Home Back Iranian national anthem Zoroastrianism Iran from 640 to the present The Arab invasion of Iran made a break with the past that affected not only Iran but all of western Asia and resulted in the assimilation of peoples who shaped and vitalized Muslim culture.
The advent of Islam (640-829)
The Prophet Muhammad had made Medina, his adopted city, and Mecca, his birthplace, centres of an Arabian movement that Muslim Arabs developed into a world movement by the conquest of Iranian and Byzantine territories.
Neither the Iranian nor the Byzantine empire had been unfamiliar to those Arabs who were the former's Lakhmid and the latter's Ghassanid vassals, the two empires' frontier guardians against fellow Arabs who roamed deeper in the Arabian Desert. Also, Meccan and Medinese Arabs had established commercial connections with the Byzantines and Sasanids.The immunity of Mecca's ancient sanctuary against outlawry and outrage had promoted this city's commercial importance. The Ka'bah, as the sanctuary was called, was cleansed of idols by Muhammad, who had himself once been engaged in commerce. He made it the sanctuary of a monotheistic faith whose sacred writings were impregnated with the injunctions and prohibitions needed by a business community for secure and stable trading.
Arab tribalism beyond urban fringes was less easily broken than idols. It was embedded in the desert sparsity that led to warfare and careful counting of a tribe's male offspring.
After Mecca and Medina had become Muslim, to secure the routes they depended upon necessitated winning the desert Arabs' allegiance. In the process of doing this, wars over water holes, scanty pastures, men-at-arms, and camels were enlarged into international campaigns of expansion.
The vulnerability of Sasanid Iran assisted the expansionist process. In AD 623 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reversed Persian successes over Roman arms, namely, the capture of Jerusalem in 614 and a victory at Chalcedon in 617.
His victim, Khosrow Parviz, died in 628 and left Iran a prey to a succession of puppet rulers who were frequently deposed by a combination of nobles and Zoroastrian clergy. Thus, when Yazdegerd III, Iran's last Sasanid and Zoroastrian sovereign, came to the throne in 632, the year of Muhammad's death, he inherited an empire weakened by Byzantine wars and internal dissension.
The former Arab vassals on the empire's southwestern border realized that their moment had arrived, but their raids into Sasanid territory were quickly taken up by Muhammad's caliphs, or deputies, at Medina--Abu Bakr and 'Umar (632-634; 634-644)--to become a Muslim, Pan-Arab attack on Iran.
An Arab victory at al-Qadisiyya in 636/637 was followed by the sack of the Sasanid winter capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris.
The Battle of Nahavand in 642 completed the Sasanids' vanquishment. Yazdegerd fled to the empire's northeastern outpost, Merv, whose marzban, or march lord, Mahuyeh, was soured by Yazdegerd's imperious and expensive demands.Mahuyeh turned against his emperor and defeated him with the help of Hephthalites from Badghis.
The Hephthalites, an independent border power, had troubled the Sasanids since at least 590, when they had sided with Bahram Chubin, Khosrow Parviz's rebel general. A miller near Merv murdered the fugitive Yazdegerd for his purse.
The Sasanid end was ignominious, but it was not the end of Iran. Rather, it marked a new beginning. Within two centuries, Iranian civilization was revived with a cultural amalgam, with patterns of art and thought, with attitudes and a sophistication that were indebted to its pre-Islamic Iranian heritage--a heritage changed but also stirred into fresh life by the Arab-Muslim conquest.
Abu Muslim's revolution
Less time was needed before the Arabs' assimilation with Iranians in regions they colonized caused a new Islamic beginning, Abu Muslim's movement, which began in Khorasan, in 747.
This revolution followed years of conspiracy directed from Medina and across to Khorasan along the trade route that linked the Far East to Merv and thence with the West.
Along the route merchants with contacts in the Mesopotamian Arab garrison cities of Kufah, Wasit, and Basra acted as intermediaries.Iranians who by converting to Islam had become clients, or mawali, of Arab patrons played direct and indirect parts in the revolutionary movement.
The movement also involved Arabs who had partnered Khorasanian and Transoxanian Iranians in ventures in the great east-west trade and intercity trade of northeastern Iran.
The revolution was, nevertheless, primarily an Arabo-Islamic movement, aimed to supplant a militaristic, tyrannical central government whose fiscal problems made it avid for revenue by one more sympathetic to the needs of the merchants of eastern Islam. Abu Muslim, a revolutionary of unknown origin, was able in Merv to exploit the discontent of the merchant classes as well as that of the Arab and Iranian settlers. The object of attack was the Umayyad government in Damascus.
When Muhammad died in 632, his newly established community in Medina and Mecca needed a guiding counsellor, an imam, to lead them in prayers and an amir almu'minin, "Commander of the Faithful," to ensure proper application of the Prophet's divinely inspired precepts.
As the Prophet, Muhammad could never be entirely succeeded, but it was accepted that men who had sufficient dignity and who had known him could fulfil the functions, as his caliphs (khulafa'), or deputies, and imams. After Abu Bakr and 'Umar, 'Uthman was chosen for this role.
By 'Uthman's time, factionalism was growing among Arabs, partly the result of the jealousies and rivalries consequent upon acquiring new territories, and partly the result of the competition between first arrivals in them and those who followed. There was also uncertainty over the most desirable kind of imamate. One faction, the Shi'ah, supported 'Ali, the Prophet's cousin and husband of his favourite daughter, Fatimah, for the caliphate, since he had been an intimate of Muhammad and seemed more capable than the other candidates of expressing Muhammad's wisdom and virtue as the people's judge.
The desire for such a successor points to disenchantment with 'Uthman's attempt to strengthen the central government and impose demands on the colonies.
His murder in 656 left his Umayyad relatives poised to avenge it, while 'Ali was raised to the caliphate. A group of his supporters, the Kharijites, desired more freedom than 'Ali was willing to grant, with a return to the simplest interpretation of the Prophet's revelation in the Qur'an, along puritanical lines.
A Kharijite killed 'Ali in 661. The Shi'ah thenceforth crystallized into the obverse position of the Kharijites, emphasizing 'Ali's relationship to the Prophet as a means of making him and his descendants by Fatimah the sole legitimate heirs to the Prophet, some of whose spiritual power was even believed to have been transmitted to them.
This Shi'ism centuries later became the official Islamic sect of Iran. In the interim, Shi'ism was a rallying point for socially and politically discontented elements within the Muslim community. In addition to the Kharijites, another minority sect was thus formed, hostile from the beginning to the Umayyad government that seized power on 'Ali's death. The majority of Muslims avoided both the Shi'ite and Kharijite positions but followed instead the sunnah, or "tradition," as these orthodox believers conceived the Prophet to have left it and as Abu Bakr, 'Umar, 'Uthman, and 'Ali, too, the "rightly guided" first caliphs, had observed and codified it.
Abu Muslim's revolutionary movement was as much as anything representing Medinese mercantile interests in the Hejaz, dissatisfied with Umayyad inability to shelter Middle Eastern trade under a Pax Islamica.
To promote the revolution aimed to destroy Umayyad power, the movement exploited Shi'ite aspirations and other forces of disenchantment.
The Kharijites were excluded, since their movement opposed the idea of a caliphate of the kind Abu Muslim's adherents were fighting to establish--one that could command sufficient respect to hold together an Islamic universal state.A discontented element ready to Abu Muslim's hand in Khorasan, however, was not a religious grouping but Arab settlers and Iranian cultivators who were burdened by taxation.
In Iran, the first Arab conquerors had concluded treaties with local Iranian magnates who had assumed authority when the Sasanid imperial government disintegrated. These notables--the marzbans and landlords (dehqans)--undertook to continue tax collection on behalf of the new Muslim power.
The advent of Arab colonizers, who preferred to cultivate the land rather than campaign farther into Asia, produced a further complication. Once the Arabs had settled in Iranian lands, they were required to pay the kharaj, or land tax, collected by Iranian notables and their agents under treaty with the Muslim government. The Iranian collectors proved extortionate and aroused the hostility of both Arab and Persian.
Another source of discontent was the head tax, or jizyah, which was applied to non-Muslims of the tolerated religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Thus, on conversion to Islam, Iranians expected exemption from this degrading tax. But the Umayyad government, burdened with imperial expenses, often refused exemption to the Iranian converts.
The tax demands of the Damascus government were as distasteful to those urbanized Arabs and Iranians in commerce as they were to those in agriculture; and hopes of easier conditions under the new rulers than under the Sasanids were not fully realized.
The Umayyads ignored Iranian agricultural conditions, which required constant reinvestment to maintain irrigation works and to halt the encroachment of the desert. This no doubt made the tax burden, from which no returns were visible, all the more odious. Furthermore, the regime failed to maintain the peace so necessary to trade. Damascus feared the breaking away of remote provinces where the Arab colonists were becoming assimilated with the local populations.
The government, therefore, deliberately encouraged tribal factionalism in order to prevent a united opposition against it.
Thus the revolution set out to establish an Islamic oecumene above divisions and sectarianism, the Pax Islamica already referred to, which commerce required and which Iranian merchants without status in the Sasanid social hierarchy looked to Islam to provide.
Ease of communication from the Oxus to the Mediterranean was wanted but without what seemed like a nest of robbers calling themselves a government straddling the route at Damascus.In 750 Umayyad power was destroyed and the revolution gave the caliphate to the 'Abbasids .
