22 Islam in Iran

Julian Baldick

Islam in Iran, although it is now a subject that attracts attention by virtue of the revolution of 1978-9 and its reverberating after­math, needs to be viewed in the perspective of a long historical process.

A massive problem confronts us. To what extent is it right to speak of an ‘Iranian Islam’? How much of the pre-Islamic heritage that was specifically Iranian went into Islam as practised and conceived in Iran? Here one essential fact dominates consideration of the question. Since the sixteenth century Iran alone has had as its official faith Twelver Shi'ism, which represents the principal minority sect in Islam, and is characterised by its extreme devotion to Muhammad’s family, notably to twelve ‘leaders’ therein. But how Iranian is this development? How far is it prefigured in Iran’s earlier religious history?

The field is overshadowed by the studies of one man, the late Henry Corbin, whose extremely personal approach and difficult style have given rise to much misunderstanding. He argued that the structures of Mazdaism (‘Zoroastrianism’, Iran’s principal and official pre-Islamic faith, distinguished by its preoccupation with an epic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil) were to reappear in Iran under the guise of Islamic mysticism. Now this argument has been misinterpreted, by over- zealous partisans and opponents alike, as implying actual continuity of Iranian doctrines, handed down from Mazdean to Muslim, from teacher to disciple, across the Islamisation of Iran from the seventh century ce onwards.

This misinterpretation has led Iranian nationalists and some academics, heavily subsidised by the late Shah, to engage in a predictable and massive exaggeration of the indebtedness of Islam to Mazda- ism, in line with the Shah’s glorification of Iranian culture as a continuous and pure self-expression of the Aryan race. On the other hand, in an extreme reaction, some specialists have tried to deny the existence of mystical ele­ments in the thought of leading Iranian Muslim philosophers, claiming that they were entirely rational; similarly, the attempt has been made to deny the existence of Shi’ite elements, or elements conducive to the acceptance of Shi’ism, in the thought of leading Iranian mystics before the Shi’ite take-over in the sixteenth century.

Recent research points to a different solution: it is not the main-line Iranian faith, Mazdaism, or the pre-Islamic monarchical tradi­tion of Iran, or, in general, specifically Iranian elements that were to have a real continuity and be preserved in Islam. Rather, it was the mystical and insurrectionary traditions opposed to Mazdaism and the old Iranian state that were to go on in Muslim form. These traditions would appear not to be specifically Iranian, though they had flourished in Iran, but to come, Eke most things in Islam, from Iraq, with ideas previously expressed in Greek. In­deed, it must be stressed that before the Islamic period Iran and Iraq consti­tuted a cultural and pohtical unity, and in the Islamic period must always be viewed together. If Shi’ism belongs in its historical origin to any country, it is to Iraq. In a wider perspective one could see its central ceremonies which evoke, with a heavy emphasis on the supply of water, the martyrdom of the Shi’ites’ third ‘leader’, Husein, as a prolongation of the fertility cults of dying semi-divine figures (Adonis, Attis, Jesus) in the ancient Near East.

Let us begin with the various religious movements in Iran after the Arab conquest in the seventh century ce.

Central to these movements is a type of Shi’ism usually seen as constituting a sub-sect: Zaydism, so called after an unsuccess­ful rebel from Muhammad’s family. This tendency is defined by its insistence on armed insurrection with a view to installing a proclaimed leader in power. It was to find a strong foothold among the warlike mountain tribesmen of northern Iran.

Alongside this we may see attempts by other insurgents to combine Islam with older religious practices against the official Mazdean clergy. In such a context the appearance of new and short-Eved prophets, uniting MusEm and Iranian elements, can be seen as a continuation of the tradition of the prophet Mani (d. c. 274 ce), the founder of a new reEgion called after him Manichaeism, and one’s interpretation would vary according to how one saw that faith: either as syncretism, the deliberate mingling together of different creeds, or as the adaptation of a secret, mysti­cal religion to local beliefs. In either interpretation the tradition is one coming from Iraq.

