The Mongol Destruction of Baghdad
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imadul
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Berke Khan was Khan of Golden Horde side, focused on Caspian, Russia, and Eastern Europe if I could remember correctly. Berke Khan cceptance of Islam had helped Mamluks Egypt but I don't remember he sent armies to help Sultan Qutz and Baibars. They defeated Chugtai ilkhanate commander by themselves.
Hulagu did not lead the armies all the times, he had many vicious commanders whose reputation preceded them.
Baybars and Qutz chekmated Chugtai commander in their own game, fast advance, then strategic pull back, then attack from flanks.
Baybars and Qutz knew their war methods and turned their strategy over them.
My books still in boxes...need to revisit.
But my history is weak about Mongols, their division after the death of Ghengiz Khan etc.
Thank you for the comment.
History is always disputed, but Ain Jalut is always famous in History.
Quran said, David killed Goliath, but some Jewish scribes dispute that also.
There will always be differences in history, some minor, some major.
I became EE and then IT, should had studies Anthropology and History
but man has one life
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khansaheeb
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Further down the YouTube videos is this one where the Chinese ruled the waves well before the Europeans and their admiral was a Muslim. Learn something everyday, lol:-
IblinI
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We had many amazing stories to told but yet largely unknown to the rest of the world.
LeGenD
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Berke Khan was Khan of Golden Horde side, focused on Caspian, Russia, and Eastern Europe if I could remember correctly. Berke Khan cceptance of Islam had helped Mamluks Egypt but I don't remember he sent armies to help Sultan Qutz and Baibars. They defeated Chugtai ilkhanate commander by themselves.
Hulagu did not lead the armies all the times, he had many vicious commanders whose reputation preceded them.
Baybars and Qutz chekmated Chugtai commander in their own game, fast advance, then strategic pull back, then attack from flanks.
Baybars and Qutz knew their war methods and turned their strategy over them.
My books still in boxes...need to revisit.
But my history is weak about Mongols, their division after the death of Ghengiz Khan etc.
Thank you for the comment.
History is always disputed, but Ain Jalut is always famous in History.
Quran said, David killed Goliath, but some Jewish scribes dispute that also.
There will always be differences in history, some minor, some major.
I became EE and then IT, should had studies Anthropology and History
but man has one life
Yes, Berke Khan was in charge of the "Khanate of the Golden Horde." And Helagu Khan was in charge of the "Ilkhanate."
Berke Khan's acceptance of Islam was a turning point for the pan-Islamic world and its fortunes in subsequent years on many counts. He admired Abbasid Caliphate for being the center of Islamic civilizational progress and prestige, and was disillusioned by Helagu Khan's demonstrations of barbarism in the conquest of Abbasid Caliphate.
Helagu Khan had created a large military force with several notable commanders under his disposal such as Baiju, Buqa-Temur, Guo Khan, Kitbuga, Köke Ilgei and Sunitai-balach.
When the great Möngke Khan died in China in 1259 AD, Helagu Khan was under pressure to return to Mongolia to partake in the political matter of succession. Helagu Khan put Kitbuga in charge of the "Ilkhanate" and took off with remaining forces and commanders.
Kitbuga was willing to take his chances with the "Mamluk Sultunate" but this was a miscalculation on his part. Kitbuga sought assistance from the French but they refused to help him; Kitbuga was without BACKUP in the region, therefore.
Qutuz was in charge of the "Mamluk Sultunate" and Baybars was his subordinate at the time of the Battle of Ain Jalut. Both were well-versed in the art of warfare with prior battlefield experiences against the crusaders and were also learning from the Mongols. The Mamluks employed every trick up their sleeve to goad Kitbuga into making a mistake as the battle progressed and capitalized on it to defeat him.
Emphasis on this part. Kitbuga put up substantial fight against the Mamluks but there wasn't any notable commander who would come to his aid in the battle. This would NOT be a problem with Helagu Khan and his others commanders in tow but they were not in the scene.
Helagu Khan's warfighting capacity and options were FAR GREATER than that of a lone Mongolian commander operating in a particular region. The Mamluks were impressive but they stood no chance against the Helagu Khan Collective. This is the point all along.
But Berke Khan prevented Helagu Khan from attacking the Mamluks, and prevented collapse of the pan-Islamic world by extension. The unsung Islamic champion.
Baybars was not only a gifted military commander but also a shrewd politician of his time. He succeeded Qutuz in 1260 AD, and established contact with Berke Khan and appealed to him to prevent collapse of the pan-Islamic world. He understood that Berke Khan would be instrumental in stopping Helagu Khan when the time is right. Berke Khan recognized and accepted the sanctity of the Mamluk Sultunate due to diplomacy of Baybars.
WE are looking at some extraordinary chain of events in this matter.
MajesticPug
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This basically halted the advance thus destruction of the Muslim and European worlds. Many historians called the win against Mongol siege led by Great Khan Mongke saved them.
imadul
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A very
account, indeed.History always has differences....it is not as true as we want to believe.
Since I have not studied the Mongol history only but sparsely I cannot put an emphatic verdict, but this thing is clear to me.
In the Battle of Ain Jalut, the forces were evenly matched. Of course the party making mistakes looses that's why we mostly have one victor in a battle.
You are correct about Qutz and BAYBARS tactics. Probably baybars was acquainted of mongols master strategy of feigned retreat, he toppled them using the same.
Ketbuqa lost in the battlefield.
Circumstances helped mamluks of Egypt, that's often happened in history.
One Khan dies and issue of succession and intriguing faction has impact.
BUT MAMLUKS COULD HAD BEEN DEFEATED, then history would had been entirely different.
Mongols fear preceded them, and Mamluks defeating them at Ain Jalut was a turning point for the Islamic world and Mongols expansion further West into Islamic Africa.
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Maula Jatt
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waz
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Yes certain groups among the Hazaras do have majority Mongol blood, most have mixed origins with some. Also no she didn’t come from the current borders of Pakistan.
khansaheeb
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The most savage barbarians in human history were tamed by Islam:-
To the east the Delhi Sultanate of Turkic slave-soldiers withstood Mongol pressure, benefited from the presence of scholars and administrators fleeing Mongol destruction, and gradually began to extend Muslim control south into India, a feat that was virtually accomplished under Muḥammad ibn Tughluq. Muslim Delhi was a culturally lively place that attracted a variety of unusual persons. Muḥammad ibn Tughluq himself was, like many later Indian Muslim rulers, well-read in philosophy, science, and religion. Not possessing the kind of dynastic legitimacy the pastoralist Mongols had asserted, he tied his legitimacy to his support for the Sharīʿah, and he even sought to have himself invested by the ʿAbbāsid “caliph” whom the Mamlūks had taken to Cairo. His concern with the Sharīʿah coincided with the growing popularity of Sufism, especially as represented by the massive Chishti ṭarīqah. Its most famous leader, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ, had been a spiritual adviser to many figures at court before Muḥammad ibn Tughluq came to the throne, as well as to individual Hindus and Muslims alike. In India, Sufism, which inherently undermined communalism, was bringing members of different religious communities together in ways very rare in the more westerly parts of Islamdom.
To the west the similarly constituted Mamlūk state continued to resist Mongol expansion. Its sultans were chosen on a nonhereditary basis from among a group of freed slaves who acted as the leaders of the various slave corps. At the death of one sultan, the various military corps would compete to see whose leader would become the next sultan. The leaders of the various slave corps formed an oligarchy that exercised control over the sultan. Although political instability was the frequent and natural result of such a system, cultural florescence did occur. The sultans actively encouraged trade and building, and Mamlūk Cairo became a place of splendour, filled with numerous architectural monuments. While the Persian language was becoming the language of administration and high culture over much of Islamdom, Arabic alone continued to be cultivated in Mamlūk domains, to the benefit of a diversified intellectual life. Ibn al-Nafīs (died 1288), a physician, wrote about pulmonary circulation 300 years before it was “discovered” in Europe. For Mamlūk administrative personnel, al-Qalqashandī composed an encyclopaedia in which he surveyed not only local practice but also all the information that a cultivated administrator should know. Ibn Khallikān composed one of the most important Islamicate biographical works, a dictionary of eminent men. Sharīʿah-minded studies were elaborated: the ulama worked out a political theory that tried to make sense of the sultanate, and they also explored the possibility of enlarging on the Sharīʿah by reference to falsafah and Sufism.
However, in much the same way as al-Shāfiʿī had responded in the 9th century to what he viewed as dangerous legal diversity, another great legal and religious reformer, Ibn Taymiyyah, living in Mamlūk Damascus in the late 13th and early 14th century, cautioned against such extralegal practices and pursuits. He insisted that the Sharīʿah was complete in and of itself and could be adapted to every age by any faqīh who could analogize according to the principle of human advantage (maṣlaḥah). A Ḥanbalī himself, Ibn Taymiyyah became as popular as his school’s founder, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. Like him, Ibn Taymiyyah attacked all practices that undermined what he felt to be the fundamentals of Islam, including all forms of Shīʿite thought as well as aspects of Jamāʿī-Sunni piety (often influenced by the Sufis) that stressed knowledge of God over service to him. Most visible among such practices was the revering of saints’ tombs, which was condoned by the Mamlūk authorities. Ibn Taymiyyah’s program and popularity so threatened the Mamlūk authorities that they put him in prison, where he died. His movement did not survive, but, when his ideas surfaced in the revolutionary movement of the Wahhābiyyah in the late 18th century, their lingering power became dramatically evident.
