The last time we gathered in the Cave of the Moobat, the bloviational historian spent a bunch of diary space articulating his aspiration to historical objectivity, so I'll spare you the rehash and get right to the narrative this time around:
Abs go gold; 1st try at Dy!
When they seized control of the Islamic Caliphate in 750 CE, the Abbasids quickly found that it behooved them to adopt many of the administrative and economic structures of the Umayyad Dynasty they had usurped - structures which themselves were of Persian origin and had been incorporated into the caliphate since shortly after the Islamic conquest of Iran. The end of the Umayyads marked the end of the Arab-only club that Muslim leadership had become; prestige and power were now proportional to one's proximity to the Caliph's ear, not beholden to tribal and family relations. Abbasid rule, in a sense, leveled the playing field for non-Arab Muslims within the vast caliphate, and the powerful ethnic minority Persians were the prime motivators and beneficiaries of this liberalization...
Under al-Mansur (754-775 CE), the capitol of the caliphate was moved from the ancient, dusty fortress of Damascus to the brand-spanking new cosmopolitan crossroads of Baghdad. The Persian Barmakid family was placed in charge of the administration of the caliphate, and by the reign of al-Mansur's Sassanid-obsessed son al-Mahdi (775-785 CE), the caliph's court had adopted the appearance and etiquette of pre-Islamic Persian royalty.
There is a solid argument to be made that the golden age of the Abbasids - generally agreed to have been during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786-809 CE) and the early part of that of his son, al-Mamun (813-847 CE) - was largely due to a combination of distinctly non-Arab sources: Persian intellect and Chinese technology. Indeed, it was the panicked retreat of a Tang Dynasty army that allowed the thinkers of the Abbasid dynasty to write down all their philosophical grokkings.
<flashback> doo doo doo doo do...doo doo doo doo do...
You're at a place called Talas, in Kazakhstan. Imagine a windswept plateau (about as far from the ocean as any place on Earth) bisected by a cold mountain stream. Now populate the stark landscape with 150,000 Muslim troops, mostly cavalry, and about twice that many Tang Chinese, mostly infantry. The year is 751 CE, the stakes are religious and cultural dominance of Central Asia, and China loses, badly. Their camp is captured by the rampaging Abbasids, and among the treasures the Muslims loot is a device that - once its secrets are revealed by enslaved POWs, of course - will allow for the broad dissemination of knowledge that will occur during both the Abbasid golden age and the European Renaissance. The Muslims capture a paper-maker.</flashback>
Once it became possible to write something down without having to kill and skin an animal, culture-enhancers like universities and general literacy became feasible. Baghdad's House of Wisdom, established around 800 CE - about the same time Charlemagne was being lionized in Europe for opening a handful of schools and working to standardize the Western European alphabet - was a repository for the most advanced of the world's thinking. In fields as diverse as astronomy (and you were thinking the Chinese invented the astrolabe!), mathematics ("hey, man, what did you get on your al-jabr test?"), and architecture (it's no coincidence that Spanish colonial buildings in Mexico look a lot like Moorish buildings in Morocco), thinkers from across the caliphate - propelled by an undercurrent of ethnically Persian influence - made huge advances.
A jumble of difficult-to-spell dynasties
The Persians were still Sunni at this point (don't worry: we're getting there!), with the majority of the Shi'a sect still living in southern Iraq. Most of the conflicts between the Shiites and the Sunnis were occurring there, though later on I'll mention a couple of important events in Shi'a history that do transpire in Iran.
The Shi'a distractions, along with the founding of rival dynasties - as in Spain, where the Umayyads tried to resurrect themselves, and Egypt, where the descendents of Fatima, Muhammad's daughter, set up a Shiite shop - competed for influence with the caliphate and diverted attention away from the peripheral provinces in the east and north of Persia. They forgot that if there's one thing the long history of the Persians has shown us, it's that the people of those particular regions will declare independence at the first sign of inattention or weakness on the part of their would-be overlords. Here's a listing of the various empires and rebellious provinces that emerged as the Abbasids declined and eventually fell:
* Tahirid dynasty (821-873)
* Saffarid dynasty (861-1003)
* Samanid dynasty (875-999)
* Ziyarid dynasty (928-1043)
* Buwayhid dynasty (934-1055)
* Ghaznavid Empire (963-1187)
* Seljukid empire (1037-1187)
Although the Shiite Buwayhid dynasty (which was Turkish enough to term its leader "sultan," a title which stuck) gained great power over most of the eastern Abbasid empire - even setting up a 90-year dynasty in Iraq after their capture of Baghdad in 945 CE - and the Ghaznavids would give us the brilliance of Omar Kayyam, it was the Seljuks who really reshuffled the deck.
