��In the Footsteps of Martyrs 187With the Imam no longer present on earth, the Shi‘ah settled into
a long period of political quietism and “cautionary dissimulation”
called taqiyyah. Because the exercise of direct political power necessar-
ily entailed the usurpation of the Mahdi’s divine authority, all govern-
ments were considered illegitimate pending his return. As a result, the
role of the Shi‘ite Ulama was reduced to little more than representa-
tives of the Mahdi, what Abdulaziz Sachedina has termed “living
isnads”: human chains of transmission leading back to the “Hidden
Imam.”
This is not to say that Shi‘ite governments did not arise. In the
year 1501, a sixteen-year-old amir named Ismail conquered Iran and
installed himself as the first Shah, or King, of the Safavid Empire.
Ismail proclaimed Twelver Shi‘ism to be the official state religion of
Iran and initiated a brutal jihad against Sunni Islam both within his
land and in the neighboring Ottoman Empire. Ismail’s jihad against
the Sunnis ended a few years later at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan
Salim I, and while that defeat may have halted the Shah’s excursion
into Ottoman territory, Iran itself was changed forever.
Shah Ismail was unmoved by arguments against the legitimacy of
a Shi‘ite state in the absence of the “Hidden Imam.” Instead, he sim-
ply declared himself to be the long-awaited Mahdi, boldly crying out
at his ascension, “I am very God, very God, very God!”
Soon after Ismail’s Safavid Dynasty came to an end in the eigh-
teenth century, Twelver Shi‘ism, though remaining the “state reli-
gion” in Iran, reverted to its former political quietism, prompting the
ayatollahs to cultivate once more the ideology of taqiyyah and to
refrain from directly interfering in the administrations of the Qajar
Dynasty, which succeeded the Safavids in the nineteenth century, and
the Pahlavi Dynasty, which succeeded the Qajars in the twentieth.
All of that changed with the Ayatollah Khomeini.
ONAWA R M February morning in 1979, hundreds of thousands of
Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran to celebrate the end of the
long, oppressive reign of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of
Iran. Among the crowd on that day were democrats, academics, and
Western-educated intelligentsia, liberal and conservative religious cler-