In the fifteenth
century, Central Asia contained many militarily strong and reasonably
well-organized groups, but Sunni Islam was the only source of transcendent
credibility. In 1501, however, Shah Ismail descended on northwest Persia with
an army of Shiites and established an empire to rival the Sunni Ottoman Empire.
Thus, in the sixteenth century, the number of sources of transcendent
credibility in northwest Persia increased from one to two, a transformation
that significantly increased the distinctiveness of boundaries between
political units.
As we have
sufficiently detailed in the case studies that can be read in
our Islam Code P.1 to 3,
he Monopoly of Sunni Islam in Fifteenth Century Central Asia Sunni Islam stood
alone as the source of transcendent credibility in centralAsia
in the fifteenth century. During this century, the collapse of the Mongol
government produced a political vacuum into which many political groups
emerged. Five political units stand out in terms of military power and ability
to establish a moderately stable government in Persia. Each of these units
relied on Sunni Islam as their source of transcendent credibility. The only
moderate challenge during this period, Sufism, although popular among many
nomadic groups of northwestern and northeastern Iran, did not succeed in
establishing itself in any stable political entity. Although Sufism posed a
minor challenge and ultimately created fertile ground for the emergence of the
Safavids, it did not affect the strategies of the major political units in a
serious manner.
Sunni Islam served as
the source of transcendent credibility among all five of the major political
entities in Persia in the fifteenth century. The Ottoman Turks in the west were
a growing power, expanding in all directions from their center in western
Anatolia (modern Turkey), eventually capturing Constantinople in 1453. Ottoman
interest in Persia was limited to keeping the peace among their more rebellious
subjects in central and eastern Anatolia and maintaining overland trade routes
with India and China. The more desirable objects of expansion lay to the south
and the west of the Ottoman capital, not to the east.
In eastern Anatolia
and Azerbaijan, two Turkmen tribes faced off against one another: the Qara Qoyunlu (or Black Sheep) and
the Aq Qoyunlu (or White
Sheep). Both of these rivals were Sunni. Many scholars had believed that the
Black Sheep were Shia or at least possessed strong Shia tendencies.151 The more
recent consensus among Islamic historians is that this was not the case. There
is very little evidence to support a Shia Black Sheep. What likely occurred was
that later historians attempting to understand the rivalries and alliances
among the many groups during this period saw the Black Sheep sandwiched between
two Sunni powers, the Ottoman and the White Sheep, and assumed, based on scant
evidence, that the Black Sheep must be Shia.152 There is far more evidence
suggesting the Black Sheep were Sunni, despite some Shia anomalies.
In the east and the
south two groups dominated in succession. The Timurids largely consisted of the
Sunni Persians who inherited the area from the collapsed Mongol empire.153 The
government of this Sunni group disintegrated due to internal struggles for
power. Invaders from the northeast, the Ozbegs, took
advantage of this opportunity and began to settle in eastern Persia. The Ozbegs were also Sunni, sharing the religious orientation
of the region. By the time they reached southern Persia, however, the Ozbegs were stretched thin and did not so much replace the
Timurids as created a power vacuum that the Shia Safavids were later able to
exploit. Given the dominance of Sunni Islam, it is important to understand how
a ruling group could use it as a source of transcendent credibility and a means
of legitimating its authority. In particular, Sunni Islam possessed four
important aspects that had implications on associated political theories.154
First, the Sunni
believed that Allah communicates with man primarily, even exclusively, through
the Scriptures and the prophets. Since Mohammed was the last and the greatest
of the prophets, the Koran is the principal means man has to follow Allah.
Thus, Allah interacts with man only indirectly. It is the magnificence of Allah
that necessitates this distant relationship.155 The Sunni believed that Allah
occasionally communicated with man through prophets, but many human attempts to
communicate with God revealed only the pride of man, the worst of the sins.
Second,
interpretation of the Scripture could not be done by just anyone. Likewise,
there was no one person who was uniquely qualified to interpret the Scripture.
Instead, Koranic interpretation depended on an informal “consensus” of the
scholarly community. Individual Muslims gravitated toward particular teachers
(ulama), possibly even to the exclusion of other teachers, yet the community in
general relied on the dialogue generated among the various teachers and schools
of theology.156 Still, this dialogue should not be confused with a “free”
exchange of ideas. Interpretations must be founded on the Koranic texts. In
addition, traditional interpretations of Islamic law carried more weight than
novel or innovative interpretations. Third, as alluded to above, individual
Muslims had some freedom in choosing which of the ulama they would follow.
While this is far from what the moderns would call tolerance, there was a
certain degree of acceptance of alternative points of view provided they were
aligned with the Koran, professed by a legitimate teacher, and not
significantly different from traditional interpretations of Islamic Law
(Sharia). Fourth, Sunnis believed that the caliph did not necessarily need to
be a descendent of Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of Mohammed, as opposed to
the Shia who argued that the caliph’s pedigree was essential. The caliph led
the more traditionally political and military aspects of government: enforcing
the law, defending Islam, managing the economy, and supervising the government.
After the first century of Islam, the caliph had increasingly fewer
specifically religious responsibilities, but continued to symbolize the unity
of the entire Muslim community.
There were several
political theories in circulation as to why a particular caliph was the
legitimate ruler. However, the method of selecting the caliph was less
important to the Sunni-Shia divide than whether the caliph descended from Ali.
This had very important political implications, but only in contrast to the
Shia political theories and so discussion of it will be postponed for a later
section.
The most significant
challenge to the Sunni monopoly as a source of transcendent credibility was
Sufism, a movement that flowered in Persia during the period under
consideration. The presence of Sufism complicated the rather simplified outline
of Sunni Islam and its accompanying political theory described above. Sufism is
a generic term for the many mystical movements within Islam that believed man
could experience direct contact with Allah under certain conditions.157 Only
the most devout could truly attain contact with Allah, so clearly not every
person was capable of achieving a direct link with Allah, even for a short
period. Still, the belief that such contact was possible posed a powerful
challenge to more traditional forms of Sunni Islam.
It is no coincidence
that Sufism was very successful among the nomadic peoples who lived on the
edges of larger empires.158 First, because the schools and theorists of
scholarly Islam were primarily centered in urban centers, they had a minimal
impact on the rural, nomadic, and uneducated people that dominated northwest
Persia. Second, the opposition of the nomads to Ottoman policies became
conflated with opposition to the Empire’s religious establishment, the Sunni
schools and scholars. As the Empire extended its power into frontiers populated
by nomads, it asked these wanderers to become sedentary. Sufi beliefs greatly
coincided with feelings of rebellion against these new circumstances both in
terms of religion and politics. The Sufi who could achieve direct contact
with Allah could not be contained by traditional religion any more than the
imperial bureaucracies could contain the nomadic way of life.
For their part, Sunni
governments repressed the Sufi movements for both religious and political
reasons. Sufi ideas were particularly popular among other Ottoman rural
populations who, not coincidentally, lived in areas beyond the everyday reach
of the bureaucracy. Sufi teachers would periodically stir up the Turkish
warriors to undertake holy wars on behalf of Allah. Some of the wandering Sufi
dervishes openly opposed any contact with the governmental authorities.159 In
short, among the rural population in eastern Turkey, the Sufi teachers often
held more authority than the Ottoman rulers.
The Ottoman
experimented with various ways of gaining control over the Sufi portions of
their population. In the fourteenth century, for example, several Sufi
brotherhoods had achieved success among the Ottoman masses. In response, the
Ottoman rulers “extended their patronage” to the Sufi elites.160 This gave the
Empire much greater control over the madrasa educational system in the region.
In turn, state sponsorship and funding of the religious schools for the various
sects gave the Ottoman a greater degree of control over the messages that were
communicated to the masses and the next generation of ulamas.
