The world that was lost

During the two centuries between 1722 and 1923 the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires withered and collapsed. The charisma and dynamism of these dynasties' early rulers had atrophied and largely evaporated by the time Afghans entered Isfahan, Nader Shah sacked Delhi, and the British and French landed troops in Istanbul at the end of the First World War. Apart from their architectural monuments, exquisite painting, and memorable poetry, dynastic collapse left markedly different legacies in the territories of these empires.

Iran

In Iran, the Safavids, the weakest of all three dynasties, left the most profound and enduring legacies: the resurrection of Iranian political identity by the establishment of a state, called Iran, in the historic heartlands of the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires; the patronage of an identifiably Persian literary and artistic culture; the equation of the Iranian state with Shi‘i Islam and the conversion of the formerly majority Sunni population to Twelver Shi‘ism; and the institutionalization of a powerful, semi-autonomous, Shi‘i clergy. The institutionalization of an Iranian Shi‘i ‘ulama had unintended consequences, as many clerics dismissed the legitimacy of monarchs or political leaders apart from the Twelfth Imam or his earthly representatives, the Ayatollahs, the senior Shi‘i clerics or mujtahids who were, like the seventeenth-century Lebanese scholar al-Karaki, competent to engage in ijtihad or interpretation of Shi‘i theology.