The Buyids (or Buwayhids) share with the Samanids the palm for having brought to fruition the Iranian renaissance. They achieved Iranian political reascendancy by doing what Ya'qub ibn Layth had failed to do and what the Samanids would probably have considered illegal to do: they captured Baghdad and made the caliph their puppet. As far east as the city of Rayy, western, central, and southern Iran were once more ruled by an Iranian dynasty. At the peak of the Buyid empire, the Buyid base second to Baghdad became Fars, whence the Achaemenids and the Sasanids had sprung. Politically, the Buyids effected the Iranianization of the metropolitan government in Baghdad. Yet, by the very fact that they saw in the caliphate an institution of enough purely political significance to merit its dramatic takeover, they paradoxically left the caliphate's political role emphasized by what at first sight might seem to have been deepest humiliation. Spiritually, the caliphate held no appeal for the Buyids, who were Shi'ite. Politically and juridically, as the stabilizing factor over the Islamic peoples, the Buyids, in spite of their own religious affiliation, maintained the caliphate.
The homeland of the Buyids was Daylam, in the Gilan uplands in northern Iran. There, at the end of the 9th century, hardy valley dwellers had been stirred into martial activity by a number of factors, among them the rebel Rafi' ibn Harthama's attempt to penetrate the region, ostensibly with Samanid support. 'Amr ibn Layth had pursued the rebel into the region. Other factors had been the formation of Shi'ite principalities in the area and continued Samanid attempts to subjugate them. After the Tahirid collapse, the lack of stability in northern Iran south of the Elburz Mountains attracted many Daylamite mercenaries into the area on military adventures. Among them Makan ibn Kaki served the Samanids with his compatriots, the sons of Buyeh, and their allies the Ziyarids under Mardavij. Mardavij introduced the three Buyid brothers to the Iranian plateau, where he established an empire reaching as far south as Esfahan and Hamadan. He was murdered in 935, but his Ziyarid descendants sought Samanid protection. They adhered to Sunnism and maintained themselves in the region southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Ziyarid Qabus ibn Voshamgir (reigned 978–1012) built himself a tomb tower, the Gonbad-e Qabus (1006–07), which remains one of Iran's finest monuments. Also still extant is a work of his descendant 'Unsur al-Ma'ali Keyka'us (reigned 1049–90), the Qabus-nameh, a prose “Mirror for Princes,” which is a valuable document on the social and political life of the time.
Mardavij's expansionism south of the Elburz was taken up by his Buyid lieutenants: the eldest brother, 'Ali, consolidated power for himself in Esfahan and Fars and obtained the caliph's recognition; another brother, Hasan, occupied Rayy and Hamadan; and the youngest brother, Ahmad, took Kerman in the southeast and Khuzestan in the southwest. The caliphs al-Muttaqi and al-Mustakfi of the 940s were at the mercy of the Turkish slaves in their palace guard. The generals of the guard competed with each other for the office of amir al-umara' (commander in chief), who virtually ruled Iraq on behalf of the caliphs. When Ahmad gained Khuzestan, he was close to the scene of the amir al-umara' contests, which he chose to settle by himself. Ahmad entered Baghdad in 945 and assumed control of the caliphate's political functions. The caliph became a Buyid protégé and conferred on Ahmad the title of Mu'izz al-Dawlah. 'Ali became 'Imad al-Dawlah, and Hasan became Rukn al-Dawlah. All these titles implied that the Buyids were the upholders of the Muslim 'Abbasid dawlah, or state. In practice, however, the dawlah became a Daylamite state. It should be noted that the titles the caliph assigned the Buyids did not include the word din, or religion (as in Salah al-Din, “Righteousness of Religion”), which the caliph awarded exclusively to Sunnite officials, thus emphasizing the continuing independence of the caliphate as a religious institution.
Later Buyid titles increased in grandeur. Even the old Achaemenian title of shahanshah, king of kings, reappeared—a title Ahmad may have thought appropriate for an Iranian whose family reconquered Iran south of the Elburz Mountains. As suggested above, Buyid titles emphasized political and territorial sovereignty. This sovereignty reached its greatest extent under Rukn al-Dawlah's son, 'Adud al-Dawlah, who, after the deaths of his father and uncles, ruled an empire that comprised all of Persia west and south of Khorasan and included Iraq, with Baghdad at its heart. 'Adud al-Dawlah pursued peace negotiations with Byzantium, perhaps to free himself for his cherished project of an Egyptian campaign against the rival caliphate of the Shi'ite Fatimids, established in North Africa in 909, which had been relocated in Egypt in 969. 'Adud al-Dawlah's concern with the middle kingdom and its westward extension toward the Mediterranean increased his hostility toward the Fatimids, despite his own Shi'ite persuasion. In the north he drove the Ziyarids out of Tabaristan, which struck a blow against the Samanids' influence in the Caspian area.