Farther west, the Rūm Seljuqs at Konya submitted to the Mongols in 1243 but survived intact. They continued to cultivate the Islamicate arts, architecture in particular. The most famous Muslim ever to live at Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, had emigrated from eastern Iran with his father before the arrival of the Mongols. In Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn, attracted to Sufi activities, attached himself to the master Shams al-Dīn. The poetry inspired by Jalāl al-Dīn’s association with Shams al-Dīn is unparalleled in Persian literature. Its recitation, along with music and movement, was a key element in the devotional activities of Jalāl al-Dīn’s followers, who came to be organized into a Sufi ṭarīqah—named the Mevleviyah (Mawlawiyyah) after their title of respect for him, Mevlana (“Our Master”). In his poetry Jalāl al-Dīn explored all varieties of metaphors, including intoxication, to describe the ineffable ecstasy of union with God.
Like most other Jamāʿī-Sunni rulers of his time, Ibn Tāshufīn had himself “appointed” deputy by the caliph in Baghdad. He also based his authority on the claim to bring correct Islam to peoples who had strayed from it. For him, “correct” Islam meant the Sharīʿah as developed by the Mālikī faqīhs, who played a key role in the Almoravid state by working out the application of the Sharīʿah to everyday problems. Like their contemporaries elsewhere, they received stipends from the government, sat in the ruler’s council, went on campaign with him, and gave him recommendations (fatwas) on important decisions. This was an approach to Islam far more current than the one it had replaced but still out of touch with the liveliest intellectual developments. During the next phase of Amazigh activism, newer trends from the east reached the Maghrib.
A second major Amazigh movement originated in a revolt begun against Almoravid rule in 1125 by Ibn Tūmart, a settled Maṣmūdah Amazigh from the Atlas Mountains. Like Ibn Yāsīn, Ibn Tūmart had been inspired by the hajj, which he used as an opportunity to study in Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, acquainting himself with all current schools of Islamic thought and becoming a disciple of the ideas of the recently deceased al-Ghazālī. Emulating his social activism, Ibn Tūmart was inspired to act on the familiar Muslim dictum, “Command the good and forbid the reprehensible.” His early attempts took two forms, disputations with the scholars of the Almoravid court and public chastisement of Muslims who in his view contradicted the rules of Islam; he went so far as to throw the Almoravid ruler’s sister off her horse because she was unveiled in public. His activities aroused hostility, and he fled to the safety of his own people. There, like Muhammad, he grew from teacher of a personal following to leader of a social movement.
Like many subsequent reformers, especially in Africa and other outlying Muslim lands, Ibn Tūmart used Muhammad’s career as a model. He interpreted the Prophet’s rejection and retreat as an emigration (hijrah) that enabled him to build a community, and he divided his followers into muhājirūn (“fellow emigrants”) and anṣār (“helpers”). He preached the idea of surrender to God to a people who had strayed from it. Thus could Muhammad’s ability to bring about radical change through renewal be invoked without actually claiming the prophethood that he had sealed forever. Ibn Tūmart further based his legitimacy on his claim to be a sharif (descendant of Muhammad) and the mahdī, not in the Shīʿite sense but in the more general sense of a human sent to restore pure faith. In his view Almoravid students of legal knowledge were so concerned with pursuing the technicalities of the law that they had lost the purifying fervour of their own founder, Ibn Yāsīn. They even failed to maintain proper Muslim behaviour, be it the veiling of women in public or the condemning of the use of wine, musical instruments, and other unacceptable, if not strictly illegal, forms of pleasure. Like many Muslim revitalizers before and since, Ibn Tūmart decried the way in which the law had taken on a life of its own, and he called upon Muslims to rely on the original and only reliable sources, the Qurʾān and Hadith. Although he opposed irresponsible rationalism in the law, in matters of theological discourse he leaned toward the limited rationalism of the Ashʿarite school, which was becoming so popular in the eastern Muslim lands. Like the Ashʿarites, he viewed the unity of God as one of Islam’s fundamentals and denounced any reading of the Qurʾān that led to anthropomorphism. Because he focused on attesting the unity of God (tawḥīd), he called his followers al-Muwaḥḥidūn (Almohads), “Those Who Attest the Unity of God.” Ibn Tūmart’s movement signifies the degree to which Maghribis could participate in the intellectual life of Islamdom as a whole, but his need to use the Tamazight language for his many followers who did not know Arabic also illustrates the limits of interregional discourse.
The best picture of Islamdom in the 14th century appears in the work of a remarkable Maghribi qāḍī and traveler, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah (1304–1368/69 or 1377). In 1325, the year that Mansa Mūsā went on pilgrimage, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah also left for Mecca, from his hometown of Tangiers. He was away for almost 30 years, visiting most of Islamdom, including Andalusia, all of the Maghrib, Mali, Syria, Arabia, Iran, India, the Maldive Islands, and, he claimed, China. He described the unity within diversity that was one of Islamdom’s most prominent features. Although local customs often seemed at variance with his notion of pure Islamic practice, he felt at home everywhere. Despite the divisions that had occurred during Islam’s 700-year history, a Muslim could attend the Friday worship session in any Muslim town in the world and feel comfortable, a claim that is difficult if not impossible to make for any other major religious tradition at any time in its history. By the time of Ibn Baṭṭūṭah’s death, Islamdom comprised the most far-flung yet interconnected set of societies in the world. As one author has pointed out, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) might have been read from Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway, but Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240) was read from Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga River. By the end of the period of migration and renewal, Islam had begun to spread not only into sub-Saharan Africa but also into the southern seas with the establishment of a Muslim presence in the Straits of Malacca. Conversion to Islam across its newer frontiers was at first limited to a small elite, who supplemented local religious practices with Muslim ones. Islam could offer not only a unifying religious system but also social techniques, including alphabetic literacy, a legal system applicable to daily life, a set of administrative institutions, and a body of science and technology—all capable of enhancing the power of ruling elements and of tying them into a vast and lucrative trading network.
The period of migration and renewal exposed both the potentiality and the limitations of government by tribal peoples. This great problem of Islamicate history received its most sophisticated analysis from a Maghribi Muslim named Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), a contemporary of Petrarch. His family had migrated from Andalusia to the Maghrib, and he himself was born in Ḥafṣid territory. He was both a faylasūf and a qāḍī, a combination more common in Andalusia and the Maghrib than anywhere else in Islamdom. His falsafah was activist; he strove to use his political wisdom to the benefit of one of the actual rulers of the day. To this end he moved from one court to another before becoming disillusioned and retiring to Mamlūk Cairo as a qāḍī. His life thus demonstrated the importance and the constraints of royal patronage as a stimulant to intellectual creativity. In his Muqaddimah (the introduction to his multivolume world history) he used his training in falsafah to discern patterns in history. Transcending the critiques of historical method made by historians of the Būyid period, such as al-Masʿūdī, Ibn Miskawayh, and al-Ṣūlī, Ibn Khaldūn established careful standards of evidence. Whereas Muslim historians conventionally subscribed to the view that God passed sovereignty and hegemony (dawlah) from one dynasty to another through his divine wisdom, Ibn Khaldūn explained it in terms of a cycle of natural and inevitable stages. By his day it had become apparent that tribally organized migratory peoples, so favoured by much of the ecology of the Maghrib and the Nile-to-Oxus region, could easily acquire military superiority over settled peoples if they could capitalize on the inherently stronger group feeling (ʿaṣabiyyah) that kinship provides. Once in power, according to Ibn Khaldūn, conquering groups pass through a phase in which a small number of “builders” among them bring renewed vitality to their conquered lands. As the family disperses itself among sedentary peoples and ceases to live the hard life of migration, it becomes soft from the prosperity it has brought and begins to degenerate. Then internal rivalries and jealousies force one member of the family to become a king who must rely on mercenary troops and undermine his own prosperity by paying for them. In the end, the ruling dynasty falls prey to a new tribal group with fresh group feeling. Thus did Ibn Khaldūn call attention to the unavoidable instability of all premodern Muslim dynasties, caused by their lack of the regularized patterns of succession that were beginning to develop in European dynasties.
After the death of Timur in 1405, power began to shift from migrating peoples to sedentary populations living in large centralized empires. After about 1683, when the last Ottoman campaign against Vienna failed, the great empires for which this period is so famous began to shrink and weaken, just as western Europeans first began to show their potential for worldwide expansion and domination. When the period began, Muslim lands had begun to recover from the devastating effects of the plague (1346–48), and many were prospering. Muslims had the best opportunity in history to unite the settled world, but by the end of the period they had been replaced by Europeans as the leading contenders for this role. Muslims were now forced into direct and repeated contact with Europeans, through armed hostilities as well as through commercial interactions, and often the Europeans competed well. Yet Muslim power was so extensive and the western Europeans such an unexpected source of competition that Muslims were able to realize that their situation had changed only after they no longer had the strength to resist. Furthermore, the existence of several strong competitive Muslim states militated against a united response to the Europeans and could even encourage some Muslims to align themselves with the European enemies of others.
