mempires

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Reconsidering the Imperial Past: The Cosmopolitanism of “Tradition”

1.  Zubaida is talking about cosmopolitanism as a class marker.  The cosmopolitanism of the urban educated classes and not the court or aristocracy (theirs was the Persianate culture we've talked about before). 

2. Cosmopolitanism was certainly available if not embraced and practiced by them well before. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the newly educated urban classes, many of them drawn into an expanded administration of the Ottoman empire or the British Raj in India or the reformist periods during the reign of the Qajars in Iran took up a cosmopolitan culture rooted in Post-Enlightenment European ideas and institutions.

3. We get the naturalization in the Middle East and South Asia of rationalist and humanist models of thought prevalent in European intellectual circles.  One of the most prominent physical linkages of Middle Eastern intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century to this budding cosmopolitan culture was their membership in Masonic lodges, in clear allegiance with renowned contemporary and past free thinkers and intellectuals in Europe. 

4. We have a new educated middle class with leisure time who see the cafe and salon as places where they can broaden their horizons, come into contact with new ideas and people (some of this behavior can have an instrumental value too, so it's a place to build networks and expand your business interests, but this kind of cosmopolitanism and cultural hybridity also has an aesthetic value to those engaged in it.

5. But nationalism and Islamism come to undermine this “European-flavored” cosmopolitanism of the 19th and early 20th century.  Islam could be a part of the Middle Eastern cosmopolitans that he talks about it, but more as a civilizational force rather than as a carefully defined set of beliefs and practices.  Exclusivist nationalisms, though, that come to dominate the Middle East and the wider Muslim world especially after the Second World War aspire to a purity and rootedness that works against the hybrid and fleeting cosmopolitanism of earlier generations.

6. Likewise, Islamist ideologies (or politicized versions of Islam that appear in the nationalist period), while they pay lip service to the earlier advocates of Islamic civilization, they don't follow their path.  They have in mind an Islam that's been transformed by the increasingly narrowly defined notions of national identity of the post-WW2 era.  Political Islam looks beyond national borders for support but the Islam it advocates is trying to flatten the experience of religion; it is just as limiting and exclusivist as those national borders.

7. The reality is though that political Islam is also borrowing from European ideas: specifically nationalist ideology.  But if political Islam is going to be an alternative to secular nationalism as a liberating force, especially in a situation where Western influence is seen to continue in the Middle East and in fact is soon seen to be propping up secular nationalist regimes, then you can't acknowledge or even fathom the intellectual debt to European political thought. The end result is that we have perhaps less cross-cultural exchange and more political hostility characterizing the Middle East in the era of nationalism and Islamism than ever before.

8. So the secular nationalist and Islamist age would seem to be at cross purposes but both become obstacles to the survival of the kind of cosmopolitanism that had existed in the late Ottoman period.  This would seem to go against the idea of the modern age as a significant advance over what came before it.  

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European Hegemony and Strategies of Resistance/Accommodation (19th C.)

1. By the 19th century, the multi-polar world of the 16th century where no one country or region could claim any great economic, political, or military supremacy over the rest had disappeared.  Now the European imperial powers held at the very least a demonstrable commercial advantage (often gained through monopoly control of trade in their colonies) and used this advantage to further their dominance in nearly every corner of the globe.  

2. The remaining and increasingly impoverished Muslim powers of the time could do little to stem European imperial expansion, which also looked more and more to territories in Africa and Asia under Muslim rule for acquisition.  

3. Mughal India was now largely under British control.  The Mughal emperors continued on into the 19th century but no more than figureheads for British colonial administrators and trading company officials.  The Caucasus region and the northern Black Sea would fall into Russian hands, further contracting the borders of the Ottoman empire and Qajar Iran.  Much of Central Asia fell to the Russians over the course of the 19th century too.  Afghanistan was definitively cut away from Iran to serve as a buffer between the British and Russian empires.  The French would take Algiers from the Ottomans in 1830 and much of N. Africa over the next few decades.  

4. The French invasion of Egypt (1798-1801), although short-lived, was perhaps the single biggest symbolic blow that the Europeans would deliver to the Ottomans and the larger Muslim world in this period.  It was this invasion that truly shook the confidence of Muslim elites across the Ottoman Empire and further afield in their ability to compete on equal terms with the Europeans, militarily, technologically, and even culturally.  