Hejazi commercial interests had in a sense overcome the military party among leading Muslim Arabs. Greater concern for the East was manifested by the new caliphate's choice of Baghdad as its capital, situated on the Tigris a short distance north of Ctesiphon and designed as a new city, to be free of the factions of the old Umayyad garrison cities of Kufah, Wasit, and Basra.
The 'Abbasid caliphate (750-821)
The revolution that established the 'Abbasids represented a triumph of the Islamic-Hejazi elements within the empire; the Iranian revival was yet to come.
Nevertheless, 'Abbasid concern with fostering eastern Islam made the new caliphs willing to borrow the methods and procedures of statecraft employed by their Iranian predecessors.At Damascus the Umayyads had imitated Sasanid court etiquette, but at Baghdad Persianizing influences went deeper and aroused some resentment among the Arabs, who were nostalgic for the legendary simplicity of human relations among the desert Arabs of yore. Self-conscious schools of manners grew up in the new metropolis, representing the competitive merits of the Arabs' or Persians' ancient ways.
Regard for poetry--the Arabs' vehicle of folk memory--increased, and minds and imaginations were quickened. Philosophical enquiry was developed out of the need for precision about the meaning of Holy Writ and for the establishment of the authenticity of the Prophet's dicta, collected as hadiths, or sayings traditionally ascribed to him, and recollected and preserved for posterity by his companions.
An amalgam known as Islamic civilization was thus being forged in Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Iranian intellect, however, played a conspicuous part in what was still an Arab milieu. Works of Indian provenance were translated into Arabic from Pahlavi, the written language of Sasanid Iran, notably by Ibn al-Muqaffa' (720-756/757).
The wisdom of both the ancient East and West was received and discussed in Baghdad's schools.
The metropolis's outposts confronted Byzantium as well as infidel marches in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Cultural influences came from both directions. Curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge had been enjoined by the Prophet "even as far as China."This cosmopolitanism was not new to the descendants of the urban Arabs of Mecca or to the Iranians, whose land lay across the routes from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. Both peoples knew how to transmute what was not originally their own into forms that were entirely Islamic.
Islam had liberated men of the scribal and mercantile classes who in Iran had been subject to the dictates of a taboo-ridden and excessively ritualized Zoroastrianism and in Arabia had been inhibited by tribal feuds and prejudices.
Despite the development of a distinctive Islamic culture, the military problems of the empire were left unsolved. The 'Abbasids were under pressure from the infidel on several fronts--the Turks in Central Asia, pagans in India and in the Hindu Kush, and Christians in Byzantium. War for the faith, or jihad, against these infidels was a Muslim duty. But while the Umayyads had been expansionists and had seen themselves as heads of a military empire, the 'Abbasids were more pacific and saw themselves as the supporters of more than an Arab-conquering militia.
Yet rebellions within the imperial frontiers had to be contained and the frontiers protected.
Rebellion within the empire took the form of peasant revolts in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, coalesced by popular religious appeals centred on men who assumed or were accorded mysterious powers. Abu Muslim, executed in 755 by the second 'Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, who feared his influence, became one such messianic figure. Another was al-Muquanna', "the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan," who used Abu Muslim's mystique and whose movement lasted from 777 to 780.
The Khorram-dinan, "Glad Religionists," under the Azerbaijanian Babak (816-838) also necessitated vigorous military suppression. Not until two decades had elapsed was Babak caught. He was brought to Baghdad for torture and death after so long defying the caliph in Azerbaijan and west Persia.
These heresiarchs revived such creeds as that of the anti-Sasanid religious leader Mazdak (died AD 528 or 529), expressive of social and millennial aspirations that were later canalized into Sufism on the one hand and into Shi'ism on the other.
Sistan, Iran's southeastern border area, had a tradition of chivalry as the ancient homeland of Iranian military champions.
Their tales passed to posterity collectively in the deeds of Rostam, son of Zal, in Ferdowsi's Shah-nameh ("Book of Kings"), the Persian national epic.
On the route to India, Seistan also had trade.
Its agrarian masses were counterbalanced by an urban population whose economy could be bolstered by forays into still non-Muslim areas under the southern Hephthalites, the Zunbils of the Hindu Kush's southwestern flanks, whose command of trade routes with India had to be contested when partnership in this command broke down.
Early exploitation of the province's agriculture by Arab governors had, however, debilitated the rural life, and Kharijites, who found refuge in Seistan from the Umayyads, organized or attracted bands of local peasants and of vagabonds who had strayed south from Khorasan.
The presence of these groups indicates agricultural depression following the first century of rule by nonagricultural Arabs who had failed to grasp the needs of the Iranian cultivator. Kharijite bands isolated the cities and threatened their supplies. Seistan needed an urban champion who could come to terms with the Kharijites and divert them to what could legitimately be termed jihad across the border, forming the gangsters into a well-disciplined loyal army.
Such a man appeared in Ya'qub ebn Leys, who founded the first purely Iranian dynasty and threatened the Muslim empire with the first resurgence of Iranian independence.
The "Iranian intermezzo" (821-1055)
Ya'qub ebn Leys's movement differed from Tahir ibn al-Husayn's establishment of a dynasty of Iranian governors over Khorasan in 821.
The latter's rise marks the caliph's recognition, after the difficulties encountered in Iran by Harun ar-Rashid (786-809), that the best way for the imam and amir al-mu'minin at Baghdad to ensure military effectiveness in eastern Islam was by appointing a great general to govern Khorasan. Tahir had won Baghdad from Harun's son al-Amin in favour of his other son, al-Ma'mun, in the civil war between the two after their father's death. Tahir was descended from the mawali of the great Arab leader to whom his forbears had become clients in eastern Khorasan.
He was, therefore, of Iranian origin, but, unlike Ya'qub, he did not emerge out of his own folk and because of a regional need.
He rose as a servant of the caliphate, as whose lieutenant he was, in due course, appointed to govern a great frontier province.
He made Nishapur his capital. Though death followed his assumption of the right of having his name mentioned after the caliph's in the khutbah (the formal sermon at the Friday congregations of Muslims when those with authority over the community were mentioned after the Prophet), his family was sufficiently influential and respected at Baghdad for the governorship to continue in it until the Tahirids were ousted from Nishapur by Ya'qub in 873. Thereafter, they retired to Baghdad.
Discussion of the rise of "independent" Persian dynasties such as the Tahirid in the 9th century has to be qualified not only by consideration of skillful 'Abbasid statecraft but also by recognition of the Muslims' need for legality in a juridical-religious setting.
The majority of Muslims considered the caliph as the legitimate head of the Faith and the guarantor of the law.
Such a guarantee was preeminently the need of merchants in the cities of Sistan, Transoxania, and central Iran.
In the Caspian provinces of Gilan and Tabaristan (Mazanderan) the situation was different.
The Elburz Mountains had been a barrier against the integration of these areas into the caliphate.
Small princely families--the Bavands, including the Ka'usiyeh and the Espahbadiyeh (665-1349), and the Mosaferids, also known as Sallarids, or Kangarids (916-c. 1090)--had remained independent of Damascus and Baghdad in the mountains of Daylam. When Islam reached these old Iranian enclaves, it was brought by Shi'ite leaders in flight from metropolitan persecution. It was not the Islam of the Sunni state.
The Saffarids
Ya'qub ebn Leys began life as an apprentice saffar ("coppersmith"), hence his dynasty's name, Saffarid. Taking to military freebooting, he mustered an army that he disciplined and regularly paid in cash, absorbing many Kharijites into its ranks. This and his extension of Islam into pagan areas of Sind and Afghanistan earned him the amir al-Mu'minin's gratitude, which Ya'qub courted by sending golden idols captured from infidels to be paraded in Baghdad. Ya'qub's attitude toward the imam's claiming political subservience was, nevertheless, strikingly similar to that of the caliph-rejecting Kharijites. He turned his attention inward instead of outside the pale of Islam. He seized Baghdad's breadbaskets--Fars and Khuzestan.
He drove out the Tahirid emir from Nishapur. His march on Baghdad itself was halted only by the stratagem devised by the caliph's commander in chief, whereby Ya'qub's army was inundated by burst dikes.
Ya'qub died soon after, in 879. He had made an empire, minted his own coin, fashioned a new style of army loyal to its leader rather than to any religious or doctrinal concept, and required that verses in his praise be put into his own language--Persian--from Arabic, which he did not understand.
He began the Iranian resurgence.
The collapse of the Tahirid viceroyalty left Baghdad faced with a power vacuum in Khorasan and southern Persia. Ya'qub's brother 'Amr was confirmed as governor of Fars and Khorasan, albeit reluctantly.
The caliph's recognition of the upstart was thrice withdrawn, 'Amr's authority being disclaimed to the Khorasanian pilgrims to the Hejaz when they passed through Baghdad.But so long as Khorasan was victimized by the rebels 'Abd Allah al-Khujistani and, for longer, Rafi' ibn Harthama, 'Amr was useful to Baghdad. After Rafi' had been finally defeated in 896, 'Amr's broader ambitions gave the caliph al-Mu'tadid (892-902) his chance. 'Amr conceived designs on Transoxania, but there the Samanid 'Abbasid vassals held the caliph's license to rule, after having nominally been Tahirid deputies.
When 'Amr demanded and obtained the former Tahirid tutelage over the Samanids in 898, Baghdad could leave the Saffarid and Samanid to fight each other, and the Samanid Esma'il (892-907) won. 'Amr was sent to Baghdad, where he was put to death in 902. His family survived as Samanid vassals in Sistan and were heard of until the 16th century. Ya'qub remains a popular hero in Iranian history.