In this period, long after Islamdom was once thought to have peaked, centralized absolutism reached its height, aided in part by the exploitation of gunpowder warfare and in part by new ways to fuse spiritual and military authority. Never before had Islamicate ideals and institutions better demonstrated their ability to encourage political centralization or to support a Muslim style of life where there was no organized state, be it in areas where Islam had been long established or in areas where it was newly arrived. The major states of this period impressed contemporary Europeans; in them some of the greatest Islamicate artistic achievements were made. In this period Muslims formed the cultural patterns that they brought into modern times, and adherence to Islam expanded to approximately its current distribution. As adherence to Islam expanded, far-flung cultural regions began to take on a life of their own. The unity of several of these regions was expressed through empire—the Ottomans in southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the eastern Maghrib, Egypt, and Syria; the Ṣafavids in Iran and Iraq; the Indo-Timurids (Mughals) in India. In these empires, Sunni and Shīʿite became identities on a much larger scale than ever before, expressing competition between large populations; simultaneously Shīʿism acquired a permanent base from which to generate international opposition. Elsewhere, less formal and often commercial ties bound Muslims from distant locales; growing commercial and political links between Morocco and the western Sudan produced a trans-Saharan Maghribi Islam; Egyptian Islam influenced the central and eastern Sudan; and steady contacts between East Africa, South Arabia, southern Iran, southwest India, and the southern seas promoted a recognizable Indian Ocean Islam, with Persian as its lingua franca. In fact, Persian became the closest yet to an international language; but the expansion and naturalization of Islam also fostered a number of local languages into vehicles for Islamicate administration and high culture—Ottoman, Chagatai, Swahili, Urdu, and Malay. Everywhere Muslims were confronting adherents of other religions, and new converts often practiced Islam without abandoning their previous practices. The various ways in which Muslims responded to religious syncretism and plurality continue to be elaborated to the present day.
This was a period of major realignments and expansion. The extent of Muslim presence in the Eastern Hemisphere in the early 15th century was easily discernible, but only with difficulty could one have imagined that it could soon produce three of the greatest empires in world history. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Balkans to Sumatra, Muslim rulers presided over relatively small kingdoms; but nowhere could the emergence of a world-class dynasty be predicted. In Andalusia only one Muslim state, Granada, remained to resist Christian domination of the Iberian Peninsula. The Maghrib, isolated between an almost all-Christian Iberia and an eastward-looking Mamlūk Egypt and Syria, was divided between the Marīnids and Ḥafṣids. Where the Sahara shades off into the Sudanic belt, the empire of Mali at Gao was ruled by a Muslim and included several Saharan “port” cities, such as Timbuktu, that were centres of Muslim learning. On the Swahili coast, oriented as always more toward the Indian Ocean than toward its own hinterland, several small Muslim polities centred on key ports such as Kilwa. In western Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula the Ottoman state under Sultan Mehmed I was recovering from its defeat by Timur. Iraq and western Iran were the domains of Turkic tribal dynasties known as the Black Sheep (Kara Koyunlu) and the White Sheep (Ak Koyunlu); they shared a border in Iran with myriad princelings of the Timurid line; and the neo-Mongol, neo-Timurid Uzbek state ruled in Transoxania. North of the Caspian, several Muslim khanates ruled as far north as Moscow and Kazan. In India, even though Muslims constituted a minority, they were beginning to assert their power everywhere except the south, which was ruled by Vijayanagar. In Islamdom’s far southeast, the Muslim state of Samudra held sway in Sumatra, and the rulers of the Moluccas had recently converted to Islam and begun to expand into the southern Malay Peninsula. Even where no organized state existed, as in the outer reaches of Central Asia and into southern China, scattered small Muslim communities persisted, often centred on oases. By the end of this period, Islamdom’s borders had retreated only in Russia and Iberia, but these losses were more than compensated by continuing expansion in Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Almost everywhere this plethora of states had undergone realignment and consolidation, based on experimentation with forms of legitimation and structure.
The first requirement for the survival of the Ṣafavid state was the conversion of its predominantly Jamāʿī-Sunni population to Imāmī Shīʿism. This was accomplished by a government-run effort supervised by the state-appointed leader of the religious community, the ṣadr. Gradually forms of piety emerged that were specific to Ṣafavid Shīʿism; they centred on pilgrimage to key sites connected with the imams, as well as on the annual remembering and reenacting of the key event in Shīʿite history, the caliph Yazīd I’s destruction of Imam al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ on the 10th of Muḥarram, AH 61 (680 CE). The 10th of Muḥarram, or ʿĀshūrāʾ, already marked throughout Islamdom with fasting, became for Iranian Shīʿites the centre of the religious calendar. The first 10 days of Muḥarram became a period of communal mourning, during which the pious imposed suffering on themselves to identify with their martyrs of old, listened to sermons, and recited appropriate elegiac poetry. In later Ṣafavid times the name for this mourning, taʿziyyeh, also came to be applied to passion plays performed to reenact events surrounding al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom. Through the depths of their empathetic suffering, Shīʿites could help to overturn the injustice of al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom at the end of time, when all wrongs would be righted, all wrongdoers punished, and all true followers of the imams rewarded.
ʿAbbās expressed his new role by moving his capital about 1597–98 to Eṣfahān in Fārs, the central province of the ancient pre-Islamic Iranian empires and symbolically more Persian than Turkic. Eṣfahān, favoured by a high and scenic setting, became one of the most beautiful cities in the world, leading its boosters to say that “Eṣfahān is half the world.” It came to contain, often thanks to royal patronage, myriad palaces, gardens, parks, mosques, medreses, caravansaries, workshops, and public baths. Many of these still stand, including the famed Masjed-e Shah, a mosque that shares the great central mall with an enormous covered bazaar and many other structures. It was there that ʿAbbās received diplomatic and commercial visits from Europeans, including a Carmelite mission from Pope Clement XIII (1604) and the adventuring Sherley brothers from Elizabethan England. Just as his visitors hoped to use him to their own advantage, ʿAbbās hoped to use them to his, as sources of firearms and military technology, or as pawns in his economic warfare against the Ottomans, in which he was willing to seek help from apparently anyone, including the Russians, Portuguese, and Habsburgs.
Under Ṣafavid rule, Iran in the 16th and 17th centuries became the centre of a major cultural flowering expressed through the Persian language and through the visual arts. This flowering extended to Ṣafavid neighbour states as well—Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Indo-Timurids. Like other Shīʿite dynasties before them, the Ṣafavids encouraged the development of falsafah as a companion to Shīʿite esotericism and cosmology. Two major thinkers, Mīr Dāmād and his disciple Mullā Ṣadrā, members of the Ishrāqī, or illuminationist, school, explored the realm of images or symbolic imagination as a way to understand issues of human meaningfulness. The Ṣafavid period was also important for the development of Shīʿite Sharīʿah-minded studies, and it produced a major historian, Iskandar Beg Munshī, chronicler of ʿAbbās’s reign.
When Bābur turned toward northern India, it was ruled from Delhi by the Lodī sultans, one of many local Turkic dynasties scattered through the subcontinent. In 1526 at Pānīpat, Bābur met and defeated the much larger Lodī army. In his victory he was aided, like the Ottomans at Chāldirān, by his artillery. By his death just four years later, he had laid the foundation for a remarkable empire, known most commonly as the Mughal (i.e., Mongol) Empire. It is more properly called Indo-Timurid because the Chagatai Turks were distinct from the surviving Mongols of the time and because Bābur and his successors acknowledge Timur as the founder of their power.
Bābur is also remembered for his memoirs, the Bābur-nāmeh. Written in Chagatai, then an emerging Islamicate literary language, his work gives a lively and compelling account of the wide range of interests, tastes, and sensibilities that made him so much a counterpart of his contemporary, the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).
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Although Akbar’s empire was, like Süleyman’s and ʿAbbās’s, a variation on the theme of the military patronage state, his situation, and consequently many of his problems, differed from theirs in important ways. Islam was much more recently established in most of his empire than in either of the other two, and Muslims were not in the majority. Although the other two states were not religiously or ethnically homogeneous, the extent of their internal diversity could not compare with Akbar’s, where Muslims and non-Muslims of every stripe alternately coexisted and came into conflict—Jacobites (members of the miaphysite Syrian church), Sufis, Ismāʿīlī Shīʿites, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuits, Jews, and Hindus. Consequently, Akbar was forced even more than the Ottomans to confront and address the issue of religious plurality. The option of aggressive conversion was virtually impossible in such a vast area, as was any version of the Ottoman millet system in a setting in which hundreds if not thousands of millets could be defined.
In some ways, Akbar faced in exaggerated form the situation that the Arab Muslims faced when they were a minority in the Nile-to-Oxus region in the 7th–9th centuries. Granting protected status to non-Muslims, even those who were not really “Peoples of the Book” in the original sense, with an organized religion of their own, was legally and administratively justifiable, but, unless they could be kept from interacting too much with the Muslim population, Islam itself could be affected. The power of Sufi ṭarīqahs like the influential Chishtīs, and of the Hindu mystical movement of Guru Nānak, were already promoting intercommunal interaction and cross-fertilization. Akbar’s response was different from that of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maḥdi. Instead of institutionalizing intolerance of non-Muslim influences and instead of hardening communal lines, Akbar banned intolerance and even the special tax on non-Muslims. To keep the ulama from objecting, he tried, for different reasons than had the Ottomans and Ṣafavids, to tie them to the state financially. His personal curiosity about other religions was exemplary; with the help of Abu al-Faḍl, his Sufi adviser and biographer, he established a kind of salon for religious discussion. A very small circle of personal disciples seems to have emulated Akbar’s own brand of tawḥīd-i ilāhī (“divine oneness”). This appears to have been a general monotheism akin to what the ḥanīfs of Mecca, and Muhammad himself, had once practiced, as well as to the boundary-breaking pantheistic awareness of great Sufis like Rūmī and Ibn al-ʿArabī, who was very popular in South and Southeast Asia. Akbar combined toleration for all religions with condemnation of practices that seemed to him humanly objectionable, such as enslavement and the immolation of widows.
