a comparative study of ottoman and safavid origins.pdf

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http://the.sagepub.com/ Thesis Eleven http://the.sagepub.com/content/76/1/85 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0725513604040111 2004 76: 85 Thesis Eleven Babak Rahimi Safavid Origins Between Chieftaincy and Knighthood: A Comparative Study of Ottoman and Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at: Thesis Eleven Additional services and information for http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://the.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://the.sagepub.com/content/76/1/85.refs.html Citations: What is This? - Feb 1, 2004 Version of Record >> at City University Library on January 6, 2012 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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Page 1: A comparative study of ottoman and safavid origins.pdf

http://the.sagepub.com/Thesis Eleven

http://the.sagepub.com/content/76/1/85The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/0725513604040111

2004 76: 85Thesis ElevenBabak Rahimi

Safavid OriginsBetween Chieftaincy and Knighthood: A Comparative Study of Ottoman and

  

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BETWEEN CHIEFTAINCY ANDKNIGHTHOOD: ACOMPARATIVE STUDY OFOTTOMAN AND SAFAVIDORIGINS1

Babak Rahimi

ABSTRACT Tracing the history of the Ottoman and Safavid empires back tothe Middle Period of Islamic history, this article focuses on their origins in thechieftaincies and the hybrid cultural formations of the Anatolian regions. Whileconsidering the inter/intracivilizational historical context of their respective riseto power, it is argued that the structural makeup of the empires differed pri-marily in their disparate forms of Sufi-knightly cultures, identified here asknightly-heroic (Ottoman) and millenarian-populist (Safavid), which is essen-tially tied to two distinctive types of tribal political organizations: frontier-chieftaincy (Ottoman) and sectarian-chieftaincy (Safavid). Although the originalOttoman and Safavid chieftaincies, based on the militant Ghazi and Qizilbashorders, dissolved once the roaming bands of warriors were replaced by moresettled military formations in the course of long-term state-building processes,the influence of their Sufi-knightly cultural heritages is still manifest in modernIranian and Turkish societies.

KEYWORDS chieftaincy • civilization • empire • state • tribe

INTRODUCTION

The Iranian and Turkish revolutions of the early 20th century, and inparticular the Islamic revolution of 1978–9 in Iran, reflect basic tensions in thecultural framework of Islamic civilizational dynamics. Conflicting trajectories

Thesis Eleven, Number 76, February 2004: 85–102SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd[0725-5136(200402)76;85–102;040111]DOI:10.1177/0725513604040111

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of historical processes led one nation to establish a religious state (Iran) andthe other a secular one (Turkey). In the case of Turkey, the so-called ‘YoungTurk Revolution’ of 1908 and the Kemalist movement of 1919–23 led to theproclamation of a Turkish secular republic in 1923. The 1908 revolution, some-times described as the ‘proto-type of Near Eastern military coups’ of the 20thcentury (Rustow, 1959: 13), began as a military elite revolt which overthrewSultan Abdülhamid II (1879–1909). Its challenge to the Ottoman ancien régimewas half-hearted and had to be renewed by another movement after a lostwar. In the case of Iran, the constitutional revolution of 1906–11 and theIslamic revolution of 1978–9 were predominantly political insurrections but-tressed by popular mass support, mobilized on the basis of revivalist andutopian ideologies.2 In retrospect, and with reference to de Tocqueville, thecontrasting versions of the esprit révolutionnaire can only be understood inlight of different historical backgrounds.

The following brief discussion is an attempt to trace the historical pro-cesses and cultural sources that shaped the destinies of the two countries. AsI will try to show, the history of these two divergent revolutions can be tracedback to the complex political and religious culture of the Anatolian Sufi-knightly tradition of the Turko-Persian ecumenical age beginning in the 11thcentury. But the long-term outcome was the creation of the Ottoman and theSafavid empires. The notion of ‘Sufi-knightly culture’ indicates a socialimaginary that brought together the Sufi mystical tradition (with its distinc-tive cosmology) and the knightly code of ethics, which came to prominenceas a political current in the Middle Period of Islamic history.3 More precisely,I argue that the establishment of these empires represents the crystallizationof two distinct types of Sufi-knightly cultures, defined here as knightly-heroic(Ottoman) and millenarian-populist (Safavid). The basic difference in thepristine cultures of Ottoman and Safavid Sufi-knightly orders – which Ipropose to examine in this article – lies in the distinct socio-organizationaltypes of the respective political coalitions, defined here as frontier-chieftaincy(Ottoman) and sectarian-chieftaincy (Safavid). At the end of the article I willbriefly consider the implications of the two types for later developments,nothwithstanding the dissolution of the Sufi-warrior classes as a consequenceof sedentarization processes unfolding in the Ottoman and the Safavidimperial formations from the 15th to the early 17th century.

Attempting to engage in a comparative study of the Ottoman and theSafavid empires, both of which began as chieftaincies and went on to exten-sive conquests, ultimately means embarking upon a broader spectrum oftasks. Here I do not pretend to develop a systematic comparative treatmentof these two empires, or of the subsequent paths of their divergent yet con-nected political histories. Nor do I intend to offer an analysis of the historical-institutional formation of the modern Iranian and Turkish nation-states, basedon Ottoman and Safavid legacies. Given the constraints of space, this articlewill only outline basic parallels and contrasts between the two Islamic

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empires, with particular emphasis on the cultural formation of socio-organizational patterns.