5. The French invasion of Egypt brought with it a loud call among many politicians and intellectuals for reform of all aspects of the state and society--and a call for reform along Western lines.  There was a growing belief that only when the "East" becomes more like the "West" will it be able to reassert itself on the global stage.  Of course, the European imperial drive into Africa and Asia would encourage this kind of thinking with further European colonization increasingly presented in paternalistic terms.  What the Europeans were bringing the "backward" people of the "East" was not domination and enslavement but "civilization."

6. Consequently, many Western-trained historians of the "Middle East" have pointed to the invasion of Egypt as the beginning of the "modern" era in Middle Eastern history.

7. The 19th century, then, is a difficult period in the history of Muslim empires---one characterized by both resistance and accommodation in the face of global European hegemony.  To be sure, some indigenous political and economic elites who aided the expansion of European empire commercially and even militarily stood to gain a great deal.  For example, British empire in India could only be sustained through the support of segments of the local population.  By the same token, some Muslim elites also accommodated the entry of new Western ideas and institutions into their lands but often with the purpose of turning these ideas and institutions against the European aggressor.  Of course these Westernizing reformers could meet great resistance from those benefiting from the current situation (or face resistance from those who saw any change whatsoever as a threat to their entrenched interests).  Some of these reforms would also be opposed by those who claimed that the answers to resisting the Europeans' steady advance were to be found in their own culture and faith---that the "essence" which had fueled the growth of Muslim empire in the past was within them but had been lost and must be regained.  Others claimed that whatever civilizational advantage that the Christian West may have now was one gained from the genius of the Muslim past---one from which current Muslims had strayed.

8. These disparate groups and strategies would each have their moment or moments during the course of the 19th century.  The history of the Muslim world, in any case, would from this period be inextricably marked by its encounter with the Christian West.  

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Successors to the Safavids and Mughals (18th-19th C.)

1. As the Safavid empire was petering out, the Mughals too were experiencing a series of crises, some self-inflicted and some external.  

2. The self-inflicted crises were often related to succession struggles, where courtiers were pitted against one another and against the crown and Mughal vassals fell out with the empire and attempted to navigate a more independent course for themselves.  These rebellious former allies now engaged the Mughals in costly wars that further contributed to the empire's weakness.  

3. The external crises were partly related to the growing presence of Europeans and, from the 1760s onwards, especially the British in India.  However, the raids of Afghan clans into N. India from the 1720s until the 1760s and even more significantly, the sacking of the capital Delhi by the new Iranian monarch Nader Shah Afshar (r. 1729-1747) in 1739 were equally devastating to Mughal fortunes.  Nader Shah was himself a member of one of the Qizilbash clans and at least initially claimed to rule in the name of the Safavids.  His military prowess also allowed him to briefly resurrect the Safavid Empire, with its boundaries surpassing even its greatest geographic extent under Shah Abbas I (r. 1587-1629).  Mughal weakness, then, did not necessarily suggest the weakness of all dynasties and their armies in the region.

4. In the long term, though, the indigenous forces struggling for supremacy in Iran and the Indian subcontinent were rarely in a position of strength vis-a-vis the European powers (Russians in Iran and British in India).

5.  The endless Russian southward advance does not face much in the way of serious opposition on either the Iranian or Ottoman front.  Only Nader Shah manages to hold the frontier but his death in 1747 would throw Iran back into chaos.  There were short reprieves but political fragmentation was the rule of the day until the emergence of another Qizilbash dynasty, the Qajars, in the 1780s.  The Qajar dynasty would take full control of Iran in 1794.  The consolidation of rule under the Qajars, however, did not hold back the Russians who inflicted several costly defeats on the Qajars during the course of the 19th century.

6.  Likewise, the British would continue to accumulate power and territory in a more systematic fashion in the final decades of the 18th century and into the 19th century.  In fact, the British took the Mughal capital Delhi in 1803 and made the Mughal emperor their puppet king.

7.  By the beginning of the 19th century, then, it was apparent to anyone who was paying attention that the European powers had the surviving Muslim empires on their back foot.  Political and intellectual elites from Istanbul to Calcutta would become entirely consumed with devising ways of dealing with and resisting this foreign domination.  