The Samanids
There was nothing of the popular hero in the Samanids' origin. Their eponym was Saman-Khuda, a landlord in the district of Balkh and, according to the dynasty's claims, a descendant of Bahram Chubin, the Sasanid general. Saman became Muslim.
His four grandsons were rewarded for services to the caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) and received the caliph's investiture for areas that included Samarkand and Herat.
They thus gained wealthy Transoxanian and east Khorasanian entrepôt cities, where they could profit from trade across Asia, even as far as Scandinavia, and the provision of Turkish slaves, much in demand in Baghdad, while they protected the frontiers and provided security for merchants in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khojand, and Herat.
With one transitory exception, they upheld orthodoxy and at each new accession paid a tribute to Baghdad for the tokens of investiture from the caliph whereby their rule represented lawful authority. Thus, legal transactions in Samanid realms would be valid, and Baghdad received tribute in return for the insignia prayed over and signed by the caliph.
This tribute took the place of regular revenue, so that it represented a solution of those taxation problems and the consequent resentments that had bedeviled the Umayyad regime. In modern assessments of imperial power, Baghdad may seem to have been politically the weaker for this type of arrangement, but ensuring the reign of Islam in peripheral provinces was important to the caliphs. Islam's portals to the Far East were adequately guarded, the supply of Turkish slaves was maintained, and Turkish pagan tribes were converted to Islam under the Samanid aura.
The Iranian renaissance
This Samanid aura lasted from 819 until eclipsed in 999. Its supremacy in northeastern Islam began in 875, when the Samanid emir, Nasr I, received the license to govern all Transoxania. Samanid emirs succeeded the Tahirid-Saffarid power in Khorasan, and under them, the Iranian renaissance at last came to fruition.
Shaped out of the vernacular of northeastern Iranian courts and households and making skillful use of additional Arabic vocabulary, the Persian language emerged as a literary medium. Persian notation had been used in the first Muslim diwans, or chancelleries, in accountancy, because the first civil servants in the old Iranian areas had been Iranians.
In 697 the ruthless Umayyad governor Hajjaj ibn Yusuf had ordered the change to Arabic notation, marking the final dethronement of Pahlavi characters.
When "New Persian" began to emerge as a written language two centuries later, its alphabet was Arabic. It emerged as poetry, by which it was disciplined into a most expressive and flexible tongue, with the flexibility resulting from perfect control of a highly formal medium.
The discipline was that of Arabic prosody, to which scenes of a verdure unknown to the Arab poet in the desert added, in the words of Iranian poets, a new and lustrous imagery.
To rival the Arabs' tales of ancient valour, the Iranian legend was versified under Samanid impetus in the Shah-nameh. Iran's "national epic" was completed by Ferdowsi of Tus in Khorasan in 1009/10.
Under the Samanids, Bukhara rivalled Baghdad as a cultural capital of Islam. Besides the Persian poet Rudaki (died 940/941), who had crystallized the language and imagery of Persian lyrical poetry as Ferdowsi (died between 1020 and 1026) was to do for that of the epic, patrons such as Nasr II (914-943) attracted Arabic poets and scholars to Bukhara, and many were bilingual. A written Persian evolved that has survived with remarkably little change.
The Ghaznavids
Rudaki, in a poem about the Samanid emir's court, describes how "row upon row" of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment.
From these guards' ranks two military families arose--the Simjurids and Ghaznavids--who ultimately proved disastrous to the Samanids.
The Simjurids received an appanage in the Qohestan region of southern Khorasan. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghazni, Afghanistan) in 962. He and Abu ol-Hasan Simjuri, as Samanid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorasan and control of the Samanid empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate.Abu ol-Hasan died in 961, but a court party instigated by men of the scribal class--civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkish generals--rejected Alp Tigin's candidate for the Samanid throne.
Mansur I was installed and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna. The Simjurids enjoyed control of Khorasan south of the Oxus but were hard pressed by a third great Iranian dynasty, the Buyids, and were unable to survive the Samanid collapse and rise of the Ghaznavids.
The struggles of the Turkish slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court's ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Samanid decline. Samanid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam.
They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty. Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997).
Sebüktigin's son Mahmud made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. Thus the Samanids' dominion was divided and Mahmud was freed to advance westward into Khorasan to meet the Buyids.
The Buyids
The Buyids share with the Samanids the palm for having brought to fruition the Iranian renaissance.
They achieved Iranian political reascendancy by doing what Ya'qub ibn Leys had failed to do and what the Samanids would probably have considered it illegal to do: they captured Baghdad and made the caliph their puppet.As far east as the city of Rayy, western, central, and southern Iran were once more ruled by an Iranian family.
At the peak of the Buyid Empire, second to Baghdad the Buyid base became Fars, whence the Achaemenids and the Sasanians had sprung. Politically, the Buyids effected the Iranianization of the metropolitan government.
Yet by the very fact that they saw in the caliphate an institution of enough purely political significance to merit its dramatic takeover, they paradoxically left the caliphate's political role emphasized by what at first sight might seem to have been deepest humiliation.
Spiritually, the caliphate held no appeal for the Buyids, who were Shi'ite. Politically and juridically, as the stabilizing factor over the Islamic peoples, the Buyids, in spite of their own religious affiliation, maintained the caliphate.
The homeland of the Buyids (or Buwayhids) was Daylam, in the Gilan uplands in northern Iran.
There, at the end of the 9th century, hardy valley dwellers had been stirred into martial activity by a number of factors, among them the rebel Rafi' ibn Harthama's attempt to penetrate the region, ostensibly with Samanid support. 'Amr ebn Leys had pursued the rebel into the region.
Other factors had been the formation of Shi'ite principalities in the area and the continued Samanid attempts to subjugate them. After the Tahirid collapse, the lack of stability in northern Iran south of the Elburz Mountains attracted many Daylamite mercenaries into the area on military adventures.
Among them, Makan ebn Kaki served the Saianids with his compatriots, the sons of Buyeh, and their allies the Zeyarids under Mardaviz. Mardaviz introduced the three Buyid brothers to the Iranian Plateau, where he established an empire reaching as far south as Esfahan and Hamadan.
He was murdered in 935 but his Zeyarid descendants sought Samanid protection.
They adhered to the Sunni orthodoxy and maintained themselves in the region southeast of the Caspian. The Zeyarid Qabus ebn Vashmgir (978-1012) built himself a tomb tower, the Gonbad-e Qabus (1006-07), which remains one of Iran's finest monuments.
Also still extant is his descendant 'Onsor ol-Ma'ali Keykakus' (1049-90) Qabus-nameh, a prose "Mirror for Princes," which is a valuable document on the social and political life of the time.Mardaviz' expansionism south of the Elburz was taken up by his Buyid lieutenants: the eldest brother, 'Ali, consolidated power for himself in Esfahan and Fars and obtained the Caliph's recognition; another brother, Hasan, occupied Rayy and Hamadan; the youngest brother, Ahmad, took Kerman in the southeast and Khuzestan in the southwest.
The caliphs al-Muttaqi (940-944) and Mustakfi (944-946) were at the mercy of the Turkish slaves in their palace guard. The generals of the guard competed with each other for the office of amir al-umara' (commander in chief), who virtually ruled Iraq on behalf of the caliphs.
When Ahmad gained Khuzestan, he was close to the scene of the amir al-umara' contests, which he chose to settle by himself. Ahmad entered Baghdad in 945 and assumed control of the caliphate's political functions. The caliph became the Buyid's protégé and conferred on Ahmad the title of Mu'izz ad-Dawlah. 'Ali became 'Imad ad-Dawlah, and Hasan, Rukn ad-Dawlah.
All of these titles implied that the Buyids were the upholders of the Muslim 'Abbasid dawlah, or state. In practice, however, the dawlah became the "Daylamite State." It should be noted that the titles did not include the world din, or faith, which was still in the caliph's sphere of action.
Later, Buyid titles increased in grandeur. Even the old Achaemenid title of shahanshah, king of kings, reappeared--a title Ahmad may have thought appropriate for an Iranian whose family reconquered Iran south of the Elburz.
As suggested above, Buyid titles emphasized political and territorial sovereignty. This sovereignty reached its greatest extent under Rukn ad-Dawlah's son, 'Adud ad-Dawlah, who, after the deaths of his father and uncles, ruled an empire that comprised all of Persia west and south of Khorasan and included Iraq, with Baghdad at its heart. 'Adud ad-Dawlah pursued peace negotiations with Byzantium, perhaps to free himself for his cherished project of an Egyptian campaign against the rival caliphate of the Fatimid Shi'ites, established in North Africa in 909, which had been relocated in Egypt in 969.
'Adud ad-Dawlah's concern with the middle kingdom and its westward extension toward the Mediterranean increased his hostility toward the Fatimids, despite his own Shi'i persuasion.In the north, he drove the Zeyarids out of Tabarestan, which struck a blow against the Samanids' influence in the Caspian area.
'Adud ad-Dawlah is celebrated for public works, of which the dam he built across the River Kor near Shiraz, the "Band-e amir," Emir's Dam, remains.
He embellished the tomb of 'Ali at an-Najaf in Iraq, where he himself is buried. He built libraries, schools, and hospitals, and he was the patron of the Arabic poet Mutanabbi. Some Arabic verses of his own are still extant.Although 'Adud ad-Dawlah was undoubtedly one of Iran's greatest rulers, his fratricidal wars, conducted with terrible intractability on his way to power, initiated Buyid decline.