THE TURKO-PERSIAN ECUMENE OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD

According to Marshall Hodgson, the Middle Period (945–1503) of Islam-icate history represents a civilizational shift of major importance. The periodof genesis (c.600–945) saw the replacement of Syriac and Pahlavi (‘Irano-Semitic’) traditions by an Arabic post-axial, agrarianate and citied civilization,underpinning an inclusive Muslim community between the Nile and the Oxusriver developed on this basis. By contrast, the Middle Period was marked bya widening gap between state and society, the diffusion of Sufism and theexpansion of Persian as a literary language throughout a large part of theAfro-Eurasian landmass (Hodgson, [1958]1974).4 In a posthumous article pub-lished in 1970, Hodgson described this period as an age of great cosmo-politan creativity that reached its height by the 16th century, when the mainregion of Islamdom came under the control of empires (Mughal, Safavid andOttoman) administered by military patronage states. This was the fifth phaseof Islamicate history, namely the era of ‘Gunpowder Empires’ (Hodgson,1970).5 In contrast to the conventional academic notion of a ‘period ofdecline’ after the collapse of the High Caliphate, Hodgson’s periodization ofIslamic history offers us an alternative historical account, showing that Islam-icate civilization underwent major transformations from the 10th to the 16thcentury.

Although a critical study of Hodgson’s system of periodization isbeyond the scope of this article, it is reasonable to argue that the impact ofthe Turkish migration to Asia Minor played an integral role in shaping newpatterns of socio-cultural crystallization in the Middle Period of Islamdom.The successive waves of Turkish migration from the steppe grasslands ofInner Asia to the settled regions of Anatolia and the Irano-Mesopotamianplateaus began in the ninth century, when Turkish slaves were recruited inorder to create a new a military elite order, loyal to the Byzantine and theearly Caliphate state. With the Ghaznavids (977–1186), military slave elites ofTurkish origin but Persianate culture emerged as heirs to the Caliphatepolitical order. The Seljuq suzerainty in the 11th and the early 12th centuries,however, marked the establishment of the first Turkish nomadic empire thatled the way to the revival of Orthodox Sunnism. The establishment of a non-military slave Turkish empire with vast expansionist aspirations representsthe first major nomadic conquest movement with religious revivalist dimen-sions.

The gradual process of Turkish migration to the Anatolian regions,beginning in the 11th century, led to major demographic transformations.This occurred in two successive historical phases. The Seljuq victory over theByzantine forces at the battle of Manzikert in 1071 inaugurated the first

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decisive stage, with major political consequences: the establishment ofTurkish-speaking principalities in the western borderland marches as a wayto challenge Byzantine control over Anatolia. This socio-demographicprocess, known as ‘Turkicization’, entered a second phase of developmentwith the Mongol invasion of 1258, which intensified the Turkmen migrationto the western regions of Anatolia, replacing the Greek-Christian peasantpopulation with Turkish groups of nomadic origin. Though sporadic move-ments occurred throughout the 11th to 13th century, the 14th century high-lights the finalization of a major demographic shift in Anatolia that involvedradical changes of socio-cultural significance.

The transition from the early to the late Middle Period, as seen in thecontext of successive Turkish migrations to Anatolia, can be regarded as arevolutionary phase in two important ways. On one level, the complexprocess of hybridization of Arabic, Persian and Turkish cultural elements,from the end of the High Caliphate to the establishment of the Ilkhanate erain Iran in the 13th century, represents a new period of creative cosmo-politanism, and a new stage of the ‘Turko-Persian ecumene’ (Canfield, 1991:xiv). The Turko-Persian Islamicate culture that had crystallized under theSamanids and the Qarakhanids on the eastern Iranian margin in the 11thcentury, and which was later exported to surrounding regions, was a productof intercivilizational encounters and open to further developments of thatkind. In the particular case of the Turkicization of Anatolia from the 11th tothe 14th century, the regional mixture of agrarian, nomadic tribal and urbansettings was particularly favourable to cultural blending.6 The fusion ofArabic-scriptural, Byzantine-Greek, Turkish-nomadic and Persianiate-letteredtraditions of the Middle Period paved the way for the creation of new culturalcomplexes.

On another level, this ‘mixed borderland civilization’ (Wittek, 1966: 20)also became a meeting ground of different religious traditions. In this sense,the blending of steppe (instrumental) religious practices of the Turkishnomads with the universal (soteriological) religions of Irano-Semitic andByzantine-Greek societies represents the crystallization of new culturalmilieus, where nomadic and settled civilizations had to some extent beenamalgamated.7 From the 11th century onwards, the most original expressionof this syncretistic process was the appearance of Anatolian Sufism, in itsdistinct shamanistic form of Darvish Islam (or bâbâ Islam), as a dominantaspect of the daily life of the Turkish nomadic population, and indeed themain factor for the conversion of rural Asia Minor to Islam. The developmentof Sufiesque heterodoxies, sectarian and millenarian movements throughoutthe Middle Period can in part be credited to this process of religious syn-cretism, in which Shi’i and Sunni ritual practices and creeds intermingled inclose proximity and at times overlapped in the shifting spaces of everydayinteraction.8

