Religious Policies of the Safavids and its Outcome in the Development of the Endowments of the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza

By declaring Shia as the official religion of Iran, the Safavids used different tools to institutionalize and disseminate it. One of these tools was developing religious endowments. The holy shrine of Imam Reza, which is the only holy shrine of Twelver Shiites in Iran, became the most important religious state at the center of attention of the Safavids, and many endowments were established for it. As a result, the amount of endowments for the shrine increased. Goals of increasing the endowments for the shrine were to disseminate Shiite beliefs, glory/dynamism of the shrine and its continuity. The purpose of this article is to describe the function of the development of the endowments of the holy shrine of Reza (AS). The approach of this paper is that the main goal of the Safavid religious policy was to promote the Shia belief by developing religious places and creating endowments and expansion of the endowments. The implementation of this policy in connection with the shrine of Imam Reza (AS), which was accompanied with the support of the Safavid politicians, in the short and long term, increased the space, facilities, administrative organization of the shrine and the expansion of services to pilgrims and adjacent people, and in the long run, guaranteed the dynamism and the reliability of the organization for the future. In this paper, the data sources consisted of endowments and manuscripts extracted, as well as the results of published researches on the subject of the endowments of the shrine of Imam Reza (AS). Using the descriptive method, with the historical attitude, the expansion of the endowments of the shrine of Imam Reza (AS) has been investigated.