Between the 15th and the 18th century the use of coffee, tea, and tobacco, despite the objections of the ulama, became common in all three empires. Teahouses became important new centres for male socializing, in addition to the home, the mosque, the marketplace, and the public bath. (Female socializing was restricted largely to the home and the bath.) In the teahouses men could practice the already well-developed art of storytelling and take delight in the clever use of language. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa laylah), the earliest extant manuscripts of which date from this period, and the stories of the Arabian hero ʿAntar must have been popular, as were the tales of a wise fool known as Mullah Naṣr al-Dīn in Persian (Nasreddin), Hoca in Turkish, and Juḥā in Arabic. The exploits of Naṣr al-Dīn, sometimes in the guise of a Sufi dervish or royal adviser, often humorously portray centralized absolutism and mysticism:
Islamic world - Ottomans
After the Ottoman state’s devastating defeat by Timur, its leaders had to retain the vitality of the warrior spirit (without its unruliness and intolerance) and the validation of the Sharīʿah (without its confining independence). In 1453 Mehmed II (the Conqueror) fulfilled the warrior ideal by...
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Conversion of Mongols to Islam
For a time the Il-Khans tolerated and patronized all religious persuasions—Sunni, Shīʿite, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Jewish, and pagan. But in 1295 a Buddhist named Maḥmūd Ghāzān became khan and declared himself Muslim, compelling other Mongol notables to follow suit. His patronage of Islamicate learning fostered such brilliant writers as Rashīd al-Dīn, the physician and scholar who authored one of the most famous Persian universal histories of all time. The Mongols, like other Islamicate dynasties swept into power by a tribal confederation, were able to unify their domains for only a few generations. By the 1330s their rule had begun to be fragmented among myriad local leaders. Meanwhile, on both Mongol flanks, other Turkic Muslim powers were increasing in strength.
To the east the Delhi Sultanate of Turkic slave-soldiers withstood Mongol pressure, benefited from the presence of scholars and administrators fleeing Mongol destruction, and gradually began to extend Muslim control south into India, a feat that was virtually accomplished under Muḥammad ibn Tughluq. Muslim Delhi was a culturally lively place that attracted a variety of unusual persons. Muḥammad ibn Tughluq himself was, like many later Indian Muslim rulers, well-read in philosophy, science, and religion. Not possessing the kind of dynastic legitimacy the pastoralist Mongols had asserted, he tied his legitimacy to his support for the Sharīʿah, and he even sought to have himself invested by the ʿAbbāsid “caliph” whom the Mamlūks had taken to Cairo. His concern with the Sharīʿah coincided with the growing popularity of Sufism, especially as represented by the massive Chishti ṭarīqah. Its most famous leader, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ, had been a spiritual adviser to many figures at court before Muḥammad ibn Tughluq came to the throne, as well as to individual Hindus and Muslims alike. In India, Sufism, which inherently undermined communalism, was bringing members of different religious communities together in ways very rare in the more westerly parts of Islamdom.
To the west the similarly constituted Mamlūk state continued to resist Mongol expansion. Its sultans were chosen on a nonhereditary basis from among a group of freed slaves who acted as the leaders of the various slave corps. At the death of one sultan, the various military corps would compete to see whose leader would become the next sultan. The leaders of the various slave corps formed an oligarchy that exercised control over the sultan. Although political instability was the frequent and natural result of such a system, cultural florescence did occur. The sultans actively encouraged trade and building, and Mamlūk Cairo became a place of splendour, filled with numerous architectural monuments. While the Persian language was becoming the language of administration and high culture over much of Islamdom, Arabic alone continued to be cultivated in Mamlūk domains, to the benefit of a diversified intellectual life. Ibn al-Nafīs (died 1288), a physician, wrote about pulmonary circulation 300 years before it was “discovered” in Europe. For Mamlūk administrative personnel, al-Qalqashandī composed an encyclopaedia in which he surveyed not only local practice but also all the information that a cultivated administrator should know. Ibn Khallikān composed one of the most important Islamicate biographical works, a dictionary of eminent men. Sharīʿah-minded studies were elaborated: the ulama worked out a political theory that tried to make sense of the sultanate, and they also explored the possibility of enlarging on the Sharīʿah by reference to falsafah and Sufism.
However, in much the same way as al-Shāfiʿī had responded in the 9th century to what he viewed as dangerous legal diversity, another great legal and religious reformer, Ibn Taymiyyah, living in Mamlūk Damascus in the late 13th and early 14th century, cautioned against such extralegal practices and pursuits. He insisted that the Sharīʿah was complete in and of itself and could be adapted to every age by any faqīh who could analogize according to the principle of human advantage (maṣlaḥah). A Ḥanbalī himself, Ibn Taymiyyah became as popular as his school’s founder, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. Like him, Ibn Taymiyyah attacked all practices that undermined what he felt to be the fundamentals of Islam, including all forms of Shīʿite thought as well as aspects of Jamāʿī-Sunni piety (often influenced by the Sufis) that stressed knowledge of God over service to him. Most visible among such practices was the revering of saints’ tombs, which was condoned by the Mamlūk authorities. Ibn Taymiyyah’s program and popularity so threatened the Mamlūk authorities that they put him in prison, where he died. His movement did not survive, but, when his ideas surfaced in the revolutionary movement of the Wahhābiyyah in the late 18th century, their lingering power became dramatically evident.
Farther west, the Rūm Seljuqs at Konya submitted to the Mongols in 1243 but survived intact. They continued to cultivate the Islamicate arts, architecture in particular. The most famous Muslim ever to live at Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, had emigrated from eastern Iran with his father before the arrival of the Mongols. In Konya, Jalāl al-Dīn, attracted to Sufi activities, attached himself to the master Shams al-Dīn. The poetry inspired by Jalāl al-Dīn’s association with Shams al-Dīn is unparalleled in Persian literature. Its recitation, along with music and movement, was a key element in the devotional activities of Jalāl al-Dīn’s followers, who came to be organized into a Sufi ṭarīqah—named the Mevleviyah (Mawlawiyyah) after their title of respect for him, Mevlana (“Our Master”). In his poetry Jalāl al-Dīn explored all varieties of metaphors, including intoxication, to describe the ineffable ecstasy of union with God.
Ascent of the Ottoman Turks
It was not from the Rūm Seljuqs, however, that lasting Muslim power in Anatolia was to come, but rather from one of the warrior states on the Byzantine frontier. The successive waves of Turkic migrations had driven unrelated individuals and groups across central Islamdom into Anatolia. Avoiding the Konya state, they gravitated toward an open frontier to the west, where they began to constitute themselves, often through fictitious kinship relationships, into quasi-tribal states that depended on raiding each other and Byzantine territory and shipping. One of these, the Osmanlıs, or Ottomans, named for their founder, Osman I (ruled 1281–1324), was located not on the coast, where raiding had its limits, but in Bithynia just facing Constantinople. In the mid-1320s they won the town of Bursa and made it their first capital. From Anatolia they crossed over into Thrace in the service of rival factions at Constantinople, then began to occupy Byzantine territory, establishing their second capital at Edirne on the European side. Their sense of legitimacy was complex. They were militantly Muslim, bound by the ghāzī spirit, spurred on in their intolerance of local Christians by Greek converts and traveling Sufis who gravitated to their domains. At the same time, ulama from more-settled Islamic lands to the east encouraged them to abide by the Sharīʿah and tolerate the Christians as protected non-Muslims. The Ottomans also cast themselves as deputies of the Rūm Seljuqs, who were themselves originally “deputized” by the ʿAbbāsid caliph. Finally they claimed descent from the leading Oghuz Turk families, who were natural rulers over sedentary populations. Under Murad I (ruled c. 1360–89) the state began to downplay its warrior fervour in favour of more conventional Islamicate administration. Instead of relying on volunteer warriors, Murad established a regular cavalry, which he supported with land assignments, as well as a specially trained infantry force called the “New Troops,” Janissaries, drawn from converted captives. Expanding first through western Anatolia and Thrace, the Ottomans under Bayezid I (ruled 1389–1402) turned their eyes toward eastern and southern Anatolia; just as they had incorporated the whole, they encountered a neo-Mongol conqueror expanding into Anatolia from the east who utterly defeated their entire army in a single campaign (1402).Timur’s efforts to restore Mongol power
Timur (Tamerlane) was a Turk, not a Mongol, but he aimed to restore Mongol power. He was born a Muslim in the Syr Darya valley and served local pagan Mongol warriors and finally the Chagatai heir apparent, but he rebelled and made himself ruler in Khwārezm in 1380. He planned to restore Mongol supremacy under a thoroughly Islamic program. He surpassed the Mongols in terror, constructing towers out of the heads of his victims. Having established himself in Iran, he moved first on India and then on Ottoman Anatolia and Mamlūk Syria, but he died before he could consolidate his realm. His impact was twofold: his defeat of the Ottomans inspired a comeback that would produce one of the greatest Islamicate empires of all time, and one of the Central Asian heirs to his tradition of conquest would found another great Islamicate empire in India. These later empires managed to find the combination of Turkic and Islamic legitimacy that could produce the stable centralized absolutism that had eluded all previous Turkic conquerors.Arabs
When the Fāṭimids conquered Egypt in 969, they left a governor named Zīrī in the Maghrib. In the 1040s the dynasty founded by Zīrī declared its independence from the Fāṭimids, but it too was challenged by breakaways such as the Zanātah in Morocco and the Ḥammādids in Algeria. Gradually the Zīrids were restricted to the eastern Maghrib. There they were invaded from Egypt by two Bedouin Arab tribes, the Banū Halīl and the Banū Sulaym, at the instigation (1052) of the Fāṭimid ruler in Cairo. This mass migration of warriors as well as wives and children is known as the Hilālian invasion. Though initially disruptive, the Hilālian invasion had an important cultural impact: it resulted in a much greater spread of the Arabic language than had occurred in the 7th century and inaugurated the real Arabization of the Maghrib.Imazighen
When the Arab conquerors arrived in the Maghrib in the 7th century, the indigenous peoples they met were the Imazighen (Berbers; singular Amazigh), a group of predominantly but not entirely migratory tribes who spoke a recognizably common Afro-Asiatic language with significant dialectal variations. Amazigh tribes could be found from present-day Morocco to present-day Algeria and from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. As among the Arabs, small tribal groupings of Imazighen occasionally formed short-lived confederations or became involved in caravan trade. No previous conqueror had tried to assimilate the Imazighen, but the Arabs quickly converted them and enlisted their aid in further conquests. Without their help, for example, Andalusia could never have been incorporated into the Islamicate state. At first only Imazighen nearer the coast were involved, but by the 11th century Muslim affiliation had begun to spread far into the Sahara.The Ṣanhājah confederation