'Adud al-Dawlah is celebrated for public works, of which the dam he built across the Kor River near Shiraz, the Band-e Amir (“Prince's Dam”), remains. He embellished the tomb of 'Ali at Al-Najaf in Iraq, where he himself was also buried. He built libraries, schools, and hospitals, and he was the patron of the Arabic poet al-Mutanabbi. Some Arabic verses of his own are still extant. Although 'Adud al-Dawlah was undoubtedly one of Iran's greatest rulers, his fratricidal wars, conducted with terrible intractability on his way to power, initiated Buyid decline. The descendants of the early Buyids reversed the mutual fidelity of the first three brothers. The power this fidelity had achieved and 'Adud al-Dawlah had made into a world force crumbled after his death in 983.
His base had been Shiraz, which he beautified and established as a cultural centre, but he died at Baghdad, where he chose to keep close to the caliph, whose daughter he married and from whom he took the title “the Crown of the Community” and the privilege, like the caliph, of having drums beaten at his gate on the calls to prayer. He also had his name mentioned after that of the caliph al-Ta'i' in the khutbah. The Buyids avoided the policy, which in all likelihood would have disrupted the empire, of favouring the Shi'ites. Instead, they offered consolations of an emotional sort to the Shi'ites in the form of public rites on the anniversaries of the Shi'ite martyrs, notably the one commemorating the massacre of 'Ali's son Husayn and his followers under the Umayyads at Karbala' in Iraq.
Although the Buyids were careful to avoid sectarian strife, family quarrels weakened them sufficiently for Mahmud of Ghazna to gain Rayy in 1029. But Mahmud (reigned 998–1030) went no farther: his dynasty paid great deference to the caliphate's legitimating power, and he made no bid to contest the Buyids' role as its protectors. Mahmud's agreement with the Samanids' Ilek Khanid successors, that the Oxus should be their mutual boundary, held, but south of the river the Ghaznavids had to contend with their own distant relatives, the Oguz Turks. Contrary to the sage counsel of Iranian ministers, Mahmud and his successor Mas'ud (reigned 1031–41) permitted these tribesmen to use Khorasanian grazing grounds, which they entered from north of the Oxus. United under descendants of an Oguz leader named Seljuq, between 1038 and 1040 these nomads drove the Ghaznavids out of northeastern Iran. The final encounter was at Dandanqan in 1040.
After their defeat by the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids, patrons of Islamic culture and letters, were deflected eastward into India, where Mahmud had already conducted successful raids. The raids took the form of jihad (or holy war), and the Ghaznavids carried Islam and Persian Muslim art to the Indian subcontinent. In Iran it was the Seljuqs' turn to create a new imperial synthesis with the 'Abbasid caliphs. Toghril Beg, the Seljuq sultan, entered Baghdad in 1055, and Buyid power was terminated, thus ending what Vladimir Minorsky, the great Iranologist, called the “Iranian intermezzo.”
Toghril I had proclaimed himself sultan at Neyshabur in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunnism, by which he gained the caliph's confidence and undermined the Buyid position in Baghdad. The Oguz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert's zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines. Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fatimid Isma'ili propaganda (Arabic da'wah) in the eastern Caliphate by means of an underground network of propagandists, or da'is, intent on undermining the Buyid regime, and by the threat posed by the Christian Crusaders.
The Buyids' usurpation of the caliph's secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Mawardi (died 1058). Al-Mawardi's treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Toghril's attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam's spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention. Al-Mawardi reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate; but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power. The Seljuqs' own political theorist al-Ghazali (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter's presence guaranteed the former's capacity to defend and extend Islam.
The caliph al-Qa'im (reigned 1031–75) replaced the last Buyid's name, al-Malik al-Rahim, in the khutbah and on the coins with that of Toghril Beg; and, after protracted negotiation ensuring restoration of the caliph's dignity after Shi'ite subjugation, Toghril entered Baghdad in December 1055. The caliph enthroned him and married a Seljuq princess. After Toghril had campaigned successfully as far as Syria, he was given the title of “king of the east and west.” The new situation was justified by the theory that existing practice was legal whereby a new caliph could be instituted by the sultan, who possessed effective power and sovereignty, but that thereafter the sultan owed the caliph allegiance because only so long as the caliph-imam's juridical faculties were recognized could government be valid.
Toghril Beg died in 1063. His heir, Alp-Arslan, was succeeded by Malik-Shah in 1072, and the latter's death in 1092 led to succession disputes out of which Berk-Yaruq emerged triumphant to reign until 1105. After a brief reign, Malik-Shah II was succeeded by Muhammad I (reigned 1105–18). The last “Great Seljuq” was Sanjar (1118–57), who had earlier been governor of Khorasan.
