International Society for Iranian Studies

Some Observations on Religion in Safavid Persia Author(s): Hamid Algar Source: Iranian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1/2, Studies on Isfahan: Proceedings of the Isfahan Colloquium, Part I (Winter - Spring, 1974), pp. 287-293 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society for Iranian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4310165 . Accessed: 05/01/2011 00:04
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SOME OBSER VATIONS ON RELIGION IN SAFAVID PERSIA

HAMID ALGAR

that the religious It is indisputable history that both of the Safavid period and of the two centuries There existed preceded it remains inadequately explored. and Anatolia, as well as the Iranian plain Transoxania of groups and individuals with diverse teau, a plethora in our and aspirations tendencies that it is difficult, present state of knowledge, to synthesize into a comprehensible whole. There are however a number of minor that I observations on Professor Nasr' s presentation wish to make. The first is an expression of respectful and the others are intended to direct disagreement, attention to matters not mentioned in his otherwise comprehensive paper. that Sufism owes its Nasr's contention Professor essential origin to Shicism, and that therefore its suppression in the Safavid period ought to be regarded as a return to the womb that bore it, is highly contestable. There is a certain tendency, deriving above all from the work of Henry Corbin, to present Sufism as an unacknowledged borrowing from Shicism, which receives its most extreme formulation in the claim that "true Shicism is Sufism, and true Sufism is Shicism.hll Apart from the fact that this view of the "origins" of Sufism is hardly more plausible than Orientalist theories of Christian or Vendantine parentage, it tends too to obscure the rich legacy of Iranian Sunni spirituality, which includes some of the greatest names of Islam, Thus, in his En Islam 287

Corbin makes hardly any mention of sunni figures, Iranien, of RuzbihAn Baqli is preceded by an and his discussion Sunni or, as it mention of that Sufi's almost apologetic The affiliations) put, "non-Shicitell is delicately Iran was assumption that the Sunni Sufism of pre-Safavid of ShiCite in essence and origin has the further effect break with the past that the Safathe radical concealing of Shicism represented. vid establishment in Iran, antecedents That Shicism had historical and that the Mongol and Timurid periods had witnessed But in ShiCism, none would deny. formative developments that the way was prepared for the coming of the assertion pregnant with Shicism is dubious. the Safavids by tarlgats The case of the Kubriviyyah is often adduced in this conand the late Marijan Mole indeed assembled much nection, article in his interesting fresh and important material drawn by him are, howThe conclusions on the subject.3 examined by Of all the figures ever, open to question. him--Najm ad-Din KubrA, SaCd ad-Din Hamuya, cAla ad-Daula SimnAnl, CAll HamadAni, and Sayyid Mutammad b. cAbdull&h Nurbakhsh- - it is only the last that may be regarded with although there is some ambias a Shicite, any certainty The others are shown only to guity surrounding Hamadini. for the Family of the Prophet, particucombine respect to the Four larly the Twelve Imams, with allegiance Caliphs and the Four Imams of the mazAhib--an attitude for the leaders of the iammahby no respect of integral The or their age. to these Kubr&vI means peculiar Najm ad-Din was very marked. Sunnism of the Kubravl as one reason for his choice RUzi D&ya, for example, cites a place of refuge the supremacy as of Seljuq Anatolia too on correct belief He insists there of Sunnism.4 of the People of Sunna defined as the belief (ictigad), for the state of "Imuridhood" and Community, as a condition The- cases of HamadanI and Nfrbakhsh and "sha khhood."5 of the for the evolution should not be taken as typical it is not as if there were a seed of whole Kubraviyyah: its Shicism planted by Najm ad-Dtn Kubrf that attained of The later history natural flowering with Niirbakhsh. unexamined, but we know largely the Kubriviyyah is still in the the Kubraviyyah flourished that in Transoxania 288

