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Iran
Index
Part of the Porch of Xeres at Persepolis
Courtesy LaVerle Berry
The Safavids, who came to power in 1501, were leaders of a
militant Sufi order. They traced their ancestry to Shaykh Safi ad
Din (died circa 1334), the founder of their order, who claimed
descent from Shia Islam's Seventh Imam, Musa al Kazim. From their
home base in Ardabil, they recruited followers among the Turkoman
tribesmen of Anatolia and forged them into an effective fighting
force and an instrument for territorial expansion. Sometime in the
mid-fifteenth century, the Safavids adopted Shia Islam, and their
movement became highly millenarian in character. In 1501, under
their leader Ismail, the Safavids seized power in Tabriz, which
became their capital. Ismail was proclaimed shah of Iran. The rise
of the Safavids marks the reemergence in Iran of a powerful central
authority within geographical boundaries attained by former Iranian
empires. The Safavids declared Shia Islam the state religion and
used proselytizing and force to convert the large majority of
Muslims in Iran to the Shia sect. Under the early Safavids, Iran
was a theocracy in which state and religion were closely
intertwined. Ismail's followers venerated him not only as the
murshid-kamil, the perfect guide, but also as an emanation
of the Godhead. He combined in his person both temporal and
spiritual authority. In the new state, he was represented in both
these functions by the vakil, an official who acted as a
kind of alter ego. The sadr headed the powerful religious
organization; the vizier, the bureaucracy; and the amir
alumara, the fighting forces. These fighting forces, the
qizilbash, came primarily from the seven Turkic-speaking
tribes that supported the Safavid bid for power.
The Safavids faced the problem of integrating their
Turkic-speaking followers with the native Iranians, their fighting
traditions with the Iranian bureaucracy, and their messianic
ideology with the exigencies of administering a territorial state.
The institutions of the early Safavid state and subsequent efforts
at state reorganization reflect attempts, not always successful, to
strike a balance among these various elements. The Safavids also
faced external challenges from the Uzbeks and the Ottomans. The
Uzbeks were an unstable element along Iran's northeastern frontier
who raided into Khorasan, particularly when the central government
was weak, and blocked the Safavid advance northward into
Transoxiana. The Ottomans, who were Sunnis, were rivals for the
religious allegiance of Muslims in eastern Anatolia and Iraq and
pressed territorial claims in both these areas and in the Caucasus.
The Safavid Empire received a blow that was to prove fatal in
1524, when the Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Safavid forces
at Chaldiran and occupied the Safavid capital, Tabriz. Although he
was forced to withdraw because of the harsh winter and Iran's
scorched earth policy, and although Safavid rulers continued to
assert claims to spiritual leadership, the defeat shattered belief
in the shah as a semidivine figure and weakened the hold of the
shah over the qizilbash chiefs. In 1533 the Ottoman sultan
Süleyman occupied Baghdad and then extended Ottoman rule to
southern Iraq. Except for a brief period (1624-38) when Safavid
rule was restored, Iraq remained firmly in Ottoman hands. The
Ottomans also continued to challenge the Safavids for control of
Azarbaijan and the Caucasus until the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin in
1639 established frontiers both in Iraq and in the Caucasus that
remain virtually unchanged in the late twentieth century.
The Safavid state reached its apogee during the reign of Shah
Abbas (1587-1629). The shah gained breathing space to confront and
defeat the Uzbeks by signing a largely disadvantageous treaty with
the Ottomans. He then fought successful campaigns against the
Ottomans, reestablishing Iranian control over Iraq, Georgia, and
parts of the Caucasus. He counterbalanced the power of the
qizilbash by creating a body of troops composed of Georgian
and Armenian slaves who were loyal to the person of the shah. He
extended state and crown lands and the provinces directly
administered by the state, at the expense of the qizilbash
chiefs. He relocated tribes to weaken their power, strengthened the
bureaucracy, and further centralized the administration.
Shah Abbas made a show of personal piety and supported
religious institutions by building mosques and religious seminaries
and by making generous endowments for religious purposes. His
reign, however, witnessed the gradual separation of religious
institutions from the state and an increasing movement toward a
more independent religious hierarchy.
In addition to his political reorganization and his support of
religious institutions, Shah Abbas also promoted commerce and the
arts. The Portuguese had previously occupied Bahrain and the island
of Hormoz off the Persian Gulf coast in their bid to dominate
Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf trade, but in 1602 Shah Abbas
expelled them from Bahrain, and in 1623 he used the British (who
sought a share of Iran's lucrative silk trade) to expel the
Portuguese from Hormoz. He significantly enhanced government
revenues by establishing a state monopoly over the silk trade and
encouraged internal and external trade by safeguarding the roads
and welcoming British, Dutch, and other traders to Iran. With the
encouragement of the shah, Iranian craftsmen excelled in producing
fine silks, brocades, and other cloths, carpets, porcelain, and
metalware. When Shah Abbas built a new capital at Esfahan, he
adorned it with fine mosques, palaces, schools, bridges, and a
bazaar. He patronized the arts, and the calligraphy, miniatures,
painting, and agriculture of his period are particularly
noteworthy.
Although there was a recovery with the reign of Shah Abbas II
(1642- 66), in general the Safavid Empire declined after the death
of Shah Abbas. The decline resulted from weak rulers, interference
by the women of the harem in politics, the reemergence of
qizilbash rivalries, maladministration of state lands,
excessive taxation, the decline of trade, and the weakening of
Safavid military organization. (Both the qizilbash tribal
military organization and the standing army composed of slave
soliders were deteriorating.) The last two rulers, Shah Sulayman
(1669-94) and Shah Sultan Hosain (1694-1722), were voluptuaries.
Once again the eastern frontiers began to be breached, and in 1722
a small body of Afghan tribesmen won a series of easy victories
before entering and taking the capital itself, ending Safavid rule.
Afghan supremacy was brief. Tahmasp Quli, a chief of the Afshar
tribe, soon expelled the Afghans in the name of a surviving member
of the Safavid family. Then, in 1736, he assumed power in his own
name as Nader Shah. He went on to drive the Ottomans from Georgia
and Armenia and the Russians from the Iranian coast on the Caspian
Sea and restored Iranian sovereignty over Afghanistan. He also took
his army on several campaigns into India and in 1739 sacked Delhi,
bringing back fabulous treasures. Although Nader Shah achieved
political unity, his military campaigns and extortionate taxation
proved a terrible drain on a country already ravaged and
depopulated by war and disorder, and in 1747 he was murdered by
chiefs of his own Afshar tribe.
A period of anarchy and a struggle for supremacy among Afshar,
Qajar, Afghan, and Zand tribal chieftains followed Nader Shah's
death. Finally Karim Khan Zand (1750-79) was able to defeat his
rivals and to unify the country, except for Khorasan, under a loose
form of central control. He refused to assume the title of shah,
however, and ruled as vakil al ruaya, or deputy of the
subjects. He is remembered for his mild and beneficent rule.
Data as of December 1987
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