Alp-Arslan had nearly annihilated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to those dependent tribesmen of the Seljuqs of whom Iran and the world were to hear more in the period of Ottoman power. Transoxania was subdued, the Christians in the Caucasus chastised, and the Fatimids expelled from Syria. An empire was for a short time achieved whose extent and stability enabled Alp-Arslan's and Malik-Shah's great minister, Nizam al-Mulk (died 1092), to pay a ferryman on the Oxus River with a draft cashable in Damascus.
Building and maintaining such a great empire necessitated a military regime and a vast war machine. The price to be paid later was oppression by military commanders and their units, set free to compete with each other and harry the land after the machine fell out of the grasp of powerful sultans. The soldiers had been remunerated by grants of land called iqta's, which were originally usufructuary but developed over time into hereditary properties. The grants later became nuclei out of which petty principalities grew with the decline of the central power. The cultivators were left at the mercy of military overlords in possession of the soil.
The great minister Nizam al-Mulk was typical of the Iranian bureaucracy, which, in an area prone to invasion, was often called on to attempt to cushion the impact of the brute military force of nomadic invaders and contain it within the bounds of administrative, economic, and cultural feasibility. For his Turkish masters he wrote the Seyasat-nameh (“Book of Government”), in which he urged the regulation of royal court procedures in line with Samanid models and the restriction of the arrogance and cupidity of the military fief holders. His book is the measure of the Seljuqs' failure to provide enduring stability and equitable government. Had they done so, such a work would have been unnecessary.
Of one disruptive force Nizam al-Mulk's book is dramatically descriptive, in terms betraying near panic. The Seljuqs failed to nip in the bud the power of the Isma'iliyyah, originally spread throughout the eastern Islamic world by clandestine Fatimid da'is—many of whose cells later split from the mainstream of events in Egypt to become an independent organization within the Seljuq empire. This organization exercised power by terrorism, and the name given its adherents by Europeans in the Middle Ages, Assassins (from hashishi, denoting a consumer of hashish), has become a common noun in English. Isma'ili doctrine consisted of an esoteric system combining extremist (Arabic ghulat) Shi'ite beliefs and a complex theology heavily permeated by the form and content of Hellenistic philosophy. Isma'iliyyah recognized only 7 of the imams in descent from 'Ali and Fatimah, whereas the Ithna 'Ashari Shi'ism—that followed by the Buyids and the dominant sect of modern Iran—recognized 12.
The movement in Iran crystallized under the leadership of Hasan-e Sabbah, who had been trained in Fatimid Egypt. In 1090 Hasan gained the castle of Alamut in the Elburz Mountains, and the order's principal cells were thereafter situated, so far as possible, in similar impregnable mountain strongholds. From these centres, fida'is, or devotees ready to sacrifice their lives, issued forth and permeated society, spreading their mission as peddlers and itinerant tailors and gaining influence among the urban artisan and weaving classes. They were also often able to win the confidence of many highly placed women and children, whom they could please with novelties of dress or toys. Nizam al-Mulk himself was assassinated by one of the fida'is, but it is possible that this was done with the connivance of one of Malik-Shah's wives, whose son the vizier did not support for the succession.
The Isma'iliyyah were able to puncture Seljuq power but not destroy it. In the end the Seljuq empire collapsed where it had begun—in Khorasan, where Sultan Sanjar ultimately failed to control Turkmen tribes related to him by blood. Sanjar could not rely on military commanders his family had raised to high posts and had rewarded with land and provincial powers. The tribesmen refused to be coerced into paying taxes. In 1153 they captured the old sultan and, although allowing him all the respect
Atsiz was the military leader who, after Sultan Sanjar's capture in 1153, succeeded in supplanting Seljuq power in northeastern Iran. His ancestor, Anustegin, had been keeper of Malik-Shah's kitchen utensils and had been rewarded with the governorship of Khwarezm on the Oxus, where he founded the Khwarezm-Shah dynasty (c. 1077–1231). Regions elsewhere in Iran, on the passing of Seljuq supremacy, became independent under atabegs, who were originally proxy fathers and tutors sent with young Seljuq princes when these were deputed to govern provinces. At first the atabegs took power in the names of Seljuq puppets. When this fiction lapsed, atabeg dynasties such as the Eldegüzids of Azerbaijan (c. 1137–1225) and Salghurids of Fars (c. 1148–1270) split Iran into independent rival principalities.
The Salghurid court in Shiraz especially fostered the arts, as parvenu, competitive courts are wont to do. The poet Sa'di (died 1292) was a contemporary in Shiraz of the Salghurid atabeg Abu Bakr ibn Sa'd ibn Zangi (reigned 1231–60), whom he mentions by name in his Bustan (“The Orchard”), a book of ethics in verse. Abu Bakr's father, Sa'd, for whom Sa'di took his pen name, conferred great prosperity on Shiraz.
