98 | Ibn-i Kemal’s Confessionalism
as “Sunni” orthopraxy, or correct behavior. Those who did not comply with such
norms of correct practice were considered suspect by the state, while outright
enemies of state increasingly came to be labeled as apostates, in accordance with
broadly religious rather than strictly dynastic justifications.
The parallel process unfolding in Safavid territories eventually culminated
in an explicitly Shiɇi identity for Iran, and the two processes together redefined
sectarian tensions throughout the region as a Sunni-Shiɇi binary. The violence
involved in this process left such a mark on the region’s cultural memory that at
the height of Iraq’s 2006–2008 Sunni-Shiɇi sectarian violence, the term most of-
ten used to insult Shiɇi was Safawī (Safavid) and the riposte was takfīrī (aposta sy
maker)—both terms with specific resonance dating from the first two decades of
the sixteenth century.
No such large and abstract progression could possibly be confined to an
eighteen-year spread, much as all historians wish it could. While these politically
transformative milestones provided the initial impetus around the turn of the
sixteenth century, the broader transition from individual to institutional modes
of piety, and from imperial ambivalence concerning individual religious identity
to state-supported orthopraxy, took nearly the entire century to run its course.
European Confessionalism
It is perhaps no accident that broadly similar developments unfolded almost in
parallel in European Christendom. In the European context, a form of confes-
sionalism usually traced back to Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five proposi-
t ion s to a W it t e nb e r g c hu rc h do or i n 15 17 c u l m i n at e d i n t he 1555 Pe a c e of Au g s bu r g
and its famous cuius regio, eius religio formulation, whereby each principality
determined its population’s religious affiliation according to that of its sovereign.
In the Ottoman context, a similar formulation was reached with the perfectly
concurrent 1555 Treaty of Amasya, which ended a lengthy Ottoman-Safavid war.
Just as Augsburg paused a lengthy religious conflict by recognizing the mutually
legitimate existence of opposing Protestant and Catholic principalities through-
out Central Europe, Amasya enshrined mutual recognition of separate religious
spheres under the Sunni Ottoman and Shiɇi Safavid Empires. Just as in Europe,
this formulation proved an imperfect solution for the long term and led to fur-
ther conflict before all parties eventually reached resolution based on the more
modern idea of toleration. The mature articulation of communal identity by both
empires followed in the decades after Amasya, a landmark event recognizing the
attachment of religious sovereignty to state sovereignty. Eventually, both com-
munal identities congealed into what most observers characterize as a “Shiɇi”
Iran and a “Sunni” Ottoman Empire. While neither state ever achieved complete
confessional homogeneity, each sectarian identity eventually characterized the