But it was the emergence of the Turkish Sufi-knightly brotherhood

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orders – the so-called ‘Ghazi’ warriors – that gave a political expression tothis civilizational fusion. The origins of the Sufi-knightly associations couldbe traced back to the urban-based ‘pure brethren’ of the Qarmati movement,which played a great role in the development of the Islamic guilds in the10th century (Lewis, 1937), and the Futuwwa associations that were revivedunder the reign of Caliph An-Nasîr in the late 12th and early 13th centuries,as a consequence of the expansion of trade and revival of towns under theSeljuq rule. In the early Middle Periods these relatively autonomous move-ments, as popular militia and volunteer Sufi-guild associations, played acrucial role in the local governance of Islamdom. The Futuwwa associationscombined an ethical code of egalitarianism, in the form of Darvish fraterni-ties, with non-egalitarian charismatic elitism, in the form of master (pîr)-disciple and patron-client relations. Ties of blood and kinship affiliationswere less important than competition for the sacred status of leadership inthe clubs, manifested in the paradoxical notion of ‘first among equals’, whichreflected the knightly-spiritual character of the associations.

In the post-Mongol era of Islamic history, the late Middle Period, theFutuwwa associations began to merge with the Anatolian-Sufi orders (Lewis,1937: 27–8), a process that during the 14th century spread further withinIslamdom. The synthesis between the Futuwwa and the Anatolian-Sufi orderscreated the Akhîyat al-Fityân or Akhis movements, which tended to fuse thehorseback warrior culture of Inner Asia with the sedentary Irano-Semitic Messianic traditions.9 Built around the ethos of steppe heroism and theQuranic notion of justice, the brotherhoods lived by a strict code of honour,embedded in a culture of reverence for spiritual sacred persons (shaman)and belief in the potential to unite the mundane with the supernatural worldthrough ritual, ceremony and, above all, war.

FRONTIER CHIEFTAINCY: THE OTTOMAN CASE

The so-called ‘Ghazi thesis’, proposed by the Austrian historian PaulWittek, which described the original Ottomans as holy warriors, has comeunder serious attack in recent years. For Wittek (1966), the Ottomans weremarch-warriors – inspired by the ideology of holy war – who attacked andoverran the frontier lands between the Byzantine and Seljuq empires.10 Theirreligious culture was rooted in the older Ghazi tradition of Anatolia. But partof the difficulty with this thesis, as Rudi Lindner has argued, is that by placingtoo much emphasis on the Islamic dimension, Wittek obscures an Inner Asianlegacy, in particular the ‘shamanistic’ tendencies characteristic of the earlyOttoman frontier principalities (Lindner, 1983: 105–12). On this view, Wittekignores certain heretical religious practices, like the rituals of human sacrifice,which played an important role in early Ottoman society. In addition, Wittekdoes not do justice to the inclusive and tolerant policy of the early Ottomanconquerors. An ‘adversary ideology’, as postulated by the ‘Ghazi thesis’,

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would have excluded Byzantines from joining the Ottoman forces. Using theanthropological literature on tribes, Lindner further argues that the earlyOttomans were a tribal political group whose membership should be definednot in terms of exclusivist religious zeal but by wide-ranging shared interestsof its heterogeneous members (Lindner, 1983).

On the other hand, Cemal Kafadar has criticized both of theseapproaches. He argues that the simple dichotomy between Inner Asian andIslamic aspects misses the ambiguous cultural reality of early Ottoman society(Kafadar, 1995). Following Kafadar, we can reconstruct the early history ofthe Ottomans as a combination of the quasi-corporate organization of tribalnomadism with the Ghazi spirit of the heterodox frontier culture; as theOttomans eventually established a centralized administration through militarybuild-up, taxation and urbanization, this unstable mixture was replaced bymore orthodox models. It is important to note that the term ‘Ghazi’ used heredoes not refer to an exclusive adversary ideology of ‘Holy War’ against aninfidel enemy, but rather to the Sufi-knightly hybrid culture of Anatolia in theMiddle Period. In this sense, the early Ottomans should be defined as afrontier-chieftaincy entrenched in a Sufi-knightly culture of honorific ethos.This can be explained on two levels.

First, the early Osmanli dynasty, although one of many petty and semi-autonomous Turkoman principalities in western Anatolia, represented adistinct type built around the chief as the source of charismatic authority. Thestatus of the early Ottoman chief was earned by victory in battle, and hisauthority depended upon accomplishments in the struggle for expansion. Ina way, this type of associational organization defies the Ibn Khaldunian defi-nition of tribal organization as based exclusively on mere kinship andreligious feeling (‘asabiyya).11 As Ira M. Lapidus has argued, the founder ofthe Ottoman dynasty did not rely on lineage ideology (this was a later fabri-cation); rather, he relied on an agglomeration of diverse groups, includingthe Byzantine defectors, whom the chieftain united based on shared interestfor military expansion (Lapidus, 1990: 33–4).

