I think there's an important thing to realize about much of history and even today; if you weren't a part of someones ethnicity/religious group/tribe/nation/etc, you were the enemy. To the Safavids, the Sunnis were ideological opposites as well as exploitable by the Ottoman Empire, and therefore had to be converted. But even this had limits, as both sides would exploit tribes of different religions to fight, or kill what they saw as "influence agents" of the others religion.
It wasn't as much as they didn't want to defend co-religionists as much as it was that the Ottomans couldn't secure the expanding lands, and religious war even against an opposing sect of the same religion was difficult. Ottomans waited until there was enough of a division within the Safavid Empire to exploit, and did do this multiple times over centuries. They were interested in a long-term squeeze approach and would atempt to exploit internal tensions with war to chip away at land, use proxy groups, etc. Following 1590 is an example of this, but the Safavids (then Afsharid, then Qajars) were good at reconstituting their forces and retaking that land, as present day Iran & Azerbaijan were already successfully converted and provided an easy launching point. It's not easy to fight a war, and you can't just throw bodies at a wall for centuries on end. Ottomans were successful in taking several important cities from the Safavids, but expanding all the way into the core of the Safavid Empire wouldn't be easy unless they made peace with every other empire they were bordered with.
As a general rule, I highly recommend never to load personal beliefs onto people who're centuries dead. All human beings are varied, naturally hypocritical, and we don't truly understand events unless we read them directly from their pens. But you're correct, in this case he was supportive of any and all suppression of a very strict, Safavid-supporting Twelve Shia Islam. He was the main organizer of a very brutal "persianizing" non-Persian Shias, then converting all Sunnis to the state religion.
I'm not an expert, but I hope this helps a little bit.
Apartmentseeking123 t1_j4hlsyp wrote
Reply to Why did the Safavids pursue brutal methods to forcibly convert Iran to Shia Islam? by ChickFleih
I think there's an important thing to realize about much of history and even today; if you weren't a part of someones ethnicity/religious group/tribe/nation/etc, you were the enemy. To the Safavids, the Sunnis were ideological opposites as well as exploitable by the Ottoman Empire, and therefore had to be converted. But even this had limits, as both sides would exploit tribes of different religions to fight, or kill what they saw as "influence agents" of the others religion.
It wasn't as much as they didn't want to defend co-religionists as much as it was that the Ottomans couldn't secure the expanding lands, and religious war even against an opposing sect of the same religion was difficult. Ottomans waited until there was enough of a division within the Safavid Empire to exploit, and did do this multiple times over centuries. They were interested in a long-term squeeze approach and would atempt to exploit internal tensions with war to chip away at land, use proxy groups, etc. Following 1590 is an example of this, but the Safavids (then Afsharid, then Qajars) were good at reconstituting their forces and retaking that land, as present day Iran & Azerbaijan were already successfully converted and provided an easy launching point. It's not easy to fight a war, and you can't just throw bodies at a wall for centuries on end. Ottomans were successful in taking several important cities from the Safavids, but expanding all the way into the core of the Safavid Empire wouldn't be easy unless they made peace with every other empire they were bordered with.
As a general rule, I highly recommend never to load personal beliefs onto people who're centuries dead. All human beings are varied, naturally hypocritical, and we don't truly understand events unless we read them directly from their pens. But you're correct, in this case he was supportive of any and all suppression of a very strict, Safavid-supporting Twelve Shia Islam. He was the main organizer of a very brutal "persianizing" non-Persian Shias, then converting all Sunnis to the state religion.
I'm not an expert, but I hope this helps a little bit.