This is certainly the case with the continuation in Muslim dress of Mazdakism (with a ‘k’, not to be confused with the main­line Mazdaism). This pre-Islamic religion, called after its leader at the end of the fifth century ce, Mazdak, who is held responsible for its famous socialistic character, did indeed grow out of Manichaeism (and thus owed its original inspiration to Gnosticism, a movement which, in its emphasis on a hidden knowledge reserved for an elite, was independent of any regional colouring). It was to live on in Islam, its rebellious adherents being known as the Khurramiyya, ‘people ofjoy’. According to one firsthand Muslim source some of them considered sexual promiscuity, and in general any harmless pleas­ures, to be lawful.

It is against this background of Zaydi and Mazdakite insurrectionism that one must see the secret propaganda of the small Ismaili sect of Shi'ism, which recognises a continuing line of ‘leaders’ up to the present day. Apparently the Ismailis and Mazdakites were not really con­nected; but the latter indirectly assisted the former’s missionary activity, which found fertile soil from north-western to north-eastern Iran. The result, as we shall note, will be Ismailism at its most extreme, both in its recourse to assassination and its messianic rejection of Islamic law.

We must now consider the extent to which the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, reigning from 750 onwards, and installing its capital in Baghdad as opposed to Damascus, might be seen as representing an Iranisation of Islam. The shifting of the capital, the fact that the revolution which brought them to power was effected by forces coming from north­eastern Iran, and their re-creation of the court ceremonial of the Persian Empire, all used to be taken to indicate a fully-fledged Iranian revival. But in recent years, after this nineteenth-century view was discarded, as it was observed that the Abbasid revolution was really the work of the Arabs themselves, leading specialists have pointed to the course of the Abbasid caliphate as following an internal logic of its own. To be sure, at the new court conventional Mazdean ethical formulas would be transposed literally into Arabic, and Indian animal fables would be translated from Middle Persian, but the real ferment of ideas would be Christian, Jewish, Greek, Manichaean and Gnostic.

We may note, under the Abbasids, the movement of the Shuubiyya, the party of the peoples, against the ruling Arabs. But it is important to remember that this is really a literary phenomenon, represent­ing a type of writer. To be sure, this provided a cover for the disgruntled non-Arab bureaucrats, whose ancestors had had to become inferior ‘associate members’ of Arab tribes to qualify for Muslim status. Arabs were called ‘lizard-eaters’ and the past glories of Iran were extolled. But one must be extremely doubtful about modern specialists’ use of literary anecdotes, with their romantic localisations of isolated poetical fragments, to show an alleged ‘strength of Persian national sentiment’ in the population as a whole, or its use for political purposes.

With these considerations in mind, we may now examine the political decline of the Abbasids in the ninth century and their fall in the tenth, along with the rise of regional dynasties in the Iranian world. In the past this process was also seen as a specifically Iranian phenomenon: one of Aryans casting off the Semitic yoke. Nowadays it would be attributed to the inner contradictions of the Abbasids, who claimed the right to rule as kinsmen but not as actual descendants of Muhammad, and to their use of slave soldiers, who were to become their masters. The rise of regional dynasties is not peculiar to Iran: it happens, noteworthily with Shi'ite rulers, in Egypt and North Africa and in Syria in the tenth century.

Moreover, the new dynasties in Iran were not always markedly Iranian. They varied from local governors whose position became hereditary to anti-sectarian vigilantes who got out of control. As for the Samanids, who ruled in north-eastern Iran and Central Asia from about 875 to 999, we may note with interest the observation made about their achieve­ments by R.N. Frye, that whereas in Iran itself the rigid caste system of Mazdaism prevented the absorption of indigenous elements into the new religion, the relative absence of such class distinctions in Central Asia enabled Iranian culture to be preserved.

