http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/cv.htm
From: "Millennialism
in Modern Iranian History," in Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson, eds. Imagining
the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London:
I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 282-311.
(N.B. Digital copy of final draft; may differ
slightly from published version.)
The coming of a messiah and the advent of the Last Days, in
which a sudden transformation of society would occur, have been an important
set of themes in early modern and modern Shi`ite Islam, and these have been
remarkably intertwined with Iranian rebellions, revolutions and state
formation. Millennialism has had an
especially significant career in Iran, which is all the more appropriate
insofar as there is a sense in which ancient Iranians were among the first to invent
and combine many of the basic motifs that go into this particular sort of
movement. Social scientists have only recently explored these themes
systematically. Bruce Lincoln argued
that earlier, positivist, Marxist and structural-functionalist paradigms
expected religion to be a pillar of order and actually to dampen revolutionary
fervor, causing students of revolution to ignore religious movements. This paradigm of religion as always
reactionary broke down in the 1960s and after, both because of research
findings like those of the “Anglo-Marxist” school (Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher
Hill), who looked at radical religious groups in the English Revolution, and
because of the rise of liberation theology in Latin America. Lincoln proposed that there were religions
of order favored by the elite (Confucianism, Anglicanism) and religions of the
oppressed that could be employed for oppositional purposes (Taoism,
Quakerism). He further saw oppositional
religions as passive, active, and revolutionary.[1] One question I want to raise is what the
Iranian experience tells us about these distinctions.
Many academics posit that millennialist motifs are usually
found in non-metropolitan communities (such as villages in rugged areas of
Europe or in the colonized global South) where no distinction can be made
between the religious and the political, and that adherents express political
and normative goals without possessing the practical means to attain them,
resorting instead to a belief in magic, healing powers, and supernatural
transformation Another division is
between those who have seen millennialist movements as an irrational form of
politics and those who see it to be cultural and symbolic in nature and
“rational” if one takes its premises into account. Eric Hobsbawm saw millennialists as oppressed peasants who
resorted to “archaic” means doomed to failure (such as banding about a local
prophet) to protest their exploitation, in contrast to the “modern” method of
joining a political party.[2] Karen Fields in her study of the Watchtower
in central Africa argued that Hobsbawm and other rationalists were mistaken in
trying to draw such a distinction, showing that contemporary converts to the
Jehovah’s Witnesses could not be seen as more “archaic” in their social action
than most other communities of the time, or even than the colonial state
officers in what is now Zambia, who often took seriously missionary warnings
that heresy equaled social disorder.
She also questioned the central antinomies that have structured debate
about the nature of millennialism—rationality and irrationality, politics and
culturally symbolic action.[3] I shall come back after presenting the
Iranian material to take sides in these debates.
Observers have often been concerned with weighting causes so
as to pinpoint which ones are key in kicking off a major millennialist
movement. Michael Barkun also asserted that disaster and dislocation lay behind
the outbreak of millennialist movements, and some have maintained that European
colonization has been among the chief such causes of dislocation.[4] Michael Adas put the main explanatory weight
on the rise of what he called a “prophet” (and what those in the Weberian
tradition would call a charismatic leader) whose attractive personality and
ability to formulate an appealing message are central to the rise of the
movement. Adas discounts social crisis
and denies that class grievances play much of a role in millennialism given
that it most often takes the form of as mass, multi-class movements.[5] Resource mobilization theorists do not
appear to have been very often attracted to the study of millennialist
movements per se, but they would put explanatory emphasis on the group’s
ability to mobilize resources to achieve its aims. More recently, O’Leary has shifted the terms of the debate by
focusing on rhetoric. That is, not
exploitation nor social crisis nor charisma nor material resources are the
determinative factor, but rather the ability of the leader to phrase
millennialist themes in a convincing and appealing way for adherents. For O’Leary, apocalyptic rhetoric functions
as a solution to the problem of evil, resolving it by positing an end to the
present world of wickedness and a future utopia wherein saints are rewarded and
the iniquitous scourged.[6] In nice synchronization with the linguistic
turn of the 1980s and 1990s, causality is now attributed not to structural
factors such as social breakdown nor to personalistic ones such as the rise of
a talented prophet, but rather to discourse itself. We shall come back at the end of this paper to some of these
issues.
Leaving aside the question of causality for that of typology,
for a moment, I maintain that millennialism is characterized by a number of
distinct motifs that are present in varying degrees in the movements social
scientists have so denominated. After
Smith (who draws on the work of Peter Berger and of Anders Nygren), I define a
religious motif as an attempt to employ “Weberian ideal typification” to
provide a “means of description” of what is most significant about a particular
religious movement, and to trace these clusters of attributes in their
historical development.[7] Like Smith, however, I reject the essentialist
overtones of the original Lund school notion of motif. Rather, I see millennialism as a set of
premises, conventions and ways of reasoning, which are analogous to a genre in
literature, with the motifs representing the equivalent of specific techniques
to naturalize this symbolic and political form of culture and social
action. These motifs are underpinned by
shared texts and approaches to them, by a sort of intertextuality among
adherents. I would like to plot social
movements on a graph, as more or less millennialist according to whether five
motifs are present, and as more or less activist depending on what sort of
chiliastic action is taken. I will
discuss the main motifs of millennialist movements under the headings of
pessimism, prophecy, apocalypse, charismatic leadership, messianism, and
utopia. The presence or absence of
these motifs will help graph movements along one axis. The other axis is determined by the range of
practical action, or praxis, i.e. the actions taken by the millennialist group
before the end comes. Social movements
can thus be high in millennialism and high in activism (which should predict
severe tensions with mainstream society), or high in millennialism but low in
activism (wherein tensions will be less severe and mainly matters of coding the
millennialists as marginal).
To take the first motif, such groups are often characterized
by extreme pessimism, a stark sense that the existing society is horribly
flawed and, indeed, doomed. The pessimism often takes the form of
dualism—though sometimes groups are sophisticated enough to demonize more than
one Other. The vehemence of the millennialist critique of existing society and
its near-celebration of an imminent cataclysm distinguish it from simple social
critique. O’Leary finds prophecy a particularly compelling rhetorical
device. Millennialists frequently
believe that a time of divine requital has been set, and that it can be
discerned by some method in scripture or in an ancient and valued text. The method employed is not a commonsense or
rational one, but rather involves extracting premises from the texts that are
not immediately obvious. Rather than
analysis or contextualization, millennialist hermeneutics depend upon a
cumulative, analogical or conspiratorial reading in which little is contingent
and even seemingly mundane statements are read so as to cast light on the
present and immediate future. Millennialists believe that the world is about to
end or to suffer enormous damage. On
the whole they do not believe that this transformation will take place by means
of ordinary political or military changes, but rather that it will be sudden
and supernatural. I would not wish,
however, to make the supernatural element of the sudden change wholly determinative
of whether a belief is millennial. In
part this is because millennialists have often been quite willing to read what
others would see as ordinary political or military events as possessing
supernatural significance.
As Adas argues so forcefully, millennialists frequently
gather around a charismatic leader to whom they impute supernatural knowledge
and power, and to whom they are fervently devoted. In many instances this leader is felt to be a forerunner for the
coming of the apocalypse or for the coming of an even greater figure, a
messiah. Thus, another key motif in
millennialism is messianism, the belief that a cosmic figure will shortly
appear to reestablish order and restore justice. Among Iran’s Shi`ite majority in modern times, this figure is
usually associated with the Hidden Imam, the twelfth in the line of succession
after the Prophet Muhammad, who is held to have disappeared as a small child
into a supernatural realm. Folk Shi`ism
also awaited the return of the martyred Imam Husayn (the third Imam) and even
of Jesus. Finally, I turn my attention
to utopia, the vision elaborated by the group of the future, post-apocalyptic
society. This future society can be in
the afterlife, as with the Jehovah’s Witnesses saints, or it can be on earth,
as with the thousand-year reign of Christ expected by some
fundamentalists. As for praxis, some
millennialist movements are quietist, others activist, some pacific, others
militant.
Millennialism in Iran has a very long history, and there is a
sense in which Zoroastrians invented many of its most salient motifs. If O’Leary is correct that millennialism is
most of all a form of theodicy, an explanation for the existence of evil, then
the more important features of this kind of theodicy were certainly formulated
by the ancient Iranians, perhaps before anyone else. They believed, after all, in an epochal struggle between the good
God, Ahura Mazda, and the evil demigod, Ahriman, which was to be determined in
part by whether human beings gave their support to Ahura Mazda by living a life
of good thought, good speech, and good deeds.
Even to lie, in Zoroastrianism, was to defect to the enemy. The dualism frequently characteristic of
millennialist pessimism thus pervades this religion. It saw the universe as
having a beginning, as developing over time, and as experiencing a future
renewal (frashkart).
Zoroastrians in the period from about 600 B.C. believed not only in a
prophet, Zarathustra, but also in a future savior, the Saoshyant, who would
arise after three millennia. The last
days are characterized by a struggle between the Azhi Dahaka (dragon or
world-serpent), who escapes his imprisonment on Mt. Damavand, and who is fought
by Thraetaona (Faridun) or Keresaspa.[8]
These beliefs about prophetic charisma, prophecy, a future
savior, the renewal of the world, the final cosmic battle between good and
evil, and the resurrection, did not disappear when Iran was conquered by the
Arab Muslims from the seventh century, and as, over the four or five subsequent
centuries, most Iranians adopted Islam.
Rather, they were melded in Iranian folk culture with Islamic beliefs
(many of them similar and quite likely influenced by Zoroastrianism directly or
indirectly in the first place).[9] Shi`ite Islam in any case had a strong
millennialist tradition of its own. Twelver
Shi`ites believed that the Prophet Muhammad should have been succeeded both
politically and spiritually by his House or family, beginning with his
son-in-law and cousin `Ali, and then the lineal descendants of `Ali and the
Prophet’s daughter, Fatimah. They
believe that the twelfth in the line of these Imams or vicars of the prophet,
Muhammad b. Hasan al-Mahdi, went into supernatural Occultation as a young
child, entering a supernatural realm from which he would someday return to
restore the world to justice. The
history of Shi`ism has been rife with millennialist movements, many of which
had a major impact on society and state.
The long-lived medieval Abbasid dynasty, for instance, which ruled both
Iran and what is now the Arab world for centuries, was brought to power by such
a movement in the middle of the eighth century. But our focus here is only on the ones occurring since 1500.
The first major movement with millennialist overtones in
modern Iran was the Safavis, as has been argued with particular force by Said
Amir Arjomand.[10] The leaders of the Safavi Sufi order, based
in the city of Ardabil in northwestern Iran, had been ordinary urban Sunni
Sufis earlier in their history, though they probably innovated in allowing very
large numbers of Muslims to be initiated.