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International Commerce and Political Decline (17th-18th C.), Pt. 1 and 2

1. The Gunpowder Empires had emerged as regional and global powers at around the same time.  Their relations were certainly defined by rivalry, whether military or cultural or economic.  Yet their mutual prosperity was often guaranteed through their links and relations with one another.  The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires were very much at the center of the East-West trade between Asia and Europe.  

2.  Scholars have viewed their eclipse in the 18th and 19th centuries especially as tied to these larger global processes.  We can in a sense talk about these empires as "pre-globalized".

3. The decline of the Ottomans, Safavids, and the Mughals is not necessarily steady and irreversible, as some earlier historians have made it out to be.  Larger global economic processes contribute to their decline in the long rune but these processes also have effects on some European powers too.  It is not a matter of religion or culture, then, necessarily holding back the Muslim empires in this period.  

4. In fact, there is strong tendency in the historiography of the Gunpowder empires to think of their decline as due to some inherent fault in their make-up---with Oriental despotism the common condition given for their decline.  However, we see that elites during the political and economic crises of the 17th and 18th centuries understand themselves as having a greater stake in the empire than ever before---that it's not simply the empire of the Ottoman royal house.

5. Similarly, efforts to further draw in elements of the subject population into imperial service provides the lower orders with a greater stake in the empire too but brings with it a new set of problems that helps to set off further crises.

6. The reasons for decline and marginalization are many but most can in some way be traced to the discovery of the New World and new trade routes to the East that bring with it massive economic and political dislocations to the "Old World''.  The initial effect of the new European mercantilist powers, however, is positive in terms of generating revenue for the Gunpowder Empires but as economies of scale grow and the effects of the commercial treaties with European representatives become clear, then the trading companies of the European powers and their local clients impoverish the empires and their taxpaying populations, making defense of their territories more difficult which contribute to further economic and territorial contraction.

7. The end result is imperial collapse, sooner or later.

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Competing Powers (17th-19th C.)

1. For the rulers of the Gunpowder Empires, it was certainly important to project their power over their subjects.  We have read about and discussed the various ways in which the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals attempted to do this.  We have also discussed the ways in which the heads of these empires also tried to rein in their courtiers, generals, and governors.

2. Often of equal importance to these rulers was projecting their power and majesty over their rivals.  This could be done militarily but also symbolically (through art and architecture, for example).

3. One's strength could also be demonstrated through diplomacy.  Powerful allies made you more powerful too.  Alliances could bring war but they could also signal the end of war.

4. In the end, war and conquest continued to define state-building in the era of the Gunpowder Empires.  The non-Muslim rivals of the Gunpowder Empires operated under similar conditions.  The court and military still made up the state apparatus.  The effectiveness of your war machine determined the power of your state and your ability to govern and tax your subjects.  

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Ordinary Life in the Gunpowder Empires

1. Documenting everyday life is not easy.  People don't exactly keep detailed records of the mundane details of their lives.  We can often only speak in generalities about everyday life in the Gunpowder Empires.

2. Architecture and public building can often be a good way to get at how people lived in the past.  There is also usually a paper trail (e.g. court documents, tax records, endowment registers) that can give us a sense of how those building projects helped to organize public life.

3. Public building projects, either preserved in the modern-day city fabric or only in documents, can even give us a sense of the prevailing religious beliefs and religious communities of a place.  For example, if there are many churches, then we can speculate about the number of Christian inhabitants in a particular city or region.

4. Many of the major cities of the contemporary Middle East and South Asia have a lengthy past (e.g. Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Cairo, Istanbul, Delhi; Tehran, Ankara, Beirut, and Mumbai, on the other hand, are relatively young cities).  While modernist regimes in the 20th century have done a great deal of damage to the historic legacy of these ancient cities, often in the name of "modernization," they have nevertheless left behind for us clues about the rhythms of life in the past.  This is one of the topics of the Faroqhi reading for this week.

5. The second main topic of the Faroqhi reading is something that's easier to piece together about the lives of ordinary people in the Gunpowder Empires: the special or extraordinary occasions in their lives (public festivals and ceremonies).  Here we have substantial documentation especially in the form of royal chronicles, illustrations, and travelers' accounts.

