Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

152 t CHAPTER SIX
caliphs, who had usurped Ali’s rightful position at the head of the
umma. The only religious resistance that might in fact be expected
would likely come from the Sunni tariqas. Ismail took no chances:
the Sufi orders were disbanded.
The planting of deeper Shiite roots into Iranian soil was the
work of Shah Abbas (1588–1629). His predecessors had already
begun to disassociate the regime’s ideology from its extremist origins,
and Shah Abbas established more formal ties to normative
Twelver Shiism by inviting Shiite ulama elsewhere to come to Iran
and founding for the first time Shiite madrasas for the formal education
of native ulama. Shah Abbas directed most of his attention
to Isfahan, but under the next dynasty to rule Iran, the Qajars
(1794–1925), similar colleges were opened, again with state support,
in Najaf (now in Iraq), Qom, and Mashhad, which remain
the chief centers of Shiite learning. The shahs’ own connection
with the Imams, meanwhile, fell increasingly into the background.
The Safavid regime managed to survive until 1722 when Afghans
from the east penetrated the crumbling kingdom and took Isfahan.
By their demise the Safavids had, however, established an apparently
irreversible Shiite state, not the first in the Middle East but certainly
the most powerful, and bound by strong ties to Iranian national
sentiments, in an overwhelmingly Sunni world. Shiites have never
constituted more than 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim population as
a whole. They remain the overwhelming majority in Iran, but it is
probable—it is to nobody’s interest to count, or be counted, too
accurately—that they also constitute more than half the Muslims in
Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain and are a significant presence in Sunni
Pakistan and multiconfessional India.
The Shiite Ulama and the State
Shiites have always stood somewhat apart from the state. As a
potentially revolutionary minority within an overarching system
of Sunni sovereignty, Shiites have tended for most of their history,
to regard “church” and “state,” the Shiite community of “(true)