Sufism, an Islamic form of mysticism, began initially as a form of
individual piety and asceticism, influenced by Syrian Christianity and
(probably) Khurasani Buddhism. Sufism
could often be individualist and form a vehicle for the promotion of heterodox
beliefs.[11] From about the twelfth century Sufis
throughout the Muslim world began organizing themselves into orders or
brotherhoods (Ar. sing. tariqah), with a hierarchy that descended from
the inspired leader (shaykh or pir, both meaning “elder”), his
“lieutenants” (sing. khalifah), often in other cities, and the mass of
adepts or murids.[12]
In the fifteenth century the Safavi leaders intermarried with
the White Sheep confederation that ruled western Iran, sought temporal power,
and came to lead Türkmen tribespeople in holy war against Christian populations on the Black Sea and in the
rugged Caucasus. As the Türkmen were displaced by the Ottoman bureaucratic
state, which had been founded with the help of the tribes’ cavalrymen but which
increasingly found them an embarrassment and source of disorder in eastern
Anatolia, they moved east into the Caucasus.
When their way north was blocked by effective resistance from Christian
tribes of the mountains there, they moved into Iran. About half of Iran’s population consisted of pastoral nomads in
the premodern period, with cities typically constituting of between ten and
twenty percent of the population and the rest being peasants. Pastoralists had enormous military
advantages over the sedentary population, insofar as their way of life made
them a “natural” cavalry, but often they suffered from being divided against
one another by clan feuds. Sufism and
pastoralism were two major social formations in early modern Iran, but they had
not usually been melded in the past, the one being largely urban and organized,
with leaders who were frequently literate, the other being rural and illiterate
and usually lacking much formal organization.[13]
The urban Safavis lent support to pastoralist practices of
raiding in Christian areas by coding them as a form of struggle for Islam and
identifying Sufis as fighters for the faith (ghazi). It seems that the
heterodox beliefs of the Sufis were mixed with the shamanistic beliefs of the
semi-Muslim Türkmen to produce a powerful new political and religious
ideology. The leader of the Safavi Sufi
order was no mere man who had thrown in with tribal forces. He was a manifestation of God himself. The Türkmen adepts went so far as to worship
their new leaders, as Khunji tells us of the fifteenth-century Safavi leaders:
“they openly called Shaykh Junayd ‘God’ and his son [Shaykh Haydar] ‘Son of
God’ . . . in his praise they said “He is the Living one, there is no God but
he . . .”[14] The tone among the Safavis seems at this
point closer to the ecstatic Bistami than to the “sober” Sufi traditions of
their forebears. Moreover, they found
that melding Bistami’s theopathic rhetoric with claims of political authority
proved a heady brew.
The segmentary politics of the tribes, with their clan feuds,
were overcome to some extent by the charisma of the Safavi God-Pir and by the
hierarchical organizational framework of the Sufi order. So it came to pass that the Türkmen
conquered Iran for their new Safavi chieftains, the most recent of which,
Isma`il, had become a Twelver Shi`ite under the influence of his tutor while in
hiding in Lahijan near the Caspian as a child.
But while Isma`il was led to view urban, literate Twelver Shi`ism with
favor, his own beliefs grouped him with what most Shi`ite ulama or clergymen
would have called “ghulah,” or theological “extremists.” He exalted `Ali, the cousin and son-in-law
of the Prophet (whom Shi`ites regard as the latter’s rightful vicar after his
death) as divine, and referred to himself in the same terms (even speaking of
himself as “of the same essence” with `Ali).
Isma`il asserted that he was a manifestation of God and demanded that
his followers prostrate (sijdah) themselves before him (something most
Muslims would do only when praying to God).[15] In similar religious and social movements of
fifteenth century Iran, we know that the warriors who fought for their
god-chieftain believed both him and themselves invulnerable when they went into
battle, and there is some reason to think that the Türkmen warriors for the
Safavids held this belief, as well, at least early on.
The fourteen-year-old Isma`il’s “sortie” from Gilan against
the White Sheep forces, which eventuated in his conquest of Tabriz (1501) and
ultimately of Iran, was spoken of by
the chroniclers as a khuruj, a word usually employed to describe the
advent of the Mahdi or guided one of Islam.[16] The earliest chronicle of Isma`il’s wars
says that before he attacked the ruler of Shirvan, he engaged in divination to
discover the will of the Imams, and it was they who sent him against Shirvan.[17] A later chronicler reported a prophecy
allegedly spoken by astrologers to a White Sheep ruler about the Safavis, which
said, “the sun will never set on their state until the advent of the Lord of
the Age, at which time [Shah Isma`il] will ride in his train, wielding his
sword;” and elsewhere the same source says, after describing the very young
Isma`il’s conquest of Shirvan, that he was among the signs of the near advent
of the Lord of the Age.[18] Even though this is a seventeenth century
work, it seems reasonable to accept this information as authentic, since it is
the sort of thing that later writers, living at a time of increased Shi`ite
orthodoxy, might have more likely suppressed than invented. Isma`il’s own
poetry gives further evidence for this belief, insofar as he wrote, “the heroic
ghazis have come forth with crowns of happiness on their heads. The Mahdi’s era has begun. The light of eternal life has dawned upon
the world” and goes on to represent himself as a “return” of the sixth and the
eighth Imams (since he also said that in his person “God has come,” merely
being the return of two of the Imams was no great difficulty). “Return” (raj`at) is a specifically
Shi`ite doctrine that is not identical to reincarnation since, in Neoplatonic
fashion, what returns is not the soul but the Idea of the holy figure (and this
helps explain why one individual could simultaneously be the “return” of a number
of holy figures of the past, embodying in himself more than one Platonic
Form).
The Shi`ite Sufi tribespeople of the early Safavid period
adopted a highly pessimistic view of the Ottoman and the White Sheep Sunni
states that ruled eastern Anatolia and the western Iranian plateau. They despised Sunnis generally as vicious
betrayers of the rights of the Prophet’s own family, and initiated what can
only be called pogroms against members of this branch of Islam (who had
constituted the vast majority of Iranians before 1500). Shi`ism gradually supplanted Sunnism in
Iran. The utopia of the Türkmen was the
theocratic state they erected, with their God-Pir as its ruler. It seems to me that the Safavid revolution
has enough of the seven elements of millennialism to have a “family
resemblance” to the phenomenon. Their praxis was tribal warfare, seeking first
a jihad state in the Caucasus where they sought to subdue Georgians and others,
and then embarking on the conquest of Iran, on which Isma`il imposed a high
bureaucracy headed by Türkmen officials and staffed by Persian scribes taken
over from pre-Safavid states. And so it
was that some key elements of modern Iranian identity--Shi`ite Islam and a
unified state ruling the entire Iranian plateau and its peripheries—derived
from the advent of the Türkmen “millennium” at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. In subsequent generations
these embarrassingly heterodox origins of Iranian Shi`ism (which came in its
more sober forms to predominate as the chief religion on the plateau) were
downplayed. The God-Pirs were reduced
to mere shahs, Sufi worship of them was discouraged, expectations of the end of the world declined, and in the end the
Türkmen cavalry was shunted aside in favor of a standing army of slave soldiers
from the marches of Georgia. Esoteric
Shi`ism was replaced among urban elites by the bookish, learned Shi`ism that
had developed earlier in Baghdad and Damascus.
The state became an ordinary bureaucratic enterprise, a process helped
along by major defeats by Ottoman artillery (e.g. Chaldiran in 1514) and at the
hands of the Uzbek cavalries in the east.
The millennialist strain in Shi`ism was so strong that it
hardly went away even at the height of later Safavid routinization. In his “Treatise on the Return” (Risalih-‘i
Raj`at) of circa1679 a middle-aged Mulla Muhammad Baqir Majlisi
(1638-1699), the Shaykhu’l-Islam of imperial Isfahan, dealt with the sayings of
the Imams about the last days in two ways.
First, he projected some of these events into Iran’s past and employed
them to support Safavid legitimacy.
Second, he projected the end-time into the next century. He quotes a saying attributed to an early
Imam from Shaykh Nu`mani’s Book of the Occultation (Kitab al-Ghaybah)
that says in part, “’When the Promised One (Qa’im) arises in Khurasan and
conquers the land of Kofan and Multan . . . and from us a promised one (qa’im)
arises in Gilan . . . then shall Basrah be destroyed and the commander of the
Cause arise, and we shall relate a long tale.’
Then he said, ‘When thousands have been armed and the troops mustered in
serried ranks and the ram has been slaughtered, there shall arise the last one
and instigate a revolution that will destroy the unbeliever, and then the
hoped-for Qa’im and the Hidden Imam—nobility and grace be his-- will arise, and
he is of my progeny O Husayn.”[19] Majlisi identifies the one who goes forth (khuruj)
from Khurasan as the Mongols, and the qa’im of Gilan as Shah Isma`il
Safavi. Majlisi sees other elements in
the saying to refer to later Safavid monarchs such as Shah Safi.[20] This prophetic motif with its implicit
support of the Safavids (and even its extraordinary acknowledgment of the
validity of the claims by Isma`il and his followers that he was a messianic
harbinger of the return of the Twelfth Imam) does not lead him, however, to
downplay millennialist hopes for the near future. He argues that the unconnected letters that appear mysteriously
at the beginning of some chapters of the Qur’an contain dates that predict the
rising of Husayn and the appearance of the Imam Mahdi, and concludes, “The
unconnected letters give 1155 (circa A.D. 1742) as the date of the
Mahdi’s appearance, 65 [lunar] years from this writing. But in fact the exact date cannot be
accurately predicted. There are other
sayings; and then, God may change his mind.”[21] Majlisi envisages a “return” of Imams `Ali
and Husayn together, such that they will right the wrongs of their previous
lives, and will jointly prevail over the Umayyads this time. The End-Time will be an era in which the
tragic scripts of Shi`ite history will be rewritten as ‘comedies’ (in the
technical sense of narratives that integrate characters into society and in
which they achieve their goals). Majlisi’s views were not so much millennialist as pre-millennial,
lacking any immediacy and any focus on an actual charismatic leader. In this respect, Majlisi II’s Shi`ism was
typical, insofar as that branch of Islam is characterized by the production and
reproduction of chiliastic anxiety and expectation, on which leaders could
capitalize.