Sa'd ibn Zangi came to terms with the Khwarezm-Shahs. Their power in Transoxania was secured by acceptance of tributary status to the non-Muslim Karakitai empire of Central Asia. They endeavoured to emulate the Seljuqs by following an expansionist policy in Iran south of the Oxus. Sa'd ibn Zangi, in his relations with the Khwarezm-Shah, set the pattern his successor Abu Bakr followed later. These atabegs saved Fars from outright invasion by northern military powers by paying heavy tribute. This tribute was the price of Shiraz's remaining the peaceful haven of the arts in which Sa'di and after him Hafez (died 1390) flourished, to continue the Persian literary tradition begun under the Samanids and continued under both the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs.
The collapse of the Karakitai empire northeast of the Oxus was partly accelerated by the unsuccessful bid of Khwarezm-Shah 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad (reigned 1200–20) to win Muslim approval while releasing himself from the Khwarezm-Shahs' humiliating tributary status to an infidel power. But the coup de grâce to the Karakitai empire was delivered by its own vassal from the east, the Mongol leader Küchlüg Khan, who from 1211 onward was to be a direct opponent of the Khwarezm-Shahs in Central Asia. The Karakitai had been defeated, but the situation on the Khwarezm-Shah's eastern border had worsened.
Meanwhile, Sultan 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad quarreled with the caliph; he set up an anticaliph of his own and further antagonized his Muslim subjects, who were unremittingly suspicious of a regime once subject to the Karakitai infidels and whose Kipchak mercenary militia and brutal commanders brought cruelty and desolation wherever they marched. 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad was unable to control his army leaders, who had tribal connections with such influential people at court as his own mother. The post-Karakitai wars between him and Küchlüg Khan damaged the safety of the Central Asian trade arteries from China to the West. The great Mongol leader Genghis Khan took Beijing in 1215 and, as lord of China, was concerned with Chinese trade outlets. The situation between Küchlüg and the Khwarezm-Shah sultan afforded scope as well as a pretext for the Mongols' westward advance, if only to restore the flow of trade.
Misunderstanding of how essentially fragile Sultan 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad Khwarezm-Shah's apparently imposing empire was, its distance away from the Mongols' eastern homelands, and the strangeness of new terrain all doubtless induced fear in the Mongols, and this might partly account for the terrible events with which Genghis Khan's name has ever since been associated. The terror his invasion brought must also be ascribed to his quest for vengeance. Genghis Khan's first two missions to Khwarezm had been massacred; but the place of commercial motives in the Mongol's decision to march to the west is indicated by the fact that the first was a trade mission. The massacre and robbery of this mission at Utrar by one of 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad's governors before it reached the capital made Genghis single out Utrar for especially savage treatment when the murder of his second, purely diplomatic, mission left him no alternative but war.
His guides were Muslim merchants from Transoxania. They had to witness one of the worst catastrophes of history. During 1220–21 Bukhara, Samarkand, Herat, Tus, and Neyshabur were razed, and the whole populations were slaughtered. The Khwarezm-Shah fled, to die on an island off the Caspian coast. His son Jalal al-Din survived until murdered in Kurdistan in 1231. He had eluded Genghis Khan on the Indus River, across which his horse swam, enabling him to escape to India. He returned to attempt restoring the Khwarezmian empire over Iran. However, he failed to unite the Iranian regions, even though Genghis Khan had withdrawn to Mongolia, where he died in August 1227. Iran was left divided, with Mongol agents remaining in some districts and local adventurers profiting from the lack of order in others.
A second Mongol invasion began when Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü Khan crossed the Oxus in 1256 and destroyed the Assassin fortress at Alamut. With the disintegration of the Seljuq empire, the Caliphate had reasserted control in the area around Baghdad and in southwestern Iran. In 1258 Hülegü besieged Baghdad, where divided counsels prevented the city's salvation. Al-Musta'sim, the last 'Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, was trampled to death by mounted troops (in the style of Mongol royal executions), and eastern Islam fell to pagan rulers.
Hülegü hoped to consolidate Mongol rule over western Asia and to extend the Mongol empire as far as the Mediterranean, an empire that would span the Earth from China to the Levant. Hülegü made Iran his base, but the Mamluks of Egypt (1250–1517) prevented him and his successors from achieving their great imperial goal, by decisively defeating a Mongol army at 'Ayn Jalut in 1260. Instead, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, or “deputy khans” to the great khan in China, was established in Iran to attempt repair of the damage of the first Mongol invasion. The injuries Iran had suffered went deep, but it would be unfair to attribute them all to Ghengis Khan's invasion, itself the climax to a long period of social and political disarray under the Khwarezm-Shahs and dating from the decline of the Seljuqs.