What is the relationship between chieftaincy and tribe? Tribes, Lapidusdefines, ‘are not familial or ethnic groups but political and religious chief-taincies whose composition varies greatly’ (Lapidus, 1990: 27). This applies,more specifically, to the tribal formations characteristic of Middle Easternhistory. They are primarily characterized as heterogeneous culturally butpolitically united under a central authority, the chief (Tapper, 1983: 9). Thismodel seems best suited to explain the success of Ottoman expansion,conquest and, ultimately, sedentarization, as it integrated diverse ethnic andreligious groups into a flexible, resilient and enduring world empire.

Second, the structural aspect of the early Ottoman chieftaincy wasrelated to the peculiar culture of an inclusive Sufi-knightly order, in the tradition of the Akhi association mentioned above. They combined mysticalreligiosity with the warrior ethos of bravery, independence and, above all,

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honour. Deeply disciplined through the codes of honorific spiritualism, witha strong heroic antipathy to submission and defeat, the early Ottomans weremale warriors who formed alliances and accepted the absolute authority oftheir spiritual guide (bâbâ), conceptualized as a living embodiment of thesupernatural world to protect the community. In more specific historicalterms, the Sufi aspect of the Ottoman chieftaincy found expression in its closeties to the Bektâshî order, which later played a central role in the formationof the religious culture of the ‘slave soldiers’, namely, the Janissary corps.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the emerging frontier-chieftaincywas its hierarchical organization, a feature that continued to prevail in Ottomansociety until the new property-holding class began to challenge the strict socialcodes of distinctions in the second half of the 17th century (Abou-El-Haj, 1991:49–51). Hierarchical order, unified at the top, divided the chief and his warriorsfrom the subjects. This social-organizational trait appears to have become moreprevalent with the consolidation of the dynastic lineage ideology (based onpatrilineal descent), as a result of the increasing sedentarization of the Ottomanchieftaincy through expansion and conquest during the 14th century. Guidedby a set of strict ceremonial and ritualistic codes of conduct that separated theknightly military caste from the rest of the population, the Ottoman elites, withthe sultan at the head, governed their conquered territories as heroic protec-tors and guardians of the chieftain community. This caste-like system may ofcourse appear to pose a problem for the egalitarian spirit of the Sufi-knightlyorder which had given birth to the Ottoman frontier-chieftaincy. But in fact theearly Ottoman Sufi-knightly order was deeply implicated in the ethos of expan-sion, incorporating the culture of honorific competition to maintain divisionand rank among its confederate members and, above all, conquered subjects.The consolidation of hierarchy paved the way for centralization and empire-building in the 15th and 16th centuries.

These developments prefigured the later expansionism and militarismof the Ottoman empire, whose administration was essentially a military struc-ture – at least until the reign of Selim III (1789–1807) when reforms led toradical changes in the structure of the Ottoman military institutions. They alsoshed light on the cultural dimension of the Ottoman empire-building pro-cesses, especially after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and moreparticularly on the combination of expansionism and cosmopolitanism:whereas the former can be identified with the chieftain politics of warlikefrontier culture, the latter can in turn be linked to a more inclusive cultureof knightly-heroism, grounded in the ethos of bravery, independence, loyaltyand self-abnegation.

SECTARIAN CHIEFTAINCY: THE SAFAVID CASE

The prehistory of the proclamation of Twelver Shi’ism (Ithna-’ashari) asthe state religion of Iran by Shah Ismail I (1487–1524) at the congregational

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mosque of Tabriz in 1501 is complicated, and a detailed discussion is beyondthe scope of this article. But a sketch of the historical background to theascendancy of Ismail I will be necessary for a better understanding of theSafavid chieftaincy, and the distinct cultural and social organizational traitsthat set it apart from the Ottoman form of chieftaincy.

The origins of the Safavids can be traced back to the Sunni-Sufi orderof the mystic Shaykh Safi al-Din (d.1334), whose status as the spiritual head(pîr) of the order gave rise to the label ‘Safawiyya’, or the Safavid.12 The Sufiorder evolved into a messianic sectarian (gulât) movement with the succes-sion of Shaykh Junayd (1459–60), during which it underwent a momentoustransformation from contemplative inner-worldly Sufism to the openly outer-worldly heterodox ‘extreme Shi’ism’ (ghuluww). The evolution of theSafavids from a quietist to a militant revolutionary force in the 15th century,represents – in a sense – an escalation of the hybridizing process betweenthe Inner Asian and Irano-Semitic civilizations. On one hand, old shamanis-tic beliefs continued to be blended with the extremist Shi’i conception in thenotions of divine incarnation of God in man and the Christian belief in thetrinity (Moosa, 1988: 40); on the other hand, though closely related, the fusionof certain Shi’i extremist practices with the Sufi belief in the mystical natureof reality saw the appearances of new heretical movements and militant mil-lenarian orders, which developed throughout Islamdom in the 15th century.13

Two main factors explain these hybridizing civilizational processes.First, beginning in the 13th century, the laissez-faire approach of the Mongolrulers to religion led to the growth of religious heterodoxies that continuedto spread well into the 15th century. The period produced a fluid ambienceof mixed religious practices, involving Christianity, Sufism, extreme Shi’ismand Sunni Islam, and a veritable explosion of Sufi movements with pro-Shi’itendencies. Second, the centralization of the Ottoman chieftaincy into anempire with the institutionalization of Sunni orthodoxy, beginning with thereign of Bayazid I (1389–1402), led to growing persecution of hereticalreligious movements throughout the Ottoman provinces. This process was acomplement to the expansion of tax farming as a source of revenue for thecentralizing Ottoman empire, applied both to the peasantry and to semi-nomadic groups. Even though uprisings by Darvish Turkoman groups, likethe Bâbâ Âshîq movement in 1241, occurred in the first half of the 13thcentury, the greater frequency of revolts in the 15th century reflects stubbornresistance to the oppressive policies of Ottoman rulers, and to their effortsto subdue the nomadic heretical forces that roamed the peripheral regionsof the empire. This also led to the emergence of revolutionary movementsfrom diverse grass-root chieftain groups, their ideologies mixed with revival-ist, utopian and eschatological themes.