One particular western Saharan Amazigh confederation, the Ṣanhājah, was responsible for the first Amazigh-directed effort to control the Maghrib. The Ṣanhājah were camel herders who traded mined salt for gold with the black kingdoms of the south. By the 11th century their power in the western Sahara was being threatened by expansion both from other Amazigh tribes, centred at Sijilmassa, and from the Soninke state at Ghana to the south, which had actually captured their capital of Audaghost in 990. The subsequent revival of their fortunes parallels Muḥammad’s revitalization of the Arabs 500 years earlier, in that Muslim ideology reinforced their efforts to unify several smaller groups. The Ṣanhājah had been in contact with Islam since the 9th century, but their distance from major centres of Muslim life had kept their knowledge of the faith minimal. In 1035, however, Yaḥyā ibn Ibrāhīm, a chief from one of their tribes, the Gudālah, went on hajj. For the Maghribi pilgrim, the cultural impact of the hajj was experienced not only in Mecca and Medina but also on the many stops along the 3,000-mile overland route. When Yaḥyā returned, he was accompanied by a teacher from Nafis (in present-day Libya), ʿAbd Allāh ibn Yāsīn, who would instruct the Imazighen in Islam as teachers under ʿUmar I had instructed the Arab fighters in the first Muslim garrisons. Having met with little initial success, the two are said to have retired to a ribāṭ, a fortified place of seclusion, perhaps as far south as an island in the Sénégal River, to pursue a purer religious life. The followers they attracted to that ribāṭ were known, by derivation, as al-murābiṭūn (Arabic: “those who are garrisoned”); the dynasty they founded came to be known by the same name, or Almoravids in its Anglicized form. In 1042 Ibn Yāsīn declared a jihad against the Ṣanhājah tribes, including his own, as people who had embraced Islam but then failed to practice it properly. By his death in 1059, the Ṣanhājah confederation had been restored under an Islamic ideology, and the conquest of Morocco, which lacked strong leadership, was under way.The Almoravid dynasty
Ibn Yāsīn’s spiritual role was taken by a consultative body of ulama. His successor as military commander was Abū Bakr ibn ʿUmar. While pursuing the campaign against Morocco, Abū Bakr had to go south, leaving his cousin Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn as his deputy. When Abū Bakr tried to return, Ibn Tāshufīn turned him back to the south, where he remained until his death in 1087. Under Ibn Tāshufīn’s leadership, by 1082, Almoravid control extended as far as Algiers. In 1086 Ibn Tāshufīn responded to a request for help from the Andalusian party kings, unable to defend themselves against the Christian kingdoms in the north, such as Castile. By 1110 all Muslim states in Andalusia had come under Almoravid control.Like most other Jamāʿī-Sunni rulers of his time, Ibn Tāshufīn had himself “appointed” deputy by the caliph in Baghdad. He also based his authority on the claim to bring correct Islam to peoples who had strayed from it. For him, “correct” Islam meant the Sharīʿah as developed by the Mālikī faqīhs, who played a key role in the Almoravid state by working out the application of the Sharīʿah to everyday problems. Like their contemporaries elsewhere, they received stipends from the government, sat in the ruler’s council, went on campaign with him, and gave him recommendations (fatwas) on important decisions. This was an approach to Islam far more current than the one it had replaced but still out of touch with the liveliest intellectual developments. During the next phase of Amazigh activism, newer trends from the east reached the Maghrib.
A second major Amazigh movement originated in a revolt begun against Almoravid rule in 1125 by Ibn Tūmart, a settled Maṣmūdah Amazigh from the Atlas Mountains. Like Ibn Yāsīn, Ibn Tūmart had been inspired by the hajj, which he used as an opportunity to study in Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, acquainting himself with all current schools of Islamic thought and becoming a disciple of the ideas of the recently deceased al-Ghazālī. Emulating his social activism, Ibn Tūmart was inspired to act on the familiar Muslim dictum, “Command the good and forbid the reprehensible.” His early attempts took two forms, disputations with the scholars of the Almoravid court and public chastisement of Muslims who in his view contradicted the rules of Islam; he went so far as to throw the Almoravid ruler’s sister off her horse because she was unveiled in public. His activities aroused hostility, and he fled to the safety of his own people. There, like Muhammad, he grew from teacher of a personal following to leader of a social movement.
Like many subsequent reformers, especially in Africa and other outlying Muslim lands, Ibn Tūmart used Muhammad’s career as a model. He interpreted the Prophet’s rejection and retreat as an emigration (hijrah) that enabled him to build a community, and he divided his followers into muhājirūn (“fellow emigrants”) and anṣār (“helpers”). He preached the idea of surrender to God to a people who had strayed from it. Thus could Muhammad’s ability to bring about radical change through renewal be invoked without actually claiming the prophethood that he had sealed forever. Ibn Tūmart further based his legitimacy on his claim to be a sharif (descendant of Muhammad) and the mahdī, not in the Shīʿite sense but in the more general sense of a human sent to restore pure faith. In his view Almoravid students of legal knowledge were so concerned with pursuing the technicalities of the law that they had lost the purifying fervour of their own founder, Ibn Yāsīn. They even failed to maintain proper Muslim behaviour, be it the veiling of women in public or the condemning of the use of wine, musical instruments, and other unacceptable, if not strictly illegal, forms of pleasure. Like many Muslim revitalizers before and since, Ibn Tūmart decried the way in which the law had taken on a life of its own, and he called upon Muslims to rely on the original and only reliable sources, the Qurʾān and Hadith. Although he opposed irresponsible rationalism in the law, in matters of theological discourse he leaned toward the limited rationalism of the Ashʿarite school, which was becoming so popular in the eastern Muslim lands. Like the Ashʿarites, he viewed the unity of God as one of Islam’s fundamentals and denounced any reading of the Qurʾān that led to anthropomorphism. Because he focused on attesting the unity of God (tawḥīd), he called his followers al-Muwaḥḥidūn (Almohads), “Those Who Attest the Unity of God.” Ibn Tūmart’s movement signifies the degree to which Maghribis could participate in the intellectual life of Islamdom as a whole, but his need to use the Tamazight language for his many followers who did not know Arabic also illustrates the limits of interregional discourse.
The Almohad dynasty
By 1147, 17 years after Ibn Tūmart’s death, Almohads had replaced Almoravids in all their Maghribi and Andalusian territories. In Andalusia their arrival slowed the progress of the Christian Reconquista. There, as in the Maghrib, arts and letters were encouraged; an example is an important movement of falsafah that included Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and Ibn Rushd (Latin Averroës), the Andalusian qāḍī and physician whose interpretations of Aristotle became so important for medieval European Christianity. During the late Almohad period in Andalusia the intercommunal nature of Islamicate civilization became especially noticeable in the work of non-Muslim thinkers, such as Moses Maimonides, who participated in trends outside their own communities even at the expense of criticism from within. By the early 13th century, Almohad power began to decline; a defeat in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa by the Christian kings of the north forced a retreat to the Maghrib. But the impact of Almohad cultural patronage on Andalusia long outlasted Almohad political power; successor dynasties in surviving Muslim states were responsible for some of the highest cultural achievements of Andalusian Muslims, among them the Alhambra palace in Granada. Furthermore, the 400-year southward movement of the Christian-Muslim frontier resulted, ironically, in some of the most intense Christian-Muslim interaction in Andalusian history. The Cid could fight for both sides; Muslims, as Mudejars, could live under Christian rule and contribute to its culture; Jews could translate Arabic and Hebrew texts into Castilian. Almohads were replaced in the Maghrib as well, through a revolt by their own governors—the Ḥafṣids in Tunis and the Marīnid Amazigh dynasty in Fès. There too, however, Almohad influence outlasted their political presence: both towns became centres, in distinctively Maghribi form, of Islamicate culture and Islamic piety.Continued spread of Islamic influence
As the Maghrib became firmly and distinctively Muslim, Islam moved south. The spread of Muslim identity into the Sahara and the involvement of Muslim peoples, especially the Tuareg, in trans-Saharan trade provided several natural channels of influence. By the time of the Marīnids, Ḥafṣids, and Mamlūks, several major trade routes had established crisscrossing lines of communication: from Cairo to Timbuktu, from Tripoli to Bornu and Lake Chad, from Tunis to Timbuktu at the bend of the Niger River, and from Fès and Tafilalt through major Saharan entrepôts into Ghana and Mali. The rise at Timbuktu of Mali, the first great western Sudanic empire with a Muslim ruler, attested the growing incorporation of sub-Saharan Africa into the North African orbit. The reign of Mansa Mūsā, who even went on pilgrimage, demonstrated the influence of Islam on at least the upper echelons of African society.The best picture of Islamdom in the 14th century appears in the work of a remarkable Maghribi qāḍī and traveler, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah (1304–1368/69 or 1377). In 1325, the year that Mansa Mūsā went on pilgrimage, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah also left for Mecca, from his hometown of Tangiers. He was away for almost 30 years, visiting most of Islamdom, including Andalusia, all of the Maghrib, Mali, Syria, Arabia, Iran, India, the Maldive Islands, and, he claimed, China. He described the unity within diversity that was one of Islamdom’s most prominent features. Although local customs often seemed at variance with his notion of pure Islamic practice, he felt at home everywhere. Despite the divisions that had occurred during Islam’s 700-year history, a Muslim could attend the Friday worship session in any Muslim town in the world and feel comfortable, a claim that is difficult if not impossible to make for any other major religious tradition at any time in its history. By the time of Ibn Baṭṭūṭah’s death, Islamdom comprised the most far-flung yet interconnected set of societies in the world. As one author has pointed out, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) might have been read from Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway, but Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240) was read from Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga River. By the end of the period of migration and renewal, Islam had begun to spread not only into sub-Saharan Africa but also into the southern seas with the establishment of a Muslim presence in the Straits of Malacca. Conversion to Islam across its newer frontiers was at first limited to a small elite, who supplemented local religious practices with Muslim ones. Islam could offer not only a unifying religious system but also social techniques, including alphabetic literacy, a legal system applicable to daily life, a set of administrative institutions, and a body of science and technology—all capable of enhancing the power of ruling elements and of tying them into a vast and lucrative trading network.
The period of migration and renewal exposed both the potentiality and the limitations of government by tribal peoples. This great problem of Islamicate history received its most sophisticated analysis from a Maghribi Muslim named Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), a contemporary of Petrarch. His family had migrated from Andalusia to the Maghrib, and he himself was born in Ḥafṣid territory. He was both a faylasūf and a qāḍī, a combination more common in Andalusia and the Maghrib than anywhere else in Islamdom. His falsafah was activist; he strove to use his political wisdom to the benefit of one of the actual rulers of the day. To this end he moved from one court to another before becoming disillusioned and retiring to Mamlūk Cairo as a qāḍī. His life thus demonstrated the importance and the constraints of royal patronage as a stimulant to intellectual creativity. In his Muqaddimah (the introduction to his multivolume world history) he used his training in falsafah to discern patterns in history. Transcending the critiques of historical method made by historians of the Būyid period, such as al-Masʿūdī, Ibn Miskawayh, and al-Ṣūlī, Ibn Khaldūn established careful standards of evidence. Whereas Muslim historians conventionally subscribed to the view that God passed sovereignty and hegemony (dawlah) from one dynasty to another through his divine wisdom, Ibn Khaldūn explained it in terms of a cycle of natural and inevitable stages. By his day it had become apparent that tribally organized migratory peoples, so favoured by much of the ecology of the Maghrib and the Nile-to-Oxus region, could easily acquire military superiority over settled peoples if they could capitalize on the inherently stronger group feeling (ʿaṣabiyyah) that kinship provides. Once in power, according to Ibn Khaldūn, conquering groups pass through a phase in which a small number of “builders” among them bring renewed vitality to their conquered lands. As the family disperses itself among sedentary peoples and ceases to live the hard life of migration, it becomes soft from the prosperity it has brought and begins to degenerate. Then internal rivalries and jealousies force one member of the family to become a king who must rely on mercenary troops and undermine his own prosperity by paying for them. In the end, the ruling dynasty falls prey to a new tribal group with fresh group feeling. Thus did Ibn Khaldūn call attention to the unavoidable instability of all premodern Muslim dynasties, caused by their lack of the regularized patterns of succession that were beginning to develop in European dynasties.
Consolidation and expansion (1405–1683)
After the death of Timur in 1405, power began to shift from migrating peoples to sedentary populations living in large centralized empires. After about 1683, when the last Ottoman campaign against Vienna failed, the great empires for which this period is so famous began to shrink and weaken, just as western Europeans first began to show their potential for worldwide expansion and domination. When the period began, Muslim lands had begun to recover from the devastating effects of the plague (1346–48), and many were prospering. Muslims had the best opportunity in history to unite the settled world, but by the end of the period they had been replaced by Europeans as the leading contenders for this role. Muslims were now forced into direct and repeated contact with Europeans, through armed hostilities as well as through commercial interactions, and often the Europeans competed well. Yet Muslim power was so extensive and the western Europeans such an unexpected source of competition that Muslims were able to realize that their situation had changed only after they no longer had the strength to resist. Furthermore, the existence of several strong competitive Muslim states militated against a united response to the Europeans and could even encourage some Muslims to align themselves with the European enemies of others.
In this period, long after Islamdom was once thought to have peaked, centralized absolutism reached its height, aided in part by the exploitation of gunpowder warfare and in part by new ways to fuse spiritual and military authority. Never before had Islamicate ideals and institutions better demonstrated their ability to encourage political centralization or to support a Muslim style of life where there was no organized state, be it in areas where Islam had been long established or in areas where it was newly arrived. The major states of this period impressed contemporary Europeans; in them some of the greatest Islamicate artistic achievements were made. In this period Muslims formed the cultural patterns that they brought into modern times, and adherence to Islam expanded to approximately its current distribution. As adherence to Islam expanded, far-flung cultural regions began to take on a life of their own. The unity of several of these regions was expressed through empire—the Ottomans in southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the eastern Maghrib, Egypt, and Syria; the Ṣafavids in Iran and Iraq; the Indo-Timurids (Mughals) in India. In these empires, Sunni and Shīʿite became identities on a much larger scale than ever before, expressing competition between large populations; simultaneously Shīʿism acquired a permanent base from which to generate international opposition. Elsewhere, less formal and often commercial ties bound Muslims from distant locales; growing commercial and political links between Morocco and the western Sudan produced a trans-Saharan Maghribi Islam; Egyptian Islam influenced the central and eastern Sudan; and steady contacts between East Africa, South Arabia, southern Iran, southwest India, and the southern seas promoted a recognizable Indian Ocean Islam, with Persian as its lingua franca. In fact, Persian became the closest yet to an international language; but the expansion and naturalization of Islam also fostered a number of local languages into vehicles for Islamicate administration and high culture—Ottoman, Chagatai, Swahili, Urdu, and Malay. Everywhere Muslims were confronting adherents of other religions, and new converts often practiced Islam without abandoning their previous practices. The various ways in which Muslims responded to religious syncretism and plurality continue to be elaborated to the present day.
This was a period of major realignments and expansion. The extent of Muslim presence in the Eastern Hemisphere in the early 15th century was easily discernible, but only with difficulty could one have imagined that it could soon produce three of the greatest empires in world history. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Balkans to Sumatra, Muslim rulers presided over relatively small kingdoms; but nowhere could the emergence of a world-class dynasty be predicted. In Andalusia only one Muslim state, Granada, remained to resist Christian domination of the Iberian Peninsula. The Maghrib, isolated between an almost all-Christian Iberia and an eastward-looking Mamlūk Egypt and Syria, was divided between the Marīnids and Ḥafṣids. Where the Sahara shades off into the Sudanic belt, the empire of Mali at Gao was ruled by a Muslim and included several Saharan “port” cities, such as Timbuktu, that were centres of Muslim learning. On the Swahili coast, oriented as always more toward the Indian Ocean than toward its own hinterland, several small Muslim polities centred on key ports such as Kilwa. In western Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula the Ottoman state under Sultan Mehmed I was recovering from its defeat by Timur. Iraq and western Iran were the domains of Turkic tribal dynasties known as the Black Sheep (Kara Koyunlu) and the White Sheep (Ak Koyunlu); they shared a border in Iran with myriad princelings of the Timurid line; and the neo-Mongol, neo-Timurid Uzbek state ruled in Transoxania. North of the Caspian, several Muslim khanates ruled as far north as Moscow and Kazan. In India, even though Muslims constituted a minority, they were beginning to assert their power everywhere except the south, which was ruled by Vijayanagar. In Islamdom’s far southeast, the Muslim state of Samudra held sway in Sumatra, and the rulers of the Moluccas had recently converted to Islam and begun to expand into the southern Malay Peninsula. Even where no organized state existed, as in the outer reaches of Central Asia and into southern China, scattered small Muslim communities persisted, often centred on oases. By the end of this period, Islamdom’s borders had retreated only in Russia and Iberia, but these losses were more than compensated by continuing expansion in Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Almost everywhere this plethora of states had undergone realignment and consolidation, based on experimentation with forms of legitimation and structure.
