The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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of the Hidden Imam.38 How, then, could there be a “state Shiism”? This did not trouble Ismail, who knew very little about Twelver orthodoxy. The Safavid order, a mystical fraternity which had been founded in the wake of the Mongol invasions, had originally been Sufi but had absorbed many of the “extreme” (ghuluww) ideas of the old Shiah. Ismail believed that Imam Ali had been divine, and that the Shii messiah would return very soon to inaugurate the Golden Age. He may even have told his disciples that he was the Hidden Imam, returned from concealment. The Safavid order was a marginal, populist, revolutionary group, far removed from the sophisticated circles of Shii esotericism.39 Ismail had no qualms about setting up a Shii state, and, instead of trying to find a civilized modus vivendi with the Sunni majority, as Shiis had done since the time of Jafar as-Sadiq, he was fanatically opposed to the Sunnah. There was a new sectarian intolerance in both the Ottoman and the Safavid empires that was not dissimilar to the feuds between Catholics and Protestants that were developing in Europe at about this time. In recent centuries, there had been a détente between Sunnis and Shiis. But during the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans were determined to marginalize the Shiah in their domains, and, when Ismail emerged in Iran, he was equally determined to wipe out the Sunnah there.40
It did not take the Safavids long, however, to discover that the messianic, “extremist” ideology that had served them well in opposition was no longer suitable once they had become the establishment. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) was determined to eliminate the old ghuluww theology, dismissed “extremists” from his bureaucracy, and imported Arab Shii ulema to promote Twelver orthodoxy. He built madrasahs for them in Isfahan, his new capital, and Hilla, endowed property (awqaf) on their behalf, and gave them generous gifts. This patronage was essential in the early days, since the ulema were new immigrants entirely dependent upon the shahs. But it inevitably changed the nature of the Shiah. Shii scholars had always been a minority group. They had never had madrasahs of their own but had studied and debated in one another’s homes. Now the Shiah was becoming establishment. Isfahan became the official scholastic center of the Shiah.41 Shiis had always held aloof from government before, but now the ulema had taken over the educational and legal system in Iran as well as the more specifically religious duties of government. The administrative bureaucracy was composed of Iranians who were still loyal to the Sunnah, so they were given the more secular tasks. A de facto split between the secular and religious spheres had developed in the government of Iran.42
The ulema, however, continued to be wary of the Safavid state; they still refused official government posts and preferred to be ranked as subjects. Their position was, therefore, quite unlike that of the Ottoman ulema, but was potentially more powerful. The generosity and patronage of the shahs had made the ulema financially independent. Where the Ottomans and their successors could always control their ulema by threatening to withdraw their subsidies or confiscate their property, the Shii ulema could not be cowed in this way.43 As Shiism spread among the Iranian people, they would also benefit from the fact that they, and not the shahs, were the only authentic spokesmen of the Hidden Imam. The early Safavids were strong enough to keep the ulema in check, however, and the clergy would not come fully into their own until the Iranian people as a whole were fully converted to Shiism in the eighteenth century.
But power corrupts. As the ulema became more at home in the Safavid empire, they also became more authoritarian and even bigoted. Some of the more attractive traits of the Shiah were submerged. This new hard line was epitomized by Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1700), who was one of the most powerful and influential ulema of all time. For centuries, Shiis had encouraged an innovative approach to scripture. Majlisi, however, was deeply hostile to both mystical spirituality and philosophical speculation, both of which had been the mainstay of the old esoteric Shiah. He began a relentless persecution of the remaining Sufis in Iran and tried to suppress the teaching of both the philosophic rationalism known as Falsafah and mystical philosophy in Isfahan. He thus introduced a profound distrust of both mysticism and philosophy that persists in Iranian Shiism to the present day. Instead of engaging in an esoteric study of the Koran, Shii scholars were encouraged to concentrate on fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.
Majlisi also transformed the meaning of the ritual processions in honor of the martyrdom of Husain.44 These had become more elaborate: now camels draped in green were ridden by weeping women and children, who represented the Imam’s family; soldiers shot rifles in the air, and coffins representing the Imam and his martyred companions were followed by the governor, the notables, and crowds of men who sobbed and wounded themselves with knives.45 A highly emotional account of the Kerbala story, the Rawdat ash-Shuhada by the Iraqi Shii Waiz Kashift (d. 1504), was recited at special meetings known as rawda-khani (“recitals of the Rawdat”), while the people wailed and cried aloud. The rituals had always had a revolutionary potential, demonstrating as they did the willingness of the people to fight tyranny to the death. Now, however, instead of encouraging the masses to see Husain as an example, Majlisi and his clergy taught them to see the Imam as a patron who could secure their admission to paradise if they showed their devotion to him by lamenting his death. The rituals now endorsed the status quo, urging the people to curry favor with the powerful, and look only to their own interests.46 It was an emasculation and a degradation of the old Shii ideal; it also bowdlerized the conservative ethos. Instead of helping people to attune themselves to the basic laws and rhythms of existence, the cult was simply used to keep the masses in line. It was a development that showed in quite a different way how destructive political power could be to religion.
One of Majlisi’s chief targets was the school of mystical philosophy developed in Isfahan by Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil, Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), a thinker who would have a profound influence on future generations of Iranians.47 Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra were both utterly opposed to the new intransigence of some of the ulema. They saw it as a total perversion of the Shiah, and, indeed, of all religion. In the old days, when the Shiis had searched for hidden meanings in scripture, they had implicitly acknowledged that divine truth was illimitable, fresh insights were always possible, and no single interpretation of the Koran could suffice. For Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra, true knowledge could never be a matter of intellectual conformity. No sage or religious authority, however eminent, could claim a monopoly of truth.
They also expressed clearly the conservative conviction that mythology and reason were both essential for a full human life: each was diminished unless complemented by the other. Mir Dimad was a natural scientist as well as a theologian. Mulla Sadra criticized both the ulema, for belittling the insights of mystical intuition, and the Sufis, for decrying the importance of rational thought. The true philosopher had to become as rational as Aristotle, but must then go beyond him in an ecstatic, imaginative apprehension of truth. Both thinkers emphasized the role of the unconscious, which they depicted as a state existing between the realm of sense perceptions and that of intellectual abstractions. Previously, Sufi philosophers had called this psychic region the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images. It was a realm of visions, proceeding from what we would call the subconscious, which rise to the conscious level of the mind in dreams and hypnogogic imagery, but which can also be accessed by some of the exercises and intuitive disciplines of the mystics. Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra both insisted that these visions were not just subjective fantasies but had objective reality, even if they remained impervious to logical analysis.48 Instead of discounting them as “imaginary” and, therefore, unreal, as a modern rationalist might do, we should attend to this dimension of our existence. It lies too deep for conscious formulation but has a profound effect upon our behavior and our perceptions. Our dreams are real; they tell us something;