They came, these descendents of a Turkic-speaking guy named Seljuk, down from Central Asia in the 10th and 11th centuries. They settled in northern Iran, north of the Oxus River in Transoxiana, in cities they had quietly-but-permanently taken from the Sassanids centuries before. They slowly converted to Sunni Islam, but then, smelling blood in the Abbasid-dominated Euphrates, they moved in for the kill in the first half of the 11th century.
It's all about the outsourcing
Don't let the title of this section mislead you; it wasn't only external pressures that doomed the Abbasids. They did plenty to screw themselves from within. The story goes back to the first Abbasid caliph, who had appealed to Shiites to support his claim to legitimacy on the basis of his being descended from Muhammad's uncle. Conveniently forgetting that the followers of Ali had come through for him when it counted, the ever-pragmatic Abbasids made Sunnism the state religion of the caliphate, then bungled several opportunities to bury the scimitar with the Shi'a. Just to make sure they'd cut off all of their noses to spite their own faces, al-Rashid turned on the loyal, empire-administering Barmakid family, disgraced them, and removed them from power.
But it was the outsourcing that truly did them in. As early as the 9th century, the Abbasids were bringing a private slave army of Turks - called Mamluks - to Baghdad, and to their later capitol at Samarra (200 km north of Baghdad, on the east bank of the Tigris). And while the Mamluks did indeed serve as an effective stabilizing force against the Byzantines and the various Shi'a and Persian uprisings, history has also shown us that an over-reliance on mercenaries, foreigners, and slaves in an army can be as dangerous to the country which raises that army as to the enemy against whom it is raised. It was no exception for the Abbasids; by 940 CE, de facto control of the caliphate had been passed to the Mamluks, who went on to invade and conquer Egypt. They remained influential well into the Ottoman and Napoleonic periods, hundreds of years later.
And of course, sometimes when you're running an empire you find yourself in need of a group of discreet, violent badasses to do your dirty work for you. For the sultans, that group was a gang of thugs called the Ismailis, who operated out of a castle at Alamot, between Rasht and Teheran. They smoked hashish and killed people for money (working for Crusader and Muslim alike) for more than 150 years, and the odd intersection of their profession and their vice has resulted in an even odder bastardization of language: from "hashishiyya" ("people of the hash") is derived our word assassin. And it just can't be a good idea to have a nest of those guys occupying high ground in the middle of your kingdom...
The Abbasids thought they had a deal with the Seljuks, too, when they agreed to give one of the Seljuk warlords the right to call himself "King of the East and the West," but this particular Turkic group, from their capitol at Isfahan (and later Merv), eventually bit the hand that fed it, too. The Seljuks decided to carve off their share of the dying Abbasid empire before the Byzantines, Mamluks, and the heretical (in their eyes, at least) Fatamid Dynasty in Egypt claimed all the best parts for themselves. By 1055 CE, the Seljuks were in control of Baghdad.
Perish the Byzantines
Under the leadership of the Seljuk kings Alp Arslan (1059-1072 CE) and his son, Malik Shah (1072-1092), Iranian dominance once again spread from China to Byzantium. Their two Persian viziers Nizam al-Mulk and Taj ul-Mulk handled the administration and the politics, leaving the Turks free to kick Byzantine ass on the field of battle. This happened decisively at a place called Manzikert, north of Lake Van in modern Turkey, in 1071 CE (or five years after the Normans took England). Manzikert is such a decisive battle, and with such a cool, treacherous back-story, that I'm going to exercise historian's prerogative and table the details for a future diary.
