Iran: Empire of the Mind (23 page)

As for any pre-industrial state, policy on land and taxation was closely tied in to military necessities. The Qezelbash tribal leaders lost out here too. Abbas took over many of the lands they had previously enjoyed and either gave them over to be administered centrally by his bureaucrats, or distributed them as
tuyul
—lands apportioned not to individuals but to state offices, from which office-holders drew an income only for so long as they held the office. Usually the income was only a proportion of the total yield of the land holding. The idea was to maximise the loyalty of the office-holders to the state, and to minimise the likelihood that land would be permanently alienated away from the crown to ambitious magnates. State revenue was also boosted by the tightening of the government’s grip on trade, especially the silk trade, based on silk production in Gilan (most Persian trade in this period went east, to India, but some silk was exported west to Europe, especially by Armenian merchants). To the same end, Abbas used the English East India Company (who acquired the right to trade in Persia in 1616) to take back control of the straits of Hormuz from the Portuguese and re-establish the Persian presence in the Persian Gulf.
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A weaker monarch would have not have lasted long with the Qezelbash if he had attempted these reforms. But Abbas cunningly played off the tribes against each other, and his success in war gave him huge prestige, making almost everything possible. With his new army he defeated the Uzbeks in the east, restoring the border on the Oxus river, and the Ottomans in the west, taking Baghdad twice. To consolidate his victories, especially in the north-east, he sent large numbers of Kurds, along with parts of Qezelbash tribes like the Qajars and Afshars to serve as protectors of the new borders. This resettlement policy served also to reinforce his authority over the tribes, and to weaken their independent power by
fragmenting them. He moved provincial governors from post to new post regularly, to avoid any of them creating a regional power base for themselves. He also resettled many Armenians from the north-west to a suburb south of Isfahan, New Julfa, where Christian Armenians and their bishop still live today.

The new capital, Isfahan, had been a significant place even in the time of the Sassanids, and contained important monuments and mosques from later periods. But it stands today, as perhaps the most splendid and impressive gallery of Islamic architecture in the world, substantially as a creation of the Safavid period. The central structures, the soaring blue iwans of the Shah mosque, the beautiful Allahvardi Khan bridge, the Ali Qapu and Chehel Sotoun palaces, the Shaykh Lotfallah mosque and the great Meidan-e Shah (as well as other palaces, pavilions and gardens that have disappeared under the shops and houses of the modern city), all were built or at least begun in the time of Shah Abbas, though others were added later. The buildings assert Safavid power and prestige, and their identification with Shi‘a Islam, with a magnificence that has rarely been surpassed.

One of Abbas’s successes was simply to survive and rule long enough for his various enterprises to bear fruit. But he had, or had created, a problem—the succession. Succession was a difficulty for many monarchs. In Europe, the problem was that every so often a prince could not get a son. This could create all sorts of difficulties—attempts at divorce (Henry VIII), attempts to get recognition for the succession of a daughter or more distant relative, disputes over the succession and war (for example, the War of the Spanish Succession 1701-1714 and the War of the Austrian Succession 1740-1748). In the Islamic world, the problem was different. Polygamy meant that kings did not normally have a problem getting a son—but they might, on the contrary, have too many sons. This could mean fighting between them and their supporters when the father died, to see who would succeed. In the Ottoman empire this was institutionalised: rival sons who had served their father as provincial governors would, on hearing of his death, race for the capital to claim the throne. The winner would get the support of the janissaries, and have the other sons put
to death. Later, the Ottomans adopted a more dignified arrangement, keeping the possible heirs in the Sultan’s harem palace until their father died. But this meant they would have little understanding or aptitude for government, and the new practice helped to increase the power of the chief minister, the vizier, so that the vizier ruled effectively as viceroy. It was a conundrum.

Many fathers have disagreements and clashes with their sons, and history is full of feuds between kings and their crown princes. Abbas was no exception—he had come to power himself by deposing his father. Following the Ottoman precedent again, he imprisoned his sons in the harem for fear that they would attempt to dethrone him. But he still feared that they might plot against him, so had them blinded, and one of them killed. Eventually (after his death in 1629) he was succeeded by one of his grandsons. The unhappy practice of keeping royal heirs in the harem was kept up by the Safavid monarchs thereafter.

Although he showed reverence for the shrines of his Sufi ancestors in Ardebil, Abbas’s deliberate weakening of the Qezelbash was matched, after signs of opposition from the Nuqtavi Sufis, by executions and other punishments that broke them too. Instead Abbas favoured the ulema and the endowments (
awqaf
) that supported them—especially in the shrine cities of Mashhad and Qom. On one occasion he went on foot to Mashhad from Isfahan as a pilgrim across the desert in twenty-eight days to show his devotion and set an example. The continuing hostilities with the Ottomans made access to the shrines of southern Iraq difficult and uncertain—the Shah’s example helped to swing ordinary Persian Shi‘as toward the Persian shrine cities, and more endowments followed the pilgrims. The ulema were grateful and aligned themselves ever more closely with the Safavid regime. These developments were also significant for the future. Abbas had been astute in his construction of a governmental system that protected state revenue, and was more successful than most previous dynasties had been. But over the century that followed more and more land was given over to religious endowments, sometimes merely as a kind of tax dodge, because religious property was exempt from tax.
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Under Shah Abbas the Safavid dynasty achieved a more sophisticated, powerful and enduring governmental system than the traditional lands of Iran had seen for many centuries.
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The Safavid state, its administration and its institutionalising of Shi‘ism, set the parameters for the modern shape of Iran. In its material culture, in metalwork, textiles, carpet-making, miniature-painting, ceramics and above all in its architecture, the period was one of surpassing creativity in the making of beautiful things. The dominance of Shi‘ism and the Shi‘a ulema was accompanied by a period of creativity in Shi‘a thought too—notably among the thinkers who have been called the School of Isfahan (Mir Damad, Mir Fendereski and Shaykh Baha’i), and the religious philosophy of the great Molla Sadra.

