The Sunni Caliph Defends the Shiʿi Shah: The Ottoman Universal Caliphate in the Persian Turmoil of the 1720s

On 8 October 1722, the Safavid Empire collapsed after a long life of more than 220 years. Over the next twenty-five years, Iran was ruled almost incessantly by Sunnis. According to commonplace assumptions regarding confessional rivalry, the establishment of Sunnism in Iran should have created a Pax-Sunnica in the broader Eurasian region. Seemingly paradoxically, however, the opposite occurred, and this twenty-five-year period witnessed major military confrontations between the Sunni states. The Ottomans were actively involved in these wars and they supported Shiʿi Safavid princes against Sunni powers in all of these struggles.

Why did the Porte decide to side with the Shiʿi Safavids against Sunni Afghans during this period? This article seeks an answer to this question by focusing on the political and military developments of the 1720s. I argue that the Ottoman political claim to the universal Sunni caliphate, which secured the Ottoman dynasty’s legitimacy in their vast domains, paradoxically led them to adopt anti-Sunni policies in Persia. Furthermore, my study also challenges extant scholarship on the Ottoman caliphate, which generally assumes that the sultans used the title of caliph in a political sense exclusively in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this article, I will first discuss how the Ottoman sultan’s claim of universal caliphate functioned in the early modern era. Following this, I will examine Ottoman support for the Safavids against the Afghans in the 1720s.

The sixteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of the Ottoman borders. However, the Porte began to abandon this expansionist policy in favor of a more settled attitude in the second half of the sixteenth century. The main reason for this shift was the Porte’s gradual recognition of its physical limits with the available technologies of war and governance at the time. As a result, the Porte focused instead on reinforcing Ottoman sovereignty in a vast geography from the western Mediterranean to the Iranian borderlands, and from Crimea to Yemen.¹

This reinforcement required the creation of a legitimizing discourse that would constitute an Ottoman form of soft power. The Ottoman sultanate’s claim to universal caliphate had already occupied a central place in the global exertion of Ottoman soft power in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Ottoman caliphate continued to theoretically retain its universal character, in practice it largely functioned regionally. Critically, it was this global symbolic significance that made it work in more local contexts. The global claim enabled the sultans to protect both their dynastic sovereignty and the Ottoman domains by delegitimizing opposing Sunni rulers. The Porte declared these rulers within and beyond the Ottoman realms as rebels against the universal caliph.

The Ottoman scholarly elite of the sixteenth century quickly incorporated this new position into official discourse. In his Ahlâk-ı ʿAlâʾî written in 1564, Kınalızade Ali, a high-ranking Ottoman jurist and kadiasker of Anatolia, characterized the Ottoman realm as the “virtuous city” (medine-i fâzıla), as opposed to the “errant city” (medine-i dâlle).² Then, he divided the errant city into two types: the “infidel errant” (dâlle-i kâfire) and “heretic errant” (dâlle-i gayri kâfire). The examples he gave for the “infidel errant city” were the lands of the Europeans (Efrenc) and the Russians (Rus). The example of the latter was the domain of the Safavids (Surh-ser taifesi) who deviated from the straight path and became corrupt (mezâhib-i fâside). With regard to the ruler of the virtuous city, Kınalızade asserts that: “Know that the administrator of the virtuous city is the righteous imam (imam-ı haq) and the absolute caliph (halife-i mutlaq), and his governance (hükumet) is the imamate and caliphate, and its purpose is to perfect people’s souls and provide means of happiness.”³

Kınalızade’s depiction provided the authority of the Ottoman sultan with the utmost discursive protection. It isolated vast Ottoman territories...