The eighteenth century wrought disaster upon Iran, with its
invasion by Afghan pastoralists who overthrew the Safavid dynasty in 1722 and
who de-urbanized the plateau with their raids and looting, setting in train a
decades-long period of political instability and economic turgidity. Although
there was something almost apocalyptic about this turmoil, and although we know
that millennialist ideas continued to exist among some Iranians, no major
millennialist movement arose during the period of turmoil and weak states. Smith has suggested that this lack of a
great millennialist movement in the disastrous eighteenth century may be
explained by the very harshness of the conditions, which left people with no
hope whatsoever.[22] It might also be pointed out that the
pastoralists’ disruption of trade and urban life made it far less likely that a
sedentary movement could mobilize substantial resources in this period. Majlisi’s kind of premillennialism was
probably widespread, but his date was pushed back, as 1742 yielded only further
destructive campaigns by the adventurer Nadir Shah, whose ‘world empire,’
including Iran, was really better conceived as a vast Central and South Asian
target for raiding and looting by the “monarch” and his tribal cavalries.
A different sort of premillennialism arose in the late
eighteenth century, which came to be known as Shaykhism.[23] I bring the movement up in this regard with
some caution, because although it has tended to be painted as having strong
millennialist tendencies, I do not believe that the founder, Shaykh Ahmad
al-Ahsa'i (1753-1826), was particularly preoccupied with such matters, at least
any more than a mainstream figure such as Majlisi II had been. His voluminous writings are mainly on issues
of metaphysics, Shi`ite mysticism, and cosmic symbolism. Shaykh Ahmad’s one
extended discussion of the Mahdi involves the refutation of the claims of a
contemporary to messianic status, and he puts off the possibility of such an
advent into the succeeding century, just as had Majlisi II. Al-Ahsa'i explains that in 1791, Shaykh
Musa al-Bahrani wrote him from Kazimain mentioning that a person had come to
him saying, “I am the representative (wakil) of the Lord of the
Age.” This man alleged that he had
visited many fabulous sites associated with the Shi`ite promised one—the
Verdant Isle, the White Sea, the Darknesses, Jerusalem, Medina, Mecca, and
“hidden” lands as big as the province of Baghdad dotted with many
villages. Therein, the representative
reported, is a mosque where they “went to perform the Friday congregational
prayers with the Qa’im.” He prayed with
them. His son, he averred, is ruler of
those lands, where the people’s work is to guide the erring, and to aid the
Qa’im and the believers. The
“representative” lived in this fabulous land for nine years, until the Qa’im
sent him back to tell others of it.
Bahrani sought Shaykh Ahmad’s advice about this claimant, who he
admitted led a pious and ascetic life, noting that the people were divided
about whether to believe him or brand him a liar.
Al-Ahsa'i replied forcefully that the man’s followers had
been deluded by their base passions, which had fooled their intellects into
mistaking the bad for the good. It is
difficult, he admitted, for the people to discern the rightly-guided from the
atheist (mulhid). He branded
this “representative of the Imam” as such an atheist, who used the rhetoric of
Sufism and the techniques of figurative interpretation (ta’wil) to
mislead. In such Sufi-tinged discourse,
he says, the promised Qa’im is identified with the intellect, so that a claim
to be the Qa’im simply means that he is one whose intellect has become sound
such that his nature and body are filled with justice and equity. Likewise, when these Sufis speak of the
antichrist (ad-Dajjal), they mean the untamed carnal self. The Verdant Isle where the promised one
lives is heaven of the imagination.
Shaykh Ahmad does not deny the validity of such figurative associations
in and of themselves, but complains bitterly that Sufis go astray when they
detach them altogether from the common sense reality recognized by ordinary
folk. That is, he holds that whatever
figurative signification the Qa’im might have, it cannot be completely ideal,
lacking any tangible reality. As for
his advent, Shaykh Ahmad cites a saying attributed to the Sixth Imam, Ja`far
as-Sadiq, that appears to speak of the Mahdi coming, disappearing, and coming
again: “He shall vanish on the last day
of the year 1266 [A.H.; i.e. November 5, 1850] , and no eye shall behold him
until all behold him.” This saying may
be the basis on which many Shi`ites of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries believed the Qa’im would arise in 1260/1844, and it seems plausible
from this text that Shaykh Ahmad, writing in 1791, agreed. But first he thought that many signs would
appear, including 40 days of rain, the resurrection of some bodies, fear,
hunger, loss of wealth and of persons, the red death and the white death (such
that only one third of the people of the houses survive), the rising of the sun
from the west, the murder of the Pure Soul, and the appearance of the evil
Sufyani (a sort of antichrist figure).
He notes, however, that “to attempt to limit these signs to the esoteric
is invalid, and any attempt to confine them to a literal interpretation is
clearly invalid, as well.” [24] Given all of Shaykh Ahmad’s metaphysical
levels, however, it is more likely that he avoided a literal interpretation
than an esoteric one. He appears to
have focused on a level of reality below the Platonic Forms but above ordinary
physicality. His letter gives evidence
that millennialist claims were being put forward in the 1790s, and also that
these were unsuccessful, attracting no great following and earning only the
ridicule even of mystics like al-Ahsa'i.
As the Muslim year 1260 A.H. (A.D. 1844) approached, the
thousandth anniversary of the Occultation of the Imam, there was widespread
millennialist speculation about his advent.
Even in Lucknow in India, where the Shi`ite-ruled post-Mughal successor
state of Awadh had emerged with its many connections to Iran, an Englishwoman
who had married an Indian Shi`ite reported in a book published in the early
1830s that many North Indian Shi`ites believed that the Twelfth Imam would
return in 1260 A.H. They pointed to a
prophetic passage in Majlisi II’s biography of the Prophet which said that
“When the four quarters of the globe contain Christian inhabitants, and when
the Christians approach the confines of the Kaabah, then may men look for that
Emaum [Imam] who is to come . . .”
Then, they thought, Jesus would descend from heaven to Mecca, there
would be a bloody Armageddon, and finally a world with only one religion would
emerge, with perfect peace and happiness throughout the world. She reports, “I have heard them declare it
as their firm belief that the time was fast approaching when there should be
but one mind amongst all men. ‘There is
but a little more to finish;’ ‘The time draws near . . .’” (Ali 1978 [1832]:76,
80-81; Cole 1988:100-101).[25] At this point, Shi`ite millennialists have
emphasized those elements in the sayings of the Imams which support anxiety
about European colonialism in Muslim lands, provoked by the British conquest of
India and subduing of Muslim-ruled states like the nawabate of Bengal, as well
as increasing British naval dominance of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf,
which certainly looked like an approach to the Muslim kaaba or the cube-shaped
shrine around which Muslims circumambulate during pilgrimage. But when Majlisi himself engaged in
millennialist speculations he had emphasized the Mongols and Safavids, not
mentioning Europeans as such.
Nineteenth century Shi`ites also saw the Christian Greek revolution
against the Muslim Ottoman empire as a sign that the last days were
approaching. That such anxieties arose
among Shi`ites in British-ruled India is unremarkable. What Mrs. Mir Hasan `Ali’s report
demonstrates, however, is that by the 1820s such millennialist expectations
were widespread in the Shi`ite community.
Thus, it is not only members of the Shaykhi school who had increasingly
chiliastic expectations in the late 1830s, but a wide range of Shi`ites throughout
Iran and even in India.
Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i was succeeded by Sayyid Kazim Rashti,
who saw his predecessor as the initiator of a new cycle in sacred history. Upon Rashti’s death on about January 1,
1844, the Shaykhi school split into several factions. Conservative Shaykhis gradually coalesced around Haji Muhammad
Karim Khan Kirmani, a Qajar noble and large landholder.[26] A more progressive Shaykhi tradition, with
fewer sectarian or cult-like attributes, gradually grew up in Tabriz, and
Tabrizi Shaykhis ultimately played a role in supporting the Constitutional
Revolution of 1905-1911. A third group
consisted of those Shaykhis convinced that the advent of the Imam or his
representative was now nigh (1260 began January 22, 1844).[27] Ultimately these millennialist Shaykhis
gathered around Sayyid `Ali Muhammad Shirazi, a twenty five year old member of
the Afnan merchant clan of Shiraz and Yazd who had studied briefly with Rashti
in the shrine cities and who put forth some sort of claim to be some sort of
representative (Bab or door) of the Twelfth Imam in spring-summer 1844. Gradually he let it be known that he was no
mere representative, but was the return of the Imam himself. By 1848 he had gone further, beyond imamate
to assertions that he was a messenger or “manifestation” of God on a par with
Jesus and Muhammad, and he wrote out his own book of laws, the Bayan, which was
to supersede the Qur’an. The Bab’s
message spread quickly through Iran and Iraq, attracting urban artisans,
merchants and younger or less prominent clergymen in particular, along with
some peasants (but very few pastoral nomads, some one-third of the
population).
Before the 1970s the little we knew of the Babi movement was
still largely based on spadework done in the nineteenth century by pioneering
researchers into Iranian millennialism such as E.G. Browne and Victor Rosen,
though Soviet scholars like Ivanov had attempted a Marxist interpretation of it
in the 1930s and the Baha’i leader Shoghi Effendi had in the same decade
“translated” and published in part an important but late chronicle of the
movement by Nabil Zarandi. A string of
dissertations, studies and books produced by academics during the past twenty
years, however, has drawn back the veil considerably.[28] On the basis of this new work we can essay a
few observations about Babism as a millennialist movement. First of all, it was certainly characterized
by dualism and pessimism about the prevailing order. The Bab was extremely critical of what he saw as the religious
laxity of the semi-feudal ruling classes and even of the bazaar, from whence
most of his own support derived.
Significantly, he attacked the imposition of extra-canonical taxes and
imposts by the Qajar elite. He was
suspicious of the motives of European merchants, and given his family’s
commercial ties to Bombay and even Hong Kong he would have been well aware of
the tendency for imperial conquest to follow in the wake of the European
trading companies. He therefore
restricted the Europeans to trading in only a few provinces of the country,
preserving the rest for the indigenous merchants. Aware of the crucial importance of credit as a modern instrument
of trade, he allowed the taking of interest on loans (not so much abolishing
the de jure Muslim prohibition on interest as regularizing the widespread de
facto practice of the Muslim merchants in taking interest on loans anyway). This pessimism is also clear in among the
earliest extended Babi treatises by someone other than the Bab that now
survives, the theological prolegomenon to the Point of Kashan (Kitab-i
Nuqtat al-Kaf), written by Haji Mirza Jani Kashani. (The chronicle of the Babi movement that
Kashani later appended to this treatise was extensively redacted and added to
by subsequent authors and seems no longer to survive in its original 1851 form,
but there is no reason to believe that the theological treatise at the
beginning of this work does not go back to about 1848. Kashani complained bitterly about the
division of the originally united Shi`ite community into many contending sects,
and this religious strife, disagreement and disunity appeared to him as among
the worst features of the premillenial world:
the people during the most
great Occultation have not acted in accordance with the mandate of the
Qa’im—peace be upon him—and for this reason, differences over the religion have
arisen. With regard to both the essential
principles of religion and secondary matters they have divided into several
sects. With regard to the principles of
religion, they separated into four sects: philosophers, mystics, Shaykhis and
mainstream Shi`ites. With regard to
secondary matters [of religious law], also, they have divided into four sects:
Akhbaris, Usulis, legalists, and Illuminationists. These eight sects have general principles I common, but on every
specific principle they are subdivided into several further sects. Since we are on the brink of almost pure
contention, it has become necessary that the government of God appear, as [the
Prophet] said, “The earth shall be filled with justice and equity” when the
Cause of the Truth appears, for it is the one Cause of God, “after it was
filled with tyranny and oppression.”[29]
Disagreement, contention and
disunity, then, are signs of the decadence of the old religious order and of
the near appearance of the promised one.