same atmosphere of sunni dominance as the Yasawiyyah and the Naqshbandiyyah, two jarigats of unquestioned sunni allegiance, as late as the second half of the sixteenth A certain century. Khaztnt, who migrated from Khwarazm to Istanbul in the reign of SultAn Selim II, was initiated into all three vrtcqats, and wrote a work setting forth their initiatic chains and devotional and making practices it plain that they were three strands of a single tradition bearing an unmistakable sunni stamp.6 The Kubravriyyah later died out in the Ottoman lands, being absorbed like the Anatolian remnants of the Yasawiyyah, into the a process that would hardly have been Naqshbandiyyah, possible for a proto-Shicite In addition, tariqat. several branches of the Kubr&viyyah are known to have flourished briefly in various areas: there is no indication that they were Shicite.7 Elements in KubrivI texts regarded as protoshicite, such as expressions of devotion to the Twelve Imams, are to be found also in the Naqshbandiyyah. Some consideration of this larigat is appropriate here, since the Corbin version of Iranian Sufism omits all mention of it, although it had spread from its Transoxanian homeland as far west as Isfahan and Qazvin before the Safavids it from the Iranian plateau.8 extirpated It is true that the chief initiatic chain of the Naqshbandiyyah leads back to Abu Bakr rather than CAlI, but since that chain passes through Jacfar as-lidiq the Naqshbandiyyah also a secondary silsilah, possesses leading from Jacfar agP&diq through the Imamite line of descent to cAlt, that it designates as the "Golden Chain" (Silsilat az-zahab).9 There is, then, an calavi element in the spiritual ancestry of this purely Sunni jarlyat. The eponymous founder of the Naqshbandiyyah, Bah& ad-Din Naqshband, is moreover related to have beheld visions of cAll at critical points in his wayfaring on the path,10 and numerous examples of similar devotion to the figure of cAll can be supplied from the later history of the tarlqat. Nor is it purely a question of CAll; all of the Twelve Imams are regarded as deserving of reverence and even as capable of functioning poshumonously as spiritual guides. It is noteworthy that the celebrated Rawdat ash-Shuhad&c, a 289

of the martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbela and one description of the ShiCite commemoration of the most important props Husayn b. CAll by a Naqshbandi, of Muharram, was written ad-Din CAll Saf-1, wrote the whose son, Fakhr Kishifi, the of the tartgat, fundamental work on the early history That devotion to the Imams has Rashabit CAyn al-Iay t. with ShiCism is further demonconnection no necessary to by its combination with pronounced hostility strated Shaykh Athmad cases. ShiCism in a number of significant founder of the important Mujaddidi branch of Sirhindi, against treatise polemical the _tariqat, wrote a bitterly the MaktiibAt described the Shica, but in his celebrated those who approach the Twelve Imams as the leaders of the Similarly, Divine Presence by way of sainthood.11 saint MawlAnA Khflid Baghdadi, when passing Naqshbandl through M4ashhad on his way to India in the early ninecomposed one poem in praise of the Imam teenth century, Rix! and another in condemnation of the hiCite culama of the city. 12 on the Kubr&viyyah and From these observations of Naqshbandiyyah we conclude then that the existence of devotion to the Twelve Imams in the jariqats attitudes of the Mongol and Timurid periods was neither a borrowing It is therefore element. from Shicism nor a proto-Shicite that the evolution to accept the assertion not possible from Sunnism to ShiCism mirrored a general of the Safavids or that the Tarigats development among the tarigats, the way for the coming of Shicism prepared effectively in Iran. accomplished of the transformation Any discussion by the Safavids must include some mention of the violent Clearly, applied. methods they liberally and coercive in the Iranian soil as Shicism could not have flourished but to ignore has through mere imposition; it manifestly as state religion nature of its introduction the violent picture the historical by Shah Ism&Cil would be to distort took transition painless and to suggest that a relatively From a campaign of suppression. not a ruthless place, point of view, the rise to power of ShAh IsmAcil certain of Iran from the may be regarded as a Turkoman invasion 290

as prewest that produced almost as violent disruptions In order to impose vious incursions from the east. ShiCism on the Sunni majority of Iran, sunni culama were and the the first three Caliphs, obliged to execrate recalcitrant among them were immolated; the tombs of Sunni saints and scholars and sunni mosques were were violated; desecrated.13 It is important to recall this violently coercive policy of the early Safavids, not only because it demonstrates that Iran was far from ready for a swift passage into Shicism, but also because it was connected with the peculiar and messianic form of Shicism practised by ShAh IsmAcil, one at variance with subsequent Ithal cashari orthodoxy. Ghul&t elements appear to have entered the Safavid doctrine with Junayd and Haydar,14 and to have reached their apogee with Shah Ismacil, who in his Turkish poetry puts forward an ecstatic of claims variety to being, alternatively, cAll reincarnate, the Mahdi come in the fullness of time, and even the deity descended to It was only with the importation earth.15 of Arab Saicite scholars from al-Ahs& and Jabal cAmil that more temperate doctrines came to prevail: an Arab scholarly influx came to complement the Turkoman military as a fundainvasion ment of Shicite Iran. Finally, it should be remembered that the violence used by the Safavids in the establisha shocked and horrified ment of Shicism elicited reaction in the sunni neighbors of Iran that for long determined their whole attitude to Shicism. There is a certain of tone and content in all the Ottoman fatvas consistency calling for war on Iran, down to the eighteenth century: are seen as neglecters of prayer and desethe Shicites of mosques, as persecutors of scholars crators and defilers of tombs.16 could be justified These accusations with reference to Shah Ismacil, and although their repetition became to some extent a matter of scribal tradition, there is no doubt that in general the Shicites of Iran were seen by the Ottomans as irredeemably violent and irreligious. Even contemporary Turkish attitudes to the Shicah may be said unconsciously to be colored by Safavid memories. In conclusion, some of the wider effects on the Islamic world of the conversion of Iran to Shicism may be indicated. With the emergence of a militantly shicite 291

