About the Strait. Commercial Issues. Conflict Scenarios. Religion in Iran. This page last modified in August Subscribe to Receive Our Emails. We respect your privacy; no spam, ever. He established a separate Mongol state, subordinate to that of the Great Khan in Mongolia, to be ruled by his descendants. This was called the Ilkhan empire, from the title of the rule. Several of the Ilkhans took steps to rebuild the Iranian economy.
Ghazan Khan converted the dynasty to Islam. Their center of rule was in Azerbaijan, the northwestern province, which had seldom played an important role in earlier Iranian history. Eastern Iran, which had flourished in the earlier Islamic centuries, never fully recovered economically or regained political importance.
The population of Azerbaijan adopted the Turkic language of the tribes that settled in the region both before and after the Mongol invasion. The Mongol language left little imprint on Iran because few Mongols settled permanently in Ilkhan territory. Politically, Iran dissolved into regional dynasties of varying origins.
Some claimed power in the name of the descendant of Genghis Khan. Others, such as the Sarbadarids in the northeast, based their rule on religion. The distinction was often unclear, since their emphasis was on emotional religious experience rather than legal structures and definitions. Timur, known in English as Tamerlane, swept away these petty dynasties in his merciless conquest of Iran in the s. He was a Turkic ruler from Central Asia with an ambition to outdo the incredible conquests of Genghis Khan, one of his ancestors.
When he died in he had subdued every adversary from the Aegean Sea to Delhi and was on his way to attempt the conquest of China. Iran again fell apart among rival petty dynasties.
The Akkoyunlu state centered in Azerbaijan was one of the most hereditary leaders of a Sufi order known as the Safaviyya, but they later grew fearful of their popularity with the Turkic tribes. The Safavid empire fought the Ottomans frequently with mixed success. Their wars fixed the Zagros Mountains as the western border of Iran down to the modern times. Safavid power and culture flourished in the early seventeenth century under Shah Abbas I.
Isfahan, the capital, became a magnificent showplace. Shah Abbas established a large Armenian community there. Surviving mosques, silks, carpets, and miniature paintings show this to be one of the most creative and flourishing periods in Iranian history. However, administrative and economic problems, combined with rivalries between Turks and Iranians, undermined the empire.
By it was so weak that an army of marauders from Afghanistan was able to take and plunder Isfahan. An able general, who dispensed with the fiction of Safavid rule and himself took the throne as Nadir Shah, rebuilt an ephemeral empire and conquered as far east as Delhi. But Iran rapidly fell apart again after his death in The Zand family based in Shiraz was for a while the most powerful political force in Iran, but in the s a family of leaders of the Qajar tribe eclipsed the Zands and established a new unified Iranian state.
The Qajar dynasty, which never approached the Safavids in power, wealth or culture, ruled throughout the nineteenth century. Occasional efforts at reform and westernization, prompted partly by the model of changes taking place in the Ottoman empire and partly by fear of Russian and British encroachment, produced no significant increase in power.
By the end of the century the country was weak and in debt to foreign creditors. The shahs were perceived as squanderers of the national wealth. Unsupported Browser Detected. Islamic Iran Through the Eighteenth Century.
Author: Richard Bulliet. Additional Background Reading on Asia. Student Jerry Tian gives us his perspective. One strategy that authorities are not pursuing, however, is development. Indeed, the continued underdevelopment of these regions is leaving the door open to radical Islam. These discriminatory policies can be felt throughout Sunni-majority regions. Molaverdi revealed this startling fact in the course of criticizing a policy put into effect by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to cut off financial support for the families of executed convicts.
The policy was reversed by the government of Rouhani. Political and religious alienation and severe poverty are widespread in Sistan-Baluchistan, a province in southeastern Iran. With a population of 2. Although there are ethnic and sectarian cleavages, the source of tension is largely due to religious differences.
It is also one of the driest regions in Iran, with little rainfall and consistent drought. Its long mile border with Pakistan and Afghanistan has become a route for smuggling and drug trafficking. The Iranian government has invested little in developing this outer region. The province is plagued by unemployment of over 50 percent , with many turning to crime, banditry, and smuggling to make an income.
Like other Iranian border regions with majority Sunni Muslim populations, Sistan-Baluchistan is also a base for armed insurgent groups, among them Jundallah and Jaish al-Adl.
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