Prophecy played an extremely significant role in the Bab’s
movement. We have already seen that a
new interpretation of the Shi`ite traditions had grown up pointing to an advent
in 1844, coupled with anxiety about Christian European colonial conquests in the
Muslim world. Babis continued even
after 1844 to refer back to the vast Shi`ite corpus of oral sayings attributed
to the Imams. The prediction that the
Mahdi’s black flag would be raised in Khurasan, which was more than a
millennium old and was used by those who made the Abbasid Revolution of the
mid-eighth century, was resurrected by Babis based in Mashhad who were upset by
the Bab’s imprisonment by the Qajar state, and who set out in 1848 to rescue
him, prominently waving black banners as they proceeded from Khurasan. The reestablishment of contact with the
Twelfth Imam, either through a Bab or through a person who was his mystical
Return, was an event that in folk Islam
pointed to the near advent of the end of time.
Among the prophetic criteria for the one who lays claim to a Cause from
God, according to Haji Mirza Jani Kashani, is that he should have been
prophesied by holy figures of the past, and that when he ordains a new
religious law, he be the first to implement it. He admits, however, that “some prophecies about his advent have
an esoteric, inner meaning” and that others “are annulled by a change of the
divine mind,” while still others, “though they are outwardly visible, only
become manifest gradually, over the duration of the dispensation from its
beginning to its end.”[30] Such a subtle and flexible approach to the
interpretation of prophecy (which even allows for abrogation of some
predictions on the grounds of a change in the divine mind (called bada’
in Shi`ite theology), could be used to justify almost anything that occurred in
the course of the Babi movement.
Shirazi himself provided the charismatic leadership for the
movement, though the force of his very attractive personality could be
projected in a direct way only briefly and to a limited number of followers in
Shiraz 1844-1846, then for a while in Isfahan, before he was transferred to
remote fortresses in the northwest of the country. Most ordinary Babis could not read the Bab’s esoteric Arabic
treatises. His better-known Persian works, such as the Book of Justice and the Seven Proofs were not written and distributed till his
movement was well under way.[31] Thus, the charisma of his major disciples, a
second layer of leadership, was probably nearly as important as his own ability
to persuade and attract. Mulla Husayn
Bushru’i, the Shaykhi cleric from Khurasan, Fatimih “Tahirih Qurratu’l-`Ayn”
Baraghani of Qazvin, the Bab’s fiery female disciple who was an accomplished
theologian and poet; `Ali “Quddus” Barfurushi of Mazandaran, a young ecstatic
mystic; and Hujjat, a rebellious cleric of the northern town of Zanjan, were among
the more important. The significance of
younger people, male and female, from prominent clerical families, seems
obvious in this layer of discipleship, though the behind the scenes role of
merchants in subventing and artisans in supporting the activities of the young
intellectuals should not be forgotten.
Tahirih Qurratu’l-`Ayn was among the most forceful proponents at the
1848 conference of Badasht for abolishing the Muslim shari`ah, a motion
that triumphed after much wrangling and even the suicide of a conservative Babi
who could not accept Tahirih’s unveiling.[32]
The Babi movement was certainly messianic. In its first phases the followers of Shirazi
probably hoped that the Imam himself would return soon. When Shirazi began publicly asserting that
he was the Imam, the Babis’ expectations turned to other figures. Shirazi himself spoke of “He whom God shall
make manifest,” a future manifestation of God. With the Bab’s execution in 1850,
Babis hoped for the return of Imam Husayn or of Jesus. Indeed, by the late 1840s it was an article
of faith that revelation was progressive and every messenger of God foretold a
successor: “Another sign is that one who lays claim to a Cause from God should
prophecy about his successor and should command the people to obey, love and
efface themselves in him; for there is no pause or cessation in the grace and
manifestation of God” (Kashani in Anon. 1910:91). Expectation of an immediate
and tangible messiah almost became institutionalized in Babism. While the Bab
was alive, the Babis were not exactly theocrats in the sense that Geneva
Calvinists were. The Bab addressed
letters to Muhammad Shah, then monarch of Iran, and hoped he and other
contemporary rulers would accept the new religion. After 1848, the Babi utopia appears to have been one wherein the
king had accepted the Bab’s spiritual counsel and implemented the laws of the
Bayan.[33] Non-canonical taxes would be abolished,
merchants would be free to pursue modern techniques requiring bank interest and
to operate in many provinces without competition from European merchants, and
the position of women might be slightly improved, with somewhat bigger
inheritance shares and a bit more freedom of movement. Babi leader Muhammad `Ali “Quddus”
Barfarushi, is said by a later Baha’i historian to have written a letter from
his encampment at Shaykh Tabarsi, saying “We are exceedingly adverse to enmity
and discord, much more to actual strife and warfare, especially with His
Majesty the King. Only those who dream
of lordship and dominion deliberately seek war with established authority . .
.”[34]
Babi praxis was various.
Most converts to Babism probably changed their daily lives only
slightly. Many practiced pious
dissimulation, hiding their new faith.
In 1844-1848, very little in the Bab’s teachings would have changed Babi
practices much from their Shi`ite form.
Even as of 1848 when his new book of laws, the Bayan, was promulgated
from his Azerbaijan prison, it is unlikely that this elaborate work, most of
the provisions of which were impracticable or idiosyncratic, could be copied
quickly and securely enough to become very widely available to Babis before the
Bab’s execution or that even those who managed to secure a copy could hope to
implement many of its ordinances. Some
Babis manifested their new faith by becoming hyper-observant of the smallest
Shi`ite regulations, whereas others took the Bab’s advent as a justification
for antinomianism and the abolition of religious restrictions altogether. (In disregard of the Bayan, many Babis took
up the drinking of wine, or newly justified an old drinking habit). Only occasionally did Babis take an activist
stance. Even a number of those that
later historiography has designated as “Letters of the Living” or formal
disciples appear to have simply lived out their lives in relative
obscurity.
In a few cases, however, Babi praxis turned violent. The band that set out from Mashhad to rescue
the Bab in 1848 moved into Mazandaran and there had a contretemps with a local
Muslim community. As a result, they
were forced to camp at the Shrine of Shaykh Tabarsi, and over time made it into
a fort, being surrounded by hostile anti-adventist Shi`ites. Ultimately government troops were dispatched
from Tehran for a long siege that ended with the defeat and massacre of the
Babis, the survivors being sold into slavery.
Conflicts also occurred in the city of Yazd and the two small towns of
Zanjan (near Qazvin in the north) and Nayriz (near Shiraz) in the south.[35] In each of the small towns, a prominent
cleric became a Babi, bringing along with him his followers and even his entire
city quarter. Since city quarters in
Qajar Iran often engaged in faction fighting, with youth gangs and turf wars,
the unacceptability of Babism to conservative Shi`ite leaders in the other
quarters, and the enthusiasm of the new converts in their own, led to
violence. This urban violence became so
great as to alarm the state, which sent in troops on the side of the
conservatives. In all cases the Babi
factional violence led to a siege and ultimately to the conquest and sacking of
the quarter, the killing of many males, and the enslavement of the
survivors. The Babis do not appear
initially to have planned out anything like a national revolt or rebellion,
though once the uprising was in full swing in Zanjan the Babis seem to have
become dedicated revolutionaries, and they minted coins in the name of the Lord
of the Age. The Bab himself did
acknowledge holy war as a principle in his religion, but he never appears to
have proclaimed it. Babi violence is
more usefully seen as local and as part of a larger tendency to faction
fighting in Qajar urban quarters than as millennialist uprising. The possible exception here is the band of
400 seminarians and artisans who set out from Mashhad in 1848. If, this small force had revolutionary
aspirations, they were wholly unrealistic.
Still, that the Babi movement spread so quickly throughout the Qajar
empire, and the simultaneous outbreak of violence in several parts of the
country, allowed the first Iran-wide urban revolts of the modern era.
Something closer to a planned revolt occurred in 1852. It was planned jointly by Shaykh `Ali `Azim
Turshizi, then the most widely recognized successor to the Bab in Tehran and
Mirza Yahya Nuri (Subh-i Azal), a fiery young nobleman from Mazandaran and son
of Mirza Buzurg Nuri, the former governor of Burujird and Luristan, The plot
involved the assassination of Nasiru’d-Din Shah and a coordinated uprising in
the Nur district near the capital, in which the Babis of Takur took up
arms. The assassination plot went awry
when the assassins hit with grapeshot but failed to kill their royal target,
and the Qajar army crushed the uprising in Takur, nearly razing it and putting
it under martial law and surveillance for the rest of the century.[36] Although the revolt in Nur was if anything
strategically more important than the ones in Shaykh Tabarsi, Nayriz, and
Zanjan, it has been suppressed in subsequent Babi-Baha’i historiography in part
because its goal of regicide and perhaps its utter failure reflected badly on
the Nuri family, which produced the two major successors to the Bab, Azal (who
led the revolt) and his older brother Mirza Husayn `Ali “Baha’u’llah” Nuri (who
opposed the revolt but was ignored).
Once the Bab was executed, many Babis appear to have become
radicalized and the 1852 revolt suggests that some even contemplated attempting
to take over the government and establishing a theocratic republic, since they
attempted to assassinate the shah and to stage an uprising in Mazandaran
without having any obvious successor to the throne in mind. Adas insists that millennialist revolts are
not centrally about social class, being mass movements and involving all sorts
of people from various walks of life, and Walbridge has also noted that he
could not find clear evidence of specifically class conflict during the Babi
revolt in Zanjan. Still, it seems to me
also the case that many Babis of the urban middle and lower middle strata
detested the Qajar high administrators, governors, big landlords, and high
clergy, in part on class grounds. In
return the Qajars viewed the Babis as rabble. The assassination plot and the
Nur uprising were the Babis’ undoing, since the slightly wounded but extremely
outraged Nasiru’d-Din Shah instituted a vast nation-wide pogrom against Babis
and suspected Babis. MacEoin estimated
that between 1848 and 1855 or so some 5,000 Babis perished. The rest mostly went underground or forsook
the new religion to return to a safer Shi`ism.