Sufism was not merely a political maneuver. It appealed to the nomadic peoples
for a number of reasons, not the least of which was a true belief in its
tenets.161
The Mongol invasions
of the fourteenth century and the collapse of those empires in the fifteenth
produced a large degree of uncertainty among the peoples in Persia. Sufi
preachers stepped in to fill this void. Not only did these Sufi teachers
perform miracles and even magic, they gave the people hope in a future in which
a savior would come and establish a new order. They preached of the qutb, the central “pole” around which the interests of the
world revolved and that was periodically manifest in a great saint or leader of
the people.162 The qutb would come and protect the
oppressed peoples of the world. It was into this religious milieu that Shah
Ismail, the leader of the Safavids, would later step.
Sufism thrived among
the nomadic tribes in eastern Anatolia and among the White Sheep, once they had
eliminated their Black Sheep competitors. Under their most powerful leader, Uzun Hasan, the White Sheep began to permit a great deal of
Sufism to infiltrate their rather traditional forms of Sunni Islam.163 It is
likely that Uzun Hasan saw this as a way of
differentiating the White Sheep from their former allies the Ottoman. It may
also have been a strategic decision intended to attract the support of the
nomadic tribes within the Ottoman eastern frontier. Whatever the reason, the
introduction of Sufi elements into the White Sheep drew the wrath of the
Ottoman, who sent an army that soundly defeated Uzun
Hasan at Bashkent in 1473.164
Uzun
Hasan’s successors, recognizing that a continuation of Sufi toleration was a
suicidal policy since Ottoman gunpowder could easily decimate White Sheep
cavalry, attempted reforms to restore orthodox Sunni laws. But Sufi beliefs had
already taken root in the region and the outcome was a civil war. It was into
this very favorable situation that Shah Ismail and the Safavids entered the
scene. Thus, the short-lived Sufism of the White Sheep created fertile ground
in the southern Caucasus region for the eventual success of the Shiite
Safavids. In northwest Persia, the unique hybridized version of Sufism and
Shiism that the Safavids introduced provided the Shia with a staging ground
from which to proselytize the rest of Persia. However, besides Uzun Hasan’s brief and relatively localized attempt to
introduce a new source of transcendent credibility into fifteenth century
Central Asia, Sunni Islam maintained its monopoly as the only source in the
system. Thus, according to the hypothesis, prior to the arrival of the Shia
Safavids, the boundaries between the political units in this region should have
been either indistinct or nonexistent.
It is difficult to
locate reliable information on boundaries in fourteenth and fifteenth Central
Asia. Much of the administration of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in its
remote eastern regions, was not committed to written records.165 The region of
eastern Anatolia, northern Iran, and the Caucasus Mountains during this period
was populated almost entirely by rural populations and nomadic peoples.
Aside from a few
towns, this region was bereft of urban populations. It is rather simple to draw
borders around urban populations since cities rarely change territory. Nomads,
on the other hand, present greater difficulties for anyone seeking to make an
exclusive claim to a territory and receive compliance from its residents. The
relative unimportance of Eastern Anatolia within the Empire coupled with the
nomadic nature of much of this population suggested more practical forms of
record-keeping. Unfortunately, these methods have generally left little
information that is accessible to the modern scholar.
Increased attempts by
the Ottoman Empire to settle the nomads in this area was actually a catalyst to
religious, political, and ideological movements that eventually resulted in the
success of the Safavids.166 Thus, an examination of the boundaries of this
period should begin by noting that even if there were efforts by local or
imperial administrators to draw distinct political lines – and it is far from
certain that this was the case – these attempts proved largely
unsuccessful in the face of the nomadic peoples of the region who resisted and
revolted to prevent such demarcations.
The more central
question to this case, however, is whether there were distinct boundaries
between the Ottoman Empire and either of the region’s two main political units:
the Black Sheep or the White Sheep. An analysis of the proxy variables for
distinctiveness of boundaries in this region reveals that, in fact, the
boundaries between these political units were extremely indistinct, as the
hypothesis predicts. The Ottoman Empire and the Turkmen tribes were either
uninterested in or unable to impose hegemonic authority on frontier peoples.
Rural populations and nomadic peoples had a variety of authority figures with
which they could comply. In addition to the Ottoman and the two Turkmen tribes,
wandering Sufi teachers and other holy men asked for and received the support
of the people of this region. These teachers encouraged the development of
local folk culture, which in turn fed into the peoples’ resistance to attempts
by any larger political authority to make them subject.167 They saw themselves
as fighting holy wars (jihads) for broader Islam or battles to maintain their
independence. The Sufi teachers told the people that their time and resources
must go to preparing the world for the coming salvation, not to
enrich far away rulers. Distance and the threat of resistance forced the
Ottoman and Turkmen to take what they could get. The people of this region also
had the opportunity – and used it – to ask for assistance from more than one
authority figure.168
Perhaps even more
importantly, they usually asked for no assistance at all. If the Ottoman pushed
their authority too hard, there was a real danger that the people in the region
would side with the Turkmen tribes, as happened in the reign of Uzun Hasan. Knowing this, the Ottoman rarely demanded
compliance using force. As a result, the peoples of the region were often left
to their own devices. They developed a folk culture replete with poetry,
theater, and local heroes.169 The culture developed around their role as holy
warriors (ghazi) battling against the Georgians, Circassians, and
Byzantines.170 Another undertone of this folk culture was a separation between
the rural people living on the edge of Islam and the urban elites, who the Sufi
suggested had grown complacent in their practice of Islam.171 The nomadic Turkish
people of the eastern provinces saw themselves as acting on their own for the
greater good of Islam.
Thus, it is no
surprise that the Ottoman and Turkmen tribes were unable to generate compliance
in these frontier areas. Historians have considered Ottoman taxation one of the
fairest systems in the pre-modern world. One author describes the system as “in
general simpler and less liable to abuse than earlier systems of feudal
services.”172 However, the use of econometric analysis has more recently led
economic historian Metin Cosgel
to suggest that Ottoman tax policy was driven more by “simple pragmatism and
concern with political stability” than by vague ideas of fairness or equity.173
In some cases, Ottoman policies of the period consciously gave up economic
efficiency in exchange for greater economic stability.174
The Ottoman faced
many problems with collecting taxes in northwest Persia. Personal taxes in the
Ottoman Empire came from two main sources: trade taxes brought to market for
sale and production taxes on farming and manufacturing.175 Both of these
sources of revenue are largely absent in nomadic communities. However, even in
the areas where there were settlements, the Ottoman pragmatically allowed
landlords who had been there before the Ottoman conquest to continue to collect
the taxes.176 Thus, much of the ability to control taxation was out of the
direct hands of the bureaucracy and large amounts of the taxes collected were
not passed on to the central government.
Another source of
inefficiency came from the Sufi teachings in the region. They preached that all
resources belonged to Allah. In the Ottoman Empire, and most of the Islamic
world, there were two types of taxes: taxes that fit within Islamic law
(tithes and alms) and taxes that did not (tax to the government).177 Where the
line between these two types of taxes was drawn became a subject for
interpretation. The Sufis instructed the people of the region to pay their
teachers the former, but deny the Ottoman the latter. This money would be
better spent on the jihad occurring there in northwestern Iran than back in
Istanbul. The same was true for military service: the local jihad was more
important than the Empire’s distant battles. It was not until the mid-1500s,
after the emergence of Shiism in the region, that the Ottoman bureaucrats and
religious leaders offered a more formal interpretation of its tax system in
which many of the personal taxes were to be included under Islamic law.178
In the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire did very little to reverse these
inefficiencies just listed. The Ottoman possessed enough military strength to
capture Byzantium, advance into the Balkans, and hold off most of its rivals in
Asia Minor. However, despite this power, the Ottoman did not consolidate its
authority in the eastern portion of its Empire sufficiently to silence the
Sufis, to wrest power from the local landlords, or to settle the nomads. Such
actions would, at a minimum, have required different military technology than
the Ottoman possessed. However, the absence of another source of transcendent
credibility in the region supported by a major political unit meant that the
Ottoman lacked an incentive to change the status quo.