6. Of perhaps particular interest are the people on the ground who were often responsible for organizing public festivals and ceremonies in the urban centers.  Here again, we return to the street youth gangs about whom we've talked a great deal before.  These men were often connected in some way to the bazaar.  The neighborhood coffeehouse, gymnasium, or tavern were their hang-outs.  They were also connected to entertainer guilds, who included clowns, acrobats, and wrestlers.  These entertainers were of course front and center in any public festival or ceremony.  Although they played such an important role in the public life of the cities in the Gunpowder Empires, they were, by virtue of their "professions" and their generally loutish behavior, often viewed as disreputable sorts.

7. Their female equivalents in the Safavid empire, as Rudi Matthee tells us, were the prostitutes, dancing girls, and courtesans.  But similar social actors could be found in the Mughal and Ottoman empires too.  Their lack of virtue, however, allowed these women to mix freely in male company in a way that "honorable" women could not.  Ironically, they were empowered and independent in a way that no other women were and as such were often considered to be "honorary" men.

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Muslim Courtly Life in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Pt. 2

1. In the histories of the three Gunpowder empires, we have seen each move from an initial empire-building phase when political power was more diffuse and contingent to a empire-stabilization phase when attempts were made (at least) to centralize power in the court and the capital and to eliminate or marginalize sources of political volatility that had once been so important to the birth of the empire.

2. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, we see the stifling of the ghazi, or holy warrior, spirit that had propelled the imperial venture in the first place and a turn towards religious orthodoxy and more conventional, grounded administrative structures.  More sober ulema take the place of wild-eyed holy men as the “official” representatives of Ottoman Islam.  More importantly, the ulema are empowered by and obligated to the Ottoman ruler.  Previously, the Ottoman ruler had gained power and legitimacy through his association with the Sufi shaykh or holy man and his band of devotees.

3. While the circumstances may differ depending on the individual empire that we’re talking about, we have in any case a general trend towards the greater institutionalization of political and religious power over time in the Gunpowder empires.

4.  The centralization and bureaucratization of power does stem political volatility but it doesn’t end it.  The general result was that power struggles now moved closer to home.  If in the past we had contenders to the throne organizing themselves against the center out in the provinces (e.g. the Ottoman prince Bayazid against Sulayman and his other son Selim II) or even outside the empire (e.g. the Mughal crown prince Humayun seeking aid from the Safavids), by the end of the 16th century, the jostling over dynastic succession was now taking place largely in the palace halls and barracks.  In fact, the daily decision-making of the sitting ruler was now more “collective” than perhaps ever before with competition between the mothers, wives, and the slave generals and administrators of the monarch making its mark on all of the activities of the court.

5. The palace may have become the definitive center of power in the empire by the 17th century but not necessarily the ruler.

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An interesting Twitter thread about American newspapers’ intense interest in Safavid Iran and the end of that empire in the early 18th century. 

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Muslim Courtly Life in the 16th and 17th Centuries

1. We have talked already about a rough societal divide in the Gunpowder Empires between the elites (askeri, khass) and the lower orders (reaya, `amm).  During the next four class sessions, we’re going to concern ourselves with the lives and interests of members of the elite, especially the imperial courts.  We will then turn to the lives of ordinary subjects.

2. We have focused in this class largely on the ideas and institutions that make up the Gunpowder empires rather than on strict chronology.  But our particular point of focus on the 16th and 17th centuries should not give you the impression that these ideas and institutions are static, unchanging things.  The defining ideas and practices of these empires are changing over time but this change does not usually involve wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch.  In our study of the history of the Muslim world from its beginnings, we have seen how important the past has been to social, political, and cultural configurations in the present.  And this phenomenon is certainly not unique to Muslims.

3.  We can talk about social, political, and cultural change in the Gunpowder empires as building on the existing base of ideas and institutions that had characterized the world in which these empires operated.  Seldom is anything from the past lost.  Frequently, the “new” is the recuperation and/or reconfiguration of ideas and practices rooted in the past.  