This brings us to the Shi'ite dynasty of the Buyids, who descended from their north Iranian homeland to take over Iraq and western Iran in the first half of the tenth century, capturing Baghdad in 945 and thereby severely reducing the position of the Abbasid caliphs. We encounter here a problem which is to recur, notably today: what are Shi'ites to do when they have succeeded in seizing power? The Buyid solution seems markedly cynical and opportunist, but also tolerant and pacific in its chosen compromise. The Shi'ite, Buyid military rulers were to coexist with the Sunni, Abbasid caliphs, who continued to command the loyalty of most Muslims. Each side would recognise the other and give it legitimacy. Thus the Buyids adopted and largely gave shape to the main, ‘Twelver’ subdivi­sion of Shi'ism, in which the twelfth ‘leader’ is held to have disappeared. Meanwhile the Buyids tried, without success, to revive the old Iranian monarchy, resurrecting the ancient title Shahanshah, King of Kings, and reproducing an old coronation rite. We may see here, as in other periods of Iranian history, a striking illustration of what has been put forward as a general rule: the State is always an attempt to restore and imitate a lost oriental original, with all its pomp and autocracy, an attempt that is bound to fail, since the pristine tradition has been forgotten, and only the outward trappings can be recalled. In any case, the new sharing of authority can be seen as the fulfilment of an old Abbasid dream of collaboration with the Shi'ite sect, brought into effect by the influence of rich Shi'ites in Iraq, rather than as the result of an authentically Iranian interference. As for the outcome, the Buyids were inevitably unsuccessful, falling as they did between the two stools of Sunnism and Shi'ism, unable to find the support of the former and unwilling to try to impose the latter.

We may here consider the most famous of Islamic philosophers, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037), who was intimately connected with the Samanid and Buyid princes as physician and political adviser. Here again Islam and Iran illustrate most emphatically a general tendency, that of philosophers and monarchs to engage in mutual support. Much controversy has surrounded Ibn Sina’s avowed attempt to produce a mystical, ‘Oriental’ thought, superior to the conventional Greco-Islamic philosophy which he inherited. He does not seem to have succeeded in making a real break with the latter, but on the other hand one specialist’s denial that he was a mystic on the grounds that Catholic theology ‘reserves the word for one whose whole life is a great love of God’ is hardly a serious contribution to the history of religions. In Ibn Sina’s literary production, as in that of other Muslim thinkers, we find both straightforward clarification of the work of predecessors on the one hand, and on the other short stories in which personal and spiritual self­realisation is expressed in symbolic form.

The dynasties just mentioned were to give way to new rulers, Turks coming from their original homeland in Central Asia. These rulers were main-line, Sunni Muslims, and they were to bring about a restoration of Sunnism and the collapse of Shi'ism’s political domination in the eastern Islamic world. The Sunni caliph in Baghdad, much against his will, it would seem, was ‘rescued’ from his comfortable arrangement with the Shi'ite dynasty of the Buyids in 1055. One family, that of the Seljuks, was now to hold sway over most Muslims in the East. They and their Iranian collaborators were to exploit all the resources of their strong and powerful state, and the institutions thereof, in order to impose upon the population a strict and respectable form of Islam. Thus a relatively new institution, the college (madrasah) was used to fight minority views condemned as ‘heretical’. Well-subsidised students were trained in these colleges to be the official judges and jurists of the future. At the same time the lodge (khanaqah) of the Sufis would be used, with suitable endowments, to prevent excessive divaga­tions and indulgence in libertinism on the part of the mystics. Political theorists were found to justify the conditions that had been imposed by force upon the caliphate, and in which the new sovereigns had effective power.

But alongside these tendencies of a restrictive charac­ter we can see others, in the opposite direction, connected with the influx of nomadic Turks from the north-east. The wilder practices of the Sufis, and of the more extended and popular class of world-renouncers called ‘dervishes’, of which the Sufis are a part, received a powerful stimulus from Central Asia. The discipline of ‘gazing at beardless boys’ in order to perceive the Divine Beauty manifested therein, and the accompanying use of song, music and dance, with the deliberate provoking of ‘blame’ from respectable society, were all strengthened by the Turks’ original religion of shamanism, distin­guished by the cultivation of ecstasy, magic and the initiate’s experience of ‘flying’. To be sure, these practices can be seen as originating elsewhere, among the Greeks, the Christians and the Cynics of late antiquity, and some are found everywhere; but the massive immigration of Turks was to rein­force these elements as characteristic of their tribal, nomadic society, not as ‘influences’ casually crossing frontiers. These themes were to overshadow, in content and background, the Persian poetry of Sufism, seen by the peoples of the eastern Islamic world as constituting their very highest cultural achievement.