Later on, in the early twentieth century the few remaining Babis were
among the most vociferous proponents of the Constitutional Revolution.
The Babi movement probably affected less than five percent of
the then 6 million strong Iranian population, with adherents having constituted
one percent to 1.5 percent at the height of the movement, and enemies and those
directly affected by the revolts or pogroms making up the rest. The primary social base of the religion in
the urban middle and lower middle strata made it extremely unlikely that it
would succeed in gaining real power, because in the mid-nineteenth century
military power still primarily rested with pastoralists and high state
officers. The state still lacked much
in the way of a modern, drilled, standing army, though it did possess some
imported weaponry and most importantly artillery; it lacked railroads or
telegraph. Had any significant number
of tribal groups joined, the movement could have had a chance of taking over
the country (as the pastoralist Qajars had in the 1780s and 1790s only a few
decades earlier, and as had the somewhat millennialist and highly heterodox
Safavids 350 years earlier), and it might have had similar temporal success if
it had become the religion of the Qajar officer class. As it was, the most the Babis in their small
towns and city quarters could have hoped for was to remain locally influential
and for the government to treat them even-handedly. But events like the faction fighting in Zanjan, which disrupted
the caravan trade between Tehran and Tabriz (Iran’s most important commercial
city from which goods flowed to Istanbul and thence to Europe) made government
intervention imperative. And the
established alliance of the Qajars with the Shi`ite clergy of the rationalist
Usuli school led them to side with the latter against heretic “rabble.”
The next significant millennialist movement in Iran, the
Baha’i faith, grew out of a defeated and disconsolate Babism and centered on
the person of Mirza Husayn `Ali Nuri, Baha’u’llah (“the Glory of God”), who
proclaimed himself the promised one of the Bab in Baghdad in 1863, and who, in
fact initially represented himself as the mystical “Return” of the Bab himself.[37] Baha’u’llah was thereafter exiled to
Istanbul (fall, 1863), Edirne (winter 1863-summer 1868) and Akka on the coast
of Ottoman Syria (1868-1892). The
remaining Babis went over to Baha’u’llah very quickly in the late 1860s and
through the 1870s, leaving the more militant Azali Babis who remained loyal to
Mirza Yahya Subh-i Azal a small minority.
Like Babism, for most of its history the Baha’i movement probably
directly affected less than five percent of the Iranian population, with
adherents seldom more than one or two percent (a possible exception is the late
teens and early 1920s, when adherents and sympathizers are said to have
amounted to a million persons in a population of around 13-15 million; but the
numbers declined dramatically thereafter).
In many ways, the Baha’i faith reversed the more salient features of
Babism. It was what Smith has called a
“promulgatory” millennialism, in which adherents were to proclaim the message
rather than take any particular action, and the first thing Baha’u’llah did on
making his declaration was to abrogate the law of jihad or holy war. He was relatively successful in imbuing the
Babis with a new ethos, which is demonstrated by the low incidence of faction
fighting between his adherents and the Shi`ites in the last third of the
nineteenth century.
Baha’u’llah’s pessimism was the pessimism of a religious
liberal about a reactionary society. He
attacked absolute monarchy; arbitrary government; over-taxation (especially of
peasants and the poor); militarism; nationalist chauvinism; religious dogmatism,
and extreme forms of patriarchal domination of women. He was speaking to the political and social realities of the
Ottoman and Qajar empires. This absolutist old world order was “lamentably
defective” and about to be “rolled up.”
He appealed to a wide range of prophetic passages in the world
scriptures to demonstrate the truth of his claims to be the world-messiah,
including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Bab’s writings,
and even at one point implicitly the Bhagavad-Gita. Baha’u’llah’s writings are suffused with somewhat vague
apocalyptic expectation. Sometimes he
is more specific, as when he warns, "If carried to excess, civilization
will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept
within the restraints of moderation . . . the day is approaching when its flame
will devour the cities . . ."[38] Often his followers were less
unspecific. Among the greatest Baha’i
theologians, Mirza Abu’l-Fadl Gulpaygani (d. 1914), told one interlocutor that
he expected “the Europeans to be completely annihilated” in accordance with 2
Peter, which promises swift perdition to any people among whom false teachers
emerge (he probably meant to condemn secularists and Darwinists).[39]
Baha’u’llah represents himself as the somewhat unwilling and
hapless recipient of divine revelation and of a mission from God. He is a “manifestation of God,” the next
stage in the evolution of the prophet, on a par with (indeed, in some sense the
“return” of) Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, and the inaugurator of a new cycle in
human history to be characterized ultimately by peace and harmony and unity on
a global scale. In his 1873 al-Kitab
al-Aqdas he abrogates both the Qur’an and the Bayan, saying that the divine
will has revealed a new book of laws for humankind. He de-emphasizes the messianic motif that dominated Babism by
proclaiming, right from 1863, that no further messengers of God would appear
for at least a thousand years.
The Baha’i utopia changed over time, though it retained some
key values. Baha’u’llah dreamed of a
world in which ethnic and nationalist hatreds were supplanted by loyalty to the
entire globe and solicitude for the whole human race, in which all spoke a
common language; in which all belonged to a single religion or at least acknowledged
the unity of the great world religions; in which small armies served mainly as
border guards; in which collective security made war difficult or at least
short and dangerous for the aggressor;
in which religion and philosophy (including what we would call science)
were handmaids of one another; in which the worst traits of modern, urban,
industrial civilization—such as ever more powerful weaponry, costly wars that
caused overtaxation of the poor, and perhaps forms of pollution, were eliminated. He spoke of the people’s rights (huquq),
and his son and successor, `Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921) praised the
eighteenth-century achievement of freedom of conscience, religion and speech in
the West.
Baha’i praxis was quietist, in which the old Babi scimitar
was traded for wise and persuasive “utterance” (bayan). Like all good liberals, the Baha’is were to
depend primarily upon convincing their interlocutors with their words. This turn is referred to as quietist
primarily in contrast with Babi militancy, and it should be remembered that
much in the Baha’i “utterance,” including praise for parliamentary democracy
and denunciation of absolutism, was still radical in a Middle Eastern
context. Baha’is were instructed to
establish in each locality a body of nine trustworthy members to serve on the
“house of justice,” which served as a steering committee for the
community. Care for the poor,
especially of the community, appears to have been a major preoccupation of the
early “spiritual assemblies” or houses of justice.
Baha’u’llah foresaw the abolition of absolute monarchy in
favor of constitutional monarchies and (less desirably from his point of view)
republics, where elected parliaments would legislate and the rights of the
people would be upheld. Baha’u’llah
himself does not seem to me to forbid his followers from attempting to gain
this objective by speaking for it, but he certainly does prohibit revolutionary
or seditious activity. Later Baha’i
leaders forbade even speech aimed at changing the political status quo,
effectively leaving Iranian Baha’is no choice but simply to wait till a
parliament dropped miraculously into their laps. Finally, Baha’u’llah foresaw a world in which religious leaders
and institutions absented themselves from the governmental sphere, leaving
politics to civil politicians. Although
his separation of religion and state drew the lines differently than was common
in the West (he still imagined the state administering some religious law), he
did erect a wall between the two spheres as a way of ruling out of the question
any form of theocracy, the old unrealized Shi`ite ideal and perhaps that of
some Babis. Ironically, desire for
theocracy was so great among Iranian Baha’is and their eventual Western
co-religionists that ultimately the conservatives among them managed to
resurrect this notion, dreaming of a world ruled by their houses of justice, in
direct contradiction to Baha’u’llah’s own vision.
The make-up of the Baha’i community was urban and
predominantly from the middle strata.
The three major groups in the period 1866-1892, each with between a
fifth and a quarter of the total, were merchants, skilled urban workman, and
younger or less prominent members of the Shi`ite clergy; nearly ten percent
were government workers.[40] Women also played a key role. Political power in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century was shifting toward these sorts of groups and away from
the pastoral nomads (by 1900 only a quarter of the population), and coalitions
of merchants, artisans and ulama, along with a modern intellectual class,
successfully mounted movements such as the Tobacco Revolt and the
Constitutional Revolution. Because of
the precarious position of Baha’is as heretics, they tended to be excluded from
such coalitions unless they dissimulated, and their own ambivalence about
direct political action and their millennialist expectations of sudden and
miraculous change, tended to make them more passive than many in their social
classes as the twentieth century wore on.
The Baha’i faith was the last great millennialist movement in
modern Iran that manifested all seven of the major motifs identified above and
which appealed directly to apocalyptic rhetoric for the purposes of
theodicy. The Tobacco Revolt protesting
the shah’s granting of a monopoly in the marketing of Iranian Tobacco in
1890-1892 to a British entrepreneur played out again the pattern of loosely
coordinated urban revolts seen earlier in the Babi movement. But this time the telegraph was used by
merchants and Shi`ite clergymen to achieve an immediate political goal for
rational economic purposes, the revocation of the monopoly and the forestalling
of massive British intervention in Iranian society and the economy. There were millennialists who saw these events
to have greater cosmological significance, but the core of the movement was
this-worldly and practical. No transcendent or even temporal transformation was
dreamt of, only a return to the status quo ante of 1889, and that was what was
achieved. Still, even this movement
could be seen through a millennialist lens.
Baha’u’llah in his 1891 “Tablet of the World” saw the Tobacco Revolt as
a vindication of his call for the institution of an Iranian parliament and of
further evidence of the apocalyptic turmoil abroad in the land. One of his followers, the prince, poet and
constitutionalist Shaykhu’r-Ra’is, referred to the burning of warehoused
tobacco by protesters:
They mounted a blockade like smoke rings
When turmoil arose throughout
Iran.
The smoke of this apocalyptic commotion
Like manifest fumes overtook
the world.
The final
verses are , "The fumes stood up in the midst and said,/ `A day when
heaven shall bring a manifest smoke.'" This last line (Qur'an 44:9), refers to the End-Time when God will
reprove the people with this visible smoke because they had turned away from
the prophets dispatched to them (in this case, the author implies that the
Qur’an was referring to Baha’u’llah).[41]
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, likewise,
was largely a pragmatic affair, with concrete political agitation for
achievable goals. Begun over economic
and anti-imperialist grievances in 1905, it took a new turn when its leaders
(especially big merchants and modern intellectuals) began demanding a
parliament and constitution. Both were
granted in the second half of 1906. The Azali Babi intellectuals, for whom the
revolution was a confirmation of the Bab’s cosmic role in re-ordering Iran
along more populist lines, played an important role in promoting its ideals as
publicists, journalists and preachers.[42] Even more mainstream Shi`ite intellectuals
such as Nazim al-Islam Kirmani depicted the Constitutional Revolution and such “signs” as new freedoms for women
as harbingers for the end of time, citing sayings from the Imams. He asserted that those who died for the
constitution were Muslim martyrs, for it would endure until the coming of the
Mahdi.[43]
The Baha’i position was far more complex.