The descendants of the early Buyids reversed the mutual fidelity of the first three brothers. The power this fidelity had achieved and 'Adud ad-Dawlah had made into a world force crumbled after his death in 983.
His base had been ShiIaz, which he beautified and established as a cultural centre, but he died at Baghdad, where he chose to keep close to the caliph, whose daughter he married and from whom he took the title "The Crown of the Community" and the privilege of, like the caliph, having drums beaten at his gate on the calls to prayer.
He also had his name mentioned after that of the Caliph at-Ta'i' in the khutbah. The Buyids avoided the policy, which would have disrupted the empire, of favouring the Shi'is.
Instead, they offered consolations of an emotional sort to the Shi'is in the form of public rites on the anniversaries of the Shi'i martyrs, notably the one commemorating the massacre of 'Ali's son Husayn and his followers under the Umayyads at Karbala' in Iraq.Although the Buyids were careful to avoid sectarian strife, family quarrels weakened them sufficiently for Mahmud of Ghazna to gain Rayy in 1029. But Mahmud (998-1030) went no further: his dynasty paid great deference to the caliphate's legitimating power, and he made no bid to contest the Buyids' role as its protectors.
Mahmud's agreement with the Samanids' Ilek Khanid successors, that the Oxus should be their and his boundary, held, but south of the river the Ghaznavids had to contend with their own distant relatives, the Oguz Turks.Contrary to the sage counsel of Iranian ministers, Mahmud and his successor Mas'ud (1031-41) permitted these tribesmen to use Khorasanian grazing grounds, which they entered from north of the Oxus.
United under descendants of an Oguz leader named Seljuq, between 1038 and 1040 these nomads drove the Ghaznavids out of northeastern Iran. The final encounter was at Dandanqan in 1040.
After their defeat by the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids, patrons of Islamic culture and letters, were deflected eastward into India, where Mahmud had already conducted successful raids.
The raids took the form of jihad, or holy war, and the Ghaznavids carried Islam and Perso-Muslim art to the Indian subcontinent.
In Iran, it was the Seljuqs' turn to create a new imperial synthesis with the 'Abbasid caliphs. Toghril Beg, the Seljuq sultan, entered Baghdad in 1055, and Buyid power was terminated, thus ending what Vladimir Minorsky, the great Iranologist, called the "Iranian intermezzo."The Ghaznavids
Rudaki, in a poem about the Samanid emir's court, describes how "row upon row" of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment. From these guards' ranks two military families arose--the Simjurids and Ghaznavids--who ultimately proved disastrous to the Samanids.
The Simjurids received an appanage in the Qohestan region of southern Khorasan. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghazni, Afghanistan) in 962.
He and Abu ol-Hasan Simjuri, as Samanid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorasan and control of the Samanid empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate. Abu ol-Hasan died in 961, but a court party instigated by men of the scribal class--civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkish generals--rejected Alp Tigin's candidate for the Samanid throne.
Mansur I was installed and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna.
The Simjurids enjoyed control of Khorasan south of the Oxus but were hard pressed by a third great Iranian dynasty, the Buyids, and were unable to survive the Samanid collapse and rise of the Ghaznavids.
The struggles of the Turkish slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court's ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Samanid decline. Samanid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam. They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty.
Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997).
Sebüktigin's son Mahmud made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. Thus the Samanids' dominion was divided and Mahmud was freed to advance westward into Khorasan to meet the Buyids.
The Seljuqs and the Mongols
The SeljuqsToghril I had proclaimed himself sultan at Nishapur in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunni orthodoxy by which he gained the caliph's confidence and undermined the Buyid position in Baghdad.
The Oguz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert's zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines.
Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fatimid propaganda by underground means in the eastern caliphate and by the threat posed by the Christian crusaders from the west.
The Buyids' usurpation of the caliph's secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Mawardi (died 1058). Al-Mawardi's treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Toghril's attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam's spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention.
Al-Mawardi reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate; but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power.
The Seljuqs' own political theorist al-Ghazali (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter's presence guaranteed the former's capacity to defend and extend Islam.
The caliph al-Qa'im (1031-75) replaced the last Buyid's name, al-Malik ar-Rahim, in the khutbah and on the coins with Toghril Beg's; and after protracted negotiation ensuring restoration of the caliph's dignity after Shi'i subjugation, Toghril entered Baghdad in December 1055.
The caliph enthroned him and married a Seljuq princess.
After Toghril had campaigned successfully as far as Syria, he was given the title of "King of the East and West."The new situation was justified by the theory that existing practice was legal whereby a new caliph could be instituted by the sultan, who possessed effective power and sovereignty, but that thereafter the sultan owed the caliph allegiance because only so long as the caliph-imam's juridical faculties were recognized could government be valid.
Toghril Beg died in 1063.
His heir, Alp-Arslan, was succeeded by Malik-Shah in 1072, and the latter's death in 1092 led to succession disputes out of which Berk-yaruq emerged triumphant to reign until 1105. After a brief reign, Malik-Shah II was succeeded by Muhammad I (1105-18).
The last "Great Seljuq" was Sanjar (1118-57), who had earlier been governor of Khorasan.
Alp-Arslan nearly annihilated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to those dependent tribesmen of the Seljuqs of whom Iran and the world were to hear more in the period of Ottoman power.
Transoxania was subdued, the Christians in the Caucasus chastised, and the Egyptians expelled from Syria. An empire was for a short time achieved whose extent and stability enabled Alp-Arslan's and Malik-Shah's great minister, Nizam al-Mulk (died 1092), to pay an Oxus ferryman with a draft cashable in Damascus.
The building and maintenance of such a great empire necessitated a military regime and a vast war machine.
The price to be paid later was oppression by military commanders and their units, set free after the machine fell out of the grasp of powerful sultans to compete with each other and harry the land.The soldiers had been remunerated by grants of land called iqta's.
The grants later became nuclei out of which petty principalities grew with the decline of the central power. The cultivators were left at the mercy of military overlords in possession of the soil.
The great minister Nizam al-Mulk was typical of the Iranian bureaucracy, which, in an area prone to invasion, was often called upon to attempt to cushion the impact of the brute military force of invaders and contain it within the bounds of administrative, economic, and cultural feasibility.
He wrote a "Book of Government" (Seyasat-nameh) for his Turkish masters in which he urged the regulation of court procedures in line with Samanid models and the restriction of the arrogance and cupidity of the military fief holders.
His book is the measure of the Seljuqs' failure to provide enduring stability and equitable government. Had they done so, such a work would have been unnecessary.
The Isma'iliyah
Of one disruptive force the book, in terms betraying near-panic, is dramatically descriptive.
The Seljuqs failed to nip in the bud the power of the Isma'iliyah, originally spread by Fatimid propagandists, but later split from the mainstream of events in Egypt to become an underground organization within the Seljuq Empire.This movement exercised power by terrorism, and the name given its adherents by Europeans in the Middle Ages, Assassins (from hashishi, denoting a consumer of hashish), has become a common noun in English.
The movement was a highly intellectual form of extremist Shi'ism, which recognized only seven of the imams in descent from 'Ali and Fatimah, whereas the Shi'ism of the Buyids and of Iran later on recognized 12.The movement was brought to Iran by Hasan-e Sabbah, who had been trained in Fatimid Egypt. In 1090 Hasan gained the castle of Alamut in the Elburz Mountains, and the order's principal cells were thereafter situated, so far as possible, in similar impregnable mountain strongholds.
From these centres, fida'is, or devotees ready to sacrifice their lives, issued forth and permeated society, spreading their mission as peddlers and itinerant tailors and gaining influence among the urban artisan and weaving classes.
They were often able to win also the confidence of many highly placed ladies and children, whom they could please with novelties of dress or toys.
Nizam al-Mulk himself was assassinated by one of the fida'is, but it is possible that this was done with the connivance of Malik-Shah's wife, whose son the vizier did not support for the succession.
The Isma'iliyah were able to puncture Seljuq power but not destroy it. In the end, the Seljuq Empire collapsed where it had begun--in Khorasan, where Sultan Sanjar ultimately failed to control Turkmen tribes related to him by blood.
Sanjar could not rely on military commanders his family had raised to high posts and had rewarded with land and provincial powers.
The tribesmen refused to be coerced into paying taxes. In 1153 they captured the old sultan and, although allowing him all the respect of his regal position, kept him captive for three years.The Khwarezm-Shahs
Atsiz was the military leader who, after Sultan Sanjar's death in 1157, succeeded in supplanting Seljuq power in northeastern Iran.
His ancestor, Anustegin, had been keeper of Malik-Shah's kitchen utensils and had been rewarded with the governorship of Khwarezm on the Oxus, where he founded the Khwarezm-Shah dynasty (1077-1231).Regions elsewhere in Iran, on the passing of Seljuq supremacy, became independent under atabegs, who were originally proxy fathers and tutors sent with young Seljuq princes when these were deputed to govern provinces.
At first the atabegs took power in the names of Seljuq puppets. When this fiction lapsed, atabeg dynasties such as the Eldegüzids of Azerbaijan (1137-1225) and Salghurids of Fars (1148-1270) split Iran into independent rival principalities.
The Salghurid court in Shiraz especially fostered the arts, as parvenu, competitive courts are wont to do.
The poet Sa'di (died 1292) was a contemporary in Shiraz of the Salghurid atabeg Abu Bakr ebn Sa'd ebn Zangi (1231-60), to whom he alludes by name in his Bustan ("The Orchard"), a book of ethics in verse. Abu Bakr's father, Sa'd, after whom Sa'di took his pen name, conferred great prosperity on Shiraz.
