Fashioning Philosopher-Kings in the Post-Mongol Persian Cosmopolis, 13th-19th Centuries (II)
Panel 156, 2017 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 20 at 1:00 pm
Panel Description
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 second panel, comprising four papers, extends the scope of the first to address later receptions and reformulations of—as well as scholarly opposition to—these Ilkhanid, Mamluk, Timurid and Safavid models throughout the Persian cosmopolis. In 15th-16th-century Anatolia, the Sunni Ottoman sovereigns Bayezid II and Süleyman asserted their religiopolitical transcendence by philosophical-scientific means expressly neoplatonic in tenor and often astral and/or occultist; thereby the latter was even fashioned a Solomonic prophet-king. In the 17th-century Deccan, Shi‘i Qutbshahi sovereigns pursued a complementary project, adapting neighboring Safavid and Mughal formulations, and especially sufi discourse, to make universalist political claims. But scholarly resistance to the very category of philosopher-kingship never ceased, for all that scholars had been fashioning their Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic sultans such for centuries; and the ulama of 18th-19th-century Bukhara resisted.
Disciplines
Participants
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Mr. A. Azfar Moin
-- Discussant, Chair
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Ms. Fatma Sinem Eryilmaz
-- Presenter
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Dr. A. Tunç Sen
-- Presenter
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Dr. James Pickett
-- Presenter
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Mr. Hunter Bandy
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. A. Tunç Sen
This paper seeks to examine the extent of Bayezid II's systematic efforts to patronize and cultivate sciences, particularly the science of the stars, as part of his broader attempts to cast himself as an idealized philosopher-king, and the newly flourishing Ottoman court as the hotbed of cultural and scientific supremacy. In the wider Eurasian landscape of the late-medieval and early-modern era it was not uncommon for a royal patron to support mathematical, astronomical, and astrological learning; thereby one could not only reap the practical benefits of the produced knowledge in various sociopolitical and military affairs but also ensure the self-evident ideological prestige of fashioning oneself as a generous patron of arts and sciences. In a few exceptional cases, the noble patron himself also became involved in the very scientific activity that he patronized. The eight Ottoman sultan Bayezid II was one such ruler, who did much more than simply gather around him a coterie of the best mathematically and astronomically trained experts or endow the palace with a set of accurate and dazzling instruments. In a way reminiscent of earlier Timurid princes, including Mirza Iskandar b. Umar Shaykh or Ulugh Beg, Bayezid II personally studied several canonical texts on varying branches of astral sciences, much to the chagrin of some of his ‘’devout’’ contemporaries. It is worth noting here that Bayezid II is often referred to in contemporary sources and modern literature with the epithets “wali” (sanctified) and/or “sofu” (pious), but little scholarly ink has been spilt over the burning relevance of his genuine celestial interests to his “piety” and ruling personality. This presentation aims to probe the significance of Bayezid II’s learned interests and intellectual aspirations on the basis of a few curious archival reports, intriguing paratextual evidence from surviving manuscripts, registers of palace household goods, and testimonies of his contemporaries.
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Ms. Fatma Sinem Eryilmaz
Protecting scholars and encouraging science and literature are the admired yet expected activities of great rulers in Islamicate Civilization. These activities are seen and often studied as important yet secondary civilizing practices, encouraging cultural advancement, in contrast to other, diplomatic, military, or economic activities, which are deemed at the forefront of medieval or early modern concerns. A close “reading” of fifteenth and sixteenth century Ottoman texts and images reveals that neither exoteric nor esoteric sciