Converting Persia Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire pdf download

Converting Persia Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire By Rula Jurdi Abisaab

CONVERTING PERSIA RELIGION AND POWER IN THE SAFAVID EMPIRE

Book Contents

• ·         Sufi Regalia and Legal Banners: The Safavids and the
• Emigré Arab Jurists                                                                                            
• The Sovereign and Religious ‘Authenticity’                                                      
• Domestic Contests: The Persian Aristocracy, the Qizilbash
• and the ‘Amili Jurists                                                                                        
• ‘Inventing’ Shi’ism: Al-Karaki (d. 940AH/1533CE) as a Court Jurist           
• Friday Prayer: Tailoring Shi’ism to Statehood                                                  
• From Marginality to Privilege                                                                             
• ‘Orthodoxy’: Ostracizing Sufis and Storytellers                                              
• Instruments of Conversion: Public Cursing                                                       
• Translating and Transporting the Word of Law                                               
• Afterthoughts                                                                                                            
• The Mujtahids Navigate the Sovereign’s World                                           
• Husayn b. ‘Abd al-Samad (d. 984AH/1576CE) at the Court of
• Shah Tahmasb in Qazvin                                                                                   
• Aims of a Polemic                                                                                                    
• Supreme and False Mujtahids                                                                                
• ·         Converting Persia       
• To Remedy the Shah from Mania: Ritual Purity and Friday Prayer 
• Conversion and Consent in Herat      
• ‘Normalizing’ Sunnism?        
• The Cleric Against the King
• Replacing the King
• Afterthoughts
• Summary and Conclusions
• Shah ‘Abbas and Imperial Reign as Clerical Discipline, 1587–1629CE       53
• The ‘Knighted’ Jurists and the Restructuring of the State    
• To Benefit the Learned and the Lay: Shi’ite Books under Shah ‘Abbas
• Afflicted by the Company of Kings: ‘The Baha’i is who I am, and
• great is my worth!’
• Imperial Uses of Clerical Shi‘ism
• Navigating Clerical Dissent
• Mir Damad (d. 1041AH/1631–2CE): The Cleric as Philosopher
• The Making of the World Inside and Outside Time  
• Human Freedom, Certitude and the Shari’a
• Shah ‘Abbas and the Muslim-Christian Polemics of Ahmad ‘Alavi 
• Lutfullah al-Maysi (d. 1032AH/1622–3CE) in Isfahan
• Mistrust of Shah ‘Abbas: Lutfullah’s Mosque and the Guildsmen of the Old Meydan       
• Summary and Conclusions
• Safavid Mistrust, Popular Protest and the Rationalists’ Retreat       
• Social Forces from Below     
• Once Upon a Time, an ‘Amili
• The Clerics’ Resources
• The New Ornament in the Crown: Khalifa Sultan    
• The Penniless ‘Amili Pilgrim and the Glory that Was
• New Contenders in the Vizierate Ranks        
• Akhbarism: the Challenge to Interpretive Rationalism         
• When Perfectly Able Arabs Fall Prey to Akhbarism 
• Dissent and the Politics of Friday Prayer      
• The Malaise of the Healer: Jurists on the Defensive 
• The Sufis Within and the ‘Essential’ Arabic 
• Conclusion     
• The Rediscovery of Traditions and the Shifting Normative                      
• Instability and Social Disorder                                                                            
• An Imperial Command on Friday Prayer                                                         
• ·         Imamhood and Eschatology in Lieu of a De-empowered State                    
• At a Cushion’s Distance From the Shah: Muhammad
• Al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1104AH/1692CE)                                                        
• On Public Reference to the Mahdi                                                                      
• On Tobacco                                                                                                              
• The Duel Over Political Custody: Jurists and Sufis                                         
• Summary and Conclusions                                                                                  
• Conclusion                                                             
• Appendices
• The ‘Amili ‘Ulama of Safavid Iran, 1501–1736CE                                          
• Posts and Activities of the Emigré ‘Amili ‘Ulama                                        
• The Intellectual Production of the Emigré ‘Amili ‘Ulama                         
• Notes                                                                                                                                 
• Bibliography                                                                                                                     
• Index                                                                                                                                 

Book introduction

In the last three decades, Islam with its varied Sunnite and Shi’ite colorings has figured as an international socio-political phenomenon with significant legal and doctrinal dimensions.

