Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to-Indus, as they did in antiquity, but they dominated literary life to the same extent. The
“Iranian Empire of the Mind,” as Axworthy calls it, was the potent idea that served to mag-
nify Iran's geographically envious position, so that a Greater Iran was a historically natural
had not turned his back on northern and central Eurasia and his arms against Iran in 1381,
the relationship between Transoxiana and Russia might have been the “inverse” of what
they actually became in modern times, with a state roughly the size of the Soviet Union
ruled not by Russians from Moscow, but by Iranians ruling from Samarkand.
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As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this idea—despite the culturally bleak and
oppressive aura projected by the Shiite clergy from 1979 through at least the first decade of
the twenty-first century. While the arrival of the Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth
Imam means the end of injustice, and thus is a spur to radical activism, little else in Shiism
necessarily inclines the clergy to play an overt political role; Shiism even has a quietest
strain that acquiesces to the powers that be, and which is frequently informed by Sufism.
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Witness the example set by Iraq's leading cleric of recent years, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who
only at pivotal moments makes a plea for political conciliation from behind the scenes. Pre-
cisely because of the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran throughout history, with
its basis in geography, it is entirely possible that in a post-revolutionary Iran, Iranians will
look more toward the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq for spiritual direction
than toward their own holy city of Qom; or that Qom will adopt the quietism of Najaf and
Karbala.
The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is historically an Arab phenomenon
that came late to Iran, but which eventually led to the establishment of a clerical hierarchy
for taking power. Shiism was further strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureau-
cratic state that Iran has enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab world, and
which is, as we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence of the Iranian plateau. The Sa-
favids brought Shiism to Iran in the sixteenth century. Their name comes from their own
militant Sufi order, the Safaviyeh, which had originally been Sunni. The Safavids were one
of a number of horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed Turkish, Azeri, Georgian, and Persian
origin in the late fifteenth century which occupied the mountainous plateau region between
the Black and Caspian seas, where eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northwestern Iran
come together. In order to build a stable state on the Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau, these
new sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and geographical origin adopted Twelver Shiism as
the state religion, which awaits the return of the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant of
ordained by history or geography, and depended greatly on various personalities and cir-
cumstances. Had, for example, the Ilkhanid ruler Oljaitu, the scion of a Mongol khanate,
not converted to Twelver Shiism in the thirteenth century, the development of Shiism in
