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Home | 16-17th Centuries Index
IRAN, SAFAVIDS and OTTOMAN EXPANSION
The younger brother of the murdered heir, Abbas, succeeded Khadabandeh in 1587, and he was to rule until 1629. Abbas drew from his family's experience with the local Qizilbash chiefs. He broke their power and confiscated their wealth. He extended state-owned lands and lands owned by the shah. Provinces were now to be administered by the state replacing the discredited Qizilbash chiefs. He strengthened his government's bureaucracy and managed to relocate tribes in order to weaken their power. Having eliminated Qizilbash chiefs as a source of military recruitment, he established a strong military force of his own, with artillery and muskets, with soldiers recruited from Iranian villages and from among Christians, Georgians, Armenians and others - the Christians proud to serve the shah and to call themselves "slaves of the shah" although slaves they were not.
Shah Abbas was open to the idea of an alliance with Europeans in common cause against the Ottomans. He welcomed to his court two young Englishmen with military training, Anthony and Robert Sherley, and employed them as military advisors. Thanks to Robert Sherley, in a short time Shah Abbas created a formidable army. In 1602 he drove the Portuguese from Bahrain. In 1603 Abbas reopened hostilities with the Ottomans. In the coming years he drove the Ottomans back from the gains they had made against the Safavids in previous decades. In 1623 he allied himself with the British effort that expelled the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Abbas was mentally active. He was curious and in ways more tolerant than his predecessors. Previously, "infidels" (foreigners and non-Muslim subjects) had been denied entry to the shah's court to prevent its defilement. Shah Abbas welcomed foreigners and his non-Muslims subjects to his court. He took an unusual step among Islamic rulers by allowing Christians to wear what they wanted and allowing them to own their own home and to ride horseback. He enjoyed discussing with foreigners the complexities of religious ideology.
Shah Abbas patronized the arts, and he built a new capital at Isfahan, including palaces, mosques and schools, Isfahan becoming the cultural and intellectual capital of Iran. Abbas encouraged international trade and the production of silks, carpets, ceramics and metal ware for sale to Europeans. He advanced trade by building and safeguarding roads. To Iran he welcomed tradesmen from Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. He used Christian merchants to sell his state produced silk, and with his governmental monopoly over the silk trade he enhanced state revenues.
Moreso than some other Islamic societies, Islam in Iran remained influenced by Hellenism. Greek philosophers had been translated into Persian centuries before, leaving Islam in Iran more theological than some other places. Islam had scholars called ulama. In Iran the ulama were trying to unite Shia beliefs with what they thought was best in ancient philosophy - mainly Aristotelian and neo-Platonic influences. Among these ulama in Safavid times emerged philosophers whose influence was to extend into the twentieth century, to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini among others.
A major Iranian philosopher in the early 1600s was Mir Damad, the founder of the School of Isfahan. He was interested in "eternity" and God having organized this eternity. Seeing time as absolute rather than relative to the motion of things as would be seen by future physicists, he labeled time as the essence of things. Unbothered by contradiction, and with a complexity that equaled Christian scholasticism, he described ranking in the order of things in relation to time while holding that all things had both an eternal essence and a temporal essence -- with the temporal world pre-determined. He argued against happenstance, as those who believe in godly power do. He wrote of the material world constantly renewing itself and remaining connected to nature -- in other words, that change is determined by laws of nature.
Damad's student, Mulla Sadra, was to be regarded as Iran's greatest philosopher. He also worked on the problem of time and the nature of things and overcame the contradiction between the eternity and the temporal. He too described the universe as having been created by God as both eternal and temporal. The essence of permanence he described as a mental construct in the minds of people as well as the mind of God, more so, of course, in the mind of God, who had knowledge of all. He argued in favor of Aristotle's natural science. Against Mir Damad and with the Aristotelians he argued that essence was an abstraction and subordinate to concrete existence. With the Islamic mystic philosopher Ibn al Arabi, he spoke of existence (also called being) as having varying degrees of intensity and perfection. He spoke of an upward movement in the scale of being, from the simplest elements to the more complex human body with a soul. And beyond the body-soul complex is, he reasoned, a purer manifestation of the heavenly body-soul complex -- the highest rank of order in the corporeal world. And beyond the corporeal world is God.
Ulama philosophers associated their ideas with the teaching of the Koran, as Islam demanded. Where necessary, the ulama philosophers applied allegory to the Koran, to match their point of view. But the ulama philosophers, Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra among them, were under pressure from those Shi'a who were not interested in philosophical complexities. Mir Damad, Mulla Sadra and other ulama philosophers were frequently rebuked by those ulama holding the majority point-of-view.
Shah Abbas had been strong enough to limit the Shia scholar-priests (ulama) to the law and to preaching, but his successors gradually lost power to the ulama. Shah Abbas died in 1629. He had feared his sons and hadput them in the protection and confines of the harem and under the tutelage of eunuchs, which left his successors were ill-equipped for government.
His son and heir, Safi, who ruled from 1629 to 1642, is known for his cruelty. He is said to have eliminated every other possible claimant to the throne, including his mother. While intoxicated he stabbed his favorite wife to death. He executed most of the generals and councilors he had inherited from his father's reign, and he put to death some of his male and female relatives.
Shah Abbas II (1642–66) attempted to eliminate bureaucratic corruption. Under Abbas II, Iran regained some prestige in the world. Shah Abbas II was active in government matters and increased central authority. He pushed the Mughals of India out of Kandahar (in Afghanistan). He intervened on the side of the peasants. He believed that a Safavid rule was sacred -- in conflict with the religious establishment, which was moving toward the notion that temporal authority belonged to a mujtahid (a scholar predating the ayatollahs).
Under Shah Suleiman, or Sulayman, (1667-94), and Shah Husayn (1694-1722) Iran declined again. Both have been described as voluptuaries. Shah Husayn was not much interested in affairs of state. He let influence pass to courtiers and eunuchs, and he would not make any significant move without instruction from the ulama.
The ulama had begun claiming that rule by these shahs was God's punishment for Islam's failure to established a legitimate successor to Muhammad the Prophet. They complained of shahs that scarcely could read, who were impious drinkers of wine and involved in passions. The supreme "throne of the universe," they claimed, belonged only to a mujtahid or someone other man who had "sanctity and science above ordinary men." There was little if any criticism of the institution of passing authority from father to son as opposed to institutionalized democracy. Ulama supported kingship much as the Catholic Church in the early Middle Ages supported monarchical rule that was subordinate to the authority of the Church. Uluma held that because a mujtahid would be a holy and peaceful person it would be necessary to have under him a king who "carries a sword" for the exercise of justice. These ulama wanted a wise man of God as the supreme authority over society, including those in charge of violence. [note]
The shahs Safi, Suleiman and Husayn brought decline to the power of the shahs. With this, local authorities were left to quarrel among themselves and free to exploit by excessive taxation. Trade declined. Agricultural productivity remained low in Iran. Mountainous terrain and great distances between population centers continued to inhibit the development of markets. International trade remained slow and the economy stagnant in part because of trade having moved from crossing land to crossing the oceans in the ships of European powers. By sea, Iran was a long way from Europe -- around Africa and out of the way for ships sailing to and from India and points farther east.
Iran had also declined militarily, leaving it more vulnerable to invasion, which came out of the east. In the year 1722, Afghan invaders, of the Sunni branch of Islam, reached the Safavid capital, Isfahan. Safavid power ended and civil wars followed, which depressed Iran's economy further and brought widespread suffering.
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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.