The relative
indistinctiveness of the boundaries between political units in northwest Persia
may also be inferred from the Ottoman Empire’s lack of credible commitment to
defend these frontier territories from rivals in the East. There is little to
no evidence that anything existed resembling distinctive lines of defense
between political units in Persia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It
can reasonably be argued that there were stretches of “no-man’s land”
separating political units. One indication was the dominant military technology
of the region: the nomad on horseback. Such soldiers were incredibly ill-suited
for defense. A second reason may be the lack of urban centers that could
provide supplies for a defensive line. As long as there was only a single
source of transcendent credibility in the region, the Ottoman and the Turkmen
tribes lacked any incentive to develop new military technology or new urban
centers to permit the construction of more distinctive lines of defense.
This was true despite
the fact that the degree of military threats in the region was rather great.
The White Sheep, for example, fought the Black Sheep, the Timurids, and the
Ottoman. Historian David Morgan suggests that one of the reasons the White
Sheep at their height were so successful was because they avoided overextension
after victories.179 One strategy was to leave large stretches of unclaimed
territory between the major political units. After the White Sheep victory over
the Timurids in 1469, they left the vulnerable areas of northeastern Iran (Transoxania and Khurasan) open. The centers of these
empires were far more important strategically than the frontier zones. Rival
militaries that entered one’s frontier could be dealt with, but otherwise there
was no incentive to defend outlying regions.
The Ottoman used the
same strategy on its eastern side. Diplomatic negotiations began in 1472 when
an embassy from Venice met with the White Sheep leader, Uzun
Hasan. Within a few months, the Ottoman decisively defeated Uzun
Hasan. However, the Ottoman did not follow up this victory with the capture of
any significant territory. The focus of the Ottoman at this moment was on their
European flank – a site of an alternate source of transcendent credibility. The
goal in the East was to keep neighbors from stirring up revolts in the region.
Although the true motives of the Ottoman still elude us, it is possible to
argue that the Ottoman strategy was to prevent the region from drifting further
into Sufism or alliance with the Christians. In other words, the Ottoman actively
sought to preserve the status quo of one source of transcendent credibility in
the region. Military defeat without subsequent territorial follow-up kept a
Sunni power in place in northwestern Iran without the expense to the Ottoman of
conquering this region.
The 1473 battle was
one of the very few times prior to 1500 when the Ottoman sent a large force the
eastern portion of their empire. Standing armies were not stationed in the
eastern portion of the Ottoman Empire, except in the relatively few cities. The
military goal was not to keep invaders out, but to keep a semblance of peace
within. Sufism was the true enemy, not the White Sheep. All of this is even
more remarkable given the strategic and economic importance of the region. The
Ottoman relied on the trade routes through northern Iran and through the
Caucasus Mountains. These overland routes were significant to the Ottoman
economy, especially given the growth of Venetian sea power in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Thus, it is noteworthy that the Ottoman did not take
stronger measures in the eastern half of their empire. The Ottoman strategy in
the east only changed once northwestern Iran fell into the hands of the Shiite
Safavids.
Another piece of evidence
that northwest Persia prior to 1500 held relatively indistinct or non-existent
boundaries is that no political entity was able to establish a hierarchical
judicial system in the area. The presence of an alternate source of
transcendent credibility on the Ottoman western flank (Christianity)
complicates the analysis of this proxy. On the one hand, the Ottoman had a very
hierarchical judicial system and maintained strict control over appointments
and rulings throughout the empire.180 However, on the other hand, they were
only partly successful in achieving the same degree of control over the
judicial system in the eastern portion of their empire. The local people often
called upon the wandering Sufi teachers, for example, to mediate disputes.181
The Ottoman judicial system, while extensive, did not reach very far beyond the
cities, plus this region held few cities that ulama, judges, and professors of
law found suitable to their position. Thus, local people could choose to either
have a Sufi holy man hear and mediate a dispute or take the case to the nearest
town and have the thinly stretched Ottoman bureaucracy assist in settling the
issue.
These were two
clearly different judicial structures, unlinked in any fashion. Both parties
made efforts to reduce the influence of the other within the region. The Sufis
relied on persuasion, which proved insufficient to remove the authority of the
Ottoman completely from the area. On the other hand, while the Ottoman
possessed more force capabilities and tried on occasion to use these to reduce
the influence of the Sufis, these efforts also came up short. Thus, a tenuous
stalemate was tolerated in the region between all of the authority figures. No
authority figure had the necessary incentives to start a full-scale assault on
the influence of any of the others. The end result was that frontier
individuals had the opportunity (and used it) to choose the most advantageous
judicial venue. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire also lacked sufficient incentives
to impose standardization of currency and other economic measurements in the
region. The sheer size of the Ottoman Empire meant that attempts to standardize
money and measurements would be an enormous problem. The central Ottoman
government had minted coins from the very early years of its existence, but
this was no guarantee that the money would be used. Examinations of the tahrir defters (imperial tax registers) reveal that not only were
regional units of measurement used, they were also often used in the imperial
bureaucracy’s record keeping.182
From its inception to
the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire increased the standardization of its coinage
within Anatolia and the Balkans.183 Still, before 1500, the Ottoman also
encouraged the use of other forms of currency within the Empire. For example,
the Ottoman used the Venetian ducat, the gold coin of their Mediterranean
rivals, as the standard for their own gold sultani.184 On its peripheries,
including eastern Anatolia, the use of non-Ottoman currencies was even more
pronounced. In newly conquered territories, there was often a locally familiar
currency already in place. Obviously, to replace these currencies with the
Ottoman currency would have had the effect of undermining the local economies
and producing unrest. In addition, imposition of a new currency and mints would
have been extremely costly to the central government. The Ottoman thus allowed
the former currencies to continue to circulate in the peripheral areas, at
least until the sixteenth century.
In sum, these proxy
variables demonstrate that before the arrival of the Shia Safavid state in the
early sixteenth century, the region of northwest Persia and eastern Anatolia
lacked a distinctive boundary. The Sunni political units of the Ottoman Empire
and the Turkmen dynasties lacked the incentives necessary to make such an
investment in the region. The status of the boundaries in this region changed,
however, with the arrival of new source of transcendent credibility in the
region that possessed the necessary military capabilities to pose a threat to
the Sunni political units also vying for control of the area. As has been
suggested in the discussion above, it is important to consider that some of
these proxy variables do not hold if one examines the entire Ottoman Empire throughout
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In particular, along the
Ottoman-Christian boundary there is much more evidence that a distinctive
boundary was in place. For instance, in this region and in the Balkans, once
they were captured, the Ottoman used the timar tax
system.185 Here, the central government appointed sipahis,
state employees who had proven themselves in war, to live in the rural areas
and collect taxes and raise and train provincial troops. This is a significant
contrast to the system of local landlords the Ottoman used in eastern Anatolia
to collect taxes.
Thus, when modern
historians talk about the centralizing efforts of Mehmet II (1451-81), the
application of these measures tended to be in regions that bordered alternative
sources of transcendent credibility, not in areas bordering other Sunni
political units.186 Thus, the locations of the exceptions in the Ottoman Empire
in the fifteenth century provide more evidence in favor of the overarching
hypothesis.
Safavid Shiism: A New Source of Transcendent
Credibility in the System
At the start of the
sixteenth century, a group known as the Safavids conquered northwestern Persia,
breaking the monopoly Sunni Islam had enjoyed in the region. Shiism, the source
of transcendent credibility in the Safavid state, posed theological and
political threats to its Sunni neighbors, compelling the Ottoman in the west
and, later, the Mughal in the east to adjust their frontier strategies and
increase the distinctiveness of their boundaries with the Safavids. From the
very beginnings of Islam, Shiites saw themselves as something other than the
more numerous Sunnis. Many of their beliefs were crucially different and their
ecclesial structures also developed in very different forms. Sunni political
leaders now faced Shiite ulema, backed by the forces of a political unit,
declaring the bases of Sunni governments to be heretical.187 Thus, the
emergence of a Shiite state in Persia was considerably unwelcome to the Ottoman
Empire.
