Well, wouldn’t you know it: the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim retaliated by locking up or executing Shi’is living in his realm. Inevitably, as Sunnis fled west into Anatolia, Shi’is fled east into Persia. The whole process led to an ever greater concentration of Shi’ism in the Safavid empire (and Sunnism in the Ottoman) and the Safavids did everything they could to promote this trend as well as to fuse Shi’ism with Persian culture. This fusion of Shi’ism and Persian nationalism became the ideological foundation of their new empire, the core of which later became the modern nation of Iran.