Malik Shah died in 1092 CE, and an all-too familiar struggle for secession ensued. The Seljuks thus found themselves in disarray a few years later, when an army of Crusaders emerged from Byzantine lands and burnt their way across Seljuk territory on their way to Jerusalem. Despite the Kurds producing such great leaders as Nur al-Din and Saladin - who were forced by circumstances to focus their attentions westward - the Crusades, internal conflicts, and the ole' rebellious-provinces thing all served to disrupt Seljuk efforts to reconsolidate, and by the second half of the 12th century CE, all that remained of the Seljuk empire was the Sultanate of Rum, a precarious kingdom carved out of formerly Byzantine holdings in Anatolia.
An army of horsemen this way comes
By 1153 CE, the Princes of Kwarezm, rulers of Khorassan, had come to dominate Iran from the eastern slopes of the Zagros to the borders of China and Afghanistan. They proved to have had too little time to consolidate their defenses before an outrageously destructive army of horsemen, unforeseen and completely unbidden, stormed across their eastern frontier in 1219 CE and started making piles out of human heads.
The Mongols took Transoxiana with the capture and sack of Samarkand (one of the oldest currently-inhabited cities on Earth, by the way) in 1220 CE. They extended their reach as far as Azerbaijan by 1221 CE. The remainder of Persia was conquered by Genghis Khan's grandson, Hugalu, who subdued the kingdoms - which were already under strain from the refugee problems that always preceded the Mongols - on his way to Baghdad. There, Hugalu ground the remains of the Abbasid caliphate beneath the heel of his riding boot: 800,000 Muslim inhabitants of Baghdad - Arab and Persian alike - were slaughtered, vast areas of the city were ravaged, and the irreparable damage was done to the canals and irrigation systems. Halted by later engagements with the Egyptian Mamluks (at the Battle of Ain Jalut) and the Byzantines, the Mongols settled down to administer - and brutally wring every last drachma of treasure from - the entirety of Persia and Mesopotamia, not to mention China, Korea, and Russia.
Tamerlane: 1st degree psychopath
Hulagu became an Ilk-khan ("subordinate khan") upon the succession of his brother Kublai to their father's throne. The Ilkhans ruled Persia for the next 80 years, and though the first few encouraged Tibetan Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity over Islam, by 1300 CE or so, the Ilkhan Ghazan converted to the Muslim faith. Those who had been earlier encouraged were now persecuted; the resurgence of fire-and-swordpoint Islam - and the at-least-partly-ethnic backlash against it - was so powerful that with the death of the 9th Ilkhan, Abu Said, in 1335 CE, the ilkhanate fell into disunion and quickly disintegrated.
One of the small kingdoms that emerged in this period gave rise to one of the most feared names in all of the Middle East's bloody history: Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane. He was neither Sunni nor Shi'a, but of a Sunni form of Sufism (there aren't many of those) called Naqshbandiyyah, and he didn't give a rat's rosy red ass about the religion - or even the administration - of the lands and peoples he conquered. His exploits are many, and his deeds severe:
he once marched an army of 100,000 men deep into Russia - he captured Moscow - in a front ten miles wide in order to trap and destroy the Golden Horde
he brought under his control lands as far west as the Hellespont and Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey), east to the Ganges, and north to the borders of Mongolia
his Transoxianan capitol of Samarkand (in modern Uzbekistan) became the most influential and architecturally beautiful city in central Asia
the jury's still out on whether he permitted his troops to plunder and rape the city of Delhi or simply lost control of his rampaging horde. Either way, the city was plundered and raped.
when he captured Baghdad in 1401 CE, he slaughtered 20,000 inhabitants by issuing a command for each of his soldiers to return with two severed heads.
his name is still used in some parts of central Asia as a boogeyman to frighten disobedient children into behaving - and he died 600 years ago!
Such empires usually do not long survive the megalomaniac would built them, and the empire of Tamerlane was no exception. Though it existed in some form until 1506 CE, the power of the Timurids declined rapidly after the death of their founder in 1405 CE, just as he was about to march against Ming China.
One last weirdness about Tamerlane: It is said that a curse was carved upon the entrance to his tomb, warning that whoever disturbed the final resting place of the mighty conqueror would have war visited upon his country. Makes one hope that the exhumation of Timur's remains by a Russian scientist on June 19, 1941, didn't have anything to do with the fact that Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, three days later...