4. As we have discussed before, reaching out to the “glorious” past to make claims of your current greatness was part of the legitimizing projects of empires (Muslim or otherwise).  The Umayyads, for example, looked especially to the Byzantines as their model for greatness—drawing on the Byzantines for their coinage, royal architecture, and administration.  But they didn’t simply adopt things from the Byzantines, they adapted them to suit their particular purposes, to create their own legacy, and to claim superiority to those whom they had replaced in power.

5. By the time the Gunpowder Empires emerge, the “base” imperial culture in much of the Muslim world had been for several centuries what some scholars have called “Perso-Islamic” (see Colin Mitchell’s article, for example).  This political and cultural “base” involved had successive adaptations of pre-Islamic Persian institutions of kingship by largely Turkic-speaking Muslim rulers since roughly the 10th century AD.  Canfield calls this (predominantly) elite culture “Turko-Persian Islamicate” rather than Perso-Islamic.  To my way of thinking, his term is more accurate than “Perso-Islamic” (why do I say that? I would appreciate your comments on this)

6.  Still others have called this elite culture “Persianate,” meaning that while it may be rooted in a Persian lettered tradition, Persian is not necessarily the language of its transmission.  Neither does this culture simply radiate outwards from Iran to other parts of the Muslim world.  Elites and even the general population who engage with Persianate culture outside Iran have not necessarily seen it as artificial cultural form, as necessarily an imposition from outside.  Aspects of it have long been internalized and naturalized, so that the issue of “origins” is given little thought.  It has been a shared, cosmopolitan culture that belongs as much to its practitioners in India, Central Asia, or in the Ottoman realms as it does to those in Iran.  The use of the word Persianate here is not unlike the way we use “Italianate” to describe a cultural moment that drew on older “Italian” models but didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Italy or Italians.

7. The Turko-Persian Islamicate or Persianate culture of the Gunpowder Empire courts involves adaptation and translation from the past.  There are strong points of unity between the courtly cultures of these empires but there are also divergences.  And over time, there are greater divergences as these courtly cultures develop independently of one another.  So it may have roots in the past but it is very much a product of its times.

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Re-framing Religious and Political Authority (16th-17th C.)

1. Just as the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals are helping to re-think warfare in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, they are also busy re-thinking the character of empire itself.  As already discussed, new gunpowder weapons and war strategies are at least partly responsible for the re-configurations of religious and political authority in these empires.  

2. The rulers (and closest advisers) of each empire went about re-configuring religious and political authority somewhat differently and produced somewhat different results.  Nevertheless, there was some overlap in their methods and outcomes.

3. The administrative systems of the Gunpowder empires resemble the systems of the great empires that preceded them but they are also more tightly controlled and centralized than their predecessors.  The emperor in turn wields more power than any of his predecessors.  This expanded power can even color the religious claims that the emperor makes about himself.  

4. But we must always be careful not to fall into the trap of assuming that the so-called "absolute monarch" rules absolutely.  A more expansive and centralized bureaucracy means more power to the bureaucrats, courtiers, and provincial elites too.  A more powerful army means more power to the military commanders.  Alliances, power-sharing, rivalries, and rebellions still characterize politics in this era, perhaps moreso than ever before.  

5. Even those seemingly without any power (i.e. the commonfolk, peasantry) make their voices heard loud and clear in the courts in the 16th and 17th centuries---often in response to the further extension of the state into their everyday lives.

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Gunpowder and Military Technology (16th and 17th C.)

1. Many historians have labeled the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids the “Gunpowder Empires” because they are supposedly the first Muslim empires to incorporate gunpowder weapons into their arsenals on a large scale.

2. These empires are said to introduce lasting changes in war strategy, military recruitment and organization, and even urban design to the Muslim world and beyond.  

3. Gunpowder warfare also dramatically extends the political reach of these empires and encourages the gradual transition that we’ve already talked about from the diffuse Turko-Mongol political institutions that had previously dominated the Muslim world to a far more centralized and bureaucratized state than had ever been created before.  

4. The new war technology is not taken up in a uniform fashion by these “Gunpowder Empires” nor does it have an identical impact everywhere it appears.  Nevertheless, it provides those with gunpowder weapons a seemingly unassailable military edge against those without them.

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Heirs to Timur, Caesar, Alexander, Darius, and Muhammad (16th-17th C.)

1. The moment that the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals establish themselves as empires, they are immediately forced to consider how to strengthen and consolidate their rule.  

