LITMIR.BIZ

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I said.

      He patted my shoulder. ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry an Iranian.’

      I entered the bridge of Allahvardi Khan. Framed in one of the pierced arches was a middle-aged couple, staring at each other. I touched the bricks. They were warm and biscuity. When I reached the other side, I looked back. The Islamic arch had been repeated like the name of God in a prayer.

      In the first years of the seventeenth century, these bricks were baking in the name of Shah Abbas I, castles of them hardening over smoking dung. Between 1598 – when Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan from the northern city of Ghazvin – and his death in 1629, they turned a provincial town into one of the world’s most opulent capitals.

      By moving to Isfahan, Abbas changed the nature of a country whose extremities now roughly corresponded to the borders of modern Iran. (At its peak, his empire encompassed the Iranian plateau, with fingers reaching into Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the west, into the Caucasus to the northwest, and almost to the River Oxus, the northern boundary of modern Afghanistan, in the northeast). Rather than stay near the Caspian Sea, as his Turkmen ancestors had done, Abbas aimed at the centre.

      The migration allowed Abbas to give up his former dependence on Turkmen tribesmen, and to set up a new confederation. His government and army contained not only Persians, Turkmens and Arabs, but also Georgian, Caucasian and Circassian converts to Islam. He forcibly imported three thousand Armenian Christian families to Isfahan, and encouraged them to prosper spiritually as well as economically. Foreign visitors found in Isfahan a suitable seat for a cosmopolitan empire – Ghazvin, by comparison, had been a draughty Turkish tent.

      Abbas enjoyed the company of foreigners. They, confused by the name of his dynasty, Safavi, called him the Sophy. Like his near-contemporary, India’s Akbar, Abbas discussed religious questions with the Augustinians and the Carmelites. Like Akbar, he resisted their efforts to convert him.

      The Balenciagas, Faberges and Dunhills of the age spoke Persian. During Abbas’s reign, Europe acquired a taste for Persian goods – for silken carpets brocaded with silver and gold, damasks and taffetas, bezoar stones and turquoises. They learned to trip on Persian opium. Abbas’s wealth was axiomatic; Fabian wouldn’t stop baiting poor Malvolio even ‘for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy’.

      Abbas was not a successful family man. He murdered his eldest son, Mirza, and blinded the second, Khodabandeh – ruling him out, according to Islamic law, of the succession. Jane Dieulafoy, a formidably disapproving French archaeologist and traveller of the nineteenth century, relates an account she heard of Khodabandeh’s revenge – apparently exacted on his own small daughter, in order to spite Abbas, who adored his grandchildren:

      One morning, at the very moment when the child came to kiss his unseeing pupils, he seized her and slit her throat, in full view of his panic-struck wife. Then, he threw himself on his son, who had come running at the sound of the struggle, and tried to deal him the same fate. In vain; the child was snatched – still alive – from his father’s arms, and Shah Abbas was informed of what had happened. When he was confronted by the corpse of his granddaughter, the old king emitted exclamations of rage and desperation that filled the killer with an exultant and dastardly happiness; for a few moments, he savoured his horrendous revenge, before ending his own life by swallowing poison.

      Abbas’s fear of his sons perhaps kept him alive; it also prevented promising princes from maturing into worthy rulers. Most of the Safavid Shahs who came after Abbas rivalled themselves only for despotism and sloth. For the remainder of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, the empire was defended only by one or two competent grand viziers, and the structural excellence of Abbas’s state.

      Today, Abbas’s paranoia has been forgiven. Even in a regime that hates and fears monarchs, people refer to him as Abbas the Great. Hard-line revolutionaries concede his achievements – though they are loath to admit that, were it not for him, their revolution could not have happened. Not only did Abbas help set the boundaries that delineate modern Iran, he also made Iran institutionally, irrevocably, a Shi’a state.

      His uncle, the mystic Ismail, had imposed Shi’ism on Iran’s mostly Sunni population. But many orthodox Shi’as considered Ismail to be a heretic. His self-depiction as (variously) the harbinger of the twelfth Imam, the twelfth Imam, the Imam Ali, even God, drew to him deluded fanatics who believed he was immortal and impossible to defeat. (Until, that is, his army was smashed by the Turks.) His poetry was denounced as blasphemous. Even by the standards of the time, he drank and sexed immoderately.

      Abbas was more conventional – and more inscrutable – than his uncle. He was tempted by flesh and wine, but he dropped Ismail’s claims to divinity. His zeal, though sincere, was complemented by his politics; his promotion of Shi’ism as a state religion helped set Iran apart from two predatory Sunni empires in the vicinity: the Ottomans and the Mughals of north India. One of his most important acts was to promote orthodox Shi’a clerics. State-sponsored mullahs were expected to be loyal and to counter the influence of mysticism. (They had a personal interest in doing so. Mysticism’s emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God undermines the mullahs’ perception of Islam as primarily a code of laws and behaviour, belittling the transmitters of that code – the mullahs themselves.) Abbas endowed Shi’a seminaries that attracted clerics from other Shi’a centres, like Bahrain and southern Lebanon; he himself married the daughter of one of these foreign clerics.

      Scholars in the seminaries learned to understand and interpret Islamic law – through logic, grammar and rhetoric. They learned the relationship between Islamic law and their sources, the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve Imams. They were taught a set of systematic principles for deriving one from the other, called jurisprudence. In time, senior mullahs started issuing new and comprehensive compilations of the sources.

      Islam has no sacrament requiring ordained ministers; there is, strictly speaking, no ‘clergy’ – certainly not in the sense of a homogeneous group of professionals whose job is to mediate between people and God. In the Safavid period, however, Iran gained a clergy in all but name, and it became a social and political institution. Experienced mullahs were sent to the provinces as judges, dispensing Islamic law. They administered wealthy religious foundations. They systematized the collection of religious taxes that entered their own coffers. They became the state’s spiritual backer.

      The expanding science of jurisprudence legitimized their influence. Jurisprudence allowed senior clerics to interpret religious rulings. The most senior of the jurists – the mojtahed – was deemed qualified to divine God’s will in areas where he had not expressed himself; this made the mojtahed a kind of divine legislator. As the Safavid era wore on, the Shah ceased in religious terms to be more than the titular head of Ismail’s old mystic order. He came to rely on the mojtahed for religious sanction of his policies and actions. The Safavid-era mullahs did not go as far as to demand political leadership; but that did not stop some of them acquiring a taste for worldly power.

      Shah Sultan Hossein, Abbas’s great-great-great grandson, came under the influence of mullahs who persuaded him to forbid alcoholic revels and to banish mystics from the capital. He endowed the Seminary of the Four Gardens in Isfahan, to propagate the theology of these mullahs. He authorized the persecution and forcible conversion of Sunnis under his control, as well as minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.

      Sultan Hossein’s bigotry, combined with indecision and misrule, led to revolt. In 1722, an army of Sunni Afghans captured Isfahan. After keeping Sultan Hossein captive for a few years, they executed him, effectively extinguishing the Safavid dynasty. Iran sank into anarchy and the clergy withdrew from sight.

      I walked up the Four Gardens. It had once been four recreational gardens that were laid out by Abbas, with arcades made up of plane trees bowing to one another and a track for horsemen. Now it’s a straight, modern road, with travel agents and cake shops. After about half a kilometre I came to a wall of arch shapes illuminated by tiles – the Seminary of the Four Gardens, Sultan Hossein’s endowment. I pushed open a door and went in.

      After the movement

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