The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Isma‘il I (1487–1524)

Isma‘il, born 1487, ruled as shah of the Safavid Empire between 1501 and 1524. He succeeded in conquering the lands of modern-day Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan with his Qizilbash (Turkmen) disciples, who venerated him as God’s incarnation on Earth. The first spiritual guide of the Safavid mystical order to assume temporal rule, Shah Isma‘il claimed he was the reincarnation of Abrahamic prophets and heroic kings from Iran’s cultural past. At a time marked by millenarian beliefs, Shah Isma‘il appropriated the role of the long-awaited Mahdi (messiah), who intercedes with God on behalf of the common believers. To help validate this identity, he claimed membership, through ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, to Muhammad’s family, from which the messiah was expected to emerge at the end of time.

In his collection of poetry, the Diwan-i Khata’i (Book of the sinner), which is the closest historical depiction of his persona, Shah Isma‘il represented himself as a penitent pilgrim, willing to sacrifice his soul for the benefit of all. He appropriated the conventional voice of the ghazal (love poem), depicting himself as a mournful sinner and the bedazzled lover of ‘Ali, presenting a pious persona to the world while inaugurating a new era in the history of Iran and beyond and carving out his Shi‘i dominion. His poetry announced his messianic mission both as an invitation to his followers and as a warning to those infidels who would resist his call. Believing that his personal path to salvation would be in the company of ‘Ali, Isma‘il imagined himself as a pilgrim circumambulating the Ka‘ba, there confessing and publicly repenting in order to achieve his desired union with ‘Ali, who not only disclosed universal mysteries to him but whose persona had actually been reincarnated in Isma‘il. Recognizing ‘Ali as the gate of Islam, in fact as God himself (“Know [him] to be God”), Isma‘il invited the audience of his poetry to emulate him by converting to Islam and joining the Safavid cause. Within a decade, Isma‘il had marshaled the support of Persian- and Turkish-speaking devotees who were ready to sacrifice their lives.

Isma‘il’s revolution could not have succeeded, however, without his corps of Turkmen devotees—that is, westward-moving Turks who his grandfather, Shaykh Junayd (d. 1460), had recruited from Ottoman domains in Asia Minor. Well before Isma‘il’s own revolution, Shaykh Junayd altered the character of the Safavid order from a Sufi brotherhood to a messianic movement with far-reaching political aspirations when he was banished to Anatolia and Syria in 1448. There he engaged in missionary activities and recruited Turkmen adepts known as Qizilbash, or Redheads (because of the color of their skull caps), who contributed military might and later aided Isma‘il in conquering lands and amassing his empire. The Qizilbash Turkmen viewed Junayd as God’s reincarnation—“the Living One, there is no God but he”—and his son Haydar as the son of God. In 1456 Junayd fought a holy war (ghazw) against the Byzantines at Trabezond, and he died in another battle in the Caucasus in 1460.

Isma‘il not only merged divine justice and worldly kingship but also exercised their functions, as would be expected from a messiah-king. In his role of divinely just ruler, he shared war booty with his Qizilbash disciples and divided the conquered territories into appanages administered by governors and tutors of Safavid princes. This generosity confirmed his image as God on Earth to his subjects. Although some of Muhammad’s descendants (sayyids) were awarded privileges, including some tax exemptions, a kind of overall social welfare was instituted: craftsmen and merchants were exempt from commercial taxes, and soup kitchens were set up for the poor and needy. Not surprisingly, Isma‘il’s treasuries were often empty.

The “Shi‘ification” and “Iranization” of the Safavid Empire over a period of 100 years prepared the landscape for a regional split into distinct Sunni Ottoman and Shi‘i Safavid dominions. Having publicly embraced Shi‘ism, Shah Isma‘il invited Arab Imami Shi‘i scholars to emigrate from Ottoman to Safavid domains, including those in greater Syria. Many subjects, however, disapproving of his messianic claims, refused his patronage. The Ottoman-Safavid hostilities checked the fluidity that the Irano-Turkish world had known and created sectarian boundaries of religious identity, which remain strongly demarcated in the region’s present-day rivalries.

Once Isma‘il had conquered the Safavid domains, new regional groups, such as Persian bureaucrats and local notables, were incorporated into the system of rule and administration of the dominions, and they brought their own cultural ideas and attitudes. During Isma‘il’s lifetime, different historical versions of his rise to power and spiritual status as the Mahdi emerged, some circulated by the king himself and several by his court historians. But an official, master history of Isma‘il’s and the Safavids’ ascendance was yet to be determined, reflecting the decentralized nature of power in this period. His son, Tahmasp, emerged from a 13-year civil war (1524–36) that had erupted over the issue of succession at Isma‘il’s death. These struggles over power eventually determined which version of Isma‘il’s story would be adopted as the Safavids’ “official” history of ascendance. In the final, official version, Isma‘il did not hold the messiah’s role but was his humble precursor who, by establishing the “right order”—namely, Imami Shi‘ism—would prepare the way for the advent of the messiah or Hidden Imam.