The Vocabularies of Islamic Sovereignty: Fashioning Authority in the Medieval Maghrib and Mashriq
Panel 155, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 16 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel takes a comparative look at the vocabularies of sovereignty used by medieval Muslim rulers between the Mashriq and the Maghrib. It aims to disrupt the regional division between the two zones by considering parallel and shared developments in the languages of political rule. As studies on the diverse political and social worlds of premodern Muslim kings proliferate, this panel aims to engage in a horizontal conversation that considers how universal discourses were localized and adapted as specific articulations of personal propaganda.
The first paper starts with the Umayyads of al-Andalus in the 10th century. Through a study of historiographical and adab works, it examines how they highlighted different facets of their lineage and aspects of the distant past, such as the martyrdom of 'Uthman b. 'Affan (d. 656 CE), to argue for legitimacy against the rival Fatimid and Abbasid caliphates. It considers the novel ways through which they adapted differing notions of kinship to anchor their rule in Arabo-Islamic cultural norms.
The second paper looks at the Ilkhanate in the 13th and 14th centuries. It situates the theological treatises composed by the Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) into the context of inter-religious court debates that took place under the reign of Öljeitü. This paper considers how Öljeitü's interjections in these discussions speak to his performance of Chingissid immanentist kingship, and how Rashid al-Din contextualizes and converts his Inner Asian performance into an Iranian and Islamic context.
The third paper considers the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in the 14th century. It explores how an intellectual-political network of Maghribi secretaries, chancellors, and statesmen effectively reworked older theories of caliphate to forego the need for a universal caliph. They furthered a vision wherein every king was endowed with divine mandate and acted as God's representatives on earth. These claims were then supported by elaborate genealogies connecting these kings to not only the Ansar of Medina, but even the pre-Islamic Himyarite kings of Arabia.
The final paper looks at a king of the Beylik period in 14th century Anatolia, Burhan al-Din Ahmad (d. 1398 CE). It argues that his lack of royal lineage led to his adaptation of the political thought of the Andalusian Sufi, Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240 CE), in order to articulate a model of kingship that privileged performance over lineage. Through this, Burhan al-Din was recast as a successor to Muhammad without the trappings of caliphal ideology.
This paper explores the role of language and poetic production in the political project of a scholar-turned-king in eastern Anatolia, Burhan al-Din Ahmad of Sivas (d. 1398 CE/800 AH). Burhan al-Din’s legacy is preserved in four manuscripts from his rule, three authored by him (two in Arabic, one in Old Anatolian Turkish) and one (in Persian) authored by his courtier, ‘Aziz b. Ardashir al-Astarabadi. In these works, an understanding of ritual performance based on the thought of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240) animates the entirety of his imperial project, recasting the twin pillars of Persianate kingship, “feasting and fighting” (bazm u razm) in a cosmology wherein justice is the equilibrium between God’s beauty and majesty, manifest in the presence of the King, “God’s shadow.”
By using Ibn al-‘Arabi, who privileged political performance over dynastic legitimacy, Burhan al-Din gained a means through which to articulate a legitimacy that connected his rule directly to Muhammad himself, sidestepping his own lack of lineage. This paper argues that the multilingual nature of the manuscripts produced at his court was crucial to this process. By demonstrating his court’s mastery over language, he performed the new metaphysics of the late medieval period. This is most clear in his divan, one of the earliest written works of Turkic court poetry, wherein his weaving of a “new garment” imitated Muhammad’s miracle of the Qur’an, transforming him into a true “King of Islam.” In his own words, this performance gathered together both Muhammad and Jamshid, archetypal prophet and archetypal king, within Burhan al-Din’s own “presence,” here understood as the itinerant court that followed him in feast and fight. By melding prophethood and kingship in a single presence, his project illustrates an early crystallization of post-caliphal post-Ilkhanid Islamic sovereignty. This paper concludes by arguing that the multilingual nature of Burhan al-Din’s project and its insistence on the king’s own linguistic production foreshadowed the new strategies and languages of political rule that would be mobilized in the Timurid age and beyond in the Eastern Islamic World.
ooking at the map of the Islamic world in the tenth century AD, multiple iterations of “kinship” present themselves, as three “cousins”— the Abbasids, the Fatimids and the Umayyads— divided the mulk into competing caliphates. In its ubiquity and fluidity, kinship, alerts us to how processes of legitimization in the three caliphates utilized shared claims, but also, to how each, separately and in competition with one another, advanced unique elements in their caliphal model.
Of these, the paper focuses the Umayyads of al-Andalus, who almost two centuries after their rule in Damascus ended (in 750AD), announced a new caliphate in Córdoba (in 929AD). The Umayyads highlighted their Qurash?/Umayyad, and at times Marw?nid, lineage. They carefully reused the argument of first Umayyad caliph in Damascus, namely, their kinship to “the martyred” ruler ‘Uthman b. ‘Aff?n (d. 656AD), a Qurash? elite, and twice the son-in-law of the Prophet, for whom they renewed the initial pledge of deferred rescue (nusra) and revenge (thar?t) by building a maqs?r? in the Great Mosque of Córdoba, housing a copy of the Qur’?n, said to have four drops of his blood.
Consulting four adab and historiographical works, the paper looks at the Umayyad venture as a product of the tenth century, and finds that kinship, as an argument for political legitimacy, was understood as a framework for constructing a model of rulership within which intimate adherence to Arabo-Islamic cultural norms was claimed. By doing so, I further show, kinship helped anchor novel features the Umayyads introduced to the caliphal model by conflating their Umayyad lineage with selective political and cultural genealogies.
Throughout medieval history, the writings of court secretaries, chancellors and other scholar-officials sought to rationalize dynastic sovereignty and harmonize it with notions of religio-political legitimacy that were in currency. Political treatises, historical chronicles, and poetry were the primary means through which particular norms of sovereignty and visions of legitimate royal authority were communicated. The frequent exchanges (through the medium of epistles) among intellectual networks of scholar-ministers, the production of coinage and the construction of monumental inscriptions across the royal palaces, colleges and other structures became the channels for the dissemination of these ideas.
This paper utilizes texts (both edited and unpublished manuscripts), numismatic and epigraphic evidence to examine the various strategies of royal legitimation employed within the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (1238–1492), the last surviving Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. It explores the emergence of new conceptions of royal and quasi-caliphal sovereignty, embodied by the ubiquity of the title “God’s caliph” (khal?fat all?h), in the writings of one particular intellectual-political network of Andalusi and North African secretaries, chancellors and statesmen during the 14th century. The usage of the caliphal title challenged the classical Islamic notion that sultans and emirs were invested with legitimate authority by a universal, symbolic caliph. Rather, kings, by virtue of their sovereign authority and kingship, were endowed with a divine mandate to rule and were effectively God’s representatives on earth. Within the context of the kingdom of Granada, the emphasis on caliphal authority was complemented by elaborate genealogical claims, which simultaneously connected the Nasrid dynasty to the Ansar of Medina and the pre-Islamic Himyarite kings of Arabia. While examining the relationship between these religio-political and genealogical bases of legitimation in the Nasrid context, this paper also interrogates similarities between these developments in the Islamic West and broader reconceptualizations of royal power and authority in the late medieval Middle East.