Alongside these developments of an institutional and ecstatic character we may observe the extremist activities of an Ismaili sub-sect, which, from 1090 to 1256, maintained a small state ofitsown, based in an isolated mountain castle in northern Iran, and recognising a separate line of‘leaders’. Its notorious ‘Assassins’ would strike fear into the hearts of political opponents, while its secret propaganda constituted the perennial bogy of main-line Islam. At one point its chief actually proclaimed that the Last Day, the Resurrection (understood symbolically) had come and Islamic law was nullified.

As Seljuk rule declined in the second half of the twelfth century there appeared a figure central to the concept of ‘Iranian Islam’, the philosopher Suhrawardi, put to death, for reasons which must remain obscure, in 1192. He divided his time between Turkey and Syria, but we cannot ignore him here. The founder of the school of‘Oriental Illumina­tion’ (ishraq), he claimed to revive an ancient wisdom common to Greece and Iran, and dominated by the theme of Light as the all-pervading reality. But here there is no continuity of Iranian ideas from teacher to disciple. Suhrawardi himself said (as Corbin has stressed) that he had no predecessor in this enterprise, and it appears that he found no suitable pupil. His first successor in the school, Shahrazuri (fl. 1281), was not, as has been imagined, in contact with any of Suhrawardi’s students. To be sure, Suhrawardi uses the names of Iranian angels (accompanied by royalist sentiments), but it would be wrong to see here any continuation of Mazdaism on the level of the structures themselves, which remain essentially Greek. Any similarities, for example that between a spiritual geography in Mazdean Middle Persian literature and Suhrawardi’s vision of a mysterious ‘No-where-place’, are to be explained in terms of Greek influences in later Mazdean thought, corre­sponding to Platonic elements in Suhrawardi’s system. As for the similarities between Plato and the oldest Iranian doctrines, with the Greek triad of reason, anger and lust corresponding to the proto-Mazdean triad of religion, war and fertility, they are explicable in terms of an original ideology of the Indo-Europeans, the linguistic ancestors of the Iranians and the Greeks.

In the same way, it is a Greek, not an Iranian struc­ture that dominates the Sufi didactic poetry produced by Iranians in this period. Thus the poet Attar (d. 1221) presents the Spirit as having six sons, in three pairs: the experiencing of God’s unity, and poverty; reason and know­ledge; the lower or carnal soul and the Devil. These three pairs correspond to Neoplatonism’s triad of the One, Reason and the Soul. The resemblances with Mazdaism’s six Archangels and its original triad of religion, war and fertility are only partial and again understandable as due to a common Indo-European heritage.

In the thirteenth century Iran, like many other coun­tries, was subject to invasions, enormous massacres and conquest at the hands of the Mongols. Islamic apologists often attribute the apparent decline of their religion and civilisation to this momentous intervention. Against this it has been said that the seeds of decline were visible before the Mongols’ advent, and came to fruition in countries not overrun by them. At any rate, as far as Islam is concerned, it can be said that the Mongol conquest acted as a catalyst in a transformation that was to some extent prefigured and need not necessarily be viewed as a ‘decline’.

Two elements dominated in this transformation, in the course of the thirteenth century. One was that of the Sufi organisations. Arising shortly before the Mongol conquest, and emphasising the important role of the Sufi master, they had to respond to the devastation that now ensued and provide leadership for Muslim society beneath non-Muslim rule. The result was inevitably a higher degree of collaboration with temporal authority, enrichment and political involvement on the one hand, and the even greater glorification of the individual Sufi teacher on the other, as the caliphate of Baghdad was overthrown.

The second dominant element was the introduction of the mystical doctrine of the Andalusian Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), Sufism’s main systematiser. This was to overshadow all subsequent Muslim thinking, and effectively take over Sufi theory in the eastern Islamic world, notably in Iran, where it found a particularly fertile soil. Ibn Arabi’s system is called that of ‘the unity of existence’ and comes dangerously close to monism, the belief that there is only one Being in all existence. It also emphasises the cosmic role of the mystic as a ‘Perfect Man’, an interface between God and this world of appearances.