As I will try to show, it was at this crucial historical juncture that thechieftain and sectarian identities mixed to form the grass-roots religious-political aspect of the Safavid revolutionary movement. Seen in this context,

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the Safavid chieftaincy was composed of followers of a Sufi order recruitedamong the tribal groups (known in Inner Asia as Oymâqs or ‘tribes’) locatedin diverse places like Anatolia, Syria and Inner Asia. Known as the Qizilbashor ‘redheads’, after their knightly red caps with 12 folds representing the 12Shi’i Imams, the followers of the Safavid order also consisted of Turkomannomads, descended from the Saljuq Ghuzz Turks, that faced persecution bythe Ottomans as the latter transformed their frontier-chieftaincy into a seden-tary empire in the early 15th century.

In broad terms, the Safavid Qizilbashi movement – during its earlyextremist and revolutionary phase – was political in nature, representing thelast bid for power by the Anatolian and Caspian regions, which had alwaysresisted Islam in its centralized and orthodox form. On the explicitly politicallevel the Qizilbash followed Shi’i traditions in recognizing the prophet’scousin and son-in-law Ali and his descendants as the leaders of the Islamiccommunity. But in line with the mystical tradition, they also attributed super-natural qualities to these hereditary leaders; they held esoteric keys toultimate reality. This fusion of diverse sectarian elements served to articulatethe opposition to Sunni power – represented by the Ottomans and their alliesin Inner Asia, the Uzbeks. The movement was thus also a radical religiousone, proposing a heterodox alternative to the existing order. In the case ofthe Safavids, the eschatological element was particularly strong; they maytherefore be described as a sectarian movement par excellence.14 In contrastto the Ottoman type of frontier chieftaincy, where religious belief was ulti-mately instrumental to the struggle against the Christian infidels, the sectar-ian ideology of the Safavids involved belief in the heretical doctrine ofreincarnation (tanâsukh) and the return of the deceased to the world invarious forms (recalling certain practices of spirit-possession); it also includedthe belief in transmigration and the oneness of the sacred spirit incarnatedin prophets and saints, and now embodied in the Sufi guide.

On one hand, the chieftain dimension of the Safavid Qizilbash orderhighlights the Oymâq, a type of political organization based on a ‘territori-ally bounded collectivity of groups’ (Tapper, 1990: 68), inclusively hetero-geneous and composite, where agricultural, pastoral and commercial (trade)economies coalesced under the charismatic leadership of an urban-basedchief (Reid, 1978, 1979). On the other hand, the Safavid chieftaincy alsoinvolved the additional aspect of sectarian belief in the supreme charismaticleadership of a single chief, recognized as the divine source of sovereignty.The heretical notion of a transmigration of divine spirit through differenthuman bodies (Babayan, 1994: 136) gave a specific flavour to the Safavidversion of charismatic leadership; this aspect was absent from the Ottomanmodel of frontier chieftaincy where spiritual authority was linked to a moreheroic ethos of struggle.

To sum up, the Safavid Qizilbash warriors differed from the OttomanGhazis primarily in regard to their religious-political structure as a dissident

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association with strong heretical tendencies.15 This popular, grass-roots aspectof the association is most apparent in the origins of the movement, as a Sufiorder that was supported by the peasants, tribal orders and discontentedgroups in Islamdom. In the 15th century, when the movement was gainingmomentum, it reconciled its followers from both the countryside and thetowns, and they included a significant number of nomadic Turkmans. Thegrass-roots origin of the Qizilbash were further reflected in some egalitarianfeatures of their power structure. As Kathryn Babayan has shown, the Qizil-bash maintained – during their revolutionary stage – a conception of authoritybased on the notion of ‘corporate sovereignty’ that recognized the sharing ofpolitical roles among the members – regardless of gender differences(Babayan, 1998). This feature mainly represented steppe traditions of an egali-tarian basis of authority, which tended to erode as the movement began toevolve from chieftaincy into a sedentary empire. The sharing of power amongthe tribal members, however, did not overshadow the sacred leadership ofthe chief; it only implied that this supreme authority operated in a more egali-tarian manner, through a less stratified power structure than in the case of theOttoman chieftaincy which operated as a frontier military order with strict hier-archical relations among its members. Although the gradual process of hier-archization also transformed the Safavid chieftaincy into an increasinglystratified imperial order, the movement was never based on the hierarchy ofdistinction. The tradition of love for the spiritual guide was a way to preservethe mystical idea of spiritual union on an equal basis, becoming one with thesupernatural world in unconditional devotion for the Sufi pîr.