A plethora of studies probing resurgent facets of Islam and its culturally distinct manifestations have searched relentlessly into the past for the ‘origins’ of this turbulent phenomenon. Since the unfolding of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979–80, the Shi’ite world, clergy, and lay society, have been transformed forever.

A striking feature of this transformation was the unprecedented political power wrested by the Shi’ite ‘ulama and their hegemony over a vital medium of legal ideas, as they proceeded to reinterpret a shari’a-based society and redefine the foundations of its modern Islamic state and political outlook.

Safavid history became a focal point of investigation for modern scholars exploring questions of empire, nation, religious community and conversion, clerical leadership, and relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

 In modern narratives on clerical and revolutionary Islam and their relevance to Persian society, Iranian and Arab nationalists and Islamists alike have given the Safavid period (1501–1736CE) a central place.¹

 These narratives are largely rooted in culturalist interpretations, which glorify Arab agency in converting Iran to ‘mainstream’ Shi’ism or treat legalistic Islam as a cultural intrusion, an imposition of an Arab normative basis of worship by émigré clerics on Persian society.²

They purport that legalistic Islam, unlike Gnosticism and philosophy, was alien to Persian culture and its forms of intellectual inquiry. My work challenges such interpretations of religious transformation in Persia.

My study also comes to life when juxtaposed against the political zeal invested by Muslim activists today in the renewal of Islamic law and the unprecedented power that clerics have assumed in recent decades.

The debates among both Shi’ite and Sunnite reformists and militants over the nature of political authority in Islam, find some of

their formative elements in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Iran.

Few if any studies have attempted to delineate the dynamic processes of exchange between Arab and Persian scholars and the contribution of their respective social matrices to the development of Islamic political theory and juridical concepts before the age of European expansion and colonialism.

Moreover, most scholars of Islamic law continue to treat ideas, particularly legal ideas, as developing outside the realm of social relations and severed from the loci of power.

 Religious thought is seen as reproducing itself from within the clerical establishment where an insulated community of legal experts seems to function outside the medium of history.

My study, in contrast, probes into the internal social and political transformations that shaped the juridical concepts of the Syrian ‘ulama of Jabal ‘Amil and the utility of their scholarship to the young Shi’ite state envisaged by the Safavid monarchs in the early sixteenth century.

 I delineate the changes the Syrian clerics made in the Islamic theory of government, their varied reinterpretations of law and ‘reinvention’ of religious legitimacy for state and society.

 Doctrinal and legal works on heterodoxy, Sunnite-Shi’ite polemic, Sufi practices, the convening of Friday prayer, religious seclusion, the meat slaughtered by Christians and Jews, alongside philosophical works on the nature of the world and God’s relationship to it are all brought to bear on larger questions of social and political history.

The theoretical framework of this work had drawn much inspiration from the epistemic foundation of Husayn Muroeh’s Al-Naza’at al-Madiyya fi al-Falsafa al-’Arabiyya al-Islamiyya, which shifts the focus from culture to social process, investigating the transmission of knowledge from one civilization/culture to another, in this case from the Arab to the Persian, in the light of the internal structural and historical forces within the hosting society (Persia).

 Muroeh rejected attempts to understand the emergence of new philosophical, scientific and legal concepts in their own terms, as ruled by personal differences among scholars or institutional changes exerted from above.

Instead, he focused attention on the incremental material-social developments, particularly class arrangements and conflicts, which shaped the production of ideas during different historical periods.

I use ‘class’ in the pre-modern period to denote a human grouping whose members are engaged in similar economic-occupational activities, have a comparable position vis-à-vis the means of production, but who nonetheless draw upon a variety of social experiences and factional, religious, ethnic or regional identities that can and do undermine class.

I also benefited from Rifa’at Abou El- Haj’s treatment of the nature of the transfer of scholarship from one locale to another ‘less as one of importation and more as one that meets local needs, thereby becoming for some… historians a creative, but projected, means for understanding their society and by extension themselves, that is in defining their identity’.

 In addition, I have found the treatment of ‘tradition’ in the works of Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger illuminating.

By understanding the dynamic and multilayered notions of ‘tradition’, as changing rather than static, I cautioned myself against self- descriptions of ‘tradition-based’ juridical concepts and rulings advanced by Safavid