Shiism entered the
region in force in 1501, when Shah Ismail led an army out of the Caucasus
Mountains and into northern Iran, conquering the remnants of the Turkmen tribes
that ruled there. His support came from the various tribes in the region that
tended toward the Sufi teachings and a warrior lifestyle. Ismail claimed Safi
al-Din (1252-1334), the famous Sufi leader, as his ancestor, thus his family
name was Safavid. Ismail was able to consolidate his victory and expand his
empire in all directions, eventually controlling an area spanning large
sections of modern Iraq and Iran.
Exactly what system
of belief Shah Ismail I brought with him when he and the Safavids captured
northern Iran remains a subject of debate.188 By the end of the 1500s, it the
Safavid state was certainly a Shia state, but the initial Shiism of Ismail and
his main supporters, the Qizilbash, was better
described as a “melting-pot” of many Sunni, Sufi, and Shia beliefs.189 However,
at least from the perspective of the Safavid’s neighbors, from the beginning
the source of transcendent credibility was assuredly perceived as not Sunni.
The Sufis who had roamed northern Iran stirring up occasional revolts had been
worrisome, but lacked sufficient strength to cause longterm
problems. The situation was dramatically different now. Many of the beliefs of
the Sufis had been combined with the might of an army and the long-term
stability of a government. The Ottoman government required a new strategy on
its eastern boundary.
Shia Islam and Sunni
Islam were clearly two different sources of transcendent credibility and were
recognized as such by contemporaries. While the content of the Safavid’s Shia
source of transcendent credibility changed through the sixteenth century, the
Sunni Ottoman reacted aggressively against it in all its manifestations. Since
the later and more traditional form of Shiism, Twelver Shiism, is the one that
eventually dominated Safavid interpretations, this is the one the following
analysis will compare with Sunni Islam. Twelver Shiism was not new with the
emergence of the Safavids, though it had found its most effective champion in
them. The split between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to first century of
Islam. Twelver Shiites believe that there have been twelve infallible imams,
all descended from Muhammed’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali. A division almost
immediately occurred between the Shiites, who believed only a descendent of Ali
could become imam, and the Sunnis, who believed that the imam did not need to
be a descendent of Ali. Each group named separate imams as the leaders of
Islam. In 874, the Shiites’ twelfth imam disappeared. Of course, he may have
been abducted and killed by his enemies, but the Shiites believe he went into
hiding, is still alive, and will return again to take power and spread the true
religion.
Those who share this
messianic notion are called Twelver Shiites. Though a complex theology
surrounding these beliefs has been developed for centuries, for the purposes of
this discussion there are five main tenets that set Twelver Shiism apart from
Sunni Islam.
First, in Safavid
Shiite theology, Allah communicated to man indirectly through Scriptures and
directly through the imam. Because the imam descended from Ali, Allah
made him infallible. Thus, when the imam interpreted Scripture or made a
pronouncement on some topic, his word represented that of Allah. The Sunnis do
not allow that any teacher has infallibility.
Second, the caliph
should be a direct descendent of Muhammad and Ali. For the Shiites, Ali was
both Allah’s hujja, meaning he was Allah’s proof or
evidence, and he was Allah’s wali, meaning he was
Allah’s close friend.190 Thus, Ali, like Muhammad, stood in the gap between men
and Allah, permitting some limited communication between the two realms.
Likewise, the direct descendents fulfilled this same
function. This was incredibly significant theologically and politically because
it allowed the selection of any spiritual or temporal ruler to be made by
Allah, not men. Only Allah could choose who descended from Muhammad and, therefore,
only Allah could choose who was qualified to rule the people. An “election” of
a spiritual leader was tantamount to humans attempting to interpose their will
where only Allah’s will should carry the day.
Third, Shiites
emphasized the imposition of doctrine by the imam, rather than through the
consensus of a scholarly community. While the Sunnis relied on the plurality of
the ulama and the emergence of a consensus from among their teaching and
writings, the Shiites depended on the infallibility of the imam. Even unanimity
could be wrong, let alone a consensus. Infallibility, by definition, was always
right. This, in turn, produced ecclesiastical structures that were far more
hierarchical than Sunni counterparts.
Fourth, believers
could not “choose” which of the ulama they followed. Again, if the imam was
infallible, then there was no choice. Of course, practically speaking, there
could be disagreements on minor matters among the Shiites that would be seen as
beneath the imam to address and, therefore, different schools of thought could
still emerge within Shiism. This, however, was a very different situation than
that presented by Sunni Islam in which different sects strictly speaking had no
overarching interpretative authority.
Fifth, the Hidden
Imam (the mahdi) would return someday. This added an
explicitly eschatological aspect to the practice of Islam that had a very
important political dimension among the Safavid. The world must be prepared so
that the mahdi could return. Because the mahdi would not return until the time was right, the duty
of every believer was to transform the world. From a political standpoint, this
likewise became the purpose of the government. Thus, Shiite military zeal was
not focused entirely on the Sunni. The Safavid state was incredibly hostile
toward non-Muslim minority populations.191 However, practically speaking, this
meant that jihad, or holy war, was no longer merely directed at Christians –
the Sunni hindered the return of the mahdi as much or
more than anyone else.
The early Shiism of
Shah Ismail and the Qizilbash shared all of these
aspects of Twelver Shiism, which made the later transition to more orthodox
beliefs much smoother. But, Ismail went much further. Depending on which source
one reads, Ismail can be seen referring to himself as a prophet, the mahdi, Ali, or even Allah. At the very least, his
followers saw him as someone who was in direct contact with Allah and who would
usher in the next phase of the world, though there was disagreement over
whether he was the mahdi or was the person who would
prepare the way for the mahdi.
The Qizilbash devoted themselves to Ismail, giving him the
military power necessary to take over northern Persia and consolidate his rule.
A weakness in Ismail’s radical formulation of Shiism as the source of
transcendent credibility was revealed when he lost to the Ottoman at the battle
of Chaldiran in 1514.192 Ismail had never lost a
battle before and this had added to the truth of his divine claims. After the
battle, however, not only did he fall into fits of depression, the Qizilbash also began to question his true status. The Qizilbash continued to support Ismail, but material reasons
were now combined with spiritual ones.
It is from this point
that the native Persians began to gain more power in government and religious
matters. Also, many more “orthodox” Shiite teachers throughout the Islamic
world began to flock to the new Safavid territories and had the effect of
moderating the more radical versions of Qizilbash
belief.193 The effect was a shift from the more radical version of Shiism
originally professed by Ismail to a more orthodox Twelver Shiism.194 This
reinterpreted Shiite source of transcendent credibility effectively united the
Turkish military class and the Persian bureaucratic class, a union that
would have been all but impossible without an effective overarching
ideology.195
Not only were there
theological differences between Shiism and Sunni Islam, these differences
produced political outcomes that made the sudden appearance of Shiism in
northern Iran a threat to the Ottoman source of transcendent credibility.
Clearly, both the Sunni and the Shia share the same ultimate source of Allah.
However, in a manner parallel to Protestant and Roman Catholic distinctions in
Europe, each group has a very different means of linking the authority of Allah
to the authority of the ruler. It is for this reason that Sunni Islam and
Shiism may be considered different sources of transcendent credibility.
For the Sunnis, Allah has no direct connection to man (except the Koran).
Believers are left
with lots of freedom to choose between different ulamas
and schools, which implied a meritocracy among the religious teachers.