2. A key element to the strategies of the rulers in these three empires is to weaken any challenge to their authority, including from among their own family and military elites.  Historians have claimed that these strategies contribute to the centralization of authority in the hands of the ruler and loyal supporters.  This centralization of authority also increasingly sets apart these empires from their predecessors’ more decentralized (and supposedly more unstable) rule.  This reframing of political (and religious) power will be a major topic of our readings and class discussions over the next week.  

3. Thus, an early step taken by all three courts is to undermine or marginalize the elite classes that helped them to reach their position in the first place.  In the Ottoman empire, we get the weakening of the Turkic-speaking ghazi warriors in favor of slave soldiers.  In the Safavids, we get the weakening of the fanatical Qizilbash supporters of the Safavid line in favor of a policy of ‘divide and rule’ over the Qizilbash clans and the recruitment of Georgian slave soldiers.  In the Mughal empire, we get the recruitment of Hindu elites (Rajput princely class) who become effectively partners in rule with the Mughal emperors.  

4. Power consolidation through symbolic means is another strategy adopted by all three empires.  We get the use of art, architecture, history-writing, and even royal titles that highlight and reference the ruler’s links to the last great world conqueror, Timur, but also to previous great empires including the Roman, Alexandrian, and Persian empires.  The claimed links of the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids to the Persian empires of past is perhaps where we see the overlaps in this strategy most clearly.  They are all claiming to be the spiritual heir of the great rulers of ancient Persia.  They are also part of the Islamization of the Persian ‘just ruler’ model, each claiming their authority on the basis of their commitment to just rule after the supposed fashion of Khusraw Anushirvan (r. 531-579), who also saw himself as the spiritual heir of Darius the Great and Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

5.  In turn, the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid rulers’ claims to just rule endows them with a religious legitimacy that they wield to ensure their authority over the clergy and other religious leaders as well.

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Origins and Rise of the Gunpowder Empires, Pt. 2

1. The three Gunpowder empires had divergent beginnings but the common threads between them would appear to be a moving away from C. Asian tribal nomadic notions of life (with their leaders often settled, city-dwelling people), from tribal nomadic notions of warfare (with their nickname indicating an increasing reliance on artillery and pitched battles), and from tribal notions of political authority that had prevailed under the Mongol Ilkhans and their immediate successors throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

2. The Ottomans succeed precisely because of their ability to draw on different points of unity than tribal affinities as well as the principle of unigeniture that goes against the Turko-Mongolian tribal institutions of shared sovereignty (best embodied in the quriltay council of tribal elders and the open-to-all struggles over succession)

3. Undoubtedly, notions of tribe and clan were important to the rise of the Safavids.  The Qizilbash (“Red-head”) Turkic-speaking tribes of E. Anatolia and NW Iran propped up the early Safavid state and its military machine. The Safavids even linked themselves through marriage to some of the more powerful Qizilbash tribes. But Qizilbash support for the Safavid political mission was primarily rooted in their religious devotion to the head of this Sufi order, and kinship relations only secondarily. Moreover, as we will find out, once the Safavid state is established, the Safavid rulers almost immediately began to undercut the power of the “volatile” Qizilbash tribes and gradually demobilized their Sufi disciples by de-emphasizing their role as Sufi pirs or spiritual guides.

4. The Mughals in India, originally from Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) were actually of Mongol blood (hence the title “Mughal,” which in Persian and Arabic means “Mongol”). The founder of the line, Zahir al-Din Babur (1483-1530), could trace his descent to Genghis Khan through Timur. In fact, the Mughals were actually known by their rivals as the Timurids of India (e.g. in Persian, their title is “Timuriyan-i Hind”). Babur’s rise was certainly due to the power struggle among the various Mongol claimants to the Timurid throne. Luck (or fate) is what drove Babur into N. India in search of his own empire as his distant kinsmen, the Shaybanid Uzbeks, took his former territories in C. Asia and later had their own progress further south blunted by the Safavids. Mongolian-style succession struggles, then, plague Babur and plague his sons as well.  But over time, his descendants would in time adjust to their new environment and altogether give up their reliance on tribal institutions including the tribal appanage system.

