Religious Communities under Safavid Rule

From its rise in 1501 to its fall in 1736, the Safavid dynasty was ruled by shahs, or kings, who made Twelver Shiism the state religion. This branch of Islam recognizes twelve Imams as spiritual leaders; Sunni Muslims, followers of Islam’s other major branch, remained throughout Iran and its borderlands. Armenian Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, adherents of an ancient Iranian religion, also lived under Safavid rule. Their experiences varied by community and place: New Julfa’s Armenian merchants received land and a local council after forced relocation, while Jews in Kashan faced forced conversion and Zoroastrians in Kerman disputed tax demands and compulsory resettlement.

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Sunni Muslims and the spread of Shiism

The Safavid court promoted Shiism through religious appointments and public teaching. In the mid-sixteenth century, Qazvin, Shiraz and Hamadan still had reputations as Sunni centers. In 1530, Shah Tahmasp sent an expedition into Shirvan, a region now substantially within Azerbaijan in the eastern Caucasus, with the stated aim of converting its Sunni population. An Ottoman observer reported in 1720 that a third of Iran’s population still identified as Sunni, showing that the confessional change remained incomplete late in Safavid rule.

In Kandahar, now in southern Afghanistan, Mir Wais led a revolt in 1709 after the governor Gorgin Khan’s troops treated the local Sunni population harshly. The Safavid court had revoked Mir Wais’s post supervising eastern caravan trade, citing his failure to collect tolls and taxes; the post had provided an income source for his clan. Troop abuse and the loss of this political office both contributed to the rebellion.

Armenians: forced movement and communal government

Old Julfa, an Armenian trading town in the Safavid province of Nakhijevan, prospered in the sixteenth-century silk trade. During Shah Abbas I’s retreat from an Ottoman counteroffensive in 1604, the Safavid army destroyed settlements and crops to deny supplies to its enemy. Julfa’s Armenian population was forced across the Aras River into Iran. The community’s merchants received three days’ notice and permission to take movable wealth, a limited concession within a compulsory deportation.

In 1605 the deportees began building New Julfa on the right bank of the Zayanderud River near Isfahan, the Safavid capital in central Iran. Shah Abbas I granted them the settlement’s land in 1619. The royal court valued the community’s silk-trading connections, while merchant households rebuilt homes and funded worship. Its churches and community institutions organized communal life; by 1617–19, the Italian traveler Pietro Della Valle counted ten Armenian churches in New Julfa.

New Julfa’s wards, or districts, organized civic life: ward headmen elected a mayor, whose appointment the shah confirmed. The mayor represented the community at court, assessed and transferred taxes, and judged civil matters. A council of ward heads settled disputes between Armenian residents and oversaw internal security and church affairs. The Muslim police chief of Isfahan probably handled criminal cases and disputes between Armenians and Muslims.

This protection did not end coercion. From 1655 to 1659, Shah Abbas II moved Armenian artisans living in Isfahan itself to the southwestern edge of New Julfa after complaints about church bells and wine. This was a separate, later forced relocation from the 1604 deportation. At the Church of Saint Gevorg in Mughni, Armenia, a church was built in 1664–69 with permission from the Safavid shah.

Jewish residents of Kashan

Kashan, in central Iran, had an important Jewish community involved in silk trading and manufacturing. Under Shah Abbas II, a campaign led by grand vizier Mohammad Beg, the shah’s chief minister, targeted Jews and other non-Muslims. In 1656, Kashan’s Jews were forced to convert to Islam, an event preserved in a contemporary poem by the Jewish writer Baba’i ben Lotf. Six years later, the Shiite scholar Mohsen Feyz Kashani and Jewish leader Molla Ebrahim helped secure their return to Judaism. Those who reverted had to repay the financial rewards they had received for converting and the suspended jizya, a poll tax levied on non-Muslim communities.

Zoroastrians in Kerman

In 1673, officials in Kerman, a city in southeastern Iran, tried to collect Zoroastrian poll-tax arrears. When a collector rejected residents’ certificates showing they had already paid, many fled; some found refuge in caves. During Shah Solayman’s reign (1666–94), Muslim religious scholars persuaded the authorities to order Zoroastrians out of the city center so they would not live among Muslims. They moved to a northern suburb and built homes and a fire temple, a place of Zoroastrian worship.