 line still roughly divides Shii Iran from the Sunni lands to its west.

The Mughal alternative: Akbar, Sirhindi and Aurangzeb

Babur (d. 1530), Armstrong notes, “had been an ally of Ismail”. Akbar abolished the jizyah, built temples, opened a “house of worship” for interfaith debate in 1575, and founded a Sufi order of “divine monotheism”. His biographer Abulfazl presented him as the Perfect Man ruling by sulh-e kull, “universal peace” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Moghul Empire”, pp. 124-127]. Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1625) “proclaimed that he himself rather than Akbar was the Perfect Man of the age” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 127]. The reference shelf calls him a Naqshbandi Hanafi jurist who opposed Akbar’s Din-i Ilahi and is honoured as Mujaddid al-Alf al-Thani, “reviver of the second millennium” [Wikipedia: Ahmad Sirhindi]. Aurangzeb (1658-1707) reimposed the jizyah and destroyed Hindu temples. Armstrong reads the Hindu and Sikh revolts that followed as proof of “how wise the previous tolerance had been” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 128].

The arrival of the West and the abolition of the caliphate

In “The Arrival of the West (1750-2000)”, Armstrong describes the West’s rise as “unparalleled in world history”. She traces the “plundering of Bengal”, Napoleon in Egypt, the occupations from Algeria (1830) to Morocco (1912), and Sykes-Picot, which was “experienced as an outrage, since the European powers had promised the Arab provinces … independence” [Armstrong, #53062, ch. 5, pp. 141-148]. Ataturk’s secularism, she writes, “closed down all the madrasahs, suppressed the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear modern Western dress … Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went underground” [Armstrong, #53062, “What is a Modern Muslim State?”, p. 158]. The legal steps are uncontested. The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922. Kemal called the remaining caliphate “nothing more than a historic relic”, and on 3 March 1924 the Grand National Assembly abolished it and exiled the dynasty, over the protests of the Indian Khilafat Movement [Wikipedia: Abolition of the Caliphate].

The readings diverge. Glenn Beck writes: “World War I marked the low point in Islam’s retreat before Western powers … Suddenly, for the first time since the seventh century, there was nobody left to claim the title of caliph”. In his account radicals grew in that vacuum, and Israel’s creation “proved a useful propaganda tool” [Beck, It Is About Islam, #63847, ch. 4]. Evola, in his disciple’s memoir, says: “What the Christians could never achieve, a Turk did. The enemy inside. He dethroned Allah. By changing the Arabic alphabet, he made it impossible for people to read their own language. Cultural genocide, you might call it” [Julius Evola: The Sufi of Rome, #65750]. Lawrence’s annotation to bin Laden notes that “no country has replaced Turkey as the Muslim world’s center. According to Sayyid Qutb, in order to bring about a new Caliphate … there must be a revival in one Muslim country” [bin Laden, Messages to the World, #73066, ed. note 25]. Inside Turkey, Said Nursi (1877-1960) gave up politics after the Ottoman fall. He wrote the six-thousand-page Risale-i Nur in prison and exile, and his Nurcu movement is credited with reviving Islam in Turkey [Wikipedia: Said Nursi].

Coda: Keshe on the Shii state’s heir

Mehran Keshe speaks about modern Iran in KSW 631. He claims that “the knowledge which supersedes nuclear, is already in the hand of the Iranian scientists”, and that “if anything happens to Iran … the Iranian scientists will release the technology above nuclear to every nation on this planet”. He also attacks the Republic’s elite: “half of our negotiating are not Iranians, most of our leadership are not Iranians. And they see their own private interest ahead of a nation of Iran” [Keshe, KSW 631, #378343]. He explains Iranians’ passion for their soldiers through “the culture of Shiite in Iran”. Armstrong traces the ritual roots of that martyr culture to Majlisi’s Muharram processions [Keshe, KSW 631, #378343; Armstrong, #53062, p. 121].

Key points

• Armstrong calls 1500-1700 “Imperial Islam”: three gunpowder empires with an explicitly Islamic orientation [#53062].
• Isma’il I and the Qizilbash imposed Twelver Shiism on Sunni Iran. The reference shelf records mass killings [Wikipedia: Safavid conversion; Qizilbash].
• Abbas I imported Arab Shii ulama, who grew into an autonomous clerical estate [#53062; #68695].
• Suleiman made the ulama a state corps. Armstrong argues this “emasculated” the Sunni clergy [#53062].
• Chaldiran (1514) and Zuhab (1639) turned the Sunni-Shia split into a territorial frontier [#5213; Wikipedia: Battle of Chaldiran].
• Akbar’s universalism and Sirhindi’s revivalism were the two Mughal options, and Aurangzeb chose the second [#53062; Wikipedia: Ahmad Sirhindi].
• The caliphate ended on 3 March 1924. Beck sees Islam’s low point, Evola a Turk “dethroning Allah”, and Qutb (via Lawrence) a call to revive one Islamic state first [#63847; #65750; #73066].
• Keshe claims Iran holds a technology “above nuclear” and denounces its leadership as self-interested [#378343].