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Safavid Iran Rebirth of a Persian Empire – Andrew J. Newman

SAFAVID IRAN REBIRTH OF A PERSIAN EMPIRE

Book Introduction

More than two thousand years ago Cyrus the Great (558–530 bc) established the ancient Persian Achaemenian empire. A few turbulent years later he was followed by Darius the Great (522–486) and his son Xerxes (486–465), but the empire eventually fell to Alexander (330–323).

At the height of its 220-year history (550–330) the Achaemenian empire stretched from modern-day Libya in the West to the Indus and Central Asia in the East, featured a well-developed administrative bureaucracy, used political marriages with, and parcelled out grants of land and/or titles to, key military and administrative figures to bind their interests to those of the ruling house, employed non-Persians in the adminstration of the realm, and portrayed the sitting ruler as simultaneously the apex of the different political traditions of all of the region’s various peoples – including the Medes, Babylonians, Jews, Lydians and Egyptians.

Indeed the well-known inscription at Bisitun (520–519) proclaiming the accession of Darius to the throne was written in three languages of the empire’s people – Akkadian/Babylonian, Elamite and Old Persian – and the famous reliefs at Persepolis (commenced c. 515) which depict processions of subject peoples bearing gifts and thus acknowledging Darius’ rule further attest to the vastness and complex makeup of the Achaemenian empire and his rulership, as representative of the paramount Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, as ‘king of kings’ over, and thus transcending, them all.

Since that time, situated between the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and Asia Minor on the West, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent on the East and Russia and the Persian Gulf on the North and South, Iran and what is distinct about the peoples of the Iranian plateau have been the mediated product of the interaction of its peoples’ own traditions with the historical, spiritual and cultural traditions of peoples of the many other regions, near and far, who have passed through and settled there.

The Safavid period, conventionally dated from Ismail’s capture of Tabriz in 1501 to the fall of Isfahan to the Afghans in 1722, stands between Iran’s medieval and modern history.

The present work offers an understanding of the history of Iran under the Safavids, the longest-ruling dynasty in Iran’s history since its conquest by Muslim armies in the 640s, which differs from that generally accepted to date.

The conventional wisdom

Roger Savory’s is the first and the last, general history of Safavid Iran.

It appeared more than two decades ago, in 1980,² the year after the flight from Iran of the last Pahlavi ruler, Muhammad Riza, the year of the latter’s death and the return to Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989) after nearly two decades of exile abroad, and in the midst of the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran which had commenced in November 1979.

Savory’s volume summarised the Western understanding of the period to that date, an understanding which was mainly the product of work by both himself and such earlier scholars as Browne, V. Minorsky (d. 1966), and Lockhart (d. 1975).³

To that time Western-language discussions of the Safavid period usually had commenced with mention of the Ardabil-based Safavid Sufi order as an urban, quietist, contemplative spiritual movement established by the eponymous Shaykh Safi al-Din (d. 1334), whose followers were, in fact, mainly Sunnis.

In c. 1447, owing to an influx of levies from a number of Turkish tribes, the order is said to have embraced a new militant, messianic religio-political discourse. Its leaders were viewed as divine and a distinctive red twelve-pleated hat (taj) was adopted to signal veneration of the Twelve Shii Imams – from which headgear the Qizil- bash (Turkish, ‘red-headed’) confederation of member tribes derived its name. The shift also signaled the start of an offensive military strategy.

In 1501 Safi al-Din’s descendant Ismail led Qizilbash forces in the capture of Tabriz and went on to seize control of a territory roughly contiguous with the boundaries of modern-day Iran.

Ismail also established Twelver Shi*ism as his realm’s official faith, in distinction to the Sunnism of the Ottomans to the West and the Uzbeks to the Northeast.

Ismail was also said to have invited large numbers of Shi*i clerics resident in Arabic- speaking lands to Iran to assist in the promulgation of the faith’s doctrines and practices throughout the realm and to have encouraged the view of himself both as a direct descendant of the Shii Imams and the new faith’s chief defender. In 1514 Ottoman forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the Safavids at Chaldiran after which Ismail, his own confidence shattered, is said to have withdrawn into himself. He died in 1524.

At Ismail’s death and the accession of his nine-year-old son Tahmasp, what is portrayed as the inherent unruliness of the Qizilbash tribal levies boiled to the surface to cause a decade of civil war which left Safavid territory vulnerable to a series of Ottoman and Uzbek invasions?