Thus whereas in the pre-Mongol period main-line, Sunni Muslims stood before God without an intermediary, and Sufis, as Sunnis, were seen as natural enemies by the Shi‘ites, intent on the mediation of their ‘leaders’, by the fourteenth century much had changed. The Sufi master, alive or dead, was accorded an all-important veneration. Sufism and Shi'ism now both represented a ‘catholic’ spirituality. An Iranian Sufi Shi'ite could write with justification that ‘he who Shi'ises Sufises and he who Sufises Shi‘ises’. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Shi'ism and Ibn Arabi are the principal influences in Persian Sufi literature. To be sure, the writers usually cited as evidence for the advance of Shi'ism were often Sunnis, who made violent attacks upon the Shi‘a as a sect. But their veneration for the family of Muhammad, akin to that of an Anglo-Catholic for Mary, was expressed more and more strongly. The boundary between Sunni and Shi'ite was not so clear as it was later to become.

The Mongol Empire was to split up into regional commands, and the rulers in Iran were to be converted to Islam before losing their power in the chaos and confusion of the fourteenth century. Then various attempts were made by the indigenous population to govern them­selves. Rebels arose, notably in a Shi'ite district in north-eastern Iran, where an extensive ‘republic’ was set up, constituting a remarkable exception to the usual run of dynasties. But this state was weakened by a fight between a faction of Shi'ite dervishes and a conservative oligarchy, and the latter submitted to a new Central Asian conqueror, Timur (d. 1405).

In the fifteenth century yet more disorder and agita­tion ensued. Of particular interest is the synthesis made by Ibn Abi Jumhur (fl. 1474—99) of Shi'ite theology, philosophy, especially that of ‘Oriental Illumination’, and Sufism, thereby prefiguring a later mixture that was to be popular in Iran, and, in its originality, affording a refreshing contrast to the more academic, backward-looking character of Sunnism at this time. It was in this period that what had been a quietly respectable Sunni organisation of Sufis, presided over by a family known as the Safavids, turned to Shi'ism and political and military activities, with all-important results for Islam in Iran.

At the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth a revolution was begun and successfully carried out by a son of this family, at the time a mere boy, who, as Shah Ismail (1501-24), founded the Safa vid dynasty of kings and brutally imposed Twelver Shi'ism as the official religion of Iran. This was done thanks to his nomadic followers, Turks, who invaded Iran from the West. Today no serious student would repeat the nineteenth-century view that the Safa vid revolution was an expres­sion of Iranian nationalism. On the contrary, as Jean Aubin has done well to emphasise, it was fully impregnated by the old Central Asian tribal traditions of Ismail’s Turkish supporters, which were now manifested in cannibalism and using the skull of the enemy as a cup. Ismail’s massacres and use of torture were horrific even by the standards of the day. However, one must be sceptical about the interpretation by some specialists of his verses to mean that he claimed to be God ‘incarnate’. The idea of incarnation is expressly rejected by the Sufi poetical tradition in which these verses must be seen. That said, his followers certainly gave him immense veneration, which, added to their messianism, posed a considerable problem for the new state. Again there arose the question of how a successful revolution could be continued. Shi'ite Sufis have tended to see, or be accused of seeing, the present heads of their organisations as in some way identical with the twelfth ‘leader’ of the Twelver Shi'ites, considered to have disappeared and to be awaiting the right moment to return and fill the world with justice. But there was to be no fulfilment of messianic hopes, and thus the Safa vid state was fatally flawed from the outset.

Accordingly, when Shah Tahmasp (1524-76) was proclaimed as the Mahdi, the divinely guided ruler whose advent was expected, by some Sufi supporters in 1554-5, he felt obliged to execute their chiefs. He preferred the more cautious policy of diplomatic marriages between his family and the religious classes. Shah Abbas (1588-1629) was able to restrain the tribal and dervish elements to which the dynasty owed its initial success. He tried to present himself as the Sufi master whose disciples would be the population as a whole. With him the family achieved its greatest power and splendour.

But the rise of the Shi'ite jurists, consequent upon the imposition of their creed, was to weaken the dynasty that had enforced its acceptance. Thus later in the seventeenth century discussion centred on a question of great contemporary interest: should society be controlled by an outstanding jurist, in the absence of the 'twelfth leader’, or should it be ruled by descendants of one of the ‘leaders’, as the Safa vids claimed to be? The Shahs did their best to check the jurists, by bureaucratic control and keeping legal proceedings out of their grasp. But as the state grew more feeble and less religious the jurists became increasingly an opposition to it.

