A charismatic Shi’ite leader seizes power in Iran by harnessing fervent popular movements and channeling rage at a decaying old regime. Once in control, he imposes Twelver Shi’ism on the population, purging dissenters and persecuting religious minorities with spectacular cruelty. His regime bankrolls Shi’ite agitation across the Middle East, exporting his revolution to neighboring lands and to co-religionists living under Sunni rule. The new ruler drags Iran into a brutal, grinding war with the great Sunni power to its west, fought to a bloody stalemate after years of carnage. He forges a theocratic state in which his own religious authority is fused with political sovereignty, and around his cult of personality a militant order of true believers becomes the regime’s ideological backbone and shock troops.
The year? Not 1979, but 1501.
Introduction
It is always tempting, almost fashionable, to examine the current predicament of Iran and attribute every major failure to foreign imperialism.1 Yet such simplistic approaches rarely reflect reality. The problem becomes especially acute when one approaches Iran exclusively through the lens of post-colonialism while neglecting the deeper foundations of the theologico-political problem embedded within Shi’ite political thought itself.2 Such approaches routinely overlook the history of the Shi’ite tradition, which for centuries developed in direct opposition to ruling political authorities across the Islamic world and therefore has a uniquely tense relationship with secular political power.
Consequently, limiting the analysis of Iran solely to the post-1970s period severely handicaps our ability to understand the country’s broader historical situation. One cannot properly comprehend the modern Iranian state without understanding the significance of the 15th-century Qizilbash movement, the 1501 Safavid Revolution, and the subsequent transformation of Shi’ism into an instrument of political sovereignty. Only in this historical context does the emergence of Iranian revolutionary Ali Shariati’s concept of “Red Shi’ism” in the 20th century become intelligible. Nor can one understand the later institutionalization of Velayat-e-Faqih, the “rule of the jurist,” without recognizing the long historical tension between theological and political authority inside Shi’ite civilization itself.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution, much like the 16th-century Safavid Revolution before it, fundamentally reshaped the geopolitical foundations of the Middle East by unleashing waves of radicalism, proxy warfare, and ideological militancy across the region. Yet unlike the earlier Safavid period, the Islamic Republic represented something historically unprecedented in Shi’ite Islam: the near total fusion of clerical and state power into a morally absolutist political structure that attempted to dissolve the enduring tension between theology and politics altogether. This historical aberration quickly exhausted its own sources of legitimacy, and in recent years the regime has transformed from a revolutionary theological order into a military bureaucratic dictatorship dominated by the functionaries of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Qizilbash movement and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 were not imported phenomena but homegrown ones, reflecting the fact that the struggle between the political and the theological runs through Iranian history like a fault line. That struggle is nowhere more visible than in the rapid and deeply painful erosion of the theological authority that once defined the Islamic Republic.
The Safavid Revolution
After Muhammad’s death in 632, the early Islamic period witnessed a profound disagreement over succession. Sunnis supported Abu Bakr, who was chosen by a council of senior companions. Shias backed Ali, citing his familial ties to Muhammad. This theological rift, fueled by differing interpretations of Quranic verses and prophetic traditions, set in motion a lasting divide that has endured for centuries.3
For most of that history, Shi’ism remained a minority tradition, politically marginal across the Sunni-dominated Islamic world. For centuries, Shi’ite thought had therefore developed independently of state power, allowing it to focus on doctrine and divine authority rather than the practicalities of rule. The Shi’ite millennial doctrine of the “Just Imamate,” awaiting its fulfillment in the return of the Hidden Imam, conveniently allowed Shi’ite jurists to sidestep questions of political governance altogether. This luxury ended when the Safavids came to power in Iran.
The Safavid story begins in 1501. A teenage boy named Ismail of the House of Safavi, originating from Ardabil, captured the city of Tabriz and declared himself Shah-an-shah, the King of Kings, thereby founding a new Twelver Shi’ite empire amidst the great Sunni powers of the Islamic world.
The event constituted not merely a dynastic transition but a political earthquake and civilizational upheaval that transformed the geography of the region. The newly established Safavid state conquered Iran and pursued the forced conversion of large populations to Twelver Shi’ism through coercion and violence. Sunni cities across Iran experienced brutal waves of persecution. In Tabriz alone, tens of thousands reportedly perished during the initial consolidation of Safavid rule.4
Shah Ismail himself was hardly an orthodox believer. His political genius lay in his ability to mobilize the Qizilbash confederation, a diverse coalition of Turkoman, Kurdish, and Yazidi tribal elements who adhered to highly syncretic systems of belief combining Islam with heterodox mysticism and remnants of pre-Islamic traditions.5 These groups were not traditional devotees of orthodox Sharia law, but rather participants in an emotionally charged revolutionary religious movement centered around charismatic messianism. The Safavid state aggressively promoted Twelver Shi’ism, particularly the reverence of Imam Ali and the doctrine of the “Hidden Imam,” Muhammad al-Mahdi, prophesied to eventually reappear during the end times to confront evil and restore divine justice. To institutionalize the new religious order, the Safavids imported Shi’ite scholars and theologians from present-day Lebanon and Iraq.