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The final qawwali from Barsaat ki Raat/One Rainy Night (1960, Dir: P. L. Santoshi).  The film concerns a forbidden love story between the poet and qawwali singer Aman and the police commissioner’s daughter, Shabnam.  There is a third spoke to this love story in the form of Shama, with whom Aman performs on the qawwali circuit, who happens to be secretly in love with him but learns in this scene of Aman’s feelings for Shabnam.  The scene is highly emotional, as is the song, building its tension with the repetition of “Yeh Ishq hai,” which means “It is love [that drives the world/that is our true religion].”  The viewer can decide to which “love” the singers are referring: to the love of Aman for Shabnam, or Shama for Aman, or the love of God.  Perhaps all three!  The final verses are particularly poignant and speak to the religious syncretism of Sufism, as Aman claims that the religion of love belongs to Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists alike. 

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Origins and Rise of the Gunpowder Empires (14th-16th C.)

1. Many historians have claimed that the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires signals a period (however brief) of cultural and political efflorescence in the Muslim world.

2. This efflorescence is said to coincide with the emergence of Christian Europe from an extended period of decline, with the Renaissance, the Reconquista, and the Voyages of Discovery heralding a new age (that eventually marginalizes the Gunpowder empires and much of the rest of the world).

3. Such events in the Muslim world and in Europe have often been treated separately by modern historians, in part because students of medieval Europe were often by necessity (and sometimes by choice) only students of medieval Europe.  Likewise, scholars working on the Muslim world stuck to histories produced for Muslim courts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish for their sources on this period.  Transregional or global approaches to history have been relatively thin on the ground.

4. It is hard to deny the Muslim character of these empires.  In fact, in the case of the Safavid empire, it springs from a Muslim religious movement in NW Iran/E. Anatolia.  The relations between these empires in their early stages is also difficult to overlook.  In fact, the shape that each of these empires takes in its early days is in part a product of its interactions with one or more of the other Gunpowder empires.

5. Yet, the Gunpowder empires are also, as we will see, a product of their times, a product of their world---one that extends far beyond the boundaries of the Muslim world proper.  It is perhaps easiest to see that with the Ottoman Empire, given its vast holdings in Europe, but events taking place in the wider world matter a great deal to all three of these empires.

6. The Gunpowder empires are a continuation of now well-entrenched imperial institutions and practices in the Muslim world that have their roots in pre-Islamic times and most immediately in the "Mediterranean" empires of the Byzantines and Persians.  At the same time, the Gunpowder empires are also the agents and patients of a "new" world coming into being that is quickly moving beyond the idea of the Mediterranean as the center of the world. The question of how these empires connect up with the Muslim past while forging a new path as part of rapidly changing world is what will guide us over the next week and half of class.

[mempires]

The Turko-Persian Timurids and their Rivals (14th C.)

1. The Mongol Ilkhanate (1256-1335) had an enormous impact on the Muslim East for an empire that did not extend beyond five generations.  Mongol rule brought with it cultural influences from and expanded trade with China.  It brought ever larger waves of migration from the steppes of Central Asia.  It also laid waste to the Abbasid caliphate and its “client states”.  What remained of the Abbasid line sought refuge in Cairo, with the Mamluks now claiming to be true leaders of the larger Muslim world.

2.  The early Mongol Ilkhans themselves did little to endear their new Muslim subjects to their rule.  The Mongol invasion of C. and W. Asia involved the use of horrific violence against civilian populations, especially in Eastern Iran.  This was more military strategy than bloodlust or anti-Muslim feeling .  The massacre of entire towns and cities was meant to terrify communities lying further west into unconditional surrender and thus ease the progress of their conquests.  Such tactics also resulted in massive depopulation, with many setting out for the Indian subcontinent.  Similar migrations of both the high and low-born from Iran and Iraq had occurred during the Arab Muslim conquests in the 7th century.  Then it was largely Zoroastrians fleeing after the collapse of their imperial patrons, the Sassanians.  Now, Muslims headed east with the collapse of the Muslim petty kingdoms and, of course, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

