Safavid Empire

Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty in 1501 by conquering Tabriz at the head of a militant Sufi order, the Safaviyya, that his own family had led for generations and that had transformed under his immediate predecessors from a mainstream Sunni mystical brotherhood into an increasingly messianic Shia movement built around his own person. Within months of taking the throne, Ismail declared Twelver Shi'ism the compulsory state religion of his new empire, a striking decision given that the population he now ruled was overwhelmingly Sunni and had been for centuries.

An introduction to Shi'i Islam's history describes the practical difficulty this created: Iran had few native Twelver scholars capable of instructing a newly Shia population or staffing a Shia religious establishment, so Ismail imported Arabic speaking Shia clergy from long established centers of Twelver learning in the Levant and Iraq to build the religious infrastructure his conversion required from essentially nothing. The Qizilbash, the Safaviyya's militant Turkoman followers who had provided Ismail's army, carried the new state religion's conversion effort forward by force in the empire's early decades, and the resulting shift proved permanent: Iran's transformation from a Sunni-majority to a Shia-majority country under Safavid rule has defined the country's religious identity ever since, outlasting the dynasty that imposed it by centuries.

The compulsory conversion Shah Ismail I began in 1501 required decades of institution building before Twelver Shi'ism functioned as a settled state religion rather than an imposed decree, and later Safavid shahs, Shah Abbas I above all, took up that work deliberately. An introduction to the history and doctrines of Twelver Shi'ism traces how the Safavid state cultivated a native clerical class, endowing seminaries and religious colleges and encouraging Arab Shia scholars who had originally been imported under Ismail to train Persian speaking successors, gradually replacing an imported clergy with a homegrown one.

Safavid patronage also built up the empire's major shrine cities, expanding the pilgrimage complexes at Mashhad, where the eighth Shia imam Ali al-Rida is buried, and at Qom, developing both into centers of religious learning as well as devotion. The office of mujtahid, a jurist qualified to exercise independent legal reasoning within Twelver law, gained growing institutional authority across the Safavid period, laying groundwork for a clerical hierarchy considerably more organized than Twelver Shi'ism had possessed before the dynasty's rise, and one that continued developing in Iran long after Safavid rule itself ended in the eighteenth century.