Sa'd ebn Zangi came to terms with the Khwarezm-Shahs. Their power in Transoxania was secured by acceptance of tributary status to the infidel Karakitais of Central Asia.
They endeavoured to emulate the Seljuqs by following an expansionist policy in Iran south of the Oxus. Sa'd ebn Zangi, in his relations with the Khwarezm-Shah, set the pattern his successor Abu Bakr followed later.
These atabegs saved Fars from outright invasion by northern military powers by paying heavy tribute. This tribute was the price of Shiraz's remaining the peaceful haven of the arts in which Sa'di and after him Hafez (died 1390) flourished, to continue the Persian literary tradition begun under the Samanids and continued under both the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs.
The collapse of the Karakitai Empire northeast of the Oxus was partly accelerated by the unsuccessful bid of Khwarezm-Shah 'Ala' ad-Din Muhammad (1200-20) to win Muslim approval while releasing himself from the Khwarezm-Shahs' humiliating tributary status to an infidel power.
But the coup de grace to the Karakitai Empire was delivered by its Gurkhan's own vassal from the east, Küchlüg Khan.
Thus, the Khwarezm-Shah was from 1211 onward faced by another hostile opponent in Central Asia--Küchlüg Khan. The Karakitai settlement had been destroyed; but the situation on the Khwarezm-Shah's eastern border had worsened.
Meanwhile, Sultan 'Ala' ad-Din Muhammad quarrelled with the caliph; he set up an anti-caliph of his own and further antagonized his Muslim subjects, unremittingly suspicious of a regime once subject to the Karakitai infidels and whose Kipchak mercenary militia and brutal commanders brought cruelty and desolation wherever they marched. Sultan Muhammad Khwarezm-Shah was unable to control his army leaders, who had tribal connections with such influential people at court as his own mother.
The post-Karakitai wars between him and Küchlüg Khan damaged the safety of the Central Asian trade arteries from China to the West.
The great Mongol leader Genghis (Chinghiz) Khan took Peking in 1215 and as lord of China was concerned with Chinese trade outlets. The situation between Küchlüg and Sultan Muhammad afforded scope as well as a pretext for the Mongols' westward advance, if only to restore the flow of trade.The Mongol invasion
Misunderstanding of how essentially fragile Sultan 'Ala' ad-Din Muhammad Khwarezm-Shah's apparently imposing empire was, its distance away from the Mongols' eastern homelands, and the strangeness of new terrain all doubtless induced fear in the Mongols, and this might partly account for the terrible events with which Genghis Khan's name has ever since been associated.
The terror his invasion brought must also be ascribed to his quest for vengeance. Genghis Khan's first two missions to Khwarezmia had been massacred; but the place of commercial motives in the Mongol's decision to march to the west is indicated by the fact that the first was a trade mission.
The massacre and robbery of this mission at Utrar by one of Sultan Muhammad's governors before it reached the capital made Genghis single out Utrar for especially savage treatment when the murder of his second, purely diplomatic, mission left him no alternative but war.His guides were Muslim merchants from Transoxania. They had to witness one of the worst catastrophes of history.
The years 1220 and 1221 saw the razing of Bukhara, Samarkand, Herat, Tus, and Nishapur, and the slaughter of whole populations. The Khwarezm-Shah fled, to die on an island off the Caspian coast.His son Jalal ad-Din survived until murdered in Kurdistan in 1231.
He had eluded Genghis Khan on the Indus, across which his horse swam, enabling him to escape to India. He returned to attempt the restoration of the Khwarezmian Empire over Iran, but he failed to unite the Iranian regions, although Genghis Khan had withdrawn to Mongolia, where he died in August 1227.
Iran was left divided, Mongol agents remaining in some districts, local adventurers profiting from the lack of order in others.The Il-Khans
A second Mongol invasion began when Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü Khan crossed the Oxus in 1256 and destroyed the Assassin fortress at Alamut. With the disintegration of the Seljuq Empire, the caliphate had created a state in the area around Baghdad and in southwestern Iran.
In 1258 Hülegü besieged Baghdad, where divided counsels prevented the city's salvation.
Al-Musta'sim, the last 'Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, was executed by being kicked to death.
Eastern Islam fell to pagan rulers.Hülegü hoped to consolidate Mongol rule over western Asia and to extend the Mongol Empire as far as the Mediterranean, an empire that would span the earth from China to the Levant. Hülegü made Iran his base, but the Mamluks of Egypt (1250-1517) prevented him and his successors from achieving their great imperial goal. Instead, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, or "deputykhans" to the Great Khan in China, was established in Iran to attempt repair of the damage of the first Mongol invasion.
But it failed in repeated attempts to reach the Mediterranean.
The injuries Iran had suffered went deep, but it would be unfair to attribute them all to Ghengis Khan's invasion, itself the climax to a long period of social and political disarray under the Khwarezm-Shahs and dating from the decline of the Seljuqs.The Il-Khanid dynasty made Azerbaijan its centre and established Tabriz as its first capital until Soltaniyeh was built early in the 14th century.
At first, repair and readjustment of a stricken society were complicated by the collapse of law. The caliphate, as the symbol of Muslim legality, had been eroded by Sultan Muhammad Khwarezm-Shah and by its own withdrawal into a temporal state in Iraq and the Tigris-Euphrates estuary region. But it had retained enough vitality for Sultan Muhammad's action in setting up an anti-caliph to have alienated influential members of his subject people.
After 1258 it was gone altogether, while Hülegü Khan showed considerable religious eclecticism and had, in any event, the yasa of Genghis Khan to apply as the law of the Mongol state, in opposition to, or side by side with, the Shari'ah, the law of Islam.
The Il-Khans' religious toleration released Christians and Jews from their restrictions under the Islamic regime.
Fresh talent thus became available, but competition for new favours marred what good effects this release might have had.
It took time for Iranian administrators toresume their normal role after the invasion and to restore some semblance of administrative order and stability.
Their process was impeded by the paganism of the new conquerors as well as by jostling for influence among classes of the conquered, not in this instance exclusively Muslim. At the same time, a shattered agrarian economy was burdened by heavy taxes, those sanctioned by the Shari'ah being added to by those the yasa provided for, so that the pressure of exploitation was increased by Mongol tax innovations as well as by the invaders' cupidity.
The pressure was increased beyond the economy's endurance: the Il-Khanid government ran into fiscal difficulties.
An experiment with paper money, modelled on the Chinese money, failed under Gaykhatu (1291-95). Gaykhatu was followed briefly by Baydu (died 1295), who was supplanted by the greatest of the Il-Khans, Mahmud Ghazan (1295-1304). Ghazan abandoned Buddhism, the faith in which his grandfather Abagha, Hülegü's successor (1265-82), had reared him, and adopted Islam.
One of his chief ministers was also his biographer, Rashid ad-Din, of Jewish descent. He seems deliberately to have striven to present Ghazan, whom he styles the "emperor of Islam" (padshah-e islam), as a ruler who combined the qualities and functions of both the former caliphs and ancient Iranian "great kings."
Ghazan made strenuous efforts to regulate taxes, encourage industry, bring wasteland into cultivation, and curb the abuses and arrogance of the military and official classes.
Facilities for home and foreign merchants were furnished.Buildings were constructed and irrigation channels dug.
Medicinal and fruit-bearing plants were imported and the cultivation of indigenous ones was encouraged. Observatories were built and improved--a sure indication of concern with agricultural improvement, for seasonal planning required accurate calendars.
He fostered Muslim sentiment by showing consideration for those who claimed descent from the Prophet's family, the Sayyids, and it seems probable that he wished to eradicate or overlay Shi'i-Sunni sectarian divisiveness, for Ghazan's Islam appears to have been designed to appeal equally to both persuasions.
Any slight bias in favour of the Shi'ah might be attributed to a desire to capture the emotions and imagination of many of the humble people who had reacted against the Seljuqs' orthodoxy and craved a teaching that included millennial overtones. Shi'ism had been liberated by the fall of the 'Abbasid Caliphate.
Its belief in the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, who was to inaugurate peace and justice in the world, satisfied this popular craving for religious solace.
Ghazan's work was carried on but less successfully by his successor Öljeitü (1304-16).
Between 1317 and 1335, though he finally relinquished the expensive campaigns against Egypt for the opening to the Mediterranean, Abu Sa'id was unable to keep the Il-Khanid regime consolidated, and it fell apart on his death. Ghazan's brilliant reign survives only in the pages of his historian, Rashid ad-Din.Wars against Egypt and their own Mongol kinsmen in Asia had in fact hampered the Il-Khans in accomplishing a satisfactory reintegration of an Iranian polity.
As the atabegs had done after the Seljuqs, after 1335, Il-Khanid military emirs began to establish themselves as independent regional potentates.
At first, two of them, formerly military chiefs in the Il-Khans' service, competed for power in western Iran, ostensibly acting on behalf of rival Il-Khanid puppet princes.Hasan the Small of the Chupanids was eventually defeated by Hasan the Tall of the Jalayirids, who set up the Jalayirid dynasty over Iraq, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan; it lasted from 1336 to 1432. In Fars, Il-Khanid agents, the Injuids, after a spell of power during which Abu Ishaq Inju had been the poet Hafez's patron, were ousted by Abu Sa'id's governor of Yazd, Mobarez od-Din Mozaffar. Thus in 1353 Shiraz became the Mozaffarid dynasty's capital, which it remained until conquest by Timur (Tamerlane) in 1393.