Sufi Safavids turn Shi'a with a vengeance
While the Timurids and the remnants of the Mongol Empire eroded away, feelings of violent self-determination were once again arising in Persia. "Black Sheep" and "White Sheep" Turkoman dynasties struggled for control of Tabriz (the White Sheep won), seemingly unaware of the growing strength of a powerful force to their north and west, in Azerbaijan: the Safavids, who were descended from a founder of one of the Shiite branches of Sufism.
The Safavids were a Persian family, but after the conversion of Junayd, the head of the Safavid Sufi order in 1477 CE, to militant Shi'aism, much of their support came from Turkomans, Syrians, Anatolians, Armenians, and the Shiite tribes of Upper Mesopotamia. Under the leadership of Shah Ismail (1487-1524 CE), the Safavids imposed their brand of Shi'a Islam from Baghdad to Heart. The were aided in this by the support of their military elite, whose elaborate red headdress earned them the nickname "Redheads."
I won't try to draw the distinctions between Shi'a and Sunni Islam in this diary; let's save that fight for another time. For now, I'll just quote the Library of Congress on the subject vis-à-vis the Safavids:
The distinctive dogma and institution of Shia Islam is the Imamate, which includes the idea that the successor of Muhammad be more than merely a political leader (as opposed to the Sunni idea of the Caliph - umb). The Imam must also be a spiritual leader, which means that he must have the ability to interpret the inner mysteries of the Quran and the shariat. The Twelver Shias further believe that the Twelve Imams who succeeded the Prophet were sinless and free from error and had been chosen by God through Muhammad.
The Imamate began with Ali, who is also accepted by Sunni Muslims as the fourth of the "rightly guided caliphs" to succeed the Prophet. Shias revere Ali as the First Imam, and his descendants, beginning with his sons Hasan and Husayn (also seen as Hosein), continue the line of the Imams until the Twelfth, who is believed to have ascended into a supernatural state to return to earth on judgment day. Shias point to the close lifetime association of Muhammad with Ali. When Ali was six years old, he was invited by the Prophet to live with him, and Shias believe Ali was the first person to make the declaration of faith in Islam.
<snip>
In Sunni Islam an imam is the leader of congregational prayer. Among the Shias of Iran the term imam traditionally has been used only for Ali and his eleven descendants. None of the Twelve Imams, with the exception of Ali, ever ruled an Islamic government. During their lifetimes, their followers hoped that they would assume the rulership of the Islamic community, a rule that was believed to have been wrongfully usurped.
The story of the 8th Imam, Reza, is associated with Iran and is part of the larger tale of Safavid Shiaism, though the story itself comes from the time of al-Mamun and the early Abbasid Caliphate. Al-Mamun invited Reza to travel up from Medina to the court at Merv, and Reza's sister Fatima began making her way to Arabia so as to accompany Reza on his journey. She took ill while en route, and died at Qom, Iran, which later became an important theological center built around her shrine. As for Reza,
Mamun took Reza on his military campaign to retake Baghdad from political rivals. On this trip Reza died unexpectedly in Khorasan. Reza was the only Imam to reside or die in what is now Iran. A major shrine, and eventually the city of Mashhad, grew up around his tomb, which has become the most important pilgrimage center in Iran. Several important theological schools are located in Mashhad, associated with the shrine of the Eighth Imam.
Reza's sudden death was a shock to his followers, many of whom believed that Mamun, out of jealousy for Reza's increasing popularity, had him poisoned. Mamun's suspected treachery against Reza and his family tended to reinforce a feeling already prevalent among his followers that the Sunni rulers were untrustworthy
I guess the point of all this is: Shiites and Sunnis have deep-seated, and perhaps irreconcilable, differences between them. Within the context of greater Islam, they are as different as the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, and like the differences between those two groups, the depth of historical animosity is difficult for outsiders to grasp. When Ismail I declared himself Shah and raised Shi'a theology to a power it had not held since the demise of the Fatamids, he was choosing for later generations of Iranians a course that would ensure sometimes-violent disagreement with their Sunni neighbors for centuries to come.
Next time in the Cave of the Moonbat: The Safavids launch yet another Persian Golden Age - man, these people sure have a lot of those things...