The Il-Khanid dynasty made Azerbaijan its centre and established Tabriz as its first capital until Soltaniyeh was built early in the 14th century. At first, repair and readjustment of a stricken society were complicated by the collapse of law. The caliphate, as the symbol of Muslim legality, had been eroded by 'Ala' al-Din Muhammad and by its own withdrawal into a temporal state in Iraq and the Tigris-Euphrates estuary region. But it had retained enough vitality for Sultan Muhammad's action in setting up an anticaliph to have alienated influential members of his subject people. After 1258 it was gone altogether, while Hülegü Khan showed considerable religious eclecticism and had, in any event, the yasa, or tribal law, of Genghis Khan to apply as the law of the Mongol state, in opposition to, or side by side with, the Shari'ah, the law of Islam.
The Il-Khans' religious toleration released Christians and Jews from their restrictions under the Islamic regime. Fresh talent thus became available, but competition for new favours marred what good effects this release might have had on interfaith relations. It took time for Iranian administrators to resume their normal role after the invasion and to restore some semblance of administrative order and stability. Their process was impeded by the paganism of the new conquerors as well as by jostling for influence among classes of the conquered, not in this instance exclusively Muslim. At the same time, a shattered agrarian economy was burdened by heavy taxes, those sanctioned by the Shari'ah being added to by those the yasa provided for, so that the pressure of exploitation was increased by Mongol tax innovations as well as by the invaders' cupidity.
The pressure was increased beyond the economy's endurance: the Il-Khanid government ran into fiscal difficulties. An experiment with paper currency, modeled on the Chinese money, failed under Gaykhatu (reigned 1291–95). Gaykhatu was followed briefly by Baydu (died 1295), who was supplanted by the greatest of the Il-Khans, Mahmud Ghazan (1295–1304). Ghazan abandoned Buddhism—the faith in which his grandfather Abagha, Hülegü's successor (1265–82), had reared him—and adopted Islam. One of his chief ministers was also his biographer, Rashid al-Din, of Jewish descent. He seems deliberately to have striven to present Ghazan, whom he styles the “emperor of Islam” (padshah-e eslam), as a ruler who combined the qualities and functions of both the former caliphs and ancient Iranian “great kings.”
Ghazan made strenuous efforts to regulate taxes, encourage industry, bring wasteland into cultivation, and curb the abuses and arrogance of the military and official classes. Facilities for domestic and foreign merchants were furnished. Buildings were constructed and irrigation channels dug. Medicinal and fruit-bearing plants were imported and the cultivation of indigenous ones encouraged. Observatories were built and improved—a sure indication of concern with agricultural improvement, for seasonal planning required accurate calendars. He fostered Muslim sentiment by showing consideration for the sayyids, who claimed descent from the Prophet's family, and it seems probable that he wished to eradicate or overlay Shi'ite-Sunnite sectarian divisiveness, for Ghazan's Islam appears to have been designed to appeal equally to both persuasions. Any slight bias in favour of the Shi'ites might be attributed to a desire to capture the emotions and imagination of many of the humble people who had reacted against the Seljuqs' zeal for Sunnism and craved a teaching that included millennial overtones. Shi'ism had been liberated by the fall of the 'Abbasid Caliphate, and its belief in the reappearance of the 12th imam, who was to inaugurate peace and justice in the world, satisfied this popular craving for religious solace.
Ghazan's work was carried on, but less successfully, by his successor Öljeitü (1304–16). Between 1317 and 1335, though he finally relinquished the expensive campaigns against Egypt for the opening to the Mediterranean, Abu Sa'id was unable to keep the Il-Khanid regime consolidated, and it fell apart on his death. Ghazan's brilliant reign survives only in the pages of his historian, Rashid al-Din. Wars against Egypt and their own Mongol kinsmen in Asia had in fact hampered the Il-Khans in accomplishing a satisfactory reintegration of an Iranian polity.
As the atabegs had done after the Seljuqs, Il-Khanid military emirs began to establish themselves as independent regional potentates after 1335. At first, two of them, formerly military chiefs in the Il-Khans' service, competed for power in western Iran, ostensibly acting on behalf of rival Il-Khanid puppet princes. Hasan Küchük (the Small) of the Chupanids was eventually defeated by Hasan Buzurg (the Tall) of the Jalayirids, who set up the Jalayirid dynasty over Iraq, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan; it lasted from 1336 to 1432. In Fars, Il-Khanid agents, the Injuids, after a spell of power during which Abu Ishaq Inju had been the poet Hafez's patron, were ousted by Abu Sa'id's governor of Yazd, Mubariz al-Din Muzaffar. Thus in 1353 Shiraz became the Muzaffarid dynasty's capital, which it remained until conquest by Timur in 1393.
