When Shah Abbas walked along the Khurasan Highroad on his way to Mashhad in 1601, one of the places he stopped at is recorded by Munajjim Yazdi as Ribat-i Qusha (the fort at Qusha: 601km from Isfahan).
A dervish named Kamal had walked with the Shah from Kashan and, around Qusha, Kamal is reported to have questioned Abbas about his act of holy pilgrimage to the grave of a dead man (Imam Reza), suggesting that the Shah should instead “Seek the live Imam”. When Abbas asked who this Imam might be; the dervish replied “Me”.
The Shah realised that Kamal and his friends were from the Nuqtavi sect and immediately challenged the dervish’s divinity by saying “Let me see if you survive a bullet” – to which the dervish is said to have responded: “Your Imam Reza died with a [poisoned] grape, you expect me to survive a bullet?”
The shootings are then said to have been carried out in the caravanserai at Qusha.
This, then, was the tail-end of Abbas’ 1593 suppression of the Nuqtavi sect – an act which signalled the Shah’s transformation from a spiritual monarch descended, via the military conqueror and ‘divine leader’ Shah Ismail, from the Sufi pirs Shaykh Safi al-Din and Shaykh Junayd; into a Shah with absolute political power.
Babayan has written that, in this way, Abbas “divorced religion from politics”. Reading the inscriptions within the Shah’s mosques in Isfahan – which portray Abbas as the propagator of Twelver Shia doctrine – I would suggest that in fact the Shah developed a mutually advantageous relationship with hand-picked shari’a minded ulama (religious legal scholars) – especially Shaykh Bahaie – as a religious extension of his usual system of sharing military and administrative power with hand-picked supporters.
The ulama moved on to convert the mass of the population to state-sponsored Imamism – to make Iran a truly Shia country at the grass roots – while Abbas got, amongst many other things, both a further squashing of those qizilbash who were not fully loyal to him, and also at least a partial resolution of the ongoing debate on the legality of Friday services during the Occultation of the Hidden Imam. This latter allowed him to not only build the gorgeous Friday mosque in Isfahan, but also – and much more importantly – to broadcast his claims to sovereignty every Friday as part of the khutba (the Friday sermon).
Excellent Story!
A pivotal moment – just reminds me of Churchill’s piviotal moment with his ‘the few by so many’ speech that we celebrated last week! Well it’s a thought!!