Shi’a Islam in Iranian History

Iran is the largest Shi’a Muslim country in the world, but it became one only after 1501, when the Safavid dynasty made Twelver Shi’ism the state religion of a population that was then mostly Sunni. The story runs from early Shi’a centres such as Qom and the shrine of Imam Reza, through the Buyids and Mongols, to the Safavid conversion, the rise of an independent clergy under the Qajars and the Islamic Republic founded in 1979.

Shi’ism before the Safavids

Shi’a Muslims hold that leadership of the community after the Prophet Muhammad belonged to his cousin and son-in-law Ali and then to a line of imams among his descendants. Twelver Shi’is recognise twelve imams, the last of whom, they believe, went into hiding (occultation) in the ninth century and will return.

For most of the first Islamic centuries Iran was majority Sunni, but Shi’a communities took root early. Arab settlers of the Ash’ari clan made Qom a Shi’a town by the late eighth century, and the death there of Fatima Masumeh, sister of the eighth imam, in the early ninth century gave it a shrine. The eighth imam himself, Ali al-Rida, died at Tus in Khorasan in 818, and his tomb became the city of Mashhad (see Imam Reza and the origins of Mashhad). Other Shi’a currents were strong in the Caspian provinces, where the Zaydi Alavids of Tabaristan ruled in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Ismaili branch built a network of mountain castles from Alamut.

The Daylamite Buyids, who took Baghdad in 945, were Shi’a and sponsored the public mourning of Imam Husayn on Ashura, though they left the Sunni caliph in place (see culture under the Buyids). The Sunni Seljuks reversed this trend. After the Mongols ended the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, the field opened again: the Ilkhan Öljaitü converted to Twelver Shi’ism around 1310, and in the fourteenth century the Sarbadars of Sabzevar ran a Shi’a state in Khorasan. Popular devotion to Ali and his family was widespread among Sunnis and Sufis too, and this blurred landscape is the background to what followed.

The Safavid conversion

The Safavids began as a Sufi order at Ardabil whose Turkmen followers, the Qizilbash, revered their leader in extravagant, messianic terms. When the young Shah Ismail I took Tabriz in 1501, he proclaimed Twelver Shi’ism the official religion. Since Iran had few trained Shi’a scholars, the Safavids invited jurists from Jabal Amil in what is now Lebanon, and from Bahrain and Iraq. Sunni practice was suppressed, ritual cursing of the first three caliphs was imposed in public, and over the following two centuries most of the population converted. The conversion also drew a religious frontier against the Sunni Ottomans and Uzbeks that helped define Iran’s borders. The full story is on Twelver Shi’ism becomes Iran’s state religion.

By the late seventeenth century the clergy had grown powerful. Mohammad Baqer Majlesi (d. 1699), the leading cleric at the court of Shah Soltan Hoseyn, compiled vast collections of Shi’a traditions and wrote in Persian for a wide public, turning away from Sufism and philosophy. After the fall of the Safavids, Nader Shah tried and failed to have Shi’ism accepted as a fifth school of Sunni law.

The Qajar era: an independent clergy

In the eighteenth century the Usuli school, which gave qualified jurists (mojtahed) wide authority to interpret the law, defeated the more literalist Akhbaris. This allowed the rise in the nineteenth century of the marja’-e taqlid, “source of emulation”, a senior jurist whose rulings ordinary believers follow and to whom they pay religious taxes. Many of the leading jurists lived in the shrine cities of Ottoman Iraq, out of reach of the shah, and the clergy’s income and authority were independent of the state.

That independence mattered politically. In 1891 a ruling attributed to Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the leading jurist in Samarra, launched the boycott that forced the shah to cancel a British tobacco monopoly (see the Tobacco Protest). Clerics were also prominent on both sides of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911. Popular religion flourished too: Muharram processions and the passion play (ta’ziye) on the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala reached their height in Qajar times.

The Pahlavi century and the revolution

Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941) cut the clergy’s control over courts and schools and in 1936 banned the veil. In the same period, in 1922, Sheikh Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi revived the seminary of Qom, which grew into the main centre of Shi’a learning inside Iran. Under Mohammad Reza Shah, Ruhollah Khomeini emerged from Qom as the leading clerical opponent of the monarchy and was exiled after the uprising of June 1963. In lectures given in Najaf around 1970 he argued for velâyat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, an idea that most senior clerics of the time did not share.

After the 1979 revolution this doctrine was written into the new constitution (see the 1979 referendum and the new constitution and Ruhollah Khomeini). For the first time in Iranian history, Shi’a jurists held state power directly. Supporters see this as the fulfilment of Shi’a political thought; critics, including some senior clerics in Iran and in Najaf, have argued that it departs from the tradition of clerical distance from government or that it has harmed religion itself. Observers also describe a wide range of personal religious practice among Iranians. For the current system see how Iran is governed and religion in Iran today; for the pilgrimage cities, Mashhad and Qom.

1. 818 Death of Imam Reza near Tus; his shrine becomes Mashhad
2. 945 The Shi’a Buyids take Baghdad
3. c. 1310 The Ilkhan Öljaitü adopts Twelver Shi’ism
4. 1501 Shah Ismail I proclaims Twelver Shi’ism in Tabriz
5. 1891 Tobacco boycott backed by the leading jurist
6. 1922 Haeri Yazdi refounds the Qom seminary
7. 1979 Islamic Republic and the principle of velayat-e faqih