THE IRANIAN PIVOT - The Revenge of Geography - page 199

northwestern Iran might have been different, and who knows how events might have tran-
spired henceforth. In any case, Shiism had been gathering force among various Turkic or-
ders in northwestern Iran, laying the groundwork for the emergence of Safavid Shah Ismail,
who imposed Shiism in the wake of his conquests, and brought in Arab theologians from
present-day southern Lebanon and Bahrain to form the nucleus of a state clergy. 26
The Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched thereabouts from Anatolia and Syria-Meso-
potamia to central Afghanistan and Pakistan—yet another variant of Greater Iran through
history. Shiism was an agent of Iran's congealment as a modern nation-state, even as the
Iranianization of non-Persian Shiite minorities during the sixteenth century also helped in
this regard. 27 Iran might have been a great state and nation since antiquity, but the Safavids
with their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian plateau retooled Iran for the modern era.
Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a fitting
expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of course, the rise of the ayatollahs has
been a lowering event in the sense of the violence done to—and I do not mean to exagger-
ate—the voluptuous, sophisticated, and intellectually stimulating traditions of the Iranian
past. (Persia—“that land of poets and roses!” exclaims the introductory epistle of James J.
Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan .) 28 But comparison, it is famously said,
is the beginning of all serious scholarship. Compared to the upheavals and revolutions in
the Arab world during the early and middle phases of the Cold War, the regime ushered in
by the 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution was striking in its vitality and modernity. The truth
is, and this is something that goes directly back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything
about the Iranian past and present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of its em-
pires from Cyrus to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who can deny the sheer Iranian talent for run-
ning terrorist networks in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of imperial
rule!), or the political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the complex efficiency
of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on dissidents. Tehran's revolu-
tionary order has constituted a richly developed governmental structure with a diffusion of
power centers: it was never a crude one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran
in neighboring Arab Iraq. Olivier Roy tells us that the “originality” of the Iranian Revolu-
tion lies in the alliance between the clergy and the Islamist intelligentsia:
The Shiite clergy is incontestably more open to the non-Islamic corpus than the
Sunni [Arab] ulamas. The ayatollahs are great readers (including of Marx and
Feuerbach): there is something of the Jesuit or Dominican in them. Hence they
combine clear philosophical syncretism with an exacting casuistic legalism.…
The twofold culture of the Shiite clergy is striking: highly traditionalist … and
yet very open to the modern world. 29