Following the capture of Tabriz, Shah Ismail established the office of the Sadr, the empire’s chief religious official, in order to consolidate clerical authority within the new empire. At the same time, the Safavid state actively sought to export its revolutionary messianic doctrine into the predominantly Sunni Ottoman Empire, especially among Anatolian Turkomans.6 The result was catastrophic instability. Anatolia descended into waves of rebellion, most notably under Shahkulu, whose very name, meaning “servant of the Shah,” reflected Safavid revolutionary influence. Ottoman chronicles describe his movement as exceptionally brutal toward Sunni populations. The perception of an existential sectarian threat became firmly entrenched within Ottoman political consciousness.
Following the death of Sultan Bayezid II in 1512, his son Selim I ascended to power and initiated one of the bloodiest anti-Qizilbash campaigns in Ottoman history. By various historical estimates, tens of thousands of Anatolian Shi’ites were massacred under his rule. The conflict culminated in the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, in which the Ottomans decisively defeated the Safavids and temporarily occupied Tabriz. Despite the military defeat, the Safavids demonstrated remarkable resilience and mastered a sophisticated form of psychological and ideological warfare. Many Ottoman soldiers themselves reportedly sympathized with Safavid religious ideas, making prolonged occupation politically dangerous.7 Nevertheless, the Battle of Chaldiran profoundly altered the internal trajectory of Safavid Iran. The defeat weakened the influence of radical Qizilbash heterodoxy and accelerated the gradual consolidation of a more orthodox, clergy-centered Twelver order.
Under Tahmasp, Ismail’s successor, Shi’ite jurists consolidated institutional authority, particularly through the influence of the Lebanese scholar Muhaqqiq al-Karaki. During this period, the Shi’ite clergy established a near monopoly over religious affairs and progressively transformed Twelver jurisprudence into the dominant ideological framework of the state.8 Importantly, however, the clergy still refrained from directly assuming political power themselves. Instead, they legitimized monarchical authority while simultaneously strengthening their own social and institutional standing.
This distinction matters enormously, because it explains why Shi’ite clerical authority historically preferred indirect influence over direct political sovereignty. The 20th century emergence of Velayat-e-Faqih, the “rule of the jurist,” therefore represented a radical rupture with centuries of Shi’ite political practice.
The Theologico-Political Problem in Safavid Iran
The dichotomy between reason and revelation, or Athens and Jerusalem, underlies the Western philosophical tradition. As Leo Strauss aptly puts it, “the opposition of the God or gods of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the opposition of reason and revelation,” characterizes Western political thought.9 Thus Western political philosophy can develop independent of revelation. In contrast, Islam, particularly Shi’ism, allocates much greater significance to the divine cause, rendering any human rule over the divine matters illegitimate. Throughout the first centuries of its history, the Shi’ite tradition evolved in opposition to Sunni caliphs and sultans, leading Twelver jurists to view state power as inherently illegitimate. They awaited the reappearing of the Hidden Imam, who will restore the divinely ordained “just rule” or Imamate, thus supplanting human authority with divine guidance.
The Safavid Period, which spanned from 1501 to 1736, was marked by significant tensions between the Shahs and the clergy. Shah Ismail initially enjoyed strong support from the Shi’ite clergy and was even considered a semi-divine figure. However, as his priorities shifted over time, he began to distance himself from clerical influence, paving the way for a relatively more secularized state.10
Subsequent rulers after Ismail I could no longer credibly claim a divine role, as it amounted to borderline heresy. They were not founding figures, and the demands of governing and stabilizing the empire from within necessitated greater power sharing with the clergy, even as the Shahs sought to retain their own authority. A working coexistence between the Shahs and the clergy held, albeit uneasy and at times fractious, until Shah Abbas came to power.