state in Iran, all possibility of territorial continuity between the western and eastern parts of the Islamic world was excluded, It is true that despite the barrier of Safavid Iran the Ottomans communicated sporadically with Central Asia, and had some seaborne contact with India and even Sumatra. It may also be conceded that their Balkan and Mediterranean interests would in any event have precluded a successful eastward expansion of their authority.7 Safavid Iran nonetheless condemned the Sunni of Afghanistan and Central Asia to virtual populations isolation from the Ottomans, the most powerful sunni state, and it may be held in part responsible for the stagnation and gradual decay of the Uzbek khanates, ending in their conquest by the Russians in the nineteenth century. This too was part of the price paid for the minor renaissance of Islamic culture that took place under Safavid patronage.

NOTES 1. Henry Corbin, I"Sih Guftir dar bab-i Tartkh-i MaCnavtyAt-i IrAn,"1 Majalyla-l Danishkada-yi biyat-i TihrAn, vol. V (1337/1959), p. 56. En Islam Iranien (Paris: 1972), vol. III, Ada-

2. 3.

pp. 9-11.

"Les Kubrawiya entre Sunnisme et Shiisme aux Huitibme et Neuvibme Si&cles de l'Hegire," Revue des Etudes Islamiques (1961), pp. 61-142. Mirs&d al-CIbAd min al-Mabdal AmIn RiyAhl (Tehran: Mubjanmmad Ibid., pp. 244, 258. ila l-Mac%d, ed. 1352/1973), p. 20.

4.

5. 6.

Lujjat al-Abrar dar As&mi-yi Auliy&-yi Kibar, Bibliothbque Nationale, ancien fonds persan, 1226, ff. 103b-173b. Some information on Khazini and another work of his is to be found in Fuad Kt5prUlU, TUrk 2nd ed. (Ankara: Ilk Mutasavviflar, Edebiyatinda 1960), p. 323. 292

7. 8.

See Bandirmalizade Ahmed MUnib, Mirat (Istanbul: 1306/1889), p. 12.

at-Turuk

Muhammadb. Husayn b. CAbdull&h Qazvini, Silsilanama-yi Khwfljag&n-i Naqshband, ms. Laleli (Istanbul: 1381), ff. 9a-llb. Ibid., ff. 2b-3a. We may note in passing that Imam JaCfar as-Sadiq was also physically descended from was Q5sim b. Abiu Bakr: his maternal grandfather Muhammadb. Abi Bakr, one of the prominent tabici-n. Ij&fiz Husayn Karbali'! Tabrlzi, Rault al-JanAn Jannat al-Jinan, ed. Jacfar SultAn al-QurrVlt (Tehran: 1344/1965), I, p. 135. wa

9.

10.

11.

Maktub&t (Lucknow: 1306/1889), III, pp. 247-248. Ris&la dar Radd-i Rav&fid is printed as Sirhindil's an appendix to this edition of the Maktiibat. Divan (Bulaq: 1260/1844), pp. 41-42, 68.

12. 13.

See Jean Aubin, "La Politique Religieuse des Safavides," Le Shicisme Imamite (Paris: 1970), pp. 237-238. See Michel Mazzaoui, The Origins (Wiesbaden: 1972), p. 73. of the Safavids

14.

15.

V. Minlorsky, "The Poetry of Shah Ism&C il vol. X (1940-1943), pp. 1006a-1053a.

I,"

BSOAS,

16.

The subject has been examined in detail by Elke Eberhard in Osmanische Polemik gegen die Safawiden im 16. Jahrhundert nach arabischen Handschriften (Freiburg: 1970). On this topic see the interesting Asrar, Osmanlilarin Dini Siyaseti (Istanbul: 1972). study of Ahmet ve tslam Alemi

17.

293