Tahmasp finally asserted his authority over the tribes, signed a peace treaty with the Ottomans, checked Uzbek incursions, and relocated the capital from Tabriz to Qazvin.

At Tahmasp’s death in 1576 the unrestrained nature of the tribal forces resurfaced and resulted in further intra-Qizilbash strife and loss of territory to foreign invasions.

Abbas I (reg. 1588–1629), Tahmasp’s grandson, is said to have checked Qizilbash influence both by opposing their military might with that of large numbers of Georgian and other Caucasian converts and by driving underground the very millenarianism which had driven the tribal levies’ earlier conquests.

Abbas retook territory seized by the Ottomans and Uzbeks, moved the capital to Isfahan, embellished that city with monumental architectural undertakings of a secular and non-secular nature, patronized poets, artists, and philosophers, and promoted contacts with Europe.

If Abbas’ reign fostered military, political, and economic stability, it is also said to have set in motion certain forces which his much less able successors were unable to manage. Friction was obtained between Abbas’ newly created non-Qizilbash military corps and the traditional tribal elite.

In addition, to meet their own, increasingly extravagant expenses successive courts expanded khassa lands (lands under direct control of the central court) at the expense of mamalik lands (lands under provincial administration) and degraded the level of the realm’s military preparedness.

Indeed, having been born and reared in the haram and, hence, understood as easily swayed by the influence of such powerful, intriguing parties at court as the haram women and palace eunuchs, Abbas’ successors are generally portrayed as more interested in debauchery or in religion than in the affairs of state.

Sultan Husayn, the last Safavid shah, is portrayed as so attentive to the goodwill of courtiers and clerics – the latter including Majlisi – and so busy with ostentatious building projects that the state was unable to mount any credible response either to burgeoning internal socio-economic and political crises or to bold raids by the Afghans from the East.

Following one such incursion, the Afghan capture of Isfahan in 1722 is understood as signalling the dynasty’s end.⁴

The appearance of a field

In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution both the number of Western scholars whose primary research interests lay in this period of Iran’s history and those for whom the period is one of many areas of interest began an exponential increase and Western ‘Safavid Studies’, as a separ- ate and distinct field of scholarly endeavour, may be said to have come into existence.

 The reasons for this growth in interest are not the subject of the present volume, but the number of post-Revolution international conferences on various aspects of the period clearly attest to it.

The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the organisation of three, successively larger, international Round Tables, in 1988, 1993 and 1998, all held in Europe, at which scholars addressed issues in Safavid society and culture.⁵ 1998 also witnessed two other scholarly gatherings on the period⁶ and more recent symposia only portend continued expansion.⁷

In Iran, incidentally, the field has followed a similar course of expansion. Of the older generation of scholars such figures as Nasrallah Falsafi (d. 1981) and M. T. Danish-pazhuh (d. 1996), Abd al-Husayn Navai, whose compilations of key documents from the period are mostly out of print, M. I. Bastani-Parizi, Iraj Afshar, Ehsan Eshraqi, Ahmad Munzavi and Husayn Mirjafari are especially noteworthy. Collectively these scholars have already forgotten more than most others might hope to know.

 For at least a decade after 1978, engulfed by revolution and war, there was some question that Iran could produce a new generation of scholars to succeed, though not replace, such giants. The subsequent appearance of such figures as Rasul Jafariyan and Mansur Sefatgol should easily set minds to rest.⁸

Indeed, despite the turmoil of the period the 1980s also witnessed the commencement of the (re)publication in Iran of key Persian- and Arabic- language primary materials both by established religious and cultural organisations and a host of new ones together with the organisation of exhibitions and other research activities.

 The latter include, for example, an exhibition centre devoted to the painter Riza Abbasi (d. 1635) opened in Tehran in 1993, a centre for the study of the work of the philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) opened in Tehran in the early 1990s, a 1999 international conference on Mulla Sadra, a conference on Majlisi in Isfahan in 2000 – itself the occasion of the publication of several works on his life and the republication of a number of Majlisi’s writings – and a conference on ‘Isfahan and the Safavids’ organised at the Uni- versity of Isfahan in February 2002.

 As an indication of the growth of domestic interest in the period, some 140 abstracts were submitted for the latter.

More recently February 2004 witnessed a conference on Surab Tanukabuni (d. 1712) at the University of Isfahan in February 2004, and ‘The Safavids and the Course of Iranian History’ was organised at the University of Tabriz in October 2004. A conference on the career and contributions of Sultan Muhammad, the early Safavid-period artist, is set for Tabriz in May 2005.