The Timurids and Turkmen
Timur claimed descent from Genghis Khan's family. The disturbed conditions in Mongol Transoxania gave this son of a minor government agent in the town of Kish the chance to build up a kingdom in Central Asia in the name of the Chagatai Khans, whom he eventually supplanted.
He entered Iran in 1380 and in 1393 reduced the Jalayirids after taking their capital, Baghdad. In 1402 he captured the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at Ankara.
He conqueredSyria and then turned his attention to campaigns far to the east of his tumultuously acquired and ill-cemented empire: he died in 1405 on an expedition to China.He left an awesome name and an ambiguous record of flights of curiosity into the realms of unorthodox religious beliefs, history, and every kind of enquiry concerning lands and peoples.
He showed interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that varied from a scholastic study of ascetic techniques for mastering the carnal self to complete abandonment of all forms of authority in the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Sufism had increased in the disturbed post-Seljuq era as both the consolation and refuge of desperate people.
In Sufism Timur may have hoped to find popular leaders whom he could use for his own purposes. His encounters with such keepers of the consciences of harried, exploited, and ill-treated Iranians proved that they knew him perhaps better than he knew himself. Whatever his motives may have been, the reverse of stability was his legacy to Iran. His division of his ill-assimilated conquests among his sons served to ensure that an integrated Timurid Empire would never be achieved.
The nearest a Timurid state came to being an integrated Iranian Empire was under Timur's son Shah Rokh Shah (1405-47), who endeavoured to weld Azerbaijan and western Persia to Khorasan and eastern Persia to form a united Timurid state for a short and troubled period of time.
He only succeeded in loosely controlling western and southern Iran from his beautiful capital at Herat. Azerbaijan demanded three major military expeditions from this pacific sovereign and even so could not long be held.
Herat he made the seat of a splendid culture, the atelier of great miniature painters (Behzad notable among them), and the home of a revival of Persian poetry, letters, and philosophy.
This revival was not unconnected with an effort to claim for an Iranian centre once more the palm of leadership in the propagation of Sunni ideology:
Herat sent copies of Sunni canonical works on request to Egypt.The reaction in Shi'ism's ultimate victory under the Safavid shahs of Persia was, however, already in preparation.
Western Iran was dominated by the Kara Koyunlu, the "Black Sheep" Turkmen. In Azerbaijan they had supplanted their former masters, the Jalayirids. Timur had put these Kara Koyunlu to flight, but in 1406 they regained their capital, Tabriz.
On Shah Rokh's death, Jahan Shah (reigned c. 1438-67) extended Kara Koyunlu rule out of the northwest deeper into Iran at the Timurids' expense.
The Timurids relied on their old allies, the Kara Koyunlus' rival Turkmen of the Ak Koyunlu, "White Sheep" clans, who had long been established at Diyarbakir in Turkey.
The White Sheep acted as a curb on the Black Sheep, whose Jahan Shah was destroyed by the Ak Koyunlu Uzun Hasan by the end of 1467.
Uzun Hasan (1453-78) achieved a short-lived Iranian Empire and even briefly deprived the Timurids of Herat.
He was, however, confronted by a new power in Asia Minor--the Ottoman Turks. His relationship with the Christian Emperor at Trebizond (Trabzon) through his Byzantine wife, Despina, involved Uzun Hasan in attempts to shield Trebizond from the ineluctable Ottoman advance.The Ottomans crushingly defeated him in 1473. Under his son Ya'qub (1478-90), the Ak Koyunlu state was subjected to fiscal reforms associated with a government-sponsored effort to reapply rigorous purist principles of orthodox Islamic rules for revenue collection. Ya'qub attempted to purge the state of taxes introduced under the Mongols and not sanctioned by the Muslim canon.
But the inquiries made by the orthodox religious authorities antagonized the vested interests, damaged the popularity of the Ak Koyunlu regime, and discredited Sunni fanaticism.
This attempt to revive religious orthodoxy through revenue reform or to effect the latter under the guise of religion no doubt gave impetus to the spread of Safavid Shi'i propaganda.
Another factor must have been related to the same general economic decline that made Sultan Ya'qub's fiscal reforms necessary in the first place.
Sheykh Heydar led a movement that had begun as a Sufi order under his ancestor Sheykh Safi od-Din of Ardabil (1252-1334).This order may be considered to have originally represented a puritanical, but not legalistically so, reaction against the sullying of Islam, the staining of Muslim lands, by the Mongol infidels.
What began as a spiritual, otherworldly reaction against irreligion and the betrayal of spiritual aspirations developed into a manifestation of the Shi'i quest for dominion over a Muslim polity. By the 15th century, the Safavid movement could draw on both the mystical emotional force and the Shi'i appeal to the oppressed populace to gain a large number of dedicated adherents.Sheykh Heydar inured his numerous followers to warfare by leading them on expeditions from Ardabil into the nearby Caucasus.
He was killed on one of these campaigns. His son Esma'il was to avenge his death and lead his devoted army to a conquest of Iran whereby Iran gained a great dynasty, a Shi'i regime, and in most essentials its shape as a modern nation state.In 1501 Esma'il supplanted the Ak Koyunlu in Azerbaijan. Within a decade, he gained supremacy over most of Iran as a ruler regarded as divinely entitled to sovereignty.
The Safavids claimed descent, on grounds that modern research has shown to be dubious, from the Shi'ah imams.
Islam in Iran, therefore, could regard itself as at last having a legitimate imam-ruler, who, as a descendant of 'Ali, required no caliph to legitimate his position.Gone were the days of rule by converted and zealous Sunni Turks or by Mongols of ambiguous spiritual allegiance. Iran's defilement was removed by the swelling tide of Shi'ism, which bore Esma'il to the throne his family was to occupy until 1722, in one of the greatest epochs of Iranian history.
The Safavids (1502-1736)
The new Iranian empire lacked the resources that had been available to the caliphs of Baghdad in former times through their dominion over Central Asia and the West: Asia Minor and Transoxania were gone, and the rise of maritime trade in the West was detrimental to a country whose wealth had depended greatly on its position on important east-west overland trade routes.
The rise of the Ottomans impeded Iranian westward advances and contested with the Safavids' control over both the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Years of warfare with the Ottomans had imposed a heavy drain on the Safavids' resources.
The Ottomans threatened Azerbaijan itself. Finally, in 1639 a treaty gave Yerevan in the southern Caucasus to Iran and Baghdad in Mesopotamia to the Ottomans.
Shah 'Abbas I The Safavids were still faced with the problem of making their empire pay. The silk trade, over which the government held a monopoly, was a primary source of revenue. Esma'il's successor, ShaH Tahmasp (1524-76), encouraged carpet weaving on the scale of a state industry.
Shah 'Abbas I (1588-1629) established trade contacts directly with Europe, but Iran's remoteness from Europe, behind the imposing Ottoman screen, made maintenance and promotion of these contacts difficult and sporadic.
Shah 'Abbas I also transplanted a colony of industrious and commercially astute Armenians from Jolfa in Azerbaijan to a new Jolfa adjacent to Esfahan, the city he developed and adorned as his capital.The Safavids had earlier moved their capital from the vulnerable Tabriz to Kazvin. Since the Uzbek menace from east of the Caspian had been overcome, 'Abbas could move his capital south to Esfahan, more centrally placed than Kazvin for control over the whole country and for communication with the trade outlets of the Persian Gulf. 'Abbas engaged English help to oust the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in 1622.
He also strove to lodge Safavid power strongly in Khorasan, where he developed the shrine of 'Ali ar-Rida at Mashhad, the eighth Shi'ah imam, as a pilgrim centre to rival Shi'i holy places in Mesopotamia, where visiting pilgrims took currency out of Safavid into Ottoman territory.
Under Shah 'Abbas I, Iran prospered. The old Sufi bands, which had been formed into artificial tribal units for military purposes during the dynasty's formative period, were replaced by a standing army trained and equipped on European lines with the advice of Robert Sherley.
Sherley was an English adventurer versed in artillery tactics who, accompanied by a party of cannon founders, reached Kazvin with his brother Anthony in 1598.The bureaucracy, too, was carefully reorganized, but the seeds of the sovereignty's weakness lay in the royal house itself, which lacked an established system of inheritance by primogeniture.
A reigning shah's nearest and most acute objects of suspicion were his own sons. Among them, brother plotted against brother over who should succeed on their father's death.
Intriguers, ambitious for influence in a subsequent reign, supported one prince against another. Shah 'Abbas did not adopt the Ottoman sultans' practice of eliminating royal males by murder (as a child he had been within a hair's breadth of being a victim of such a policy). Instead, he instituted the practice of immuring infant princes in palace gardens away from the promptings of intrigue and the world at large.
As a result, his successors tended to be indecisive men, easily dominated by powerful religious dignitaries to whom the Safavids had accorded considerable influence in an attempt to make Shi'ism the state religion.
The Afghan interlude
Shah Soltan Hoseyn (reigned 1694-1722) was of a religious temperament and especially influenced by the divines, whose conflicting advice, added to his own procrastination, sealed the sudden and unexpected fate of the Safavid empire. One Mahmud, a former Safavid vassal in Afghanistan, captured Esfahan and murdered Soltan Hoseyn in his cell in the beautiful mosque-school, or madrasah, built in his mother's name.
The Afghan interlude was disastrous for Iran. In 1723 the Ottomans took advantage of the disintegration of the Safavid realm and invaded from the west, ravaging western Persia. Nader, an Afsharid Turkmen from northern Khorasan, was eventually able to reunite Iran, a process he began on behalf of the Safavid prince Tahmasp II (1722-32), who had escaped the Afghans.