In short, certain distinct cultural patterns central to the identity of theQizilbash and to their symbolic resources in the struggle for power set theSafavid chieftaincy apart as a specific kind of Sufi-knightly order. This culturalcharacter of the Qizilbash warriors – especially evident in their extremist stageof development when they entered the battlefield unarmed with the beliefthat Ismail’s supernatural power would protect them from the enemy(Babayan, 1994: 135) – combined the Ghazi spirit of holy war with theshamanistic practices of exocannibalism, decapitating the enemy’s body forconsumption (Arjomand, 1981a: 6). This fusion of hybrid Sufi and steppecultures, grounded in sectarian revolutionary zeal, appears to have expandedunder the leadership of Junayd when the emerging Qizilbash warriors beganto combine the devotional practices of reverence for the Sufi master with theShi’i belief in a messianic figure. In the 15th century, with the merging of theethos of honour with the custom of devotion to the chief as a sacred figurein the 15th century, the knightly culture of the Safavid movement becamemore and more different from the Ottomans. In addition, apocalyptic beliefsin the end of the world, coupled with the populist yearning for redemptionthrough self-sacrifice, gave the Safavid culture a special flavour, knighthood.

The heretical Qizilbash version of Sufism rejected the notion of resur-rection, central to Shi’i orthodoxy, and replaced it with the belief that divine

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spirit can migrate into different bodies through time. This notion translatedinto a strong model of sacred leadership, which served to channel populistprotest against the established order and contain egalitarian and pluralist con-ceptions of authority.

STATE FORMATION AND THE PACIFICATION OF THE SUFI-KNIGHTS

Despite the different structure of their chieftaincies, there were someremarkable similarities between the Ottomans and the Safavids. The twoincipient states represent similar patterns of inclusive political organization,which enabled them to develop into empires with stable combinations ofreligious and political authority.

In a broad comparative perspective, and in contrast to the Westernknighthoods that emerged in the High Medieval times, the Ottomans and theSafavids did not evolve through the restructuring of an established nobilityinto a military elite (Arnason, 2002: 128). And in contrast to the Japanesesamurai warriors, the Ottomans and the Safavids did not primarily rely on anhonorific culture, as a symbolic system of stratification and the expression of‘collective elitist discipline’ (Ikegami, 1997: 11). As I tried to show in theprevious two sections, the formation of these two imperial powers involvedan intricate cultural mix of semi-nomadic politics and ‘popular’ (or unofficial)cultures, together with a syncretic blending of steppe shamanistic, Shi’i, Sufiand Sunni religions; these processes give rise to two distinctive forms of chief-taincy. Furthermore, the development of the two models can only be under-stood in the context of the general transformation and diversification ofIslamic political regimes during the Middle Period.

Further similarities emerged during the complex process of sedentariza-tion and the formation of centralized states. As the two chieftaincies grew intoneighbouring empires, they applied parallel strategies of consolidation. Inboth cases, there were systematic and violent attempts to subdue the roamingbands of Sufi-knights, in their respective Ottoman Ghazi and Qilizbash forms,and replace them with state-organized professional armies. The Ottomans,especially under the reign of Bayazid I at the end of the 14th century, replacedthe Ghazi warriors with slave soldiers, the Janissaries. This newly establishedmilitary class went on to dominate the sultanate until 1826 – when they werereplaced by a more modern organized army which underwent further reformsduring the Tanzimat era (1839–76). The development of fiscal centralizationthrough a new tax system (timar) went hand in hand with the consolidationof a system of landholding in return for military service. Similarly, the Safavids,especially under the reign of Shah Abbas I (1587–1629), ruthlessly eliminatedthe original Qizilbash warriors and replaced them with a Georgian slave army(ghulâms). The emergence of a military slave-state under the reign of AbbasI was the climax of Safavid power. At the same time, the imperial court brought

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the former Qizilbashi fiefdoms under control and used their revenues to paythe salaries of the new military.

In both cases, the institutionalization of slave armies laid the foun-dations for a new political order and led to the disestablishment of pre-imperial warrior elites. In close connection with the policy of detribalization,the Ghazis and the Qizilbashs lost their influence at the courts of the Ottomansultan and the Safavid shah. These developments strengthened the imperialcentres and marginalized the dissenting elements of warriors that had con-tinued to challenge the centralized empires during their formative stages. Asa result of progressive bureaucratization, the original charismatic force of theGhazi and Qizilbash movements was routinized and subordinated to theunfolding imperial projects. Imperial competition and military conflicts on anever-increasing scale shaped the course of institutional change on both sides.In brief, the accumulation of military power and the structural changes tomilitary organization were at the centre of more comprehensive politicaltransformations.

