The strongly neoplatonic tenor of Islamic political philosophy, from Farabi (d. 950) onward, entailed an enduring focus on philosopher-kingship as the ideal form of governance; and philosopher-kings may transcend even Islam itself. To the messianic imperial rulers of the early caliphal era, such a model was of obvious attraction, and Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs strove vigorously to embody it. But their pretensions to absolutist philosopher-kingship were challenged with equal vigorousness by the rising class of ulama, who successfully disallowed such transcendence, becoming the primary political counterweight to caliph and sultan alike.
With the growing divergence between Sunni and Shi‘i political theories, the Helleno-Irano-Semitic ideal of the philosopher-king migrated from the political mainstream of Islam to its Shi‘i-sufi periphery—and there it remained until the epochal Mongol conquest of the mid-13th century, the pivot of Islamic history. The destruction of the reigning, but brittle, caliphal-sultanic-jurisprudential model inaugurated a long era of religiopolitical experimentation and imperial ascendancy, whereby Islamic, Chinggisid and Iranian categories were synthesized with (occult) science, sufism and Alidism to create new platforms for universalist absolutism. The age of the transcendent philosopher-king had returned with a Turko-Mongol vengeance.
This double panel presents an array of new research on the evolution of the theory and practice of philosopher-kingship in the post-Mongol Persian cosmopolis, from the eastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe to Central Asia and India, and from the mid-13th century to the end of the 19th. Its eight papers examine the eclectic strategies whereby supremely ambitious Muslim sovereigns and world conquerors fashioned themselves, and were fashioned or refashioned by the scholars that served or resisted them, as sacral, even divine, philosopher-kings.
The first panel, comprising four papers, addresses such strategies as influentially pursued in Ilkhanid Iran, where Islamic, Chinggisid and Iranian discourses of sovereignty were first fused, and concurrently in Mamluk Egypt, where a new ideology of millennial kingship was developed in occult-scientific and sufi terms. The Ilkhanid and Mamluk models were in turn combined in the highly distinctive and similarly influential Timurid model of sacral occult-philosopher-kingship, whereby sultans became scientists. In the 16th century, the image developed in Iran in the preceding century of the Muslim world-conqueror Timur as supreme Lord of Conjuction and holy scion of ‘Ali was then subject to Safavid retooling, which added a prophetic valency through conflation with the persona of the Prophet Muhammad.
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Dr. Noah Gardiner
While discussions of “millennial sovereignty”—notions of kingship legitimized on eschatological grounds—have focused primarily on the Persianate world of the ninth/fifteenth century and later, this paper explores indications that similar ideological avenues were explored at the court of the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Barquq (r. 784/1382-801/1399). The first of the post-Qalawunid, Circassian sultans, Barquq’s rise to power and reign were marked by questions of legitimacy and internal and external turmoil that were extreme even by the standards of the Mamluk period, and evidence addressed in the paper suggests that he and members of his court sought out novel means of asserting divine license for his rule. Drawing on the writings of 'Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami, Sayyid Husayn al-Akhlati, Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, Ibn Khaldun, and others, it is argued that a coterie of practitioners of the occult “science of letters and names” ('ilm al-huruf wa-al-asma') Barquq fostered, including many individuals of Persianate origin, helped formulate an ideology of Sufi-inflected millennial sovereignty for their patron. Beyond questions of Barquq’s embrace of such an ideological program, the paper explores the notion that eighth/fourteenth-century Cairo was an important cauldron for the formulation of these ideas that would so shape religio-political dynamics of the Persianate world.