Politically, this meant that the legitimacy of the ruler was largely tied to
his ability. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, legitimacy often required
stability within the Empire and territorial expansion. Muslim rulers would also
try to maintain their legitimacy through the patronage of notable religious
scholars. They gave gifts, made endowments (awqaf),
and created places within the government for the more popular teachers, who
tended to produce fatwas that supported the government.196 In these ways, a
Sunni ruler could demonstrate that he ruled with the support of Allah, even
though Allah did not communicate directly with men. This is not to suggest that
subjects had the freedom to judge the ruler’s effectiveness openly, nor that
the people had a “right” to choose a more effective ruler. In ordinary
circumstances, the fact that the ruler was the ruler was often enough in to
verify that the ruler worked on behalf of Allah.197
It is important to
note that the Sunni religious leaders did not call for the exclusion of Shiites
from the community of Islam.198 From the Sunni standpoint, Shiism is just one
of the many possible schools of thought. However, due to Shiism’s exclusionary
nature, Sunni rulers were not willing to allow this particular school of
thought to gain a stable political foothold. The Shiites, on the other hand,
were not as inclusive as the Sunnis. They clearly defined the boundaries
between their beliefs and those of the Sunni. For example, to the central
Islamic tenet that “there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet,” the
Shiites added the phrase “and Ali is the friend of Allah.”199 The Sunni
rejected this phrase.
For the Shiites,
Allah did have direct connection with man: the imam. If the imam was among the
people, he was not just the best spiritual and temporal ruler – he was the only
legitimate one. Legitimacy was not determined by outcomes, as it was for the
Sunni. Legitimacy could only come via birth and heritage. Subjects had
absolutely no say in who the ruler was or evaluating the job he was doing.
Allah determined the ruler through birth. Thus, submitting to the ruler was the
same as submitting to Allah.
Of course, one
problem for the Shiites was that the rightful heir of Ali was still in hiding,
raising the question of how government should operate in his absence. The
solution was something akin to stewardship. The leader of a Shia government was
granted the authority he needed on the condition that he prepared the world for
the return of the mahdi.200 The religious leaders had the ability to declare
the ruler as delinquent in his responsibilities as steward and remove him, an
event that occurred most recently in Iran in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini
removed the Shah. The spiritual realm thus trumped the temporal sphere in
Shiism to an extent it did not and could not within Sunni Islam.
Practically speaking,
contemporaries saw these two sources of transcendent credibility as different
and threatening to each other.201 Not only did the Shiite Safavid “self conscious sense of self-righteousness make cooperation
with Sunnis difficult, but it led to extravagant claims and aggressive
activities.”202 As was mentioned earlier, Ismail redefined the term jihad so
that the Sunni Ottoman became the primary targets rather than Christians.203
Over the next two centuries, Safavid rulers and Christian rulers would develop
numerous alliances that were partly trade related and partly directed
against the Sunni Ottoman Empire.204 The Ottoman, for their part, recognized
that the Shiism of the Safavids was especially attractive to persons living in
central and eastern Anatolia. Almost immediately, people on the Ottoman eastern
frontier, who thanks to centuries of Sufi influence shared many of the same
beliefs as the newly emerged Shiite state, began to drift into the Safavid
sphere of influence. Ismail sent envoys into eastern Anatolia who were
instructed to stir up the population there and bring them into the Safavid
sphere of influence.205
The Ottoman “could
not fail to notice” that there was a flow of compliance eastward.206 In fact,
the growing instability in East helped precipitate the abdication of the
Ottoman ruler Sultan Bayezid in favor of his son Selim the Grim, who
immediately turned his attention eastward.207 Selim understood the crisis in
the east very well. He had been the governor of an eastern province during the
early years of Shah Ismail and watched as Ismail transformed himself from a
local religious leader into the fanatical leader of a massive army. Selim fully
comprehended that this was no ordinary revolt or invading army – it was an army
in possession of an alternate source of transcendent credibility that would
have tremendous appeal among the subjects of eastern Anatolia.208 Selim’s every
action in the east supported the hypothesis that the arrival of a new source of
transcendent credibility necessitated a new strategy with respect to the
boundaries of the two political units. This Sunni-Shiite rivalry did not
dissipate after the Ottoman victory at Chaldiran in
1514. On the contrary, it has shaped economic, social, religious, and political
realities in eastern Anatolia and northern Iran up to the present day.
The Shiite Safavids
faced a threat not only from the Sunni Ottoman Empire, but also from the
emergence of the Sunni Mughal state in India. Forced out of the eastern edges
of the Safavid empire by Shah Ismail’s armies, a local leader known as Babur
entered the political vacuum of northern India in the 1520s. With the help of
gunpowder, his army had a relatively easy time taking control of vast stretches
of India. The control of Babur’s Mughal dynasty was still somewhat tenuous
until Babur’s grandson, Akbar (1556-1605), took the reigns
of power and turned his realm into a full-fledged empire. The Mughal depended
on a source of transcendent credibility relatively similar to the Sunni Islam of
the Ottoman Empire. Thus, central Asia in the sixteenth century contained three
major political units and two sources of transcendent credibility. Being
surrounded on both sides by a different source of transcendent credibility
exacerbated the perceived threat the Safavids faced. When Shah Ismail I first
conquered the eastern portion of his territory (modern Afghanistan and
southeastern Iran) in the 1510s and early 1520s, there was no credible
political unit threatening Shiism on the eastern flank. Within a decade, this
situation changed dramatically. Therefore, if the hypothesis holds in the case
of the Safavids, the distinctiveness of the borders along the eastern portion
of the Safavid state should have increased by at least the 1530s.
This, in fact, was
the case. Ismail had left local princes in control of the territory on the
eastern edges of the Safavid state. These rulers were ostensibly loyal to
Ismail, but were not hierarchically connected to the central government. In
1536, however, Tahmasp I, the Safavid ruler who
succeeded Ismail I, appointed a governor for the eastern region of Lahijan to replace the local prince Ismail had left as
ruler.209 This move was a direct response to the rise of the Sunni Mughal
Empire. Throughout the mid-sixteenth century, the Safavids continued to replace
local princes with governors appointed by the central government, turning what
was a frontier region into portions of a unified state. The border that
eventually emerged between Safavids and Mughal stayed largely intact for the
next two hundred years. Several attempts were made by the Mughal to conquer the
Qandahar region (in modern Afghanistan), but all of these ended with the Mughal
being pushed back into India.210 This border very closely matches the
present-day border between Pakistan on the one hand, and Afghanistan and Iran
on the other.
As has just been
demonstrated, the hypothesis successfully explains the case of the Safavid
state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emergence of the Shiite
Safavid state introduced an alternative source of transcendent credibility into
the system, raising the number of sources from one to two. According to the
hypothesis, then, the distinctiveness of the boundaries between political units
of differing sources of transcendent credibility should also have increased.
This was the case. The boundaries between the Shiite Safavid state and the
Sunni Ottoman Empire, on one hand, and with the Sunni Mughal Empire on the
other, became more distinct.
Increased Effort and Ability to Impose Hegemonic
Authority on Frontier Peoples
The Ottoman Empire
vigorously responded to the threat of the Shiite Safavid state. In 1502, a year
after the appearance of Ismail and his Qizilbash
army, the Ottoman sultan sent troops into eastern Anatolia to physically brand
every person with known sympathies for the Safavids and emigrate those persons
to the West. 211 Thiswas a powerful demonstration
that although distinctive boundaries are sometimes drawn on land, they can also
be physically inscribed on people. Most of the fighting between the Safavids
and the Ottoman and their allies between 1502 and 1514 occurred in territories
that had been frontier zones between the Ottoman and the White Sheep.212 In
each of these encounters the Safavids were victorious, encouraging the people
of eastern Anatolia to rise up in open revolt against the Ottoman. This, in
turn, created a crisis within the Ottoman government, which, as has already
been mentioned, led to the replacement of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II in
1512. The arrival of a new source of transcendent credibility in the region
necessitated a new strategy in the east or the loss of large stretches of
territory. Bayezid was either unwilling or unable to make the necessary adjustments
– his son Selim the Grim was not.
Selim’s first actions
involved getting the nomadic people of the east under firm central government
control. The nomadic people, especially the Qizilbash
in the Ottoman territories, were either registered, imprisoned, or executed.
Troops were stationed in the area purposefully to prevent the flow of people
from Ottoman territory into Safavid lands.213 Significantly, the townspeople in
the region were not persecuted at all. Once these groups were brought under
control, Selim gathered a larger army complete with cannon and marched out to
meet Ismail, ultimately defeating his army at Chaldiran
in 1514.
