TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

Junayd left his son two very important legacies, which would fundamentally
change the flow of not only Safavid history but also of the history of Anatolia and Iran
as well. One was the transformed esoteric doctrine of the Order, which was no more
fitted into the quietist traditional Islamic Sufism but was heavily influenced by ghulat
shi’ite ideas, and was grafted with intense political aspiration. Another legacy of Shaykh
Junayd to his son was the large-scale devoted and militant Turkoman disciples recruited
among Anatolian and Syrian nomadic tribes.
As delineated in the previous chapter, the early signs of incompetence between
the economic, political, cultural, and religious habits of these nomadic Turkomans and
that of the newly arising ‘Ottoman realm’ had already appeared before Junayd’s arrival
in Anatolia. Junayd’s energetic activities and his khalifas’ enthusiastic propaganda
among these nomads succeeded in adding most of them to ‘the Safavid cause’. As a
matter of fact, Junayd successfully sowed the seeds of ‘the Safavid Movement’ in the
fertile socio-cultural and religious ground of Turkoman nomads. The first outcomes of
these seeds would immediately sprout during the time of his son, Haydar. In this aspect,
one may regard Haydar as a gardener who raised the newly emerged saplings. However,
Haydar’s live would not be long enough to see the fruits. It would rather be his son
Ismail who gathered the fruits of seeds sown into soil by Shaykh Junayd. It is not a
coincidence that the army, which would open for Ismail the gates of the sovereignty of
whole Iran and Azarbaijan, was exclusively composed of Turkoman tribes stemming
from the regions visited by Shaykh Junayd half a century earlier. 638
temporal power. See Sümer, p. 11. HS and HT mistakenly say that Haydar was the older son of Sultan
Junayd. See HS, p. 561, HT, p. 155.
638 To give a very brief summary, among foremost tribes of Safavid military aristocracy were the Rumlu
and Ustaclu tribes. The former was most probably composed of the nomads of the Province of Rum. (An
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