Timur (Tamerlane) claimed descent from Genghis Khan's family. The disturbed conditions in Mongol Transoxania gave this son of a minor government agent in the town of Kesh the chance to build up a kingdom in Central Asia in the name of the Chagatai Khans, whom he eventually supplanted. He entered Iran in 1380 and in 1393 reduced the Jalayirids after taking their capital, Baghdad. In 1402 he captured the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, near Ankara. He conquered Syria and then turned his attention to campaigns far to the east of his tumultuously acquired and ill-cemented empire; he died in 1405 on an expedition to China. Timur left an awesome name and an ambiguous record of flights of curiosity into the realms of unorthodox religious beliefs, history, and every kind of inquiry concerning lands and peoples. He showed interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that varied from a scholastic study of ascetic techniques for mastering the carnal self to complete abandonment of all forms of authority in the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Sufism had increased in the disturbed post-Seljuq era as both the consolation and the refuge of desperate people. In Sufism Timur may have hoped to find popular leaders whom he could use for his own purposes. His encounters with such keepers of the consciences of harried, exploited, and ill-treated Iranians proved that they knew him perhaps better than he knew himself. Whatever his motives may have been, the reverse of stability was his legacy to Iran. His division of his ill-assimilated conquests among his sons served to ensure that an integrated Timurid empire would never be achieved.
The nearest a Timurid state came to being an integrated Iranian empire was under Timur's son Shah Rokh (reigned 1405–47), who endeavoured to weld Azerbaijan and western Persia to Khorasan and eastern Persia to form a united Timurid state for a short and troubled period. He succeeded only in loosely controlling western and southern Iran from his beautiful capital at Herat. Azerbaijan demanded three major military expeditions from this pacific sovereign and even so could not long be held. He made Herat the seat of a splendid culture, the atelier of great miniature painters (Behzad notable among them), and the home of a revival of Persian poetry, letters, and philosophy. This revival was not unconnected with an effort to claim for an Iranian centre once more the palm of leadership in the propagation of Sunnite ideology: Herat sent copies of Sunnite canonical works on request to Egypt. The reaction, in Shi'ism's ultimate victory under the Safavid shahs of Persia, was, however, already being prepared.
Western Iran was dominated by the Kara Koyunlu, the “Black Sheep” Turkmen. In Azerbaijan they had supplanted their former masters, the Jalayirids. Timur had put these Kara Koyunlu to flight, but in 1406 they regained their capital, Tabriz. On Shah Rokh's death, Jahan Shah (reigned c. 1438–67) extended Kara Koyunlu rule out of the northwest deeper into Iran at the Timurids' expense. The Timurids relied on their old allies, the Kara Koyunlu's rival Turkmen of the Ak Koyunlu, or “White Sheep,” clans, who had long been established at Diyarbakir in Turkey. The White Sheep acted as a curb on the Black Sheep, whose Jahan Shah was defeated by the Ak Koyunlu Uzun Hasan by the end of 1467.
Uzun Hasan (1453–78) achieved a short-lived Iranian empire and even briefly deprived the Timurids of Herat. He was, however, confronted by a new power in Asia Minor—the Ottoman Turks. His relationship with the Christian emperor at Trebizond (Trabzon) through his Byzantine wife, Despina, involved Uzun Hasan in attempts to shield Trebizond from the ineluctable Ottoman advance. The Ottomans crushingly defeated him in 1473. Under his son Ya'qub (reigned 1478–90), the Ak Koyunlu state was subjected to fiscal reforms associated with a government-sponsored effort to reapply rigorous purist principles of Sunnite Islamic rules for revenue collection. Ya'qub attempted to purge the state of taxes introduced under the Mongols and not sanctioned by the Muslim canon. But the inquiries made by the Sunnite religious authorities antagonized the vested interests, damaged the popularity of the Ak Koyunlu regime, and discredited Sunnite fanaticism.
This attempt to revive strict Sunnite religious values through revenue reform or to effect the latter under the guise of religion no doubt gave impetus to the spread of Safavid Shi'ite propaganda. Another factor must have been related to the same general economic decline that made Sultan Ya'qub's fiscal reforms necessary in the first place. Sheikh Haydar led a movement that had begun as a Sufi order under his ancestor Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil (1253–1334). This order may be considered to have originally represented a puritanical, but not legalistically so, reaction against the sullying of Islam, the staining of Muslim lands, by the Mongol infidels. What began as a spiritual, otherworldly reaction against irreligion and the betrayal of spiritual aspirations developed into a manifestation of the Shi'ite quest for dominion over a Muslim polity. By the 15th century, the Safavid movement could draw on both the mystical emotional force of Sufism and the Shi'ite appeal to the oppressed populace to gain a large number of dedicated adherents. Sheikh Haydar inured his numerous followers to warfare by leading them on expeditions from Ardabil against Christian enclaves in the nearby Caucasus. He was killed on one of these campaigns. His son Isma'il was to avenge his death and lead his devoted army to a conquest of Iran whereby Iran gained a great dynasty, a Shi'ite regime, and in most essentials its shape as a modern nation-state.