We must now consider a phenomenon of the very greatest importance, sadly neglected by many previous writers: the brilliant revival of philosophy in Safavid Iran. Why did this take place, when in the rest of the Muslim world philosophy, and indeed theology, had effectively been suppressed? One particular reason is that a thirteenth-century col­laborator of the Mongol conquerors had diverted religious trusts in order to subsidise the philosophical sciences in Iran, and consequently they continued to be studied there. A more general explanation is to be found in the theological positions of Shi'ism, taken over from the Mutazilite sect, which had borrowed its methods from Greek philosophy. Yet another is to be seen in the pro-philosophical leanings of strong monarchies, such as the Safavid Empire at its height of glory.

The philosophical revival is dominated by the figure of one man, Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), who brought about a great revolution in his discipline, and founded a kind of‘existentialism’. For he insisted that existence itself is original and prior to the essences of things, and he developed a system on this basis for the first time. Being, in its acts of existing, produces essences, which, since they are not original, are not unchangeable, as is usually the case in Islamic thought, but go through infinite degrees of alteration in a process of movement which actually operates within sub­stances themselves. Thus Sadra was able to go much further than his pre­decessors in Iran in liberating philosophy from its conventional self­restrictions, while incorporating Ibn Arabi’s Sufi doctrine of the ‘unity of existence’ and applying the whole to the Shi'ite canon of‘Traditions’. The result was to inspire an impressive progression of philosophical thinking up to the present day.

Complementing Sadra’s work in philosophy is that done in law by Majlisi (d. 1699). In him Shi'ite learning finds its definitive and most comprehensive expression and codification, notably in the field of the ‘Traditions’ attributed to the ‘leaders’ in Muhammad’s family, and constitut­ing the main source of jurisprudence. Thus he and his colleagues, in contrast to Sadra and his school, represented a greater concern with externals, and manifested a considerable hostility, which was to be continued to the present day, towards Sufism, as improperly transferring veneration to the heads of the organised ‘brotherhoods’. Unfortunately, Majlisi also had considerable hostility for Sunnis, and it was largely thanks to him that they were perse­cuted, so that Sunnis from Afghanistan duly revolted and overthrew the Safavid Empire in 1722.

There now followed a peculiar episode. A new monarch, Nadir Shah (1736-47), tried to find a diplomatic solution to heal the rift between Shi'ite Iran and the Sunni exterior. For the existence of the Shi'ite, Safavid Empire between two Sunni empires, the Turkish, Ottoman Empire on the one hand and the Indian, Mogul Empire on the other, had hardened the divisions between the two main sects of Islam. Nadir thought that by depriving Shi'ism of its most offensive aspects, the rejection and the public vilification of Muhammad’s first successors as usurpers, and by restyl­ing it as a ‘Jafarite’ school of law, so named after the sixth ‘leader’ of the Shi'ites, he could get it accepted as a fifth respectable school of law alongside the four established among the Sunnis. As it happened, the Ottoman Empire and its jurists refused to agree to this, and in any case Nadir’s extreme cruelty led to his murder. One must severely doubt the viability of his enterprise. After him the most powerful ruler in Iran, Karim Khan Zand (c. 1751—79), was a loyal and tolerant servant of both Shi'ism and the continuing shadow of Safavid legitimacy, which retained popular support despite the actual fall of the dynasty, owing to its claim to descent from Muhammad’s family.

During the violent chaos of the eighteenth century many Iranian religious scholars took refuge in the Shi'ite centres of Iraq, and there something happened which was to have immense reverberations in our own time. For a long time, Shi'ite lawyers had been divided between two factions, the Akhbaris or ‘Traditionites’, who insisted that one should simply conform to the canonical ‘Traditions’, and the Usulis or ‘Principlites’ who held that the qualified jurist could use his own judgement. Now whereas in the early eighteenth century the ‘Traditionites’ carried all before them, by the end of the century they were effectively beaten for ever. The attraction of the opposite position doubtless lay in the massive political power which it conferred on the jurists, whom the ordinary believer was required to obey.