On the level of religious culture, the institutionalization of a centralizedorthodoxy led to the disintegration of Ottoman and Safavid heretical religiosity. In the Ottoman case, the process of establishing a Sunni orthodoxlegal order unfolded from the early 15th to the late 16th centuries. Especiallyunder the rule of Mehmet I (1413–21) and Mehmet II (1421–51), the creationand the consolidation of the office of Shaykh-al-Islam led to the suppressionof frontier heterodoxies and the strengthening of central religious institutionsunder the supervision of the sultan (Pixley, 1976). The Safavids also pursuedthe institutionalization of orthodoxy beginning with the offialization ofShi’ism in 1501 and culminating under Abbas I in 1591. They supported themigration of the Shi’i ulama from Arabic Iraq and Lebanon to centres oflearning under imperial control (Arjomand, 1981b, 1984). The increasingpower of the sharî-minded ulamas at the court, a process that reached itshighest point under the reign of Shah Sulayman (1666–94), shifted the focusof religious life away from Qizilbashi sectarianism towards a Twelver Shi’ipuritanical and hierarchical religious order. In short, the bureaucratization ofthe religious sphere not only signified the consolidation of a centralized stateunder the rule of the shah and the sultan, but also indicated the systematiceradication of non-official religions that had been characteristic of the originalSufi-knightly culture of the early Ottoman and the Safavid chieftaincies.

Despite the domestication of Ghazi and Qizilbash warriors, in thecourse of long and bloody struggles involving civil wars and periodic rebel-lions, the original Sufi-knightly cultures left significant traces in the symbolicframeworks of the two sedentarized empires. The civilizing effort to domes-ticate the Ghazi and the Qizilbash orders was accompanied by a systematicdissociation of Sufi-knightly cultures from their original social bearers. Thismainly occurred by means of state-led construction of new urban spaces andthe institutionalization of rituals, ceremonies and customs in connection with

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crystallization of new collective identities. In this regard, the Sufi-knightlycultures were reshaped in the imperial contexts of knightly initiation rites(Ottoman) and millenarian rituals of death and redemption (Safavid) thatdemarcated the symbolic domains of the integrative and normative imperialcollectivities.16

After the collapse of the empires in the early 18th (Safavid) and theearly 20th centuries (Ottoman), new political institutions and social move-ments drew heavily upon the symbolic resources of the Sufi-knightly tra-ditions in order to legitimate their projects and self-understandings.Knightly-heroic culture played a central role in the establishment of theTurkish republic, in connection with the struggle to protect the nation fromexternal threats. The tradition of millenarian populism in post-Safavid Iraniansociety surfaced in mass-based political movements which used eschato-logical language to articulate their struggle against ‘oppression’. But in a moregeneral sense, the legacy of the two cultures was crucial to the formation ofmodern Iran and Turkey: the sustained struggle for independence and self-determination owed much to traditions inherited from the warrior elites ofthe formative phase.

CONCLUSION

The task of historical sociology is to link theoretical arguments toconcrete analyses of events, processes and transformations. Comparativeanalysis is an essential part of this project and the best way to avoid an over-generalization from particular cases.

In this spirit, the present article suggests ways of comparing theOttoman and Safavid empires. Popular stereotypes of the two empires haveidentified them, respectively, with Sunni (Ottoman) and Shi’i (Safavid) Islam.As I have argued, such views miss the very complicated inter/intraciviliza-tional macro-historical trajectories that were crucial to the creation of the twoempires: they also ignore the divergent patterns of cultural idioms embeddedin their respective political orders. By emphasizing the Sufi-knightly culturaldimensions of the early Ottoman and the Safavid chieftaincies, I tried to showhow the gradual domestication of the chieftain warrior elites was closely tiedto the state-building processes; at the same time, their cultural heritages wereimportant to the construction of new collective identities.

It should be noted that the divergent versions of the original Sufi-knightly ethos were not the only cultural paradigms that enabled the Ottomanand the Safavid empires to prevail over other competitors in the field at thedawn of early modern Islamic history. They played prominent roles in theprocesses of state and nation formation. A more broadly based comparativeanalysis would have to account for their interaction with other models andtraditions. But the legacy of the Ottoman and the Safavid Sufi-knightlycultures was alive and active in recent history. In the early 20th century, the

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rise of Atatürk to power in 1923, as the father (bâbâ) of the newly estab-lished Turkish (secular) republic, is a fascinating reminder of the Sufi-knightlyculture of reverence for the heroic knight as the guide and protector of thecommunity. Similarly, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979 as apopular quasi-messianic leader of the new Islamic republic, with the title ofImam, showed that the ethos of millenarian populism was still present inmodern Iranian politics. And to conclude, contemporary trends of the samekind should be noted. The military version of the knightly-heroic ethos, withits secular Jacobin tendencies, remains a powerful factor in Turkish politicsand an obstacle to the consolidation of democracy. On the other hand, mil-lenarian populism, in its modern Shi’i nationalistic form, remains a potentsymbolic resource for movements struggling against the hierocratic regime inpost-revolutionary Iran, as can be seen from recent popular demands for amore democratic government.

Babak Rahimi is currently writing his PhD thesis on the history of the Safavidstate and society relations, titled ‘Between Carnival and Mourning: The MuharramRituals and the Emergence of the Early Modern Iranian Public Sphere in the SafavidPeriod, 1590–1641’, at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Address:European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Via deiRoccettini 9, 1-50016 San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. [email: [email protected]].

Notes1. An earlier version of this article was originally presented to the World Sociology

Congress in Brisbane, Australia, in 2002. I am grateful to Dr Jari Eloranta, whohas critically reviewed sections of this work, and also to Professor S. N. Eisen-stadt for his encouraging comments.

