The Safavids

Very good question and I will try to answer it as simply as possible.

The Safavids were Iranians and they recognized that fact. They referred to themselves as the Shahanshahs of Iran. They were originally Kurdish, but claimed that they were descendants of Mohammad, and used their Turkic language to gain allies. They also used the Shia faith to separate themselves from the Ottomans and gain support throughout Iran. Infact, they were originally Sufi Muslims, a sect of Sunni Islam, yet Ismail took advantage of the fact that Shia'ism was different than Sunnism to gain power.

It was the Safavids who forced Shia Islam on the rest of Iran, which was mostly Sunni at the time. Infact, the Ottomans referred to the Safavids as the Kings of Iran or Persia (whichever term they used at certain periods, remember that people in the Near East, such as the Ottomans and Iranians, used the term Iran, which is the correct native term, where as the Europeans used the Greek term Persia), and they referred to the Safavids as descendants of the great kings of Ancient Iran such as Khosrow II.

The Azerbaijan that you refer to did not exist then, and would not exist till 1918.

The Azerbaijan that the Safavids come from is Iranian Azerbaijan, the only Azerbaijan in world history until 1918, when The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was founded in order to separate northern Iran from the rest of the country by first the Turkish nationalists of the late Ottoman Empire and a later the Soviets (Azerbaijan SSR), who wanted to spread communism throughout Iran and gain access to oil and the Persian Gulf.

The Azerbaijan that the Safavids recognized was at that time as is still today a major part of Iran (which actually stands for "Land of the Aryans" which many mistake for Nazism but actually pre-dated Nazism by over a thousand years! Iran means Aryan in the scholarly sense, but since Nazism ruined the term "Aryan", the term Iranic has been used instead, the term Iran is not a discriminatory term in any way shape or form, it historically predated whatever crazy idea's Hitler had, who simply hijacked the term)

The Republic of Azerbaijan is mainly a creation of nationalism, consisting of a Turkic speaking Azeri people, but their region historically is Arran/Albania/Russian governates (Baku governate, Elisabethpol governate, etc...)

Other than language and the Iranian culture which both the Azeri's in the Caucasus and Iran share (although the Azeri's in the Republic of Azerbaijan have a huge Turkish (Turkey) influence), they are not the same people and have different histories. For example, Arran/Albania was Christian for a really long time, while Azerbaijan (Iran) was never Christian and Iranians themselves considered them as Arrani's (in fact, when the Azerbiajan Democratic Republic was created, many Iranian Azari's complained).

The fact that Iran exists today is because the Safavids resurrected and preserved it. That alone goes to show that the Safavids considred themselves Iranians. Before them, there was not a unified Iranian dynasty that was truly Iranian, there were simply Iranified Arabic, Mongol, and Turkic dynasties (although there were some Iranian dynasty but they never managed to reconquer all of Iran). They are really the founders of modern Iran as we know it today.


Edited by TheGreatSimba - 03-Dec-2009 at 04:23

Yea, Thats a good point Cyrus. Back then there was no concept of nationalism. Both the Ottomans and Safavids were fighting for Islam and their religion was top priority.

The Ottomans for example, use Persian (the cultural language) and Arabic  (religious language) more than Turkish and were more or less Iranian culturally. So I would say that the Safavids were fighting so that they could be the rulers of the Islamic world, not for Iranian nationalism or anything.

TheGreatSimba