Surviving Afsharid State

  • Thread starter Deleted member 67076
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Deleted member 67076

So what would happen if the Afsharids, founded under Nader Shah had managed to survive? What's needed to achieve this and what are the implications for Iran?
 

Deleted member 14881

Well you would need Nader Shah on his way back from India to die because that devastated the Persian Economy and without him killing off his son Reza who was a capable adminstrator. It could survive. Iran would be better off without the chaos of the 18th century. Also Nader tried to have Shiism be more like a fifth Madhab of Sunni Islam.
 
Hmm, an interesting prospect and one that is appealing to some because of the tolerance showed by Nader Shah toward the Twelvers. However idk if the Afsharids could achieve a totally different and more Sunni tolerant or Sunni dominated Iran.I feel that it is almost inevitable after the polarizing Safavid rule and the ideology preached by them that it was becoming more and more difficult to rule Iran without being a Twelver. For one thing, I would say that it would take a radically intolerant and domineering Sunni regime (Salafi?) to redo and end the Shia dominance of the area. Tolerance alone will not cut it, with the Twelvers.

However if a longer Afsharid dynasty happened I would suspect them to slowly become more and more like their subjects and this other than going Safavid on them, which won't be easy, is, to me, the only way the Afsharid state could survive any longer than what it did (60 years).
 
I tend to be in the camp of "Nader needs to do an Alexander and die on the way back from India".

Nader's son, Reza, also sounds pretty competent in many sources. Of course, in the other sources, he is portrayed very badly, but there are reasons to doubt those as being propaganda written to justify Nader's mistreatment of him.

One of the timeline projects that I tinker away at is actually based on just this PoD (an early death of Nader), what I am trying to work out at the moment is if Nader's generals are likely to try and make a bid for the throne themselves or if a strong pro-Safavid push (possibly even led by former generals) might overthrow Reza early on.

Assuming Persia doesn't succumb to civil war, it is a very interesting situation. Could go in many ways.

fasquardon
 
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