3.  Yet, whatever initial hostility the Ilkhans may have had for their subjects, it would quickly dissipate.  The histories that we have so far read all make this point: that the nomadic invaders are inevitably won over by the sedentary culture and society over which they rule.  They become “civilized” and lose their nomadic ways.  There is certainly some truth to this.  After settling in NW Iran (Azerbaijan), the Mongol rulers and most of their men would eventually convert to Islam.  They employed Muslim (largely Iranian) clerks and administrators and they themselves became immersed in Persian courtly traditions that had been revived and adapted to a Muslim setting by the Turkic-speaking and ethnically Iranian petty rulers that they had replaced.  They too became patrons of the new Persian literature, of the arts of illustration and calligraphy, and carried out royal building projects in line with those of their immediate predecessors but on a grander scale.  The Mongols contributed to the efflorescence of a “Turko-Persian” courtly culture in C. and W. Asia, which had preceded them and would reach even greater heights after them.  They encouraged popular Muslim religious movements that would continue on long after their eclipse.  At the same time, the Mongols did not entirely turn their backs on their older nomadic ways, which both helped and hurt their rule.

4. Nevertheless, the Mongols’ (partial?) acculturation meant that they too would become part of royal lore in the Muslim East (not unlike the way that Alexander the Great had through his policies of cultural accommodation built a universal empire and become just as heroic a figure in the “East” as he was in the “West”).  Proof of noble Mongol lineage was a path to rule just as much as proof of descent from the Prophet’s family could bolster claims of religious and political authority.

5. The fracturing of the Ilkhanate did not mean the end of Mongol rule in the Muslim East.  The various petty kingdoms that emerged with the death of the final Mongol Ilkhan, Abu Sa'id (r. 1316-1335), were ruled either by descendants of the Mongol ruling family or by former Turkic speaking allies claiming their independence.  This temporary power vacuum also allowed for the rise of the Ottoman Turks on the Anatolian frontier.  Political fragmentation characterized C. and W. Asia until the rise of Timur Barlas Khan (1336-1405, r. 1370-1405), who claimed descent from a minor branch of the Mongol imperial line.  Starting in C. Asia, he set out to recreate the world empire of his ancestor, Genghis (Changiz in Persian/Jankiz in Arabic) Khan (1162-1227).  He would eventually take the name Timur “Gurkhani” or “Gurkani,” derived from the Mongol title “Gurkhan” meaning “Lord of the World” previously attributed to Genghis Khan and his successors.

6. Timur would in short order create a massive empire encompassing most of today’s Middle East and Central Asia.  His empire, however, would not survive him intact.  Nevertheless, Timur and his political vision would have an enormous impact, positive and negative, on the “Gunpowder” Empires that would follow it.

[mempires]

Turko-Mongol Invasions and Steppe Migrations (13th C.)

1. The Mongol invasions, beginning in the 1220s, were only the latest and greatest round of migrations of Mongolian and Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples into Central and Western Asia.

2. In fact, the Turko-Mongolian armies that continued their steady advance across these two regions until 1260 did so often at the expense of Turkic-speaking Muslim rulers and armies.  Only the Mamluk rulers of Syria and Egypt (1250-1517) stood in the way of their complete domination of the area.

3. The Mongols faced the same dilemma of adapting to a new social and political milieu that earlier arriving Turkic peoples and, before them, the invading Arabs had faced.  More specifically, they were faced with the question of how do you square notions of diffuse clan authority with long established ideas of hereditary kingship common to the former territories of the Persians and Byzantines?  Previous to the Mongols, the answer had been to largely adopt (and even Islamicize) those older ideas of kingship.

4. The Mongol invasions sent a jolt through the Muslim world (and well beyond).  It was a time of massive social and political dislocation.  It brought about a definitive end to the Abbasid caliphate and any pretensions to a universal Muslim empire.  But the Mongol ruling elite and their armies were equally transformed by their encounter with now well-entrenched Muslim societies in Central and West Asia.  

5. Many modern historians, largely relying on chroniclers hostile to the Mongols writing in Mamluk Syria and Egypt or in Europe, have labeled the Mongol era as a dark and hopeless one in the history of the Muslim world.  But it was also a period that ushered in a new set of cultural and intellectual influences from further East (specifically China) and helped to expand the Muslim faith into the Eurasian steppe.  Of equal importance, the Mongol era set the stage in the 14th and 15th centuries for the emergence of the Gunpowder Empires (Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal), whose study will occupy us for much of what remains in the term.