Gone were the days of rule by converted and zealous Sunnite Turks or by Mongols of ambiguous spiritual allegiance. Iran's defilement was removed by the swelling tide of Shi'ism, which bore Isma'il to the throne his family was to occupy without interruption until 1722, in one of the greatest epochs of Iranian history.
In 1501 Isma'il I (reigned 1501–24) supplanted the Ak Koyunlu in Azerbaijan. Within a decade he gained supremacy over most of Iran as a ruler his followers regarded as divinely entitled to sovereignty. The Safavids claimed descent—on grounds that modern research has shown to be dubious—from the Shi'ite imams. Muslims in Iran, therefore, could regard themselves as having found a legitimate imam-ruler, who, as a descendant of 'Ali, required no caliph to legitimate his position. Rather, Safavid political legitimacy was based on the religious order's mixture of Sufi ecstaticism and Shi'ite extremism (Arabic ghulu), neither of which was the dusty scholasticism of the Sunnite or Shi'ite legal schools. The dynasty's military success was based both on Isma'il's skill as a leader and on the conversion of a number of Turkmen tribes—who came to be known as the Kizilbash (Turkish: “Red Heads”) for the 12-folded red caps these tribesmen wore, representing their belief in the 12 imams—to this emotionally powerful Sufi-Shi'ite syncretism. The Kizilbash became the backbone of the Safavid military effort, and their virtual deification of Isma'il contributed greatly to his swift military conquest of Iran. In later years, though, extremist (ghulat) zeal and its chiliastic fervour began to undermine the orderly administration of the Safavid state. Isma'il's attempt to spread Shi'ite propaganda among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia prompted a conflict with the Sunnite Ottoman Empire. Following Iran's defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, Safavid expansion slowed, and a process of consolidation began in which Isma'il sought to quell the more extreme expressions of faith among his followers. Such actions were largely preempted, however, by Isma'il's death in 1524 at the age of 36.
The new Iranian empire lacked the resources that had been available to the caliphs of Baghdad in former times through their dominion over Central Asia and the West: Asia Minor and Transoxania were gone, and the rise of maritime trade in the West was detrimental to a country whose wealth had depended greatly on its position on important east-west overland trade routes. The rise of the Ottomans impeded Iranian westward advances and contested with the Safavids' control over both the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Years of warfare with the Ottomans imposed a heavy drain on the Safavids' resources. The Ottomans threatened Azerbaijan itself. Finally, in 1639 the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin (also called the Treaty of Zuhab) gave Yerevan in the southern Caucasus to Iran and Baghdad and all of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans.
The Masjed-e Emam (Imam Mosque) in Esfahan, Iran.
Ray Manley/Shostal
The Safavids were still faced with the problem of making their empire pay. The silk trade, over which the government held a monopoly, was a primary source of revenue. Isma'il's successor, Tahmasp I (reigned 1524–76), encouraged carpet weaving on the scale of a state industry. 'Abbas I (reigned 1588–1629) established trade contacts directly with Europe, but Iran's remoteness from Europe, behind the imposing Ottoman screen, made maintaining and promoting these contacts difficult and sporadic. 'Abbas also transplanted a colony of industrious and commercially astute Armenians from Jolfa in Azerbaijan to a new Jolfa adjacent to Esfahan, the city he developed and adorned as his capital. The Safavids had earlier moved their capital from the vulnerable Tabriz to Qazvin. After eliminating the Uzbek menace from east of the Caspian Sea in 1598–99, 'Abbas could move his capital south to Esfahan, more centrally placed than Qazvin for control over the whole country and for communication with the trade outlets of the Persian Gulf. 'Abbas engaged English help to oust the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in 1622. He also strove to lodge Safavid power strongly in Khorasan. There, at Mashhad, he developed the shrine of 'Ali al-Rida, the eighth Shi'ite imam, as a pilgrimage centre to rival Shi'ite holy places in Mesopotamia, where visiting pilgrims took currency out of Safavid and into Ottoman territory.