After he had cleared the country of Afghans, Nader was made governor of a large area of eastern Iran.
Nader Shah (1736-47)
Nader later dethroned Tahmasp II in favour of another Safavid puppet.
His successful military exploits, however, which included victories over rebels in the Caucasus, made it feasible for this stern warrior himself to be proclaimed shah in 1736. He attempted to mollify Perso-Ottoman hostility by establishing in Iran a less aggressive form of Shi'ism, which would be less offensive to Ottoman susceptibilities; but this experiment did not take root.Want of money drove him to embark on his celebrated Indian campaign in 1738-39. His capture of Delhi and of the Mughal emperor's treasure gave Nader booty in such quantities that he was able to exempt Iran from taxes for three years.
His Indian expedition temporarily solved the problem of how to make his empire financially viable.
How large this problem loomed in Nader's mind is demonstrated by his increasingly morbid obsession with treasure and jewels. After suspecting his son of complicity in a plot against him in 1741, Nader's mind seems to have become unhinged; his brilliance and courage deteriorated into a meanness and capricious cruelty that could no longer be tolerated. In 1747 he was murdered by a group of his own Afshars, together with some Qajar chiefs--a sad end to one of Iran's greatest leaders.
Nader had been the first modern Iranian leader to perceive the importance of having his own navy, and in 1734 he had appointed an "Admiral of the Gulf." Ships were purchased from their British captains, and by 1735 the new Iranian navy had attacked Basra.
What really mattered, however, were the land forces. Nader's reign exemplified the fact that to be successful, a shah of Iran had to prove himself capable of defending his realm's territorial integrity and of extending its sources of wealth and production by conquest.
To these ends, Nader built up a large army composed of tribal units under their own chiefs, such as his Afsharid kinsmen, and the Qajars and Bakhtyaris.
But on Nader's death his great military machine dispersed, its commanders bent on establishing their own states. Ahmad Shah Durrani founded a kingdom in Afghanistan based on Qandahar.
Shah Rokh, Nader's blind grandson, succeeded in maintaining himself at the head of an Afsharid state in Khorasan, its capital at Mashhad. The Qajar chief Mohammad Hasan took Mazanderan south of the Caspian Sea. Azad Khan, an Afghan, held Azerbaijan, whence Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar ultimately expelled him.The Qajar chief, therefore, disposed of this post-Nader Afghan remnant in northwestern Iran, but was himself unable to make headway against a new power arising in central and southern Iran, that of the Zands.
The Zand dynasty (1750-79)
Mohammad Karim Khan Zand began his career as an ally of the Bakhtyari chief 'Ali Mardan Khan in a bid to oust Shah Rokh's nominee, Abu ol-Fath Bakhtyari, from Esfahan.
Victory over this representative of the Mashhad regime having been achieved, it was agreed that Shah Soltan Hoseyn Safavi's grandson, a boy named Abu Tarab, should be proclaimed Shah Esma'il III; but 'Ali Mardan Khan broke the compact and was killed. Karim Khan gained supremacy over central and southern Iran and reigned as regent or deputy (vakil) on behalf of the powerless Safavid prince, never arrogating to himself the title of shah. Karim Khan made Shiraz his capital and did not contend with Shah Rokh (1748-95) for the hegemony of Khorasan.He concentrated on Fars and the centre but managed to contain the Qajars in Mazanderan, north of the Elburz Mountains. He kept Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar a hostage at his court in Shiraz, after repulsing Mohammad Hasan Qajar's bids for extended dominion.
Karim Khan's geniality and common sense inaugurated a period of peace and popular contentment, and he strove for commercial prosperity in Shiraz, a centre accessible to the Persian Gulf ports and the Indian trade. After Karim Khan's death in 1779, Agha Mohammad escaped to the Qajar tribal country in the north, gathered a large force, and embarked upon a war of conquest.
The Qajars (1779-1925)
Agha Mohammad Khan. Between 1779 and 1789 the Zands fought among themselves over their legacy. In the end, it fell to the gallant Lotf 'Ali, the Zands' last hope.
Agha Mohammad Khan relentlessly hunted him down until he overcame and killed him at the southeastern city of Kerman in 1794.In 1796 Agha Mohammad assumed the imperial diadem, and later in the same year he took Mashhad. Shah Rokh died of the tortures inflicted on him to make him reveal the complete tally of the Afsharids' treasure.
Agha Mohammad was cruel and he was avaricious.
Karim Khan's commercial efforts were nullified by his successors' quarrels. With cruel irony, attempts to revive the Persian Gulf trade were followed by a British mission from India in 1800, which ultimately opened the way for a drain of Persian bullion to India.This drain was made inevitable by the damage done to Iran's productive capacity during Agha Mohammad's campaigns to conquer the country.
European penetration
Fath 'Ali Shah (ruled 1797-1834), in need of revenue, relied on British subsidies but lost the Caucasus to Russia by the treaties of Golestan in 1813 and Turkmanchay in 1828.
The last gave Russian commercial and consular agents entrance to Iran, and this began a diplomatic rivalry between Russia and Britain that victimized Iran.
This rivalry was eventually resolved when in 1907 an Anglo-Russian convention established, in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tibet, exclusive Anglo-Russian spheres of influence.Hajji Mirza Aghasi, a minister of Mohammad Shah (ruled 1834-48), tried to activate the government in a revival of the sources of production and to cement ties with lesser European powers, such as Spain and Belgium, as an alternative to Anglo-Russian dominance, but little was achieved. Naser od-Din Shah (ruled 1848-96) made Iran's last effort to regain Herat, but 1857 saw the end of such expansionist efforts.
Popular and religious antagonism to the Qajar regime increased as Naser od-Din Shah strove to raise funds by selling concessions, ostensibly for the development of his country's resources, to Europeans.
The money paid for concessions was squandered by the court and on the Shah's journeys to Europe.
Popular protest and the constitution
The effect of popular protest in bringing about cancellation of a tobacco concession in 1890 demonstrated two factors of crucial significance for the future:
first, that unified popular protest could limit despotism's scope and, second, that a mercantile class of sufficient prosperity existed in Iran to make use, with support from religious orators, of popular feeling.The Shah's suppression of the Babi and Baha'i heterodoxies had not, in spite of its ugly severity, ingratiated the regime with the orthodox 'ulama'.
The "Tobacco Riots" were the prelude to the constitutional revolution of the reign of Mozaffar od-Din Shah (ruled 1896-1907).
Iran remained on silver after the failure of bimetallism and the world slump in silver values from the 1870s onward. Silver bullion drained out of the country and copper money proliferated, causing bread riots.In 1906 the ailing shah granted a constitution.
In October of that year the first National Consultative Assembly (the Majles) was opened. In 1908, under Mohammad 'Ali Shah (ruled 1907-09), the Majles was suppressed with the aid of the Persian Cossack Brigade.
The Majles was revived after a civil war that culminated in Mohammad 'Ali's deposition.
Rise of Reza Khan
During World War I, Iran was the scene of rival intrigues by pro-British and pro-German groups among the notables, a class that had succeeded in gaining control of the Majles.
The economic and political disruptions caused by the war were exacerbated by famine and national bankruptcy.
In 1919 the Majles refused a British offer of financial and military assistance, and British financial and military experts were withdrawn from the country.
Salvation came from another quarter, in the person of an Iranian officer, Reza Khan, of the Persian Cossack Brigade.In collaboration with a political writer, Sayyid Zia od-Din Tabataba'i, he staged a coup d'etat in 1921 and took control of all the military forces.
Reza Khan's efforts between 1921 and 1925 as, successively, war minister and prime minister under Ahmad Shah resulted in the formation of an army loyal to him, the achievement of order, and finally, in 1925, the deposition of the last Qajar shah and the transference of sovereignty to himself.The Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79)
Reza ShahDuring the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (Reza Khan's imperial style), educational and juridical reforms were effected that lessened the influence of the religious classes and laid the basis of a modern state.
Women were freed from the veil, and divorce laws were modified in their favour.
The nation's independence from foreign political interference was restored. In 1933, improved terms were gained for Iran on the oil concession granted to a British company in 1901.
Iran's first railroad was inaugurated in 1938. Unfortunately, trade necessities, fear of the Soviet grip on the routing of Iranian goods to Europe, and fear of British influence in the south and of Soviet influence in the north made Reza Shah turn to Nazi Germany.
His refusal to abandon what he conceived to be obligations toward numerous Germans in Iran in 1941 occasioned an Anglo-Soviet invasion of the country, to ensure the safe passage of American supplies to the Soviet front through Iran.
In September 1941 Reza Shah abdicated and left Iran.
He died in South Africa in 1944.Mohammad Reza Shah In difficult wartime conditions, Reza Shah's son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, succeeded to the throne to begin the long process of restoration in a country subjected to the inflation stemming from occupation and to take up the struggle for power between the throne and landed notables, who had emerged once again to influence the Majles after Reza Shah's abdication.
The Soviet Union and a Communist "popular" regime were removed from Azerbaijan (then the Northwestern Province of Iran) in 1946 after a tense moment when it appeared that it would become a Soviet satellite. In 1951 the Majles passed an act, introduced by Mohammad Mosaddeq, nationalizing Iranian oil; the British Oil Company withdrew.
The disturbed political situation during Mosaddeq's premiership and the grip held by Western oil companies on the marketing of the commodity turned his nationalization triumph into a Pyrrhic victory. His period in office ended in turmoil in 1953.
