Building a Clergy That Did Not Exist

The compulsory conversion Shah Ismail I began in 1501 required decades of institution building before Twelver Shi'ism functioned as a settled state religion rather than an imposed decree, and later Safavid shahs, Shah Abbas I above all, took up that work deliberately. An introduction to the history and doctrines of Twelver Shi'ism traces how the Safavid state cultivated a native clerical class, endowing seminaries and religious colleges and encouraging Arab Shia scholars who had originally been imported under Ismail to train Persian speaking successors, gradually replacing an imported clergy with a homegrown one.

Safavid patronage also built up the empire's major shrine cities, expanding the pilgrimage complexes at Mashhad, where the eighth Shia imam Ali al-Rida is buried, and at Qom, developing both into centers of religious learning as well as devotion. The office of mujtahid, a jurist qualified to exercise independent legal reasoning within Twelver law, gained growing institutional authority across the Safavid period, laying groundwork for a clerical hierarchy considerably more organized than Twelver Shi'ism had possessed before the dynasty's rise, and one that continued developing in Iran long after Safavid rule itself ended in the eighteenth century.