Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

I

790 Political and Cultural History of Islam

since the classical Abbasid empire. Again, it was the Safavid state that worked out the main lines along which the subsequent monarchy has continued to be defined, having its capital in the western Iranian and Azeri provinces, and above all establishing an official Shi’ism This has been the context which the most important of the modern Iranian nationalism grew up. Abbas had to reconquer his empire and in doing so he established the central administrative authority more strongly than ever.
He had a, strong professional bureaucracy which upheld the absolute power of the throne at the expense of local autonomies. The financial administration, controlled by elaborate checks and balances, sums to have been backed up by a military strength honest and comprehensive. This bureaucracy was based increasingly on those outsiders who had already become an important element in Tahmasp’s time, especially converted Georgians and Armenians. Abbas still made use of the military resources that Isma’il had brought into play, including those of tariqah Shi’ism. But even the Qazilbash Turkish tribes, he reorganized, appealing to their devotion to himself as Badishah, so overriding even hereditary tribal ties.
At the peak of the empire’s power, his reign displayed the empire’s splendour in all its aspects. To the gratification of all Shi’is his forces reconquered the Iraq from the Ottamans (it had been lost to them as early as 1534), restoring the sacred Shi’i cities to Shi’i control though he was unable to advance farther and seize control of Syria and of the Hijaz, yet an empire that included the Iraq, western Iran and Khurassan, where were the great majority of the cultural centers of classical Islamdom, challenged comparison with the Abbasid, empire to which it was the evident successor. Abbas thus perfected the Safavid absolutism. In some measure, this was in the tradition of the military patronage state. The division was maintained of the population into two sectors, the privileged recipients of taxes, regarded as members of the military establishment and as proteges of the Badishah, and the taxable subjects, at the Badishah’s disposal. The most important industrial investments at the capital were regarded as the personal property of the Badishah. Yet in its very success, the strongly military character the state had was being x£tcm”’ded away. Abbas’ reign meant, in effect, civilian supremacy in the !” ’inistration.
Unlike the Renaissance, the persianate flowering provided ~>f classical institutions for those who came after. Sulayman
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(1520-66) in the Ottoman empire, Akbar (1556-1605) in the Timuri empire of India, and ’Abbas (1587-!629)in the Safavid empire were regarded as model emperors whose example was to be followed and then whose times were to be restored, if possible, when the empires fell increasingly into difficulties. None were founders of their dynasties, rather, the}’ brought to culmination some of the institutions implicit in a military patronage state, they carried their states into effective bureaucratic absolutism, in doing so, incidentally confirmed the bureaucratic civilization which was to undermine the central power of these states by denaturing their military organization and discipline.
All three were known for their definitive establishment of the dynastic law which in a military patronage state stood along side Shari’ah and local custom. Sulayman was known as Qanuni, the Law Giver, for it was under him that the in creased body of Qanun or dynastic law of the Ottoman empire was brought into what was regarded as perfected form. Akbar establishment not only the provincial administration but the most important precedents of his dynasty, observed largely even by those successor who disapproved his religious policy. It is said that the law code of Shah Abbas is still preserved, though it has not been studied. It is perhaps not accidental that the central empire, established in the mid-Arid Zone itself, should be the last to assume the full forms of agrarian absolutism (and prove politically the weakest of the three in their time of decline).
Abbas, as Badishah (emperor) and representative of the Imam, had left free not only to insist on the application of customary law in criminal cases to the exclusion of the Shari’ah law of the Qazi’s court, but even to associate the Sader, as authority in the Shari’ah with the judgments of his ro\al customary, non-Shart’ahcourts.