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Dr. Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Ulugh Beg b. Shahrukh (r. 1409-47), Timurid ruler of Transoxania, is justly famed as founder of the Samarkand Observatory and Madrasa, the most important scientific complex of the 15th-century Islamo-Christianate world. Not only did he assemble a team of mathematical astronomers who would revolutionize the science, but performed the role of competent scientist himself—hence Qazizada Rumi’s (fl. 1440) striking title for his patron: al-sultan al-faylasuf, the sultan-scientist. Most notably, Ulugh Beg’s scientific team was responsible for mathematizing the cosmos, this through their unprecedented divorce of aristotelian physics from astronomy. This fateful project has been well feted in current scholarship as the immediate intellectual precedent for Copernicus, Kepler and Newton; but its broader neopythagorean-occultist context has been wholly elided, which in turn has obscured Ulugh Beg’s status as claimant to a peculiarly Timurid form of (occult) philosopher-kingship. The model here is Ulugh Beg’s cousin and would-be successor to Temür, Iskandar Sultan (r. 1409-14), whose patronage of the occult sciences, especially lettrism and astrology, was far more explicit. Nevertheless, the surviving textual record suggests that Ulugh Beg was equally familiar with the occult-scientific works with which Iskandar Sultan fashioned and performed his Timurid sovereignty.
This paper restores Ulugh Beg’s title of sultan-scientist to its original neopythagorean-occultist context with reference to three such works. Specifically, it cannot be considered coincidental that construction of the Samarkand Observatory was begun the same year, 1420, that Ibn Turka (d. 1432) completed his landmark Book of Inquiries (K. al-Mafahis)—the first summa of Islamic neopythagoreanism, which opens precisely with a call for a mathematical revolution. The same lettrist thinker—whose first patron was precisely Iskandar Sultan, and a close friend and colleague to Qazizada Rumi—further dedicated his Sharh al-Basmala (1426) to Ulugh Beg. Equally suggestive is the fact, moreover, that ‘Abd al-Qadir Ruyani Lahiji (d. 1519), ‘Ali Qushchi’s (d. 1474) protégé, produced the Key of Keys (Miftah-i Mafatih), one of the Persianate world’s most popular manuals of geomancy. It was thus in recognition of Ulugh Beg’s accession to occult philosopher-kingship that Ibn Turka exclaims in his dedication to the Timurid sultan-scientist: “Long have I held out hope for just such a time—and that time is yours!”
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Ms. Marian Elizabeth Smith
In late fifteenth-century Khurasan, ‘Abd Allah Hatifi (d. 1521) composed a masnavi chronicling the life, military campaigns, and rule of Timur, which he dedicated to the last Timurid ruler, Sultan-Husayn (d. 1506). Hatifi’s work, known as the Timur-nama or Zafar-nama-yi Hatifi, presents Timur as a sacred king (sahib-qiran) and inheritor of both Chinggisid and Iranian traditions of kingship who, by virtue of his auspicious birth, is blessed with wisdom, a proclivity for just rule, and a mandate to conquer the world.
The large number of extant manuscripts demonstrates that the Timur-nama enjoyed widespread circulation and popularity in courtly circles in the post-Timurid Persianate world, from Ottoman Anatolia to Mughal India. Upon closer inspection, however, the Timur-nama’s manuscript tradition reveals that while Timur’s status as a sahib-qiran remains a stable feature of Hatifi’s masnavi, later accretions and interpolations to the text re-fashion Hatifi’s portrait of Timur, cloaking him in a language of overt Islamic piety and chivalry (javanmardi). Moreover, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recensions of the text, especially those produced in the Safavid realm, include elements not present in the earliest surviving manuscript copied in Herat in 1496, namely an exordium, doxology, and account of the Prophet's Muhammad’s ascension, or mi'raj. In these narratives, the Prophet Muhammad’s valor, piety, military prowess, and status as the Seal of the Prophets are valorized and subsequently find their analog in the characterization of Timur.
I examine this reimagining of Timur and Timurid kingship in the early modern period through the lens of the Timur-nama. In particular, I explore the reasons why Safavid-era manuscripts expand upon Hatifi’s original text in a way that departs from the emphasis that author placed on the language of Turco-Mongol, Chinggisid sacred kingship and instead privileges a more pan-Islamic (neither Sunni nor Shi’i) language of sovereignty. While the Turco-Mongol and Iranian elements of Timur’s ancestry are certainly not expunged from the narrative, here his portrait is refashioned as model of the ideal Islamic sacred sovereign and philosopher-king in accordance with the the religious, cultural, and political shifts in early modern Safavid Iran.