Ottomans
Continuation of Ottoman rule
After the Ottoman state’s devastating defeat by Timur, its leaders had to retain the vitality of the warrior spirit (without its unruliness and intolerance) and the validation of the Sharīʿah (without its confining independence). In 1453 Mehmed II (the Conqueror) fulfilled the warrior ideal by conquering Constantinople (soon to be known as Istanbul), putting an end to the Byzantine Empire, and subjugating the local Christian and Jewish populations. Even by then, however, a new form of legitimation was taking shape. The Ottomans continued to wage war against Christians on the frontier and to levy and convert (through the devşirme) young male Christians to serve in the sultan’s household and army, but warriors were being pensioned off with land grants and replaced by troops more beholden to the sultan. Except for those forcibly converted, the rest of the non-Muslim population was protected for payment according to the Sharīʿah and the preference of the ulema (the Turkish spelling of ulama), and organized into self-governing communities known as millets. Furthermore, the sultans began to claim the caliphate because they met two of its traditional qualifications: they ruled justly, in principle according to the Sharīʿah, and they defended and extended the frontiers, as in their conquest of Mamlūk Egypt, Syria, and the holy cities in 1516–17. Meanwhile, they began to undercut the traditional oppositional stance of the ulema by building on Seljuq and Mongol practice in three ways: they promoted state-supported training of ulema; they defined and paid holders of religious offices as part of the military; and they aggressively asserted the validity of dynastic law alongside Sharīʿah. Simultaneously, they emphasized their inheritance of Byzantine legitimacy by transforming Byzantine symbols, such as Hagia Sophia (Church of the Divine Wisdom), into symbols for Islam, and by favouring their empire’s European part, called, significantly, Rūm.Reign of Süleyman I
The classical Ottoman system crystallized during the reign of Süleyman I (the Lawgiver; ruled 1520–66). He also pushed the empire’s borders almost to their farthest limits—to the walls of Vienna in the northwest, throughout the Maghrib up to Morocco in the southwest, into Iraq to the east, and to the Yemen in the southeast. During Süleyman’s reign the Ottomans even sent an expedition into the southern seas to help Aceh against the Portuguese colonizers. In theory, Süleyman presided over a balanced four-part structure: the palace household, which contained all of the sultan’s wives, concubines, children, and servants; the bureaucracy (chancery and treasury); the armed forces; and the religious establishment. Important positions in the army and bureaucracy went to the cream of the devşirme, Christian youths converted to Islam and put through special training at the capital to be the sultan’s personal “slaves.” Ulema who acquired government posts had undergone systematic training at the major medreses (madrasas) and so in the Ottoman state were more integrated than were their counterparts in other states; yet they were freeborn Muslims, not brought into the system as slaves of the sultan. The ruling class communicated in a language developed for their use only, Ottoman, which combined Turkic syntax with largely Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It was in this new language that so many important figures demonstrated the range and sophistication of Ottoman interests, such as the historian Mustafa Naima, the encyclopaedist Kâtip Çelebi, and the traveler Evliya Çelebi. The splendour of the Ottoman capital owed not a little to Süleyman’s chief architect, the Greek devşirme recruit Sinan, who transformed the city’s skyline with magnificent mosques and medreses.The extent of Ottoman administration
Even in North Africa and the Fertile Crescent, where Ottoman rule was indirect, the effect of its administration, especially its land surveys and millet and tax systems, could be felt; remnants of the Ottoman system continue to play a role in the political life of modern states such as Israel and Lebanon, despite the fact that Ottoman control had already begun to relax by the first quarter of the 17th century. By then control of the state treasury was passing, through land grants, into the hands of local aʿyān, and they gradually became the real rulers, serving local rather than imperial interests. Meanwhile discontinuance of the devşirme and the rise of hereditary succession to imperial offices shut off new sources of vitality. Monarchs, confined to the palace during their youth, became weaker and participated less in military affairs and government councils. As early as 1630, Sultan Murad IV was presented by one of his advisers with a memorandum explaining the causes of the perceived decline and urging a restoration of the system as it had existed under Süleyman. Murad IV tried to restore Ottoman efficiency and central control, and his efforts were continued by subsequent sultans aided by a talented family of ministers known as the Köprülüs. However, during a war with the Holy League (Austria, Russia, Venice, and Poland) from 1683 to 1699, in which a major attack on Vienna failed (1683), the Ottomans suffered their first serious losses to an enemy and exposed the weakness of their system to their European neighbours. They signed two treaties, at Carlowitz in 1699 and at Passarowitz in 1718, that confirmed their losses in southeastern Europe, signified their inferiority to the Habsburg coalition, and established the defensive posture they would maintain into the 20th century.Ṣafavids
The Ṣafavid state began not from a band of ghāzī warriors but from a local Sufi ṭarīqah of Ardabīl in the Azerbaijan region of Iran. The ṭarīqah was named after its founder, Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn (1252/53–1334), a local holy man. As for many ṭarīqahs and other voluntary associations, Sunni and Shīʿite alike, affection for the family of ʿAlī was a channel for popular support. During the 15th century Shaykh Ṣafī’s successors transformed their local ṭarīqah into an interregional movement by translating ʿAlid loyalism into full-fledged Imāmī Shīʿism. By asserting that they were the Sufi “perfect men” of their time as well as descendants and representatives of the last imam, they strengthened the support of their Turkic tribal disciples (known as the Kizilbash, or “Red Heads,” because of their symbolic 12-fold red headgear). They also attracted support outside Iran, especially in eastern Anatolia (where the anti-Ottoman Imāmī Bekṭāshī ṭarīqah was strong), in Syria, the Caucasus, and Transoxania. The ability of the Iranian Shīʿite state to serve as a source of widespread local opposition outside of Iran was again to become dramatically apparent many years later, with the rise of the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic republic in the late 1970s.Expansion in Iran and beyond
By 1501 the Ṣafavids were able to defeat the Ak Koyunlu rulers of northern Iran, whereupon their teenage leader Ismāʿīl I (ruled 1501–24) had himself proclaimed shah, using that pre-Islamic title for the first time in almost 900 years and thereby invoking the glory of ancient Iran. The Ṣafavids thus asserted a multivalent legitimacy that flew in the face of Ottoman claims to have restored caliphal authority for all Muslims. Eventually, irritant became threat: by 1510, when Ismāʿīl had conquered all of Iran (to approximately its present frontiers) as well as the Fertile Crescent, he began pushing against the Uzbeks in the east and the Ottomans in the west, both of whom already suffered from significant Shīʿite opposition that could easily be aroused by Ṣafavid successes. Having to fight on two fronts was the most difficult military problem any Muslim empire could face. According to the persisting Mongol pattern, the army was a single force attached to the household of the ruler and moving with him at all times; so the size of an area under effective central control was limited to the farthest points that could be reached in a single campaign season. After dealing with his eastern front, Ismāʿīl turned west. At Chāldirān (1514) in northwestern Iraq, having refused to use gunpowder weapons, Ismāʿīl suffered the kind of defeat at Ottoman hands that the Ottomans had suffered from Timur. Yet through the war of words waged in a body of correspondence between Shah Ismāʿīl and the Ottoman sultan Selim I, and through the many invasions from both fronts that occurred during the next 60 years, the Ṣafavid state survived and prospered. Still living off its position at the crossroads of the trans-Asian trade that had supported all previous empires in Iraq and Iran, it was not yet undermined by the gradual emergence of more significant sea routes to the south.The first requirement for the survival of the Ṣafavid state was the conversion of its predominantly Jamāʿī-Sunni population to Imāmī Shīʿism. This was accomplished by a government-run effort supervised by the state-appointed leader of the religious community, the ṣadr. Gradually forms of piety emerged that were specific to Ṣafavid Shīʿism; they centred on pilgrimage to key sites connected with the imams, as well as on the annual remembering and reenacting of the key event in Shīʿite history, the caliph Yazīd I’s destruction of Imam al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ on the 10th of Muḥarram, AH 61 (680 CE). The 10th of Muḥarram, or ʿĀshūrāʾ, already marked throughout Islamdom with fasting, became for Iranian Shīʿites the centre of the religious calendar. The first 10 days of Muḥarram became a period of communal mourning, during which the pious imposed suffering on themselves to identify with their martyrs of old, listened to sermons, and recited appropriate elegiac poetry. In later Ṣafavid times the name for this mourning, taʿziyyeh, also came to be applied to passion plays performed to reenact events surrounding al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom. Through the depths of their empathetic suffering, Shīʿites could help to overturn the injustice of al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom at the end of time, when all wrongs would be righted, all wrongdoers punished, and all true followers of the imams rewarded.
Shah ʿAbbās I
The state also survived because Ismāʿīl’s successors moved, like the Ottomans, toward a type of legitimation different from the one that had brought them to power. This development began in the reign of Ṭahmāsp (1524–76) and culminated in the reign of the greatest Ṣafavid shah, ʿAbbās I (ruled 1588–1629). Since Ismāʿīl’s time, the tribes had begun to lose faith in the Ṣafavid monarch as spiritual leader; now ʿAbbās appealed for support more as absolute monarch and less as the charismatic Sufi master or incarnated imam. At the same time, he freed himself from his unruly tribal emirs by depending more and more on a paid army of converted Circassian, Georgian, and Armenian Christian captives. Meanwhile, he continued to rely on a large bureaucracy headed by a chief minister with limited responsibilities, but, unlike his Ottoman contemporaries, he distanced members of the religious community from state involvement while allowing them an independent source of support in their administration of the waqf system. Because the Shīʿite ulama had a tradition of independence that made them resist incorporation into the military “household” of the shah, ʿAbbās’s policies were probably not unpopular, but they eventually undermined his state’s legitimacy. By the end of the period under discussion, it was the religious leaders, the mujtahids, who would claim to be the spokesmen for the hidden imam. Having shared the ideals of the military patronage state, the Ottoman state became more firmly militarized and religious, as the Ṣafavid, became more civilianized and secular. The long-term consequences of this breach between government and the religious institution were extensive, culminating in the establishment of the Islamic republic of Iran in 1978.ʿAbbās expressed his new role by moving his capital about 1597–98 to Eṣfahān in Fārs, the central province of the ancient pre-Islamic Iranian empires and symbolically more Persian than Turkic. Eṣfahān, favoured by a high and scenic setting, became one of the most beautiful cities in the world, leading its boosters to say that “Eṣfahān is half the world.” It came to contain, often thanks to royal patronage, myriad palaces, gardens, parks, mosques, medreses, caravansaries, workshops, and public baths. Many of these still stand, including the famed Masjed-e Shah, a mosque that shares the great central mall with an enormous covered bazaar and many other structures. It was there that ʿAbbās received diplomatic and commercial visits from Europeans, including a Carmelite mission from Pope Clement XIII (1604) and the adventuring Sherley brothers from Elizabethan England. Just as his visitors hoped to use him to their own advantage, ʿAbbās hoped to use them to his, as sources of firearms and military technology, or as pawns in his economic warfare against the Ottomans, in which he was willing to seek help from apparently anyone, including the Russians, Portuguese, and Habsburgs.