2. Together with the Russian, Mexican and Chinese revolutions, the Iranian Consti-tutional Revolution of 1906–11 was a significant part of a global popular revol-utionary movement of the early 20th century. As Janet Afary argues, theConstitutional Revolution was not merely a transformation of the elite structure,but rather a grass-roots based political and socio-cultural revolution, whichreduced the powers of the shah and his ministers (Afary, 1996), marking the‘first popular constitutional revolution in Asia’ (Mottahedeh, [1985]2002: 6). TheIslamic revolution of 1978–9 was also a popular insurrection against arbitrarypower, but the context was very different. As Ervand Abrahamian and Saïd AmirArjomand have shown in their seminal studies, the 1979 revolution was anoutcome of socio-economic changes on the political structure, especially underthe rule of the Pahlavi regime (Abrahamian, 1982), and of changes to the dualsystem of ulama and royal authority that had prevailed before the centraliza-tion of the Pahlavi state (Arjomand, 1988).

3. The term ‘knightly’ does not signify the Western form of knighthood, i.e. themilitary elite of the High Middle Ages that maintained a privileged social statusby having control over land. Though similarities can be detected betweenWestern and Islamic knighthoods, the idea of ‘knightly’ order here represents

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distinctive Islamic traits in reference to the history of the Ottoman and theSafavid chieftaincies.

4. Hodgson (1974) lists six periods of Islamic history: the formative (to 692 CE),the High Caliphate (to 945), the International Civilization (to 1258), the Age ofMongol Prestige (to 1503), the era of the Gunpowder Empires (to c.1800) andModern Times, with the emergence of nation-states. The ‘Middle Period’ lumpstogether the third and the fourth period in this categorization.

5. In this article, Hodgson argues that egalitarian and cosmopolitan elements inIslam, incorporated and institutionalized in the civilization of the Irano-Semiticsocieties, have made a lasting impact on interregional developments on a hemi-spheric-wide basis.

6. Although Claude Cahen has argued that it is obviously impossible to give anyfigure for the Turkish immigration into Asia Minor (Cahen, 1968: 143; Cahen,1969), evidence indicates a long-term process of conversion of the natives toIslam with the migration of Turkish Muslims to the region from the 11th to the13th century (Ménage, 1979; see also Vryonis, Jr, 1971).

7. As David Gellner explains, the difference between soteriological and instru-mental religions is primarily based on their experiential orientation towards thesupernatural: whereas the former type represents the belief in salvation withpractices directed towards appeasing the supernatural with the aim of redemp-tion, the latter is directed towards making specific things happen in the worldthrough magical practices of shamanism and spirit-possession. In this sense,instrumental religions are not based on the faith, but rather on notions ofefficacy of spiritual experience to control the supernatural (see Gellner, 1992).

8. For the best exposition of Sufi history in this period, see Arjomand (1984:66–84). It is important to note, however, that Sufism and Islamic messianism(especially in its Shi’i form of Mahdism) existed in earlier periods of Islamichistory. The histories of the Abbasid and the Isma’ili (Fatimid) revolutions inthe eighth and tenth centuries, for instance, are replete with apocalyptic andmessianic beliefs in the Mahdi that ‘spread widely beyond other extremist Shi’itegroups’ (Arjomand, 2002: 114).

9. It is important to note that the name Akhis is not derived from the Arabic wordfor brethren but is ‘purely’ a Turkish word, meaning knightly or noble (Blakeand Langer, 1932: 500).

10. See also Wittek (1982: 285–319).11. It should be noted in passing that I do not accept the functionalist notion of

segmentary organization, especially as it is used by Ernest Gellner, definedexclusively in terms of lineal descent, with tribal members at each segment ofthe association equally balanced by others. As has been noted by a number ofanthropologists, segmentary lineage theory ignores divergent cultural aspectsthat involve complex ambiguous relations between the actual groups of a tribe.For an interesting critique of this theory, see Hammoudi (1980).

12. For a general history of the Safavids, see Mazzaoui (1972) and Savory (1980).13. I base my argument here on Annemarie Schimmel’s assertion that this apparent

fusion between Sufism and Shi’ism (both in its orthodox and heretical form)occurred in the centuries prior to the rise of the Safavid to power, which facili-tated the advent of the dynasty as a result of this hybrid process (see Schimmel,1974).

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14. It should be noted that Ottoman politics, from chieftaincy to the ‘classical’imperial period, also manifested features of millenarian religiosity. But suchmillenarian elements were limited to the legitimization of power and themonopolization of authority, especially in the 16th century when the Safavidmovement represented the greatest threat to the Ottoman control of easternAnatolia. Unlike the Safavids, millenarianism never played a central symbolicrole in the formation of the Ottoman empire. For a study of Mahdism and themessianic politics of the Ottoman state see Fleischer (1992: 157–78).

15. In a generic sense, the early Qizilbash also regarded themselves as Ghazi, holywarriors for the faith. The specific name of ‘Ghazi’ is used in this work in anominal sense, and is to address the early Ottoman Turks so to differentiatethem from the Qizilbash.

16. Here, I am mainly referring to the Ottoman Imperial Circumcision, celebratedfor the circumcision of a prince, and the Safavid Muharram ceremonies,performed in commemoration of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson,Hussain, on the plains of Karbala, 680. In a later article I shall discuss theimportance of these two rituals in the formation of the Iranian and Turkishcollective identities.

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