By then the movement was led by Baha’u’llah’s eldest son `Abdu’l-Baha
(1844-1921). He initially welcomed news
of the Shah’s willingness to call elections for parliament and to sign a
constitution as millennial confirmation
of Baha’u’llah’s prophecies, saying to
a correspondent:
You wrote a glorious letter
saying that the time has arrived, of the most great glad-tidings that a
national parliament [shura-yi milli] has been established in Iran and that arrangements
are being made for a constitutional government that is in accord with the
divine Law, in conformity with the explicit command of the Most Holy Book. I
read what you wrote about the joy and delight of the American intellectuals and
scholars at this life-giving good news, as well as the rejoicing at the
glorious embassy. This became a cause for great happiness. The constitutional
government is, according to the unequivocal divine Text, sanctioned by the
revealed Law, and it is a cause of the might and prosperity of the State, to
which allegiance is owed, and of the progress and liberty of the respected
citizenry (`Abdu’l-Baha 1998b; cf. `Abdu’l-Baha 1998a).[44]
Once the constitution had
been signed, `Abdu’l-Baha urged Baha’is to attempt to elect some of their own
religious leaders to the parliament.
One secret Baha’i, Shaykhu’r-Ra’is, was not only a speaker of
parliament but the poet laureate of the Constitutional Revolution. In 1908 Muhammad `Ali Shah made a royal
absolutist coup against the parliament and constitution, executing many of
their supporters, including a number of Azali journalists, and he had
Shaykhu’r-Ra’is imprisoned briefly.
`Abdu’l-Baha at that point ordered the Baha’is to dissociate themselves
from the constitutionalists and to return to political quietism, though his
earlier pro-Constitutionalist stance suggests that here he was pragmatically
attempting to prevent pogroms against the small and exposed Baha’i community,
already considered heretical, than that he was instituting a principle of
complete withdrawal from all “political” affairs. The latter interpretation came to be put on his words, however,
as the twentieth century unfolded. `Abdu’l-Baha’s charisma and liberal
principles attracted enormous numbers of Iranians in the opening two decades of
the twentieth century, from all accounts, and an internal Baha’i census is said
to have returned one million Iranian adherents and sympathizers in the early
1920s. In contrast, the Azalis
continued to decline in numbers and influence, easily melding into the world of
secular politics and culture, usually taking a left of center position. The Constitutional Revolution was the last
time they played a significant role in Iranian history.
The subsequent reinstatement of the Iranian parliament in
1909 and its dismal performance as a weak and divided government open to
foreign lobbying gradually undermined belief in parliamentary democracy among
many Iranians. In 1925 Col. Reza
Pahlevi swept away the constitutional system, abolished the Qajar monarchy,
crowned himself the first king of the new Pahlevi dynasty, and instituted an
authoritarian-populist dictatorship in Iran that attacked liberals and leftists
alike. Almost in tandem, the new leader
of the Baha’i movement from 1921, Baha’u’llah’s great-grandson Shoghi Effendi,
moderated his predecessors’ high opinion parliamentary democracy and began
speaking of “the ineptitude of the parliamentary system of government as
witnessed by recent developments in Europe and America”,[45]
as well as condemning the “foul stench of the foreign parties and factions of
the West” and forbidding membership in political parties in Iran, which were in
his view “originators of tumult and destroyers of the foundation of state and
society.”[46] He briefly celebrated the hard line
secularist policies of Reza Shah in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, rejoicing that the “ignorant and tyrannical ulama”
had been “defeated and were despondent and scattered,” and that “this is what
we were promised in the prophecies.”[47] The shah later turned on Baha’i
institutions, as well, however. Shoghi
Effendi was convinced that a global catastrophe was scheduled for 1963, a
century after Baha’u’llah’s declaration, in the aftermath of which the Baha’i
religion would be sought out by the remnants of humankind.[48] He forbade nominations and campaigning in
Baha’i elections, transforming the spiritual assemblies into mysteriously
elected soviets rather than democratic bodies, and discouraged public criticism
of their policies and decisions. He
expanded a system of internal Baha’i censorship, and in 1951 instituted a
division of lay bishops he called “Hands of the Cause for Protection” who
monitored Baha’is for signs of too much independent thinking, and who could
recommend that such individuals be disfellowshipped or even shunned.
The increasingly regimented Baha’i communities of Iran under
the unchallengeable sway of the newly undemocratic spiritual assemblies proved
unattractive to most of the religion’s members and former admirers, who voted
with their feet and deserted it in the hundreds of thousands. By 1978 there were less than 100,000
registered Baha’is in Iran, with perhaps another two hundred thousand ethnic
Baha’is and close sympathizers. Even if
the figure of one million adherents and sympathizers for the early 1920s is
exaggerated, it seems clear that the history of the Baha’i millennialist
religion in twentieth century Iran has resembled a bell curve. As the religion forsook generally liberal
ideals for illiberal ones, and as Iranians became more educated and
politicized, the Baha’i faith was less and less attractive to them, more
especially as its leaders deserted the founders’ democratic commitments for a
system that increasingly resembled nothing so much as a one-party system
imposed on a community that otherwise valued peace, harmony, globalism and
progress. Finally, Baha’u’llah’s vision
of a world full of parliamentary democracies (albeit many of them
constitutional monarchies) at peace with one another, with religious
organizations forbidden to interfere in affairs of state, was gradually
replaced by late twentieth-century rightwing Baha’i leaders with a
millennialist hope for a world in which the spiritual assemblies or houses of
justice will supersede civil governance altogether and institute a global
theocracy.[49] In short, the evolution of Baha’i
millennialist ideology through the twentieth century ironically took it in a
parallel direction to that followed by Shi`ite Islam.
Rinehart maintains that Iranian movements of the later
twentieth century such as the Tudeh Communist party and Khomeinism are forms of
millennialism in which expectations of a sudden and miraculous transformation
of the world have been replaced with practical, political action of a
rationalized and bureaucratic sort.[50] I agree with him that Iranian communism
demonstrates many millennialist features—the extreme (and as it turns out
somewhat unwarranted) pessimism about capitalist society with its total
condemnation of bourgeois institutions; its use of dialectical materialism to
predict certain revolution when the conditions become ripe; its dream of a
revolutionary, almost apocalyptic break with the past; its cult of personality
around the party leaders and its exaltation of the party line to
unchallengeable dogma; its cell organization and attempts to infiltrate the
state, and its dream of an egalitarian utopia.[51] But it seems to me that it is a different
matter to identify millennialist features in a modern political movement than
to call such a movement millennialism without further qualification. I am sensitive to Fields’ implicit critique
of Hobsbawm for his stage-like theory of progression from “pure” millennialism
to “modern” political action, with the former remaining “archaic” and
ineffectual. As we have seen in the
instance of Shah Isma`il, premodern millennialism is not always
ineffectual. It does seem to me useful,
however, to make the distinction in every time and place between millennialist
movements with the sort of motifs and rhetorical properties I have identified,
and other sorts of movement that only have a partial resemblance to
millennialism. Communists’ attempts to
know the future are a form of sociological speculation based on material cause
and effect, unlike in their rhetorical form and premises Hal Lindsey’s or Pat
Robertson’s use of biblical texts to situate the present and the future in
sacred time. Practical revolution is
not precisely identical to supernatural apocalypse. The resemblance is there, but it is insufficiently strong to
place communism precisely in the “species” of millennialist movements.
Likewise, it would be my position that the Islamic Revolution
of 1978-79 against the Pahlevi dictatorship had millennialist overtones but was
not a millennialist movement.[52] The Khomeinists’ pessimism about Pahlevi
dictatorship, Iranian lopsided capitalism, and Western cultural forms and institutions
was certainly total (though not everyone who opposed the shah and wanted change
agreed with such a wholesale condemnation of the Iranian social forms of the
day). Khomeini and his circle did not
appeal explicitly to prophecy in order to bolster their claims, though some of
their terms had what Amanat calls an apocalyptic overtone.[53] It is true that many Muslims believed that
at the beginning of each Islamic history a renewer would arise, and some held
that Khomeini was the renewer for 1400 A.H..[54] But this is a rather weak sort of “prophecy”
that is not notably millennialist in form; some of the figures to whom the
status of renewer was attributed included pillars of the Muslim establishment
like Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi of seventeenth
century Mughal India. The Khomeinists
may have expected a Mahdist revolution in some ways, but they primarily looked
forward to a practical change in government, with clerics replacing the shah’s
technocrats. Among the strongest
similarities to millennialism is Ruhu’llah Khomeini’s own charismatic
leadership and the extraordinary authority he gained. Ultimately Khomeini’s “Islamic government” was seen as having the
prerogative to set aside temporarily even basic elements of Islamic law. A certain millennialist aura was attributed
to Khomeini by the ordinary folk, as Arjomand points out:
An unmistakably apocalyptic
mood was observable during the fateful month of Moharram 1399 [December 1978]
among the masses in Tehran . . . Khomeini’s face was allegedly seen in on the
moon in several cities, and those who had been privileged to see it proceeded
to sacrifice lambs. Intense discussions
were reported as to whether or not Khomeini was the Imam of the Age and the
Lord of Time. Those who answered in the
affirmative were undoubtedly among the millions who massed in the streets of
Tehran to welcome the returning Ayatollah in February 1979, and whose frenzy
was to be televised across the globe.
But even many of those who answered in the negative were ready to accept
Khomeini as the precursor of the Mahdi.[55]
Arjomand also notes that
Muhammad Rayshahri, a revolutionary prosecutor, wrote a book in 1981 on The
Continuation of the Islamic Revolution of Iran until the Global Revolution of
the Mahdi, and notes, “this belief bears striking similarity to the claim
that the Safavid rule would continue until the advent of the Hidden Imam.” The Austrian anthropologist Reinhold
Loeffler also found villagers who believed that the revolution had been
predicted by the fifth imam, who “wrote over one thousand years ago that in the
year 1400, which is the current year, there would be an Islamic revolution in
Iran, 80,000 people would be killed, and there would be unrest for six years
until Iran became victorious.” Another villager, however, dismissed Khomeini’s
claim to have come in order to “prepare the way for the coming of the Last
Imam.” [56]
Khomeini’s own claims and rhetoric were in fact distinctly
pragmatic. Although, he says, “we are
in the time of the Occultation of the Imam,” and so legitimate political and
religious authority is in some sense absent, it is necessary that
government-related ordinances of Islam be implemented to avoid anarchy. It is the practical threat of anarchy that
is given as the impetus for a search for some legitimacy for government below
the level of the Hidden Imam. And there
is a solution, in Khomeini’s view. Just
government depends on a ruler possessing knowledge of the revealed law and
being upright (`adil). Since
large numbers of Shi`ite clerics possess these attributes, “if they would come
together, they could establish a government of universal justice in the
world.” In particular, a single individual
who possesses these two traits in an exemplary way could establish a government
and then “he will possess the same authority as the Most Noble Messenger in the
administration of society, and it will be the duty of all people to obey him.”[57] Yet this form of reasoning is not
millennialist nor even particularly premillennialist. The Imam is absent. The
Imam will someday return. The question
is, what shall we do in the meantime?