Shah Abbas, who reigned from 1588 to 1629 as the fifth Safavid Shah, was known for his successful military campaigns against the Ottomans, for wrestling Hormuz away from the Portuguese with English assistance, and for transforming Isfahan into one of the most spectacular imperial capitals of the early modern period. Yet Abbas’s most consequential and ultimately most dangerous legacy was ecclesiastical. By granting the jurists expanding authority over law, education, and public morality, Abbas sought to cement the crown’s religious legitimacy on firmer foundations.11 It was a rational bargain, and one consistent with his broader ambition to strengthen the Persian national character of the empire. Yet the clerical establishment Abbas so systematically empowered would spend the following centuries developing its own institutional interests, intellectual traditions, and ultimately political ambitions, until a ruler capable of containing them no longer existed.
Shah Abbas stood as the last Safavid ruler capable of holding monarchic authority and clerical influence in any workable equilibrium. His reforms paved the way for the clergy to gain greater leverage under his successors, destabilizing the fragile balance the great Shah himself had set. His grandson Shah Safi proved incapable and yielded further to clerical dictates. Abbas II, who came after Safi, was a skilled ruler and by most accounts the last Safavid shah of genuine political competence. Yet Abbas II’s reign was the first in which the clergy openly criticized the equation of royal with divine authority, citing the moral vices of the monarchs.
Shah Suleiman, who succeeded Abbas II, succumbed further to clerical pressure. The harassment and forced conversion of Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians gained new traction under his watch. Shah Soltan Hoseyn, who followed Suleiman, was deeply religious and proved still more subservient to the clergy. Under his rule, the jurist Mohammad Baqer Majlesi transformed the Sharia code from a doctrine of private conduct to a system of public law. Soon afterward, the Safavid dynasty came to an end, giving way to the Afsharid Empire.
Tracing the relationship between the monarchy and the clergy across these reigns, what emerges is a gradual degradation of state power and a rise of clerical authority. It did not unfold instantly. But it proved decisive in shaping the direction of Iranian society in the centuries to come.
The Theologico-Political Problem in Modern Iran
Modernity and Islamic polities have a complicated relationship. The explicit promise of modernity is progress in terms of material well-being, reason, and individual autonomy. Mainstream Islamic political theology takes a less favorable view of those aspects of progress and has always been skeptical of reason as the chief organizing principle of human governance. However, as time progressed, there emerged an acute need for modernization across major Islamic societies in order to maintain national sovereignty.
Modernization for the sake of political survival required a great deal of internal reform. Centuries of traditional Islamic rule were no longer palatable in a rapidly changing world.
This need was most acutely felt in the Ottoman Empire during the period of Tanzimat (“reorganization”). The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 triggered major waves of reform within the Ottoman state. Those reforms produced mixed results at best. They did not spare the Empire from further despotism, brutality against religious and ethnic minorities, or endemic corruption, and ultimately could not arrest its collapse and disintegration following successive military catastrophes: defeat against the Russian Empire in 1877 to 1878, the First Balkan War of 1912, and finally the First World War.
The 19th century was similarly unforgiving to Iran, then governed by the Qajar dynasty. Iran lost two wars against the Russian Empire, in 1804 to 1813 and 1826 to 1828, and was forced to cede the entirety of the Caucasus to Russia. These wars profoundly impacted the Iranian political psyche by exposing with brutal clarity the extent of the country’s decline. Shah Naser Al Din, the longest reigning monarch in the history of modern Iran, aimed to modernize the country and bring it into alignment with the 19th century.
The reforms were ambitious in scope. The Dār al-Funūn, the Abode of Sciences, was founded in 1851. It was a military academy that sent students to Europe and brought foreign instructors home to teach languages, sciences, and mathematics. Mirza Malkam Khan, a diplomat of Christian Armenian origin, advised the shah to establish a State Council, an early precursor to a cabinet of ministers. The state set up civil courts as well, a direct assault on the regressive Sharia judicial system that had long anchored clerical power. Tehran itself underwent a massive reorganization: wide streets, pavements, and telegraph lines remaking the city into a modern capital. By 1888, the first railway connecting Tehran to Rey was built.
These reforms produced mixed results, despite the Shah’s genuine efforts. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Qajar Persia, despite the best intentions of its monarch, was not prepared for the forces of reason to prevail in any meaningful sense. The entrenched power of the clergy among the general population was the most formidable obstacle. Just as in the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Persia found itself in the grip of a deepening divide between national aspirations and traditional Islamic political theology. Even after the fall of the Qajar dynasty in 1925, the ascending Pahlavi dynasty could not overcome the fundamental tensions generated by this predicament. Unlike in previous centuries, however, the conflict had by now acquired a sharper and more explicit character: a clear antagonism between the secular state and the entrenched clerical establishment.
