Real or Fake Sayyeds? -- part 2

This is part 2. Part 1 is here.


As among the rest of society, among sayyids also there were prominent families, such as the Tabataba'is, whose credentials were well-known and acknowledged. However, it was also a well-known fact that many sayyids had no claim to such distinction.

These fake sayyids took advantage of the reverence and the pecuniary [monetary] benefits paid to sayyids by presenting themselves as a legitimate sayyid in communities that did not know them.

It was sufficient to put on a green belt or turban, for even to question the validity of the claim to sayyidship was considered to be blasphemy. 

Whereas the Tabataba'is have a recognized family tree, these self-made sayyids had such family trees fabricated in the Shi'ite shrine cities in Iraq, in particular from Samarra, and were therefore referred to
as Samarra sayyids.

In fact, according to Dieulafoy, only four families in Persia were recognized as having a legitimate—though even there on disputable grounds—claim of descent from Ali.

This was also reflected in the large number of imamzadahs, or tombs of alleged descendants of the Shi'ite Imams.

The chief professor of the madrasa at Qazvin told the Dieulofoys, for example, that he was quite aware that in Persia alone there were more than 20 imamzadahs claiming to house the ashes of the same sayyid, in addition to those in the country where the sayyid had or even had not lived at all. However, the point was, according to this 'alim, one did not really need the ashes of the imamzadah to dedicate a tomb in his honor and pray to him.

 As a consequence, the number of sayyids was large. "Persia swarms with Saiyids, a lazy, worthless set of men as a rule, who do not work and expect to be fed by others, and the Turkoman Khojah is the same," according to Yate.

Other contemporary European observers concurred with Yate's opinion. According to Polak, the sayyids as a group represented as many as 2 percent of the entire population.

Another nineteenth-century source estimates their number even higher, that is, at 20 percent of the urban population, which cannot be right, but indicates that the impression existed that sayyids were omnipresent,a hard-to-avoid urban phenomenon. In rural areas sayyids sometimes dominated a village's population, as, for example, in the Khabujan area in Khorasan.

To be continued..