Molla Sadra was born in Shiraz in 1571 or 1572. He studied in Qazvin and Isfahan as a young man, being interested in philosophy and the usual religious studies, but also Sufism. He was taught by two great thinkers of the age, Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and spent some time near Qom and travelling before finally settling as a teacher in Shiraz again. His ideas (most notably expressed in the book known as
al-Afsar al-arba’a
—Four Journeys) drew upon the philosophy of Avicenna and neoPlatonism, but also on traditional Shi‘a thought, and on the Sufism of Sohravardi (Illuminationism) and Ibn Arabi; and have been called existentialist for their insistence that existence is prior to essence. His thought was controversial at the time for its leaning toward mysticism, which the ulema had traditionally opposed. But in explaining a way that philosophical rationalism and personal mystical insight should be combined in a programme of individual reflection and study,
¹⁴
Molla Sadra was able to domesticate mysticism
¹⁵
and, calling it
erfan
, make it acceptable to the madreseh tradition. His thinking has been central in Islamic philosophy in the centuries since his time.

Persian cultural influence in the eastern part of the Islamic world was still strong, and it was in these centuries that it flowered outside Persia with the greatest brilliance—in Ottoman Turkey (where Persian was used for diplomatic correspondence and Turkish poetry followed Persian forms), in the Khanates of Central Asia, and above all in Moghul India, where Persian was the language of the court and a whole new Persianate culture
of poetry, music and religious thought flourished. But it was the heritage of previous ages that sustained the influence, and the hostility of Sunni regimes on all her borders tended to have an isolating effect on Persia itself. Some poets and others emigrated to the fabulously wealthy Moghul court. Some have called the poetry of this period Safavid poetry; others, reflecting the fact that much of the poetry, even if composed in Persian, was composed in India, have labelled it the Indian period. Opinion has also divided over its quality; the great Iranian critic Bahar disliked it, as did Browne, and the general view from the mid-nineteenth century was negative: the poetry was held to have been insipid, making use of rather stale imagery and lacking in real insight. To a degree, this view reflected the more favourable judgement of the same critics on the movement of poetry that supplanted the Safavid style from the 1760s onward (in Persia, though not elsewhere), and others have found more merit in the Safavid poets. Whatever the judgements of taste, it is nonetheless true that there was a Persianate literary culture at this time that maintained itself from Istanbul to Delhi and Samarkand, which in turn had a strong influence on contemporary and later poetic compositions in Turkish and Urdu in addition, and reflected the wider intellectual, religious and court culture. But in some ways this culture was weakest in the Persian capital, where the court language was Turkic and mullahs tended to be more in favour than poets
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.

In previous centuries (notwithstanding the violent uncertainties of life in those times) there had been, by accident and as a consequence of political instability and the existence of competing polities within the cultural space of
Iran zamin
, conditions in Persia that permitted considerable, albeit erratic pluralism of religion and relative freedom of thought. Over the period of strong Safavid rule the central territorial core of the Iranian plateau was kept safe from invasion, which after the trauma of the preceding centuries must have seemed an invaluable blessing. But some previous freedoms wilted and narrowed.

The Shi‘ism of the Safavids and the ulema under their rule had from the beginning more than a streak of extremism and intolerance within it, which was intensified by the religious conflict with the Ottomans. The
Safavids from the outset tended to be more earnestly religious than many previous Sunni rulers had been. This is a delicate subject, but it is important to look at it squarely. The Sufis were increasingly out of favour and intellectual life was channelled into the madresehs. There were always hangers-on and pseudo-mullahs who could attract a following among the
luti
(unruly youths) of the towns by being more extreme than their more reflective, educated rivals; and the perceived history of persecution suffered by the Shi‘a did not always prompt a sensitivity to the vulnerability of other minorities once the Shi‘a became the dominant sect. Notions of the religious impurity (
najes
) of unbelievers, especially Jews, contributed to a general worsening in the condition of minorities, and there was a particularly grim period after 1642 of persecution and forced conversions. Orders were issued (going further than older codes that originated in part in pre-Islamic Byzantine analogues) that Jews should wear distinguishing red patches on their clothing to identify themselves, that their word at law was near-worthless, that they must not wear matching shoes, fine clothes or waist-sashes, that they must not walk in the middle of the street or walk past a Muslim, that they must not enter a shop and touch things, that their weddings must be held in secret, that if they were cursed by a Muslim they must stay silent… and so on.
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Many of these would-be rules (running directly contrary to the spirit of proper tolerance accorded to People of the Book in Islam, and reminiscent of similar ugly rulings imposed in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and at other times) probably reflect the aspirations of a few extremist mullahs rather than the reality as lived, and conditions would have varied greatly from town to town and changed over time, but they were still indicative of the attitudes of some, and appeared to legitimate the actions of others. As authority figures in villages and towns, humane, educated mullahs were often the most important protectors of the Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.
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But other, lesser mullahs frequently agitated against these vulnerable groups.

Some have suggested that even among the ulema the close relationship between the Safavid state and the Shi‘a clergy was not a healthy phenomenon. The over-close relationship led some mullahs to overlook the strong distrust of politics, kingship and secular authority that is deeply
entrenched in Shi‘ism (and is perhaps one of its most attractive characteristics) in their scramble for the good things that the Safavid Shahs had on offer: appointments, endowments and a chance to wield some political authority.
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As is often the case with unchecked processes that involve greed, this one brought some of the senior Shi‘a clergy to shipwreck at the end of the Safavid period.