In the mid-20th century, the Pahlavi dynasty pursued rapid modernization with the explicit aim of transforming Iran into a modern nation state. The Pahlavis significantly curtailed clerical influence over education, law, and public life. Yet modernization unfolded unevenly and often without adequate political legitimacy or institutional accountability. Corruption, social dislocation, inequality, and authoritarian governance generated widespread resentment across society. Social discontent was widespread, and religion stood at the forefront of that resentment.
Unlike in earlier periods, the authorities could no longer count on clerical acquiescence, while an entire generation of young Iranians and intellectuals had begun searching for alternatives to what they regarded as a corrupt and illegitimate order. It was within this atmosphere that Ali Shariati developed his revolutionary doctrine of Red Shi’ism, heavily influenced by the anti-Western thought of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and his theory of Gharbzadegi, often translated as “Westoxification” or “Occidentosis.”12
Red Shi’ism emerged as a direct reaction to what he called “Black Shi’ism,” the quietist tradition of Shi’ite faith that rewarded martyrdom while avoiding political engagement altogether, drawing its identity from centuries of suffering under Sunni caliphs. Red Shi’ism took that same theological conviction and turned it outward, blending faith with social justice and demanding active interference in political affairs on behalf of the oppressed. It was the liberation theology of the Shi’ite world.
With Red Shi’ism, the centuries-old theologico-political problem had resurfaced with renewed force. In the backlash against both Westernization and failed modernization, the Shia cleric Ruhollah Khomeini successfully positioned himself as the authentic revolutionary alternative. The 1979 Revolution he led gave the clergy ultimate political power for the first time in Iranian history.
The Situation Today
The Arab conquests of the 7th century shattered Iranian civilization, beginning a prolonged period of feudal fragmentation in which the absence of any unifying ideology condemned multiple principalities to a condition of permanent mutual conflict.13 Shah Ismail’s introduction of Shi’ism changed that for the first time in centuries, paving the way for the reconstitution of the Iranian state under a fresh theological and political dispensation. Yet it also gave rise to a theologico-political problem of a kind Iran had not previously encountered.
Even after the introduction of the Shi’ite faith, the Iranian state managed to strike a careful balance between the divine and the profane that held, however uneasily, for generations. The pressures of modernity broke that balance, and not in favor of secularism.
Post-1979 Iran, governed directly by the clerics, proved far less adept at managing the tension than the Shahs who had first inherited it. Mismanagement, corruption, and the coercive enforcement of the Sharia code produced not spiritual renewal but its opposite: the steady collapse of clerical moral authority. More than two-thirds of Iranians were born after 1979. They have no emotional stake in the revolutionary Shi’ite ideology. The clergy accomplished what centuries of foreign pressure could not: turning Iranians against their own faith.
Following the uprising of January 2026, what emerged was not a revitalized Khomeinist order but an ideologically exhausted security state dominated by IRGC functionaries. The decline of religious appeal has opened an ideological vacuum that cannot be easily filled.
Secular republicanism does not arise on demand, least of all in a country with no meaningful tradition of electoral politics or civic liberty. The contrast with neighboring Turkey is instructive. Iran has never had its Atatürk moment – no leader has emerged capable of anchoring secular nationhood to a credible civic vision. With political Islam discredited and nothing prepared to replace it, profound strategic uncertainty will define the decades ahead.
For outside powers, this situation calls for deterrence rather than ambition. The theologico-political tensions of Iran stretch back centuries and have unfolded largely independent of foreign interference. As long as Shi’ite Iran has not made its peace with modernity, that tension will not ease, and no amount of external pressure will settle what is ultimately an argument a civilization must have with itself.
1 The historical facts and narratives in this article are sourced from Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
2 Mark C. Henrie, “Leo Strauss and the Recovery of the Theologico-Political Problem,” Intercollegiate Studies Institute, October 8, 2014, isi.org.
3 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1974)
4 Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 47.
5 Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 45.
6 Gizem Magemizoğlu, “The Uprise of Shahkulu Baba Tekeli Rebellion” (research paper, Academia.edu), 4.
7 Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 70-71
8 Rula Jurdi Abisaab, “KARAKI,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, published December 15, 2010, last updated October 31, 2012.
9 Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” Commentary Magazine, June 1967.
10 E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 145.
11 Moosa Kosari Damirchi, Amir Teymour Rafiei, and Seyed Hassan Quorishi Karin, “Religious Devotions of Shah Abbas I and Their Impact on His Political Actions,” Islamic Knowledge and Insight 2, no. 2 (2024): 67.
12 Sushil Jain, “Occidentosis, Gharbzadigi, Westoxification,” SSRN, January 2024, ssrn.com.
13 Bert G. Fragner, “Central Asian Aspects of Pre-Modern Iranian History (14th to 19th Century),” Central Asian Survey 12, no. 4 (1993): 465.