It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the ‘Traditionites’ were mere dusty pedants. On the contrary, they gave rise to a number of original thinkers in the field of mystical philosophy, and notably the Shaykhi school, so called after its founder, Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai (d. 1826). This movement, though small in itself, continuing up to our own time in one family in an out-of-the-way provincial city, has none the less given birth to a large and world-wide development in the history of religions. For this school’s spiritual emphasis on a secret Bab or gate, that is an unknown person acting as intermediary between the hidden twelfth ‘leader’ and his followers, was to lead to the appearance in the nineteenth century of someone publicly claiming to be the Bab, and the consequent founding of a new sect, Babism, and a new religion, Bahaism.

Also in the late eighteenth century, and on the mysti­cal side, we must observe the revival of Sufism, and the return of Sufi masters after a long period of exile in India. The Safavid state and its jurists had persecuted these dervishes in the past: now, when the Sufis came back after the fall of the empire, the lawyers were to hound several of them to their deaths.

We now come to the history of the Qajar dynasty (1785-1924). The religious aspects of this period have been admirably pre­sented by Hamid Algar, in a study that shows us many elements which have resurfaced violently in recent years. This dynasty did not have the aura of legitimacy conferred on the Safavids by their claim to descent from Muhammad’s family. Real power lay in the hands of the Shi'ite jurists: but, unlike their contemporary counterparts, they chose to exercise it without taking over the apparatus of the State, for which they evinced an undisguised distaste. Here they found a natural ally in the merchant class, which was also independent of the government and hostile to such un-Islamic innovations as customs duties and foreign loans. Opposition to the monarchy found expres­sion in the public recitation of verses evoking the martyrdom of Husein, the third ‘leader’ of the Shi'ites, and in the association of the reigning house with the rulers responsible for his killing. As in recent years, opposition to the Shah from a jurist brought the latter increased popular respect, while one who collaborated with the dynasty found himself unable to exercise the ultimate authority of the expert considered to have the greatest knowledge.

Of particular interest is the massacre of the Russian Legation in Tehran in 1829. Here the religious scholars showed their ability to mobilise rioters in defence of Islam: it was alleged that the Russians were detaining Muslim women. The Shah had to threaten a counter-massacre, that of the populace, in order to ensure the departure of the religious leader who had been most prominent in the agitation.

In the reign of Muhammad Shah (1834—48), the gov­ernment was in the hands of his Sufi teacher. Resistance was led by a jurist who was not only the spiritual, but also the temporal master of a former capital, Isfahan, and ruled as an extremely rich man, revered by the popula­tion, with a mysterious organisation of brigands to help him. The reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (1848-96) was marked by tyranny and yet more resistance from the Muslim leadership. Violence surrounded Europeanisation, special concessions given to foreigners, the rise of the new sect of Babism, and the right of sanctuary, which was exercised not only in shrines but also in mosques and the houses of the scholar-jurists.

Antagonism reached its height in the tobacco crisis of 1891-2. The monarchy had given a monopoly of all commercial activities involving tobacco to a British company. The religious leaders and merchants united to force the government to cancel this. Their success demonstrated the Shi‘ite loyalty of the population, who boycotted the use of tobacco when copies of a legal opinion were circulated, declaring smoking to be equivalent to war against the twelfth ‘leader’ of Muhammad’s family. One should notice in this affair, the classic use, still practised nowadays, of the jurist’s highly effective threat to go away and deprive his supporters of his spiritual gui­dance, and also the practice by demonstrators of dressing themselves in their shrouds in preparation for martyrdom.

In 1905 a beating inflicted upon some merchants for opposing the government provoked the scholar-jurists into actually leaving the capital. In 1906, as the agitation continued, they did so again and forced the monarchy to agree to the grant of a constitution. The constitution gave the religious leaders a right of veto over legislation, but in practice this clause remained a dead letter. Britain and Russia cynically intervened to divide the country between themselves. The resulting disorder gave rise to a new dynasty, that of the Pahlavis, founded by Rida (Reza) Shah (1925-41).