By 1961 the Shah was able finally to take the initiative. Dissolving the 20th Majles in May of that year, he cleared the way for the first Land Reform Law, enacted in 1962.
The landed minority had to give up its lands to the government for redistribution to cultivators. (Among those stripped of land was the Shi'ah Muslim religious establishment.) Profit sharing in industry was introduced, and the former landlords could receive compensation for their holdings in the form of shares in industries. Cultivators and workers were given more voice in national affairs, and cooperatives in rural areas began to replace the former landowners as sources of capital for irrigation and agrarian maintenance and development.
A campaign was organized to reduce illiteracy, and education was further removed from the control of the clergy.
The country's power structure was radically changed in a program termed the "White Revolution."
On January 26, 1963, the White Revolution was overwhelmingly endorsed by the nation.
By 1971, when land distribution ended, about 2,500,000 families, comprising a farming population of more than 12,000,000, were estimated to have benefitted from the reforms.
During 1960-72 the percentage of owner-occupied farmland in Iran rose from 26 to 78 percent.
The new policies did not go unopposed, however; many clerical leaders were critical of land reform, liberalization of laws concerning women, and the extension of government and royal authority.
The arrest in 1963 of Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini--an Islamic jurist accorded the honorific title of ayatollah ("sign of God")--after he had made a speech directly attacking the Shah and his policies, touched off rioting; the riots were severely suppressed, and Khomeini was exiled, first to Turkey and then to Iraq, in 1964.
Per capita income rose from about $176 in 1960 to about $2,500 in 1978.
During 1970-77 the gross national product was reported to have increased to an average annual rate of 7.8 percent.Oil revenues financed the extraordinary growth of investment under Iran's successive development plans, rising from $68,455,000 under the 1949-56 plan to $9,802,300,000 (50 percent from oil) under the Fourth Plan of 1968-73 and to some $68,600,000,000 (more than two-thirds from oil) under the Fifth Plan of 1973-78.
Improvement and construction after 1961 were accompanied by an "independent national policy" in foreign relations.
The main principles of this foreign policy were support for the United Nations and peaceful coexistence, with a positive approach in cementing friendly and mutually beneficial ties with other nations. Relations with the United States remained close, reflected by the strong American presence in the country and the increasing predominance of Western culture.
Iran played a major role in the Central Treaty Organization (Cento) and Regional Co-operation for Development (RCD) with Turkey and Pakistan. It also embarked upon trade and cultural relations with eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, and Scandinavia.
Iranian oil development was accelerated after 1954 by a multinational Western consortium led by British Petroleum.
The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) embarked on all-around expansion.
It formed a petrochemical subsidiary and concluded agreements, mainly on the basis of equal shares, with several international companies for exploitation of oil outside the area of the consortium.
In July 1973 a new 20-year oil agreement with the consortium of Western firms was concluded.
It had the effect of initiating a plain seller-buyer relationship between Iran and the oil companies and of giving Iran control over field operations.
These operations, along with all facilities and installations previously worked by the consortium, were vested in NIOC.
The consortium agreement was cancelled in 1979, leaving NIOC in control of the Iranian oil industry.
World monetary instability and fluctuations in Western oil consumption dangerously threatened an economy rapidly expanded after 1954 and directed on an unprecedented scale to high-cost development programs.
Acutely aware of the danger of dependence on a diminishing asset, the Shah pursued a policy of diversification. Assembly of motor vehicles started in 1957, and in the early 1970s Iran became an exporter of motor vehicles to Egypt and Yugoslavia.
Copper reserves were exploited, and in early 1972 Iran's first steel mill began producing structural steel. Iran purchased a major share in the Krupp firm of West Germany in 1974 and continued to press for barter agreements for the marketing of its oil and gas.
Population continued to rise, and the flight from rural areas to towns, particularly to the capital and other northern centres, presented a serious problem.
Employment was artificially increased by loans and credits, while businesses were obliged to offer 49 percent of their stock for sale to workers.In 1975 a government-sponsored war on high prices resulted in arrests and fines of traders and manufacturers, injuring the market's confidence.
The Islamic Republic
Revolution of 1978-79The sense that in both the agricultural and industrial spheres too much had been attempted too rapidly and that mistakes had been made and expectations disappointed was manifested in demonstrations against the government in 1978; many people were killed, and martial law was imposed in the major cities in September.
This ended the relaxation of government controls, begun in 1977, that had encouraged protests and that had led to the emergence of religious activists allied with extremist "Dedicated Fighter" groups, the Mujahedin; these groups were opposed to the influx of foreigners, particularly Americans, and to a westernization they saw as threatening to those traditional values subsumed under the cloak of Shi'ite Islam.
During his exile, Khomeini coordinated an upsurge of opposition--first from Iraq and then from France, after 1978--demanding the Shah's abdication.
On January 16, 1979, in what was officially described as a "vacation," the Shah fled Iran.
The Regency and Supreme Army Councils established for the Shah's absence proved unable to function, and Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar was unable to effect compromise with his former National Front colleagues or with Khomeini. Crowds in excess of 1,000,000 demonstrated in Tehran, proving the wide appeal of Khomeini, who arrived in Iran amid wild rejoicing on February 1, 1979.
Ten days later Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find exile in Paris.
The Republic
On April 1, after a landslide victory in a national referendum (in which only one choice was offered and the balloting was not secret), Khomeini declared an Islamic republic, subsequently invested with a new constitution reflecting his ideals of Islamic government.
Fundamentalist measures followed, and revolutionary committees patrolled the streets enforcing Islamic codes of behaviour and dress.
Efforts were made to suppress Western influence, and many of the Western-educated elite fled the country.
Anti-American sentiment was strong, and the Shah's admission to the United States for medical treatment touched off a huge demonstration in Tehran demanding his extradition.
On November 4, 1979, supporters of the revolution took control of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, seized 66 U.S. citizens there and at the foreign ministry, and, with the exception of 14 who were granted early release and despite the death of the Shah on July 27, 1980, held them hostage until January 20, 1981.
Also in November 1979, the republic's first prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, resigned.
The republic's first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, opposed the holding of the U.S. embassy.He was impeached by the Majles and forced to flee to France, together with opposition leader Massoud Rajavi of the outlawed Mujahedin-e Khalq (Fighters for the People) faction, with whom he formed the National Council of Resistance for the overthrow of the Khomeini regime.
The Mujahedin stepped up a campaign of sporadic and highly demoralizing bombing throughout the country that killed many clerics and government leaders, including the bombing on June 28, 1981, of the headquarters of the ruling Islamic Republican Party, in which 73 people were killed.
Bani-Sadr's successor, former prime minister Mohammad Ali Rajai, and his prime minister were killed in another bombing on August 30.
Hojatolislam Sayyed Ali Khamenei was elected to succeed him in October and was reelected in 1985.
The early years of the revolutionary government were marked by the virtual elimination of political opposition and the consolidation and regularization of revolutionary organizations. Unrelenting executions on sometimes trivial allegations, rumours of torture, persecution of Baha'is, arbitrary arrests, bad prison conditions, and the denial of basic rights tarnished the reputation of the republic's leaders.
In September 1980 a long-standing border dispute prompted the president of Iraq to order the invasion of the southwestern oil-producing Iranian province of Khuzestan, but a supposedly weakened Iranian army achieved surprising defensive success.
By summer 1982, Iraq's initial territorial gains had been recaptured by Iranian troops that were stiffened with Revolutionary Guards and, to a disturbing degree, with young village boys attracted by a promise of rewards after life.
The war soon lapsed into one of attrition, however, and its prolongation caused Arab and international anxiety, centred on the possible threat to the oil-producing countries on the Persian Gulf. Both countries' civilian populations suffered severely as a "war of the cities" resulted in the bombings of population centres and industrial targets, particularly oil refineries; a "tanker war" greatly curtailed shipping in the Gulf.
Finally on July 18, 1988, after a series of Iraqi offensives during which Iraq recaptured virtually all of its territories, Khomeini announced Iran's acceptance of UN Resolution 598, requiring both sides to withdraw to their respective borders and observe a cease-fire, which came into force on August 20.
The cease-fire redirected attention to long-standing factional conflicts within the government between "conservatives," "pragmatists," and "leftists" over economic, social, and foreign policy objectives.
These conflicts were underscored in November 1986 when, denunciations of the "Great Satan" aside, it was revealed that, with Khomeini's consent, Iran had accepted arms shipments from the United States in exchange for Iranian assistance in the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Shi'ite extremists.
The factionalism only served to further increase disillusionment among the Iranian population, whose decimated numbers suffered high unemployment, inflation, and shortages brought on primarily by the war.
Ayatollah Khomeini died of a heart attack on June 3, 1989.
The transition of power was surprisingly smooth, orderly, and quick. The Assembly of Experts met in emergency session on June 4 and elected President Khamenei the new faqih, or spiritual leader, simultaneously promoting him to the status of ayatollah. Presidential elections and a referendum on constitutional amendments were moved up to July 28, and Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majles since 1980, was elected with 95 percent of the vote; he ran virtually unopposed.
Upon the approval by the Majles of all of his ministerial nominations (representing a healthy balance of the factions), Rafsanjani began the process of rebuilding the war-torn economy.
Considered a "pragmatist," or "moderate," Rafsanjani favoured a policy of economic liberalization, privatization of industry, and a rapprochement with the West that would encourage much-needed foreign investment.
Source : Courtesy of "ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA", 2000
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