Thinking More Historically about Islam and Violence? A Case Study of the Early Safavid Dynasty

This paper offers the first systematic overview in scholarship of the teachings of the Safavid Sufi order and dynasty under the leadership of Shah Ismaʿil Safavi (d. 1524), who proclaimed Twelver Shiʿism the official religion of Iran and whose supporters violently enforced its public observance.  Contrary to popular belief, I show the firm rootedness of Safavid teachings in normative intellectual and literary Sufi traditions, using textual evidence from not only Ismaʿil’s didactic poetry, but also a completely neglected work of Sufi philosophy authored in 1502 by Ilāhī Ardabīlī (d. 1543), the first Iranian state cleric to author a work of Twelver jurisprudence in Persian. 

My analysis contradicts the prevalent idea in scholarship that, despite the lack of any textual evidence, the Safavids and their Kizilbash followers supposedly harbored a unique set of “extremist” Shiʿite beliefs that were responsible for their violent actions, or otherwise identifiably distinguished them from their Sunni contemporaries.[1]  At the same time, I show that the Safavids did not differ meaningfully in their use of violence from that employed by other nomadic dynasties and their militaries, both non-Muslim and Sunni, to seize and maintain control over sedentary populations throughout history, such as the Seljuq, Chinggisid, Timurid, or Aqqoyunlu dynasties.  I further argue that interpretations of the Safavid decision to publicly enforce Shiʿism should focus less on conjecture about how much popular support previously existed for Shiʿism in Iran or for how long, and should instead be situated in the context of their Timurid and Aqqoyunlu counterparts, whose constant, deadly succession struggles over the century prior must have become synonymous in public consciousness with their efforts to also style themselves “revivers” of Sunni Islam.

I conclude with a reminder that the rise of the Safavids actually marked the end of a more than century-long cycle of deadly succession struggles in Iran, even though their development of the kind of state apparatus needed to actively suppress such violence would take almost another century—suggesting that official Shiʿism may have contributed to eliminating other contenders for dynastic succession not by physical force, but through its success as a discourse, because such contenders’ claims to legitimacy had invariably been based on official Sunnism.

Together, these findings seriously complicate the common perceptions that Shiʿism owes its majority status in Iran to a set of origins that are primarily or particularly violent, or that the Safavid revolution is evidence of, or best explained by, the existence of an undercurrent of latent “militant” or “volatile” tendencies specific to Shiʿite communities and their narratives—an idea explicitly entertained by such a range of experts as Momen, Modarressi, Arjomand or Amanat.

These findings also contribute significantly to the literature on Islam, sectarianism and violence, specifically by showing both the utility and need therein for a kind of Islamic-non-Islamic, “religious–secular” dichotomy, something first proposed by Hodgson.  Though not offering a normative definition of Islam—while also acknowledging Dagli’s recent contention of the impossibility of not doing so implicitly—my argument for this dichotomy centers instead on the “non-Islamic” or “secular,” defined provisionally as simply including whatever administrative or military aspects of Islam’s social and political history that obviously would have, or did in fact at one time exist in the absence of whatever is meant by “Islam.”  Without some such distinction, doubtless in need of refinement, my analysis of Safavid history and historiography nevertheless shows how any violence occurring in Islamic societies otherwise risks interpretation simply as “religious violence.” 

Indeed, among academic efforts to dispel widespread perceptions of a defining link between Islam and violence, Asad’s and Cavanaugh’s are particularly notable for basing themselves on W. C. Smith, J. Z. Smith, and Masuzawa’s critiques of the very religious–secular distinction as a culturally specific, modern Western concept fabricated to justify colonialism.  Both Asad and Cavanaugh’s writings, however, respond directly to modern-day polemics and pejorative depictions of Islam, and thus are confined to longue duree intellectual and discursive continuity in their general treatments of Islam’s history.  Thus, while they assert that distinguishing between the “religious” and “non-religious” elements in a culture or civilization distort and essentialize it, their treatments unfortunately lack an acknowledgment of Islamic history’s full diversity and complexity of the kind pioneered by Hodgson. 

Lawrence, meanwhile, offers the most persuasive recent refutation of any proposed essential connection between Islam and violence precisely through a thematic, historical study of the variety of forms and roles of violence in Islamic civilizations over time—with the strength of his argument, by contrast, relying precisely on an implicit distinction between Islam as a normative tradition, and other areas of life in Muslim history in which violence can take place, and therefore be an object of response.  Similarly, such recent, historically grounded surveys of Islamic sectarianism as Gaiser and Matthiesen’s advance overviews of intra-Islamic difference with sensitivity and nuance only by portraying violence between Muslim religious identity groups as partly or primarily explainable by factors that are only political, economic—or in other words, in themselves non-Islamic or non-religious.

And yet, it is striking that, given especially the centrality with which contemporary consciousness has for decades hysterically linked the broader question of “Islam and violence” with Iranian Shiʿism specifically, even these recent advances in the literature omit any analysis of the latter’s modern-day origins in the Safavid dynasty contextualized by the forms of violence endemic to the Iranian plateau, particularly in the perennial competition between sedentary and nomadic peoples for land and resources.  My analysis of the Safavids against this broader backdrop of routine social conflicts historically associated with no particular religion makes a strong case for considering anew an idea like Hodgson's of the “secular” in the study of Islam—perhaps not literally and not anachronistically, but simply to advance the (regrettably still) necessary discussion of such topics as “Islam and violence”—as well as the continued relevance of textual and historical study to such undertakings.

[1] E.g. from Minorsky, Roemer, Savory, Mazzaoui, Scarcia Amoretti, and Arjomand, to even the more deliberately sympathetic treatments of Babayan and Yildirim.