After Chaldiran, the Ottoman army continued east to capture the
Safavid capital of Tabriz. However, this portion of the world was considered a
backwater by the Ottoman military. The real glories and riches were to be found
in fighting in Europe or Egypt, not in the sparsely populated mountains of
Iran. Faced with an impatient military, Selim and his army stayed in Tabriz only
one week before heading back to the Ottoman capital.214 However, over the next
few years, the Ottoman carefully built up their territories that bordered
Safavid occupied lands. What had once been frontier provinces, either claimed
by two or more political units or claimed by none, began to fall under the
exclusive jurisdiction of one of the dominant political units in the area. The
circumstances on the Safavid-Mughal boundary have already been discussed. In
the northwestern Safavid territories there are also several examples. In the
sixteenth century, the province of Bitlis,215 was transformed into an ordinary
Ottoman district, rather than a frontier region governed by local princes
that claimed loyalty to the Ottoman government.216 Other formerly frontier
provinces soon followed suit including Arzinjan and Diyarbakr, both on the newly established border with the
Safavids.217
Before the arrival of
the Safavids, the people of eastern Anatolia and northern Iran possessed
significant latitude to appeal to the authority of the Ottoman administration,
the Turkmen tribes, or various Sufi teachers. However, in the first two decades
of the sixteenth century, these areas were captured militarily and
administratively for either the Ottoman or the Safavids. Frontier territories
and loosely allied princes became obsolete. Nomads were settled or at least
controlled in the Ottoman territories. In Safavid territories, nomad chiefs
received significant government and military positions.
In short, the
appearance of a second source of transcendent credibility created the necessary
incentive for the territory of eastern Anatolia and northern Iran to become a
more settled territory. At least in the first two decades of the sixteenth
century, the people of the area moved around largely according to their
religious beliefs to place themselves under the exclusive authority of either
the Ottoman or Safavids. Thus, on the one hand both political units exerted
more efforts to impose hegemonic authority in the specific territories in the
region. However, on the other hand, the sometimes voluntary and sometimes
coerced emigration of the local population increased the ability of the
political units to be successful in those efforts. In the sixteenth century,
the Ottoman Empire required more income than it did in the past. Military
technology changed during this century and the central government required
larger standing armies and navies.218 As a result, the central government
needed to change its tax collection system to increase the efficiency of
taxation in the peripheral and rural regions. Thus, the landlord system in
Eastern Anatolia was replaced with tax farming, a method that had long been
used in urban areas.219 By 1695, tax farming had been replaced by the malikane system, whereby taxes were farmed out on a
lifetime basis, rather than on the basis of annual or fiveyear
contracts.
Ideally, what we
would like to know here is whether the Ottoman administration was able to raise
more taxes relative to the wealth of the population after the organization of
the eastern provinces in the early sixteenth century. I have not found any
secondary material that makes such a comparison at all. However, it is
plausible to argue that the new administrative realities in the eastern
provinces allowed for a more efficient collection of taxes. With central
government administrators now located in these provinces, the rural areas would
have been more thoroughly registered and the local landlords would have been
less able to conceal their share of the tax.
Corruption of central
government officials is a likely scenario, but, as has been mentioned before,
officials would have sought a better position that one in what was seen as the
backwater of the Empire. In addition, the more rebellious of the Sufi teachers
who had encouraged the local population to eschew paying taxes to the central
government had been eliminated or forced to emigrate thanks to the programs of
Selim in the early 1500s. Finally, thanks to the Ottoman possession of
provinces in Armenia and Georgia, more overland trade would have passed through
this region and could be taxed. Thus, even if there is no evidence that
taxation in this region was higher relative to the wealth of the population, at
the very least it may be argued that tax collection methods would have
increased the amount of revenue flowing into the central government’s treasury.
A credible commitment
by the Safavids to defend frontier territories grew only gradually over the
sixteenth century. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the military
technology Ismail initially relied on, the nomadic cavalry, was an excellent
means of conquest, but ill-suited to defense. Thus, during the reign of Tahmasp I (1533-76), the core defensive strategy against
Ottoman invasions was retreat coupled with scorched earth tactics. On three
separate occasions the Ottoman army managed to capture large stretches of
northwestern Iran, but after the army withdrew, these Shiite territories
reverted right back to the Safavid state.220 Thus, we are presented with
Safavid borders that were frequently subject to attack and invasion, but which,
over the long term, stayed relatively unchanged.
In gratitude for
their loyalty, Ismail granted the Qizilbash leaders
important positions within the government. On the positive side in terms of
Safavid defense, this meant that the various nomadic tribes had a larger stake
in keeping the Ottoman out of their lands. However, on a more negative side, Qizilbash resistance to military reform meant that it took
most of the sixteenth century to transform the military organization into one
that concentrated on defending boundaries. In fact, it was not until the major
reorganization of the military instituted by Shah Abbas I (1587-1629) that the
Safavid state possessed the military strategy and technology to establish lines
of defense that were more or less permanent. Still, this does not mean that the
Safavids were unable to credibly commit to defending their frontier territories
in different ways. Governors in Safavid provinces along strategically important
boundaries were often given the title of amir
al-umara, which highlighted their military role over their other administrative
functions.221 These governors were given some troops to supplement the
provincial armies that they were asked to raise and train. Thus, no invading
force would be permitted to march untouched into Safavid territory, though the
force that met them may be small and under equipped.
In regions covered by
deserts or mountains, a line of defense is rarely the best option to prevent
the flow of persons across a boundary. In such places, there are only a few
roads or passes that must be guarded in order to tightly control movement. For
the Safavids, many of their frontiers fell into this category, which is a large
reason why they were able to use a relatively small military strength to
protect a vast border. It was also important to guard these passages since they
were the main route of trade – and the best way to collect trade taxes. The
Safavids, more than any of the preceding authority figures in Persia,
dispatched guards, traders, and inspectors at key points along these routes and
especially at the edges of their territory.222
The Ottoman also
built up their defenses along their eastern boundary to a degree that would
have been unheard of in the fifteenth century. There was little danger of an
outright attack coming from Safavid territory into Ottoman lands because of the
asymmetry in military strength between the two powers. Still, the population in
northwestern Iran had proven to be susceptible to fanaticism and, thus, the
more radical elements had to be kept out of eastern and central Anatolia.
Maintaining peace and order in the eastern half of the empire required strict
control of the flow of ideas and persons coming from Safavid territories.
Increased Efforts to Establish a Hierarchical Judicial
System
In the late sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman central government took greater steps to
infuse hierarchy into its judiciary throughout the empire. Before this period,
the central government was very interested in maintaining law and order
throughout their territory, but the actual practice was decentralized, resting
in the authority of local landlords or central government military officials
located in the more remote areas. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ottoman
system began to redefine “justice” to mean the protection of rural and urban
producers against abuses of the military elite.223 In essence, this allowed the
ruler to claim authority as sole protector of the weak in the peripheral areas.
The population was encouraged to appeal to the central government when it was
believed that this justice had been denied. Obviously, it was still difficult
for persons on the periphery to make such an appeal, but the central government
adapted the system in order to more easily facilitate the process.
During the first
years of the Safavids, there were many courts in the realm and many different
administrators of these courts. This created a large degree of jurisdictional
conflict and confusion. The solution the early Safavid rulers devised was the
creation of a new position, the divan-begi. This
position was given authority over other courts within the state, making it “the
highest court of appeal.”224 Thus, in both the Safavid and Ottoman territories,
judicial structures were rearranged so that there existed a regularized
procedure of appeal over which the respective central governments held the
ultimate authority.