And the answer is that in the meantime the Shi`ite clerics shall rule,
and moreover they are perfectly capable of ruling in a fashion that forestalls
anarchy and implements routine justice until such time as the Imam
reappears. He rejected the idea that
the ulama could wage holy war in the Imam’s absence, though he did look forward
ultimately to an “Islamic World Government” which would come into being with
the advent of the Imam.[58] The implication seems to be, however, that
his return is not all that urgent.
Khomeini, like all Shi`ites, did believe in a return of the Twelfth
Imam, but he demonstrates no millennialist impatience about it, and future
messianism is a very weak element in his thought—whatever his followers thought
in the heady days of the revolution. Nor is utopia a particularly millennialist
affair for Khomeini. He foresaw a spread of Islam, especially of Shi`ism, to
the peoples of the world, and famously (and bizarrely) had his eye on a
geriatric and failing communist leadership in
Russia as a potential source of converts. In this hope for a global Shi`ite theocracy he resembled his
arch-enemies, those among the rightwing Baha’i leadership which also dreamed
millennial dreams of their religious institutions taking over the world. But it appears to have been more important
to Khomeini in the short and medium term that clerics rule than that they be
Shi`ite clerics, and he seemed to think a Latin America ruled by Catholic
priests would be a perfectly good thing. His praxis was to organize
demonstrations from the mosques and engage in politics of an authoritarian-populist
kind, outlawing, once he got the chance, other political parties and
ideologies, and employing “revolutionary guards” rather as Mussolini did
brownshirts. There was nothing very
millennialist about this way of proceeding.
As is clear from my adoption of the Berger-Smith “motif”
approach and my acceptance of O’Leary’s argument for millennialism as a
rhetorical means of explaining the existence of evil, I believe that
millennialism is a set of fluid premises and rhetorical styles and conventions
that can be adopted by very different sorts of actors on the stage of cultural
politics and symbolic (and therefore practical) action. These premises and this rhetoric are not
hurt by having an eloquent exponent or by a general feeling of discontent in the
land. But neither disaster nor
prophetic leadership is the absolute key here.
A cultural tradition like Twelver Shi`ism that is deeply imbued with
millennialist ideas seems to be especially important. There have been a few mahdis in modern Syro-Lebanese
history. None of them has been nearly
as important as their Iranian equivalents.
And several of them arose among Shi`ites of one sort or another. The Twelver Shi`ite emphasis on the eventual
return of the Imam, and Shi`ite discomfort with political authority in his
absence gives millennialist leaders and their arguments a certain base of
plausibility in large numbers of people.
Iranian millennialism challenges many of the stereotypes of
such movements found in the literature.
To the idea that milliennialist ideas flourish mainly in
non-metropolitan settings such as backwoods villages, and that adherents
foolishly attempt to substitute magic for modern politics in expressing their
grievances and seeking their goals, we can certainly reply that the Iranian
cases seem not to fit such a characterization.
Shah Isma`il successfully promulgated his millennialism among the
Türkmen tribal cavalry, among the finest fighting men in the region, enabling
him to overthrow the White Sheep tribal-feudalist state and to conquer
Iran--during a period when pastoralists where the force in society most likely
successfully to found a state, more especially when they could be united by
some over-arching loyalty or religious ideology. Belief in magic and the supernatural, when coupled with expert
pastoralist fighters, could bolster morale and lead to actual victory. (The defeat in 1514 at the hands of Ottoman
artillery gunners shook the Türkmen faith in Isma`il’s and their own invulnerability,
but did not prevent the Safavid state from emerging). While the goals and institutions of the Babis may have remained a
bit vague or impractical, their command of the tactics of urban
faction-fighting and their willingness to resort to political assassination
made them formidable enemies of the state who were by no means easily
suppressed. Baha’u’llah’s millennialism
posited pragmatic institutional mechanisms, such as parliamentary democracy,
international collective security, and the consultative processes of the Baha’i
“spiritual assemblies,” as mechanisms of political, cultural and religious
reform. His adherents, although they
included peasants, were primarily members of the urban middle strata and far
from socially helpless.
It is not at all clear that the White Sheep or Qajar
governments were less “archaic” than their millennialist opponents. Indeed, Baha’u’llah’s vision of global
community, human unity and equality, and international collective security make
a number of his contemporaries among European statesmen look rather savage. The
millennialists who supported Imam Khomeini (many bazaaris or urban craftsmen,
or slum dwellers recently arrived from the countryside) joined practical
networks of revolutionary action coordinated from the mosques, engaged in
street protests, and supported a status group, the ulama, who had the
legitimacy and the popularity to take over the country through political
revolution. They may have seen the
Imam’s face in the moon and yearned for the soon advent of the Hidden Imam, but
they were not thereby paralyzed from taking politically efficacious
action. (In this latter case, of
course, it could be argued that the basic political techniques were promoted by
non-millennialist political groups, but the point is that the millennialists
did not hesitate to adopt them, as well).
Karen Fields suggests that millennialist protests in Central Africa had
a real effect on a British colonial state that joined religion and government
in an almost medieval fashion, because in some way the Jehovah’s Witnesses
understood the state and the way they could have an impact on it.[59]
In the same way, we can see that Iranian millennialists in a wide variety of
times and settings frequently did have make a significant impression on the
state, because their millennialism addressed the realities of the political
situation, in some cases quite successfully.
And even where they failed, as with Babism, they were hardly
inconsequential. I think I can concur
wholeheartedly with Fields that it is hopeless and counterproductive to attempt
to separate “political” from “culturally symbolic” action. Millennialism was cultural and political,
symbolic and in its own way rational.
Nor has Iranian millennialism been particularly tied to
issues in Western colonial domination.
Indeed, the most millennialist of these movements, the Safavi and Babi,
were least concerned with this issue, whereas the movement most focused on
issues in neo-imperialism, the Khomeinist, was only marginally characterized by
millennialist themes. I am unconvinced
that “disaster” or “social crisis” provoked most of these movements. Societies are always in flux and social and
material goods are always unequally distributed, so that I find disaster hard
to operationalize, and I concur with resource mobilization theorists such as
Charles Tilly that grievances you have always with you. It is true that the Türkmen were being
displaced from eastern Anatolia by the Ottomans in the late fifteenth century,
but they could just have wandered off in search of better pasturage
elsewhere. The steppe is vast and
pastoralists were not tied down or hemmed in by strong states to the East. The merchants and craftsmen of Iran may
have been somewhat hurt by the competition of Western manufactured goods and of
Russian imports with low tariffs (imposed by the Treaty of Turkomanchai in 1828
after a major Iranian loss to the Russians in the Caucasus). But it is unclear that the impact of such factors
was greater in the 1840s than in other decades. In the 1890s after the Tobacco Revolt the world collapse of
silver prices badly hurt the silver-based Iranian currency, but there was no
millennialist uprising then.
And while there was high
inflation in 1977-78 (partially as a result of the rise in petroleum prices)
and economists have pointed to a number of economic discontents, including the
shah’s anti-corruption campaign against shopkeepers that blamed them for the
price rises, it has long struck me that these discontents seem incommensurate
with the magnitude of the revolution made, and that many other petroleum states
experienced similar problems but no revolution.
Obviously, Shah Isma`il, the Bab, Baha’u’llah, and Khomeini
all attest to the importance of charismatic leadership, as Adas argued. But as a social historian I am unhappy with
a Great Man theory of millennialist movements.
Movements tend to have leaders, and to throw up leaders where they start
with none. Isma`il was only a
14-year-old child when he set out against Shirvan, and it seems to me likely
adult mentors were helping him “lead.”
The Bab was in prison for a good deal of his short ministry, and often
inaccessible when he was not. Likewise,
Baha’u’llah was in distant Edirne and Akka, and exerted his influence in Iran
mainly through letters and couriers.
Khomeini, though widely respected in the late 1970s, was in Paris and
not taken seriously as a leader by the vast majority of politically aware
Iranians, most of whom hoped for the emergence of a constitutional monarchy or
a democratic, secular republic with a freedom for religion that might make the
old man happy. Workers, teachers,
students, leftist guerrillas and bazaaris were the main actors in the
revolution, with the ulama playing a lesser supporting role until Khomeini came
back in February, 1979 and began the process of hijacking it.
I also believe that conflict among various social strata and
conflict with at least one major faction in the power elite are generally key
to these millennialist movements, even if the movements themselves end up being
broadly based and drawing from a number of strata. Here I differ with Adas.
Shah Isma`il’s movement united Türkmen pastoralists with urban Sufi and
Shi`ite religious networks, but this town-tribe alliance cut out the peasants,
who were to be sheared like sheep, and worked to challenge or overthrow the
major states in the area—Shirvan, White Sheep, Ottoman. The Bab’s partisans were largely urban
merchants, craftsmen, junior or low-ranking clergy, and a few peasants, and
they had nothing but contempt for the Qajar state and the very large landowners
who were its mainstay, nor had they any affinity with the tribal peoples and
their leaders. This is not to say that
no landlords adopted Babism (nor indeed that no members of the state
bureaucracy did—the Nuris were only one such noble-administrative family who
converted). But these few joiners often
had their own conflicts with the Qajar state, and do not alter the balance of gravity
within the movement. The Baha’is drew
from the same urban middle and lower middle strata, but on the whole they
forsook antipathy to the civil wing of the state, instead becoming moderate
reformers, and channeling their hatred into a rather fierce anticlericalism
instead of an anti-Shah feeling. Since
the Shi`ite ulama or clergy staffed the Qajar judiciary and many of them
received state stipends as notaries or prayer leaders, they could be seen as
one wing of the state, and were certainly a wing that the Baha’is would like to
have displaced (and which returned the hatred ten-fold). The Khomeinists despised the shah both
because of his cultural politics of Iranian nationalism (with its exaltation of
the pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian and Achaemenid heritage of Iran) and because of
his complaisance toward Western political and cultural influence in the
country. He had after all been put back
on the throne in 1953 after a CIA countercoup.