Under Ṣafavid rule, Iran in the 16th and 17th centuries became the centre of a major cultural flowering expressed through the Persian language and through the visual arts. This flowering extended to Ṣafavid neighbour states as well—Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Indo-Timurids. Like other Shīʿite dynasties before them, the Ṣafavids encouraged the development of falsafah as a companion to Shīʿite esotericism and cosmology. Two major thinkers, Mīr Dāmād and his disciple Mullā Ṣadrā, members of the Ishrāqī, or illuminationist, school, explored the realm of images or symbolic imagination as a way to understand issues of human meaningfulness. The Ṣafavid period was also important for the development of Shīʿite Sharīʿah-minded studies, and it produced a major historian, Iskandar Beg Munshī, chronicler of ʿAbbās’s reign.
Decline of central authority
None of ʿAbbās’s successors was his equal, though his state, ever weaker, survived for a century. The last effective shah, Ḥusayn I (1694–1722), could defend himself neither from tribal raiding in the capital nor from interfering mujtahids led by Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī (whose writings later would be important in the Islamic republic of Iran). In 1722, when Maḥmūd of Qandahār led an Afghan tribal raid into Iran from the east, he easily took Eṣfahān and destroyed what was left of central authority.Indo-Timurids (Mughals)
Foundation by Bābur
Although the Mongol-Timurid legacy influenced the Ottoman and Ṣafavid states, it had its most direct impact on Bābur (1483–1530), the adventurer’s adventurer and founder of the third major empire of the period. Bābur’s father, ʿUmar Shaykh Mīrzā (died 1494) of Fergana, was one among many Timurid “princes” who continued to rule small pieces of the lands their great ancestor had conquered. After his father’s death the 11-year-old Bābur, who claimed descent not only from Timur but also from Genghis Khan (on his mother’s side), quickly faced one of the harshest realities of his time and place—too many princes for too few kingdoms. In his youth he dreamed of capturing Samarkand as a base for reconstructing Timur’s empire. For a year after the Ṣafavid defeat of the Uzbek Muḥammad Shaybānī Khān, Bābur and his Chagatai followers did hold Samarkand, as Ṣafavid vassals, but, when the Ṣafavids were in turn defeated, Bābur lost not only Samarkand but his native Fergana as well. He was forced to retreat to Kabul, which he had occupied in 1504. From there he never restored Timur’s empire; rather, barred from moving north or west, he took the Timurid legacy south, to a land on which Timur had made only the slightest impression.When Bābur turned toward northern India, it was ruled from Delhi by the Lodī sultans, one of many local Turkic dynasties scattered through the subcontinent. In 1526 at Pānīpat, Bābur met and defeated the much larger Lodī army. In his victory he was aided, like the Ottomans at Chāldirān, by his artillery. By his death just four years later, he had laid the foundation for a remarkable empire, known most commonly as the Mughal (i.e., Mongol) Empire. It is more properly called Indo-Timurid because the Chagatai Turks were distinct from the surviving Mongols of the time and because Bābur and his successors acknowledge Timur as the founder of their power.
Bābur is also remembered for his memoirs, the Bābur-nāmeh. Written in Chagatai, then an emerging Islamicate literary language, his work gives a lively and compelling account of the wide range of interests, tastes, and sensibilities that made him so much a counterpart of his contemporary, the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).
Reign of Akbar
Süleyman’s and ʿAbbās’s counterpart in the Indo-Timurid dynasty was their contemporary, Akbar (ruled 1556–1605), the grandson of Bābur. At the time of his death, he ruled all of present-day India north of the Deccan plateau and Gondwana and more: one diagonal of his empire extended from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal; the other, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. Like its contemporaries to the west, particularly the Ottomans, this state endured because of a regularized and equitable tax system that provided the central treasury with funds to support the ruler’s extensive building projects as well as his manṣabdārs, the military and bureaucratic officers of the imperial service. For these key servants, Akbar, again like his counterparts to the west, relied largely on foreigners who were trained especially for his service. Like the Janissaries, the manṣabdārs were not supposed to inherit their offices, and, although they were assigned lands to supervise, they themselves were paid through the central treasury to assure their loyalty to the interests of the ruler.Own Your Financial Future.
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Although Akbar’s empire was, like Süleyman’s and ʿAbbās’s, a variation on the theme of the military patronage state, his situation, and consequently many of his problems, differed from theirs in important ways. Islam was much more recently established in most of his empire than in either of the other two, and Muslims were not in the majority. Although the other two states were not religiously or ethnically homogeneous, the extent of their internal diversity could not compare with Akbar’s, where Muslims and non-Muslims of every stripe alternately coexisted and came into conflict—Jacobites (members of the miaphysite Syrian church), Sufis, Ismāʿīlī Shīʿites, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuits, Jews, and Hindus. Consequently, Akbar was forced even more than the Ottomans to confront and address the issue of religious plurality. The option of aggressive conversion was virtually impossible in such a vast area, as was any version of the Ottoman millet system in a setting in which hundreds if not thousands of millets could be defined.
In some ways, Akbar faced in exaggerated form the situation that the Arab Muslims faced when they were a minority in the Nile-to-Oxus region in the 7th–9th centuries. Granting protected status to non-Muslims, even those who were not really “Peoples of the Book” in the original sense, with an organized religion of their own, was legally and administratively justifiable, but, unless they could be kept from interacting too much with the Muslim population, Islam itself could be affected. The power of Sufi ṭarīqahs like the influential Chishtīs, and of the Hindu mystical movement of Guru Nānak, were already promoting intercommunal interaction and cross-fertilization. Akbar’s response was different from that of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maḥdi. Instead of institutionalizing intolerance of non-Muslim influences and instead of hardening communal lines, Akbar banned intolerance and even the special tax on non-Muslims. To keep the ulama from objecting, he tried, for different reasons than had the Ottomans and Ṣafavids, to tie them to the state financially. His personal curiosity about other religions was exemplary; with the help of Abu al-Faḍl, his Sufi adviser and biographer, he established a kind of salon for religious discussion. A very small circle of personal disciples seems to have emulated Akbar’s own brand of tawḥīd-i ilāhī (“divine oneness”). This appears to have been a general monotheism akin to what the ḥanīfs of Mecca, and Muhammad himself, had once practiced, as well as to the boundary-breaking pantheistic awareness of great Sufis like Rūmī and Ibn al-ʿArabī, who was very popular in South and Southeast Asia. Akbar combined toleration for all religions with condemnation of practices that seemed to him humanly objectionable, such as enslavement and the immolation of widows.
Continuation of the empire
For half a century, Akbar’s first two successors, Jahāngīr and Shah Jahān, continued his policies. A rebuilt capital at Delhi was added to the old capitals of Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, site of Shah Jahān’s most famous building, the Taj Mahal. The mingling of Hindu and Muslim traditions was expressed in all the arts, especially in naturalistic and sensuous painting; extremely refined and sophisticated design in ceramics, inlay work, and textiles; and in delicate yet monumental architecture. Shah Jahān’s son, Dārā Shikōh (1615–59), was a Sufi thinker and writer who tried to establish a common ground for Muslims and Hindus. In response to such attempts, a Sharīʿah-minded movement of strict communalism arose, connected with a leader of the Naqshbandī ṭarīqah named Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī. With the accession of Aurangzeb (ruled 1658–1707), the tradition of ardent ecumenicism, which would reemerge several centuries later in a non-Muslim named Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, was replaced with a stricter communalism that imposed penalties on protected non-Muslims and stressed the shah’s role as leader of the Muslim community, by virtue of his enforcing the Sharīʿah. Unlike the Ottoman and Ṣafavid domains, the Indo-Timurid empire was still expanding right up to the beginning of the 18th century, but the empire began to disintegrate shortly after the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, when Ṣafavid and Ottoman power were also declining rapidly.Between the 15th and the 18th century the use of coffee, tea, and tobacco, despite the objections of the ulama, became common in all three empires. Teahouses became important new centres for male socializing, in addition to the home, the mosque, the marketplace, and the public bath. (Female socializing was restricted largely to the home and the bath.) In the teahouses men could practice the already well-developed art of storytelling and take delight in the clever use of language. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa laylah), the earliest extant manuscripts of which date from this period, and the stories of the Arabian hero ʿAntar must have been popular, as were the tales of a wise fool known as Mullah Naṣr al-Dīn in Persian (Nasreddin), Hoca in Turkish, and Juḥā in Arabic. The exploits of Naṣr al-Dīn, sometimes in the guise of a Sufi dervish or royal adviser, often humorously portray centralized absolutism and mysticism:
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