As was alluded to
earlier, the main judicial rival in northern Iran was not another political
unit, but the Sufi teachers to which locals appealed. Because Sufi teachings
mirrored the Shia beliefs to a much larger degree than the Sunni system of
belief, Sufi teachers and organizations were permitted a wide degree of freedom
in Safavid territory that they were not in Ottoman lands. The Ottoman solution
was, in a sense, to “buy off” the Sufi teachers. Whether or not this exchange
was a quid pro quo, the granting of these endowments had the effect of
moderating the Sufi teachings.225 Sufi teachers who resisted this influence
were forced to emigrate. The Safavid solution was slightly different. Rather
than buy off specific Sufis, the Sufi teachers were permitted to maintain their
organizations, and it was these larger groups that the Safavids brought into
the government. These “continued to exist as a system within a system,” but
over time their influence was minimized to the point where they were “devoid of
any real function within the state.”226 Integrated into either the Ottoman or
Safavid government, the Sufi teachers lost their ability to appeal
independently to the population, plus they were forced to confine their
activities to one side of the emerging border or the other. The end result was
that the central governments absorbed the Sufi teachers into their respective
judicial hierarchies.
Any discussion about
the currency in Central Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth century must
begin with the strength of European currency and the presence of European
trading posts. Florentine and Venetian gold coins continued to flow throughout
Central Asia after the establishment of the Safavid state. Because gold was far
more valuable than silver, it was the currency of international trade. Silver
and copper, on the other hand, were the coin of local merchants. Thus, at least
in the Safavid state and in Mughal India, European gold coins could continue to
be exchanged without doing too much damage to the sovereignty of these
political units. The average subject would deal in quantities too small for
gold coins, but would have plenty of use for silver and copper.
The Ottoman Empire,
facing different challenges on the border of Europe, was an exception here.
Starting in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman made its sultani
the only gold coin to be used in its Empire. This gold coin, which the central
government took pains to ensure its weight and fineness in order to compete
with the Venetian ducat, helped to unify the Empire.227 The Ottoman saw coins as
a symbol of national sovereignty and circulated them on purpose to demonstrate
the power of the central government.228
For their part, the
Safavids focused on the standardization of silver coins, a less valuable, but
therefore more frequently used type of currency. For a variety of reasons (the
two most important being the instability in leadership following Tahmasp I and the control of the southwestern port of
Hormuz by the Portuguese), mint consolidation was not undertaken systematically
until the 1600s.229 In the 1500s, the mahmudi, a silver coin that was minted in
southwestern Iran, was the most widely circulated currency in the Persian Gulf
region. It is likely that, at least in the sixteenth century, the Safavids did
not see any great benefit in tampering with a currency that was already highly
successful, nor with confronting the military might of the Portuguese who
profited most from this coin. Still, it must be noted that the Safavids
demanded, and the Portuguese usually acquiesced, that Portugal assist in the
imposition of the Shia creed in Hormuz, Goa, and other Portuguese port towns in
the region.230 The demands of the Safavid rulers in the early 1600s were
different, however, and the central government began to consolidate the
various mints around the state. The mahmudi gradually deteriorated in value and
was replaced with coins from official Safavid-approved mints. Though this
process took place later than the hypothesis would predict, it is not
necessarily problematic. The Safavids lacked the incentives to intervene.
However, in the late
sixteenth century, the Mughal Empire became the largest importer of metals
outside Europe, excluding Ming China.231 This greatly affected the value of
silver in the Safavid state and required the central government to take more
active role in the minting of all coins. Secondly, there had been a dramatic
decline in Portuguese power and its ability to stay in direct control of
Hormuz. In addition, questions of authority and sovereignty became more
significant for Safavid rulers in the 1600s. As a result, the incentives to
fully standardize currency emerged at that point.
In the early
sixteenth century, the Safavids also sought to control the minting through the
indirect method of taxing all mints in the territory. In addition to the fees
the central government charged mints for the privilege of operation, up until
1565 mints were also charged a tamgha tax, which was
the difference between the real and nominal value of every coin made.232 In
1565, Tahmasp I cancelled this tax, though it
continues to show up on royal treasury records well into the eighteenth
century. The large amount of revenue gathered through these taxes each year
demonstrates that the central government had a fairly tight control over the
workings of its mints. In short, both the Ottoman and the Safavids increased
their efforts to standardize their currencies in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Admittedly, there were many external factors that interposed
themselves, which brings into question the causal impact of the emergence of a
second source of transcendent credibility. I would not argue that Shiism’s
appearance was the exclusive cause of increased standardization, though at
least because of incentives tied to sovereignty issues it did play some role.
Taken together thus, these proxies suggest that, in
the sixteenth century, Central Asian political units invested in more distinct
boundaries with neighboring political units that did not share the same source
of transcendent credibility. Something had clearly changed in the sixteenth
century that produced incentives to invest in these boundaries to a degree that
was unheard of or impossible in the previous century. The most significant
change over that period was the arrival of a new source of transcendent
credibility in the system, increasing the number of sources from one to two.
Despite persistent military threats in the east in the fifteenth century, it is
only after the arrival of a military threat that was coupled with an alternative
source of transcendent credibility that the Ottoman changed their strategy in
the eastern portion of their empire, investing resources to bring the nomadic
peoples under control and establishing a more distinctive boundary with the
Safavids. In short, this case provides additional evidence in support of the
relationship between number of sources of transcendent credibility in a system
and the distinctiveness of the boundaries between political units.
151 A discussion on
the religious attitudes of the Black Sheep may be found in Roemer, 166-168. A
good discussion on the religious attitudes of the Black Sheep and their
relationship with the later Safavid Empire can be found in Vladimir Minorsky (1992 [1957]), Persia in AD 1478-1490 (London:
Royal Asiatic Society).
152 It is important
to note at this point that the dependent variable of this dissertation is
distinctiveness of boundaries between political units, not peaceful relations
with neighbors. Thus, although the Black Sheep frequently warred with their
Sunni neighbors, the hypothesis suggests that the boundaries between them were
relatively indistinct, which was the case.
153 There were
several towns in the Timurid territory, including Ray, Qum, and Kashan, that
had a large population of Shiites and the regions around the eastern side of
the Caspian Sea also had a higher than usual number of Shiites. Still, these
groups were small in number and mostly located in mountainous regions that were
already geographically isolated from the rest of the Timurid realm. Beginning
with the reign of Shah Rukh in 1409, there was a successful crackdown on these
Shiite regions: Maria Eva Subtelny and Anas B Khalidov (1995), “The Curriculum of Islamic Higher Education
in Timurid Iran in the Light of the Sunni Revival under Shah-Rukh,” Journal of
the American Oriental Society 115(2): 210-12.
154 Islamic political
theory is incredibly complex and varied. The nature of this research requires
an oversimplification of centuries of political thought. The implications that
are listed in the chapter were commonly held, particularly in the early modern
period. For a fuller discussion on the historical development of Islamic
political theories see Antony Black (2001), The History of Islamic Political
Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (London: Routledge); Ann Lambton
(2002), State and Government in Medieval Islam (London: Routledge); Patricia
Crone (2005), God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval
Islamic Political Thought (New York: Columbia University Press): 197-257.
155 Even the title
“Allah” connotes this meaning. It is derived from a combination of El, meaning “strong,”
and ilah, meaning “standing alone.” Thus, Allah means
“the far and distant God.” Robert O Ballou, ed. (1972 [1944]), The Portable
World Bible (New York: Penguin Press), 438-39.
156 The Sunni jurist
al-Shafi’i put it this way: “We accept the decision
of the public because we have to obey their authority, and we know that
wherever there are sunnas of the Prophet, the public
cannot be ignorant of them although it is possible that some are, and we know
that the public can neither agree on anything contrary to the sunna of the Prophet or on an error.” Quoted in David Waines (1995), An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 69.
157 Waines, 133-154. Perhaps the most famous of the Sufi sects
to the West is the whirling dervish.
158 Lawrence G Potter
(1994), “Sufis and Sultans in Post-Mongol Iran,” Iranian Studies 27(1-4),
77-102.
159 Ira M Lapidus
(2002 [1988]), A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 266.