The most striking conclusion we may draw from this macrohistorical survey is that religions in Iran have been extremely volatile and ever-changing along the spectrum that Lincoln posited, from religions of the establishment to religions of the oppressed, and from passive to active to revolutionary and back. Shah Isma`il and the Türkmen took a folk Twelver Shi`ism that functioned as the oppositional religion of Sufis and pastoralists and made it into the national religion of Iran that was, by the time of Majlisi II, a pillar of the establishment. And yet Imam Khomeini used its motifs for oppositional purposes and even made it revolutionary. Its main institutions and leaders are now settling once again into the role of supporters of the established order. The Babis began as passive millennialist oppositionists, until urban faction-fighting encouraged them to become activists, and in the end the way the state sided with their opponents helped turn them into revolutionaries. But Baha’u’llah took over the movement, reformed it, and made it passively oppositional and a vehicle for liberal and democratic ideas. By the 1960s, however, Shoghi Effendi’s introduction of authoritarian and hierarchical governance techniques, his amoral insistence that Baha’is support all established governments, and the class location of most Baha’is in the middle and upper strata, had transformed it into a minor prop for the Pahlevi status quo, which is one reason the Khomeinists hate the Baha’is so much. Admittedly, rightwing Baha’i “passive” hopes for a future Baha’i theocracy lend it a latent oppositional role, but such hopes are projected so far into the future as to almost entirely mute the opposition. If we compare the 1840s to the 1970s, then, we find an almost complete reversal. In the former decade Babi forebears of the Baha’is were revolutionary and the Shi`ite ulama supported the Qajar monarchy against them. In the latter the Baha’is were largely pro-Establishment and Khomeinist ulama had become anti-monarchical republicans! Lincoln’s suggestion that there are long-term, fixed religions of the establishment distinct from other movements that are religions of the oppressed, must therefore be modified. At any one time, the center of gravity of a religious movement may lie with the power elite or with the disprivileged, but this can change radically over time (and sometimes quite quickly). Religious ideologies are revealed as fluid and volatile, not as in some way fixed. In short, religious politics is still a kind of politics, with shifting alliances over time.
Notes
[1]Bruce Lincoln, “Notes toward a Theory of Religion and Revolution,” in idem., ed., Religion, Rebellion (London: Macmillan , 1985), pp. 266-99.
[2] Hobsbawm, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Mement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Norton, 1965).
[3]Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
[4] Michael Barkun, ed., Millennialism and Violence (London: Frank Cass, 1996).
[5] Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).
[6] Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
[7] Peter Smith, “Motif Research: Peter Berger and the Baha’i Faith.” Religion 8 (1979):210-234.
[8] Mary Boyce, A history of Zoroastrianism. 3 vols. (Leiden : Brill, 1975-1991).
[9] John Walbridge, "A Persian Gulf in the Sea of Lights: the Chapter of Naw-Ruz in the Bihar al-Anwar,” Iran 35(1997):83-92.
[10] Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
[11] Carl Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).
[12] J. Spencer Trimmingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
[13] H. R. Roemer, “The Safavid Period,” in Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds. The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) , pp. 189-350.
[14] Fadl Allah Ruzbihan Khunji, 1957. Persia in A.D. 1478-1490, trans. and ed. V. Minorsky (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1957), pp. 65-67.
[15] Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam, p. 80.
[16] For the term khuruj see Abbas Amanat, “The Resurgence of Apocalyptic in Modern Islam,” in Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins and Stephen Stein, eds., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998), 3:237; for the young Isma`il see A. H Morton, “The Early Years of Shah Isma`il in the Afzal at-Tavarikh and Elsewhere,” in Charles Melville, ed., Safavid Persia (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 27-51.
[17] Rumlu, Hasan. 1931-34. Ahsan at-Tavarikh. Persian text ed. and Eng. trans. by C. N. Seddon. 2 volumes. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1931-34), 1:32.
[18] Anon., Jahangusha-yi Khaqan : (Tarikh-i Shah Isma‘il) : ta’lif dar 948-955 H., ed. and intro. Allah Datta Muztar. (Islamabad : Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i Farsi-i Iran va Pakistan, 1986), pp. 36, 128; Arjomand, Shadow of God, p. 81.
[19] Muhammad Baqir Majlisi, Risalih-‘i Raj`at (Lucknow: Matba`-i Ja`fari, n.d.), p. 5.
[20] Ibid., p. 6; Mulla Muhammad Baqir, Tadhkirah-i Mulla Majlisi (Lahore: Matba`-i Hindustan, 1911), pp. 28-29 (Urdu).
[21] Majlisi, Risalih-‘i Raj`at, p. 9.
[22] Peter Smith, 1982. “Millenarianism in the Babi an Baha’i Religions,” in Roy Wallis, ed. Millennialism and Charisma (Belfast: Queen’s University, 1982), p. 251.
[23] Juan R. I. Cole, "Rival Empires of Trade and Imami Shi`ism in Eastern Arabia, 1300-1800." International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987):177-204; idem., “The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i.” Studia Islamica 80 (1994):1-23; Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982); Corbin, Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971-1972), esp. volume 4.
[24] Ahsa'i, Shaykh Ahmad al-. Jawami` al-kalim. 2 vols. (Tabriz: Muhammad Taqi Nakhjavani, 1856-1859)., 1:235-236.
[25] Ali, Mrs. Meer Hasan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1832]), pp. 76, 80-81; J. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi`ism in Iran and Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 100-101.
[26] Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent.
[27]Denis MacEoin, From Shaykhism to Babism (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1979); Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
[28] Major recent works include: Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal; Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent; Todd Lawson, “The Qur’an Commentary of Sayyid `Ali Muhammad, the Bab.” 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 1987; MacEoin, From Shaykhism to Babism;; idem., The Sources for Early Babi Doctrine and History: A Survey (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992); idem., Rituals in Babism and Baha’ism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994).
[29] Anon., Kitab-i Nuqtat al-Kaf: Being the Earliest History of the Babis. Ed. E. G. Browne (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1910; digitally reprinted Lansing, MI: H-Bahai, 1997), p. 89. Available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/areprint/nk/nuqta.htm; for this work see 1998c. Juan R. I. Cole, "Nuqtat al-Kaf and the Babi Chronicle Traditions." Research Notes in Shaykhi, Babi and Baha'i Studies, Vol. 2, no. 6 (August 1998). Available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/notes/vol2/babihist.htm
[30] Ibid., pp. 91-92.
[31] Sayyid `Ali Muhammad "the Bab" Shirazi, Dala'il-i Sab`ih, (Tehran: 1950?; reprinted, Lansing, MI: H-Bahai, 1998), and available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/areprint/bab/A-F/dalail/dalail.htm; idem., Sahifih-'i `Adliyyih (Tehran: 1950?; reprinted, Lansing, MI: H-Bahai, 1998) and available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/index/bab/sahifadl.htm
[32] The best account of Tahirih is Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal.
[33] Sayyid `Ali Muhammad "the Bab" Shirazi, Bayan-i Farsi (Tehran, 1946). Digitally reprinted (Lansing, MI: H-Bahai, 1999). Available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/areprint/bab/A-F/bayanf/bayanf.htm
[34] Mirza Huseyn Hamadani, Tarikh-i-Jadid: The New History of Mirza `Ali Muhammad, the Bab, trans. E.G. Browne (Cambridge at the University Press, 1893; Amsterdam: Philo, 1975), p. 59.
[35]Moojan Momen, "'The Social Basis of the Babi Upheavals in Iran (1848-53)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 15 (1983): pp.157-83; ); John Walbridge, “The Babi Uprising in Zanjan: Causes and Issues.” Iranian Studies Vol. 29, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 1996):339-362.
[36] Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 27-28; Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the universe : Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997), pp. 204-218.
[37] Cole, Modernity and the Millennium; Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha’i Religions: From Messianic Shi`ism to a World Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
[38] Baha’u’llah in Cole, Modernity, p. 46.
[39] Juan R. I. Cole, "Muhammad `Abduh and Rashid Rida: A Dialogue on the Baha'i Faith." World Order Vol. 15, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 1981):7-16. Available on the World Wide Web at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/diglib/articles/A-E/cole/abduh/abduh.htm
[40] Moojan Momen, “A Preliminary Survey of the Baha’i Community of Iran during the Nineteenth Century,” in C. Bürgel and I. Schayani, eds., Iran im 19. Jahrhundert und die Entstehung der Baha’i Religion (Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 1998), pp. 33-51, esp. p. 50.
[41] Cole, Modernity, pp. 102-103.
[42] Mangol Bayat, Iran’s First Revolution:Shi`ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 3.
[43] Said Amir Arjomand, “Millennial Beliefs, Hierocratic Authority, and Revolution in Shi`ite Iran,” in idem., ed., The Political Dimensions of Religion, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 227.
[44]`Abdu’l-Baha, "`Abdu'l-Baha Lauds the Establishment of the First Iranian Parliament, 1906," trans. Juan R. I. Cole. Translations of Shaykhi, Babi and Baha'i Texts vol. 2, no. 7 (October 1998). Available on the World Wide Web at: http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/trans/vol2/abparl/abconst.htm
[45]Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, World Order of Baha’u’llah (Wilmette, Ill.: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1938 [repr. 1970], p. 90.
[46]Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, "Tawqi`at-i Mubarakih-'i Hadrat-i Vali-yi Amru'llah, 1922-1933." Photocopy of MS. in Private Hands, pp. 616, 676
[47] Ibid., p. 767.
[48] A. E. Suthers, “A Baha'i Pontiff “ Moslem World 25 (January, 1935), pp. 27-35, esp. pp. 33-34; available on the World Wide Web at http://bahai-library.org/articles/bahai.pontiff.html.
[49] Juan R. I. Cole, “The Baha’i Faith in America as Panopticon, 1963-1997,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 37, no. 2 (June 1998):234-248.
[50] James F. Rinehart, Revolution and the Millennium (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
[51] Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Zabih, Sepehr, The Communist Movement in Iran (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
[52] Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions; idem., Khomeinism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Amanat, “The Resurgence of Apocalyptic;” Said Amir Arjomand, Turban for the Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Juan R. I. Cole and Nikki Keddie, eds., Shi`ism and Social Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Nikki R. Keddie, Roots of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
[53] Amanat, “Resurgence,” p. 256.
[54] Arjomand, “Millennial Beliefs,” p. 230; Rinehart, Revolution and the Millennium, p. 139.
[55] Arjomand, “Millennial Beliefs,” p. 230.
[56] Reinhold Loeffler, Islam in Practice (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988)., pp. 230, 235.
[57]Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and revolution, tr. Hamid Algar. Berkeley, [Calif.] : Mizan Press, 1980), pp. 61-62; Rinehart, Revolution, p. 138.
[58] See R.K. Ramazani, “Shi`ism in the Persian Gulf,” in Cole and Keddie, Shi`ism and Social Protest, pp. 30-54..