This potentate had secured his power by having Chopin’s Funeral March played during the main Shi‘ite period of mourning, thus falsely convincing the scholar-jurists that he was on their side. He now embarked upon a series of measures designed to Europeanise Iran and deprive the country of its Islamic character. He tried to ban the veil and believed that progress could be achieved by making men wear a Western style of hat. Although his own limited literacy occasioned many a jest, his regime tried to impose examinations upon students of the religious sciences, who had man­aged perfectly well without them for centuries. Not surprisingly, positive achievements were few. The Shah’s open pro-Nazi sympathies were to pro­vide a pretext for another British and Russian intervention in the Second World War, and he left his relieved subjects for South Africa.

His son and successor, Muhammad Rida Shah (1941-79), was also to hold views characteristic of the losing side of the Second World War. He had to be restored to power by American intelligence officers in 1953, and later concentrated upon the fulfilment of increasingly grander visions, which he identified with ‘civilisation’. Money from oil revenues was lavished upon Western academics, whose obliging panegyrics replaced the court poetry of yore, and who discovered an enlightened toler­ance in pre-Islamic Iranian kings. Torture was carried out on an unparalleled scale, presumably illustrating the continuity of ancient ‘national’ traditions, now elevated above the Semitic intrusion of Islam.

In 1963 the regime gunned down a large number of the religious leaders’ supporters, in an action which was later saluted by the British Ambassador of that time as the very highest masterpiece of states­manship. The population was to take a different view. One leading scholar­jurist, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had distinguished himself by his outspoken stance, and was thus able, in long years of exile, to command the allegiance of his fellow-countrymen. In the later 1970s the Shah’s self-identification with Iran’s pre-Islamic past became increasingly divorced from practicability, as the regime tried to replace the Islamic calendar with an ‘Imperial’ one, and had Khomeini denounced as a British agent. By now the religious leadership and the population in general had had enough, and after further attempts to intimidate his subjects by mass shootings had failed the Shah left, for Khomeini to return in 1979.

The continuation of the Revolution, with the estab­lishing of an Islamic Republic, has followed a pattern normal in revolutions, with inevitable disappointments, excesses and abuses. Added to this, an attack from a Sunni regime in Iraq, ruling a very large Shi'ite population, and the ensuing long war, with huge loss of life, provided a tragically significant underlining of the two countries’ interdependence in religious history. In general, with regard to recent developments, it must be said that the more privileged classes of Iranian society (along with American and British med­dlers) should bear a heavy burden of blame for their irresponsible conduct under the Shah. Their absurd efforts to ape the manners of the West, while losing touch with the lower classes and the latter’s traditional, Islamic cul­ture, along with the Shah’s failure to develop genuinely representative institutions, were bound to result in chaos. Not surprisingly, they now complain that they do not receive more money, food and influence than their social inferiors.

Recent political activity, then, points to a real con­tinuity in the insurrectionary traditions of Islam in Iran, as opposed to the discontinuity of the monarchical failures to revive a forgotten past. It seems better to speak of‘Islam in Iran’ rather than ‘Iranian Islam’: it was Muslims who changed the country, rather than Iranians who changed the religion. The strange form of Islam in Iran, a poignant cult of martyrdoms, is domi­nated by paradoxical features that owe their origin to the early development of the religion itself: Twelver Shi'ism has become a Catholicism without the phenomenon of a Church, and involves a messianism whose infallible Mes­siah can apparently never come, since the elite who would confirm his legitimacy seem to view his interior presence as excluding his physical advent. The result is a Papacy without a Pope, while on the other hand the rich tradition of Persian Sufi poetry, with its glorification of ecstasy against conventional worship, vigorously expresses the sentiments of anti­clericalism without a clergy as such to attack. But such paradoxes are inherent in the nature of both mysticism and religion, and it is difficult to see how any viable solution to Iran’s present problems could be expressed in terms other than Islamic.

Further Reading

One may wish to read Chapters 20 and 34, ‘Early Islam’ and ‘Mazdaism’ in conjunc­tion with this chapter.

Algar, Hamid Religion and State in Iran 1785-1906 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1969)

Bakhash, Shaul The Reign of the Ayatollahs (Tauris, London, 1985)

Corbin, Henry Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1977)

----- The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (Shambhala Publications, 1981)

The Cambridge History of Iran, vols. 4—5 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968-75)