160 Ibid., 265.
161 Ibid., 232.
162 “Qutb,” John Bowler, ed., (2000), The Concise Oxford
Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
163 It is still a
matter of debate exactly how much Sufism affected the White Sheep under Uzun Hasan. What is clear is that Uzun
Hasan’s successor spent most of his reign trying to eradicate whatever Sufism
had seeped into the Turkmen society. HR Roemer (1986), “The Turkmen Dynasties,”
in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Peter
Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
184-85.
164 David Morgan
(1988), Medieval Persia: 1040-1797 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
105-107. The presence of an alternate source of transcendent credibility in the
White Sheep increased the perceived threat to the Ottoman, whether this was
because the Ottoman feared these new ideas seeping into the Empire and
undermining their Sunni source or because the White Sheep used the source to
stir up the nomads living in Azerbaijan and Eastern Anatolia. The Ottoman were
not responding to the White Sheep as a military threat (they had always been a
potential military rival but the Ottoman had not attacked), but to an
ideological threat.
165 Even the more
developed and urbanized Ottoman Empire relied more on oral performance in its
early-modern courts than on written documentation in its court proceedings.
When this is coupled with the predominantly uneducated nomadic population in
eastern Anatolia, it is no surprise that there is a significant lack of written
records, including property deeds, contracts, and court decisions. Bogac A Ergene (2004), “Evidence
in Ottoman Courts: Oral and Written Documentation in Early-Modern Courts of
Islamic Law,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 124(3): 487.
166 See pp. 7-10
above.
167 Lapidus, 266.
168 Potter (1994).
Elites in the region also had the opportunity to choose between several
authority figures, see Maria Eva Subtelny (1988),
“Socioeconomic Bases of Cultural Patronage under the Later Timurids,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 20(4): 479-505.
169 Lapidus, 266.
170 Morgan, 109.
171 Lapidus, 266.
172 H Inalcik (1973), The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age,
1300-1600 (London: Phoenix
Press), 73.
173 Metin M Cosgil (2004), “Taxes,
Efficiency, and Redistribution: Discriminatory Taxation of Villages in Ottoman
Palestine, Southern Syria, and Transjordan in the Sixteenth Century,” Working
Paper 2002-22, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics, 23.
174 Relli Shechter (2005), “Market Welfare in the Early-Modern
Ottoman Economy – A Historiographic Overview with Many Questions,” Journal of
the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48(2), 253-76.
175 Metin M Cosgil (2005),
“Efficiency and Continuity in Public Finance: The Ottoman System of Taxation,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 37(4), 571.
176 Sevket Pamuk (2004), “Institutional Change and the
Longevity of the Ottoman Empire, 1500-1800,” Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 35(2), 230.
177 Cosgil (2005), 581.
178 Ibid., 582.
179 Morgan, 105.
180 For example, in
the western portion of the Ottoman Empire, many ethnic communities were
permitted to create their own court systems that used that group’s religious
laws. However, all of these court systems still remained ultimately subject to
the Ottoman Shariah judicial system, Daniel Goffman (2002), The Ottoman Empire
and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 73.
181 Lapidus, 266
182 Metin M Cosgil (2004), “Ottoman
Tax Registers (Tahrir Defterleri),” Historical
Methods 37(2), 90; H Inalcik and D Quataert (1994), An Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 987-93.
183 Pamuk (2004), 238-39.
These were the regions of the Empire that shared boundaries with political
units relying on sources of transcendent credibility other than Sunni Islam.
184 Sevket Pamuk (2000), A Monetary History of the Ottoman
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
185 Pamuk (2004),
230.
186 See for example, Oktay Ozel (1999), “Limits of the
Almighty: Mehmed II’s ‘Land Reform’ Revisited,” Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 42(2): 226-46.
187 Waines, 170-72.
188 Morgan 112-23; BS
Amoretti (1986), “Religion in the Timurid and Safavid Periods,” in The
Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Peter
Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
629-40; Kathryn Babayan (1994), “The Safavid Synthesis: From Qizilbash Islam to Imamite
Shi’ism,” Iranian Studies 27(1-2), 135-61.
189 Amoretti, 629.
190 Michael Sells,
ed. (1999), Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (Ashland, OR: White
Cloud Press), 152-53.
191 The exception to
this is the reign of Abbas I, Roger M Savory (2003), “Relations between the
Safavid State and Its Non-Muslim Minorities,” Islam and Christian-Muslim
Relations 14(4): 435-58.
192 Roger M Savory
(1986), “The Safavid Administrative System,” in The Cambridge History of Iran,
Vol 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart,
eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 359.
193 Colin Turner
(2001), Islam Without Allah? The Rise of Religious Externalism in Safavid Iran
(New York: Routledge), 72-87; Rula Jurdi Abisaab (2004), Converting
Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (I R Taurus), 7-30.
194 Some of the early
beliefs about Ismail persisted, however. For example, even as late as 1629, the
successive leaders of the Safavids were referred to by a title the Qizilbash gave to Ismail: murshid-i
kamil (Perfect Guide), Savory, “The Safavid
Administrative System,” 360.
195 Morgan, 128.
196 Gregory C
Kozlowski (1995), “Imperial Authority, Benefactions and Endowments (Awqaf) in Mughal India,” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 38(3): 355-70.
197 This political
theory is reminiscent of the Mandate of Heaven in Confucian China or the use of
Romans 13 in Christian Europe.
198 Waines, 170. On the other hand, the more the Shia claimed
to be the only orthodox version of Islam, the more Sunni religious and
political leaders established policies that would prevent this exclusionist
branch of Islam from dominating particular areas. A source of transcendent credibility
that claims it is the only legitimate source must be considered a threat by all
other sources of transcendent credibility. Hence, even “inclusive” sources of
transcendent credibility (such as Sunni Islam) can become exclusivist when
faced with an exclusivist source of transcendent credibility.
199 Ibid., 171.
200 Waines, 167-69.
201 Waines 170-72.
202 Ronald Ferrier
(1986), “Trade from the Mid-14th Century to the End of the Safavid Period,” in
The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Peter
Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
427.
203 Amoretti, 635.
204 Even though the
Shiites and the Christians had different sources of transcendent credibility,
neither bordered the other, although both bordered the Ottomans with their
Sunni source of transcendent credibility.
205 HR Roemer (1986),
“The Safavid Period,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6: The Timurid and
Safavid Periods, Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 218.
206 Ibid., 219.
207 Morgan, 116.
208 Roemer (1986b),
222.
209 Ibid., 244-45.
210 Roemer (1986b),
299-300.
211 Ibid., 219.
212 Ibid.
213 Ibid., 219-220.
214 Roemer (1986b),
225; Morgan, 117.
215 Bitlis (or Bidlis) was a province
located on western and southern shores of Lake Van, on what became part of the
border between the Ottoman and Safavid territories.
216 Mehmet Oz (2003),
“Ottoman Provincial Administration in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia: The
Case of Bidlis in the Sixteenth Century,”
International Journal of Turkish Studies 9(1-2), 144-56.
217 Roemer (1986b),
225.
218 Charles Oman
(1987 [1937]), A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London:
Greenhill Books), 607-770.
219 Cosgil (2005).
220 Morgan, 127-28.
221 Savory, “The
Safavid Administrative System,” 370.
222 Ferrier, 415.
223 BA Ergene (2001), “On Ottoman Justice: Interpretations in
Conflict (1600-1800),” Islamic Law and Society 8(1): 52-87.
224 Savory, “The
Safavid Administrative System,” 355-56.
225 Kozlowski (1995).
226 Savory, “The
Safavid Administrative System,” 356.
227 Pamuk (2004),
238-39.
228 Pamuk (2000).
229 Ruti Matthee (2001), “Mint
Consolidation and the Worsening of the Late Safavid Coinage: The Mint of Huwayza,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient 44(4), 505-39.
230 Ferrier, 427.
231 Najaf Haider
(1996), “Precious Metal Flows and Currency Circulation in the Mughal Empire,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39(3), 298-364.
232 Bert Fragner (1986), “Social and Internal Economic Affairs,” in
The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Peter
Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 545.
For updates
click homepage here