Under 'Abbas, Iran prospered. The monarch continued the policy begun under his predecessors of eradicating the old Sufi bands and ghulat extremists whose support had been crucial in building the state. The Kizilbash were replaced by a standing army of slave soldiers loyal only to the shah, who were trained and equipped on European lines with the advice of the English adventurer Robert Sherley. Sherley was versed in artillery tactics and, accompanied by a party of cannon founders, reached Qazvin with his brother Anthony in 1598. The bureaucracy, too, was carefully reorganized, but the seeds of the sovereignty's weakness lay in the royal house itself, which lacked an established system of inheritance by primogeniture. A reigning shah's nearest and most acute objects of suspicion were his own sons. Among them, brother plotted against brother over who should succeed on their father's death. Intriguers, ambitious for influence in a subsequent reign, supported one prince against another. 'Abbas did not adopt the Ottoman sultans' practice of eliminating royal males by murder (as a child he had been within a hair's breadth of being a victim of such a policy). Instead, he instituted the practice of immuring infant princes in palace gardens away from the promptings of intrigue and the world at large. As a result, his successors tended to be indecisive men, easily dominated by powerful dignitaries among the Shi'ite 'ulama'—whom the shahs themselves had urged to move in large numbers from the shrine cities of Iraq in an attempt to bolster Safavid legitimacy as an orthodox Shi'ite dynasty.
Husayn I (reigned 1694–1722) was of a pious temperament and was especially influenced by the Shi'ite divines, whose conflicting advice, added to his own procrastination, sealed the sudden and unexpected fate of the Safavid empire. One Mahmud, a former Safavid vassal in Afghanistan, captured Esfahan and murdered Husayn in his cell in the beautiful madrasah (religious school) built in his mother's name.
The Afghan interlude was disastrous for Iran. In 1723 the Ottomans, partly to secure more territory and partly to forestall Russian aspirations in the Caucasus, took advantage of the disintegration of the Safavid realm and invaded from the west, ravaging western Persia. Nadr, an Afsharid Turkmen from northern Khorasan, was eventually able to reunite Iran, a process he began on behalf of the Safavid prince Tahmasp II (reigned 1722–32), who had escaped the Afghans. After Nadr had cleared the country of Afghans, Tahmasp made him governor of a large area of eastern Iran.
As in the case of the early Sunnite caliphate, Safavid rule had been based originally on both political and religious legitimacy, with the shah being both king and divine representative. With the later erosion of Safavid central political authority in the mid-17th century, the power of the Shi'ite clergy in civil affairs—as judges, administrators, and court functionaries—began to grow, in a way unprecedented in Shi'ite history. Likewise, the 'ulama' began to take a more active role in agitating against Sufism and other forms of popular religion, which remained strong in Iran, and in enforcing a more scholarly type of Shi'ism among the masses. The development of the ta'ziyyah—a passion play commemorating the martyrdom of al-Husayn and his family—and the practice of visits to the shrines and tombs of local Shi'ite leaders began during this period, largely at the prompting of the Shi'ite clergy.
These activities coincided with an escalated debate between Shi'ite scholars in Iran and Iraq over the role played by the clergy in interpreting Islamic precepts. One faction felt that the only sound source of legal interpretation was the direct teachings of the 12 infallible imams, in the form of their written and oral testaments (Arabic akhbar, hence the name of the sect: the Akhbariyyah). Their opponents, known as the Usuliyyah, held that a number of fundamental sources (usul) should be consulted but that the final source for legal conclusions rested in the reasoned judgment of a qualified scholar, a mujtahid. The eventual victory of the Usuliyyah in this debate during the turbulent years at the end of the Safavid empire was to have resounding effects on both the shape of Shi'ism and the course of Iranian history. The study of legal theory (fiqh), the purview of the mujtahids, became the primary field of scholarship in the Shi'ite world, and the rise of the mujtahids as a distinctive body signaled the development of a politically conscious and influential religious class not previously seen in Islamic history.
This rising legalism also facilitated the implementation of a theory that was first voiced in the mid-16th century by the scholars 'Ali al-Karaki and Zayn al-Din al-'Amili, which called for the clergy to act as a general representative (na'ib al-'amm) of the Hidden Imam during his absence, performing such duties as administering the poor tax (zakat) and income tax (khums, “one-fifth”), leading prayer, and running Shari'ah courts. A strong Safavid state and the presence of influential Akhbari scholars at first managed to suppress the execution of these ideas, but the complete collapse of central authority in Iran during the 18th century accelerated the already considerable involvement of the clerisy in state and civil affairs, a trend that would continue until modern times.
Nadir Shah, painting by an unknown artist, c. 1740; in the Victoria and Albert …
Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Nadr later dethroned Tahmasp II in favour of the latter's son, the more pliant 'Abbas III. His successful military exploits, however, which included victories over rebels in the Caucasus, made it feasible for this stern warrior himself to be proclaimed monarch—as Nadir Shah—in 1736. He attempted to mollify Persian-Ottoman hostility by establishing in Iran a less aggressive form of Shi'ism, which would be less offensive to Ottoman sensibilities; but this experiment did not take root. Nadir Shah's need for money drove him to embark on his celebrated Indian campaign in 1738–39. His capture of Delhi and of the Mughal emperor's treasure gave Nadir booty in such quantities that he was able to exempt Iran from taxes for three years. His Indian expedition temporarily solved the problem of how to make his empire financially viable.
