A Country Changes Its Religion in a Generation

Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty in 1501 by conquering Tabriz at the head of a militant Sufi order, the Safaviyya, that his own family had led for generations and that had transformed under his immediate predecessors from a mainstream Sunni mystical brotherhood into an increasingly messianic Shia movement built around his own person. Within months of taking the throne, Ismail declared Twelver Shi'ism the compulsory state religion of his new empire, a striking decision given that the population he now ruled was overwhelmingly Sunni and had been for centuries.

An introduction to Shi'i Islam's history describes the practical difficulty this created: Iran had few native Twelver scholars capable of instructing a newly Shia population or staffing a Shia religious establishment, so Ismail imported Arabic speaking Shia clergy from long established centers of Twelver learning in the Levant and Iraq to build the religious infrastructure his conversion required from essentially nothing. The Qizilbash, the Safaviyya's militant Turkoman followers who had provided Ismail's army, carried the new state religion's conversion effort forward by force in the empire's early decades, and the resulting shift proved permanent: Iran's transformation from a Sunni-majority to a Shia-majority country under Safavid rule has defined the country's religious identity ever since, outlasting the dynasty that imposed it by centuries.