The Safavid World

Rudi Matthee, Rudi Matthee, Rudi Matthee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501–1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources.

In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context.

Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.

PART 1

FOUNDATIONS

Chapter One

The emergence of the Safavids as a mystical order and their subsequent rise to power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer

Introduction

The story of how the Safaviyya family metamorphosed from a mystical order into a ruling state and its subsequent rise to power in early modern Iran has been the subject of sustained interest among historians. Pro-Safavid chronicles and their followers, up until the twentieth century, depicted the Safaviyya order as a Shi‘i movement from its inception in an attempt to portray Twelver Shi‘i identity as the core of Iranian civilization(s) in the Islamic era. This attitude stands in contrast to mainstream modern scholarship,¹ which defines the Shi‘itization of the order as a sudden, pragmatic change in the mid-fifteenth century under the tenure of Sheykh Joneyd. In an attempt to repudiate the idea of a long history of Shi‘ism in Iran, both premodern anti-Safavid scholarship and its modern-day exponents, who have dominated the field since the 1930s, developed a new yet still problematic approach, claiming that the founder and the early leaders of the order were staunch Sunnis who rigorously adhered to the Shāfi‘i mazhab, or school of Islamic law, until Sheykh Joneyd (d. 1460), as the head of the order, abruptly converted to Shi‘i Islam. Thus, prominent historians of the Aqqoyunlu, Ottoman and modern Turkish states have focused on specific parts of primary sources that justify their efforts to delegitimize the Shi‘i ideology of the Safavids, as well as post-Safavid Iranian governments, by stressing the alleged fervent Sunni background of the Safaviyya family. Both of these arguments have repeatedly been articulated to serve later pro- and anti-Safavid political and/or religious agendas. For instance, from the pro-Safavid perspective, the consolidation of Shi‘i power in greater Iran created a long history of Shi‘ism for the ruling family; by the same token, religious discrepancies between the earlier and later leaders of the Safaviyya family facilitated the attempts of anti-Safavid authors to discredit the increasing power of the Shi‘i Safavids, as well as their successors in the region.²

While Sheykh Joneyd’s reign signifies a turning point in the transformation of the order, it was certainly far from being so sharp or incontestable. An examination of pro- and anti-Safavid chronicles, as well as various European accounts, points to a religiously and culturally syncretistic milieu in northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia during the fourteenth and much of the fifteenth centuries, where confessional identities at the public level were not as well defined as they would be in the following centuries.³ Depicting a clear bifurcation between ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shi‘i’ during this period not only overlooks the period-specific sociopolitical and religious dynamics of the region but also reinforces an essentialist stance concerning the origins and rise of the Safaviyya order.⁴ First of all, one should mention that the strict ‘border’ between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam in the region was in fact a latter-day product of the conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids. In contrast, the coexistence of various religious beliefs and a relative reciprocal tolerance was one of the main features of the late medieval/early modern era before and during the advent of the Safaviyya order and its transformation into a significant religious/political actor in the region. Therefore, claiming a deep-rooted Sunni background for the Safaviyya order is as dubious as attributing to it a long Shi‘i past.

In other words, as opposed to these politically driven explanations and anachronistic distortions, the division between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam in late medieval/early modern Iran and Anatolia was not definitive and binary though the schism ultimately became the defining characteristic of the religious atmosphere by the late fifteenth century. Apart from a few exceptions, Turkish and Iranian historians, most of whom are the products of a rigidly sectarian worldview, have placed the founders of the order within the borders of an uncompromising mazhab, either Sunni or Shi‘i, while depicting a clear-cut transformation from a mystical order into a military movement that happened ‘overnight’.⁵ However, the transformation of the Safaviyya order represented a gradual crystallization of a nonsectarian mystical order into a Shi‘i political entity as a product of specific sociopolitical and religious dynamics. A new approach is, therefore, needed to connect this era to recent studies that emphasize continuities instead of ruptures in the religiosity(ies) of the late medieval/early modern Islamic period.⁶ Examining the origins of the Safaviyya order, as well as its leaders up until the sixteenth century, from this angle is crucial to understanding not only the contemporary sociopolitical and religious characteristics of the era and their influence on this process but also the spread of Safaviyya doctrine among neighboring Anatolians ‘like wildfire’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Sheykh Safi Al-Din (d. 1334). Establishment of the order, family lineage and religious background

The exact date of the establishment of the Safaviyya order and the circumstances surrounding its foundation are difficult to pinpoint due to the scarcity of written material from this period and the distorted border between the historical facts and the pietistic legends of later pro- and anti-Safavid ideologists. With the exception of Safvat al-Safā, written by Ebn Bazzāz (d. 1391/2), a devout follower of the order, around 1356/7, there are no surviving sources composed by either the sheykhs or the followers of the order during its infancy.⁷ Safavid chronicles authored during or after Shāh Esmā‘il’s reign (1499–1524), collectively using Safvat al-Safā as their main reference point,⁸ praise Sheykh Safi, the eponymous founder of the order, as a respected Shi‘i sayyed, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, through his daughter Fatima and her husband ‘Ali b. Tāleb (d. 661), a cousin of Mohammad.⁹ This connection to the Prophet’s family, according to the chroniclers, was the only true sign of being the rightful ruler of the umma, or the Muslim community.¹⁰ Several court historians of the Safavid Empire even extended this genealogy to Adam, who, according to the creation myths of all Abrahamic religions, was the first man.¹¹

The sayyedhood of the Safaviyya family, as well as its deep-rooted and narrowly defined Shi‘i background, however, was a carefully tailored and monitored post facto fabrication of the original work of Ebn Bazzāz, which depicted a distinctly different picture regarding Sheykh Safi and his religious and genealogical attributes. A meticulous examination of the few available contemporary sources reveals that Sheykh Safi was a prime example of what John E. Woods calls ‘confessional ambiguity’.¹² As a Sufi dervish with no clear (or conflicting) sectarian indications, he incorporated both Sunni and Shi‘i tenets into his interpretation of Islam.

Sheykh Safi’s confessionally fluid and heterogeneous doctrine as the founder of the order quite likely attracted both Sunni and Shi‘i sympathizers, as well as nonsectarian Sufis, to become his followers.¹³ The earlier versions of the Safvat al-Safā, as well as various other contemporary sources, describe the order’s congregation as a ‘nonsectarian’ community rather than a shari‘a-centered assembly defined by strict sectarian beliefs and values. For instance, Hamadāni, a self-claimed devotee of Sheykh Safi, does not use either Sunni or Shi‘i descriptive words to explain his love and devotion to his master and the order.¹⁴ Interestingly, mainstream historians have interpreted Hamadāni’s self-consciously nonsectarian descriptions of Sheykh Safi and his order as indicative of the Sunni nature of the movement, rather than a sign of potential confessional plurality and/or of the dynamism of the era. In contrast, pro-Shi‘i scholars have explained this explanation as a common Shi‘i practice of the time, referred to as taqiyya, or religious dissimulation under the hostile rule.

Furthermore, the key Mongol policy of non-interference with the religious landscape also contributed to this picture where new religious authorities and centers rose to prominence in Iran. Contemporary sources, particularly biographical dictionaries, written in this new era, often mention the increased relevance of the Twelver Shi‘i community in greater Syria, Iran, and Anatolia.¹⁵ For instance, the Ilkhānid Soltan Mohammad Khodābanda, also known as Öljeytu (d. 1316), established Twelver Shi‘ism as the state religion, albeit for a brief period, under the heavy influence of al-Motahhar al-Helli (d. 1324), a prominent late thirteenth- early fourteenth-century Twelver Shi‘i scholar.¹⁶ M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Note on transliteration and dates
• Introduction
• Part 1 Foundations
• Part 2 History and Historiography
• Part 3 Safavid Society
• Part 4 Religious Life
• Part 5 Science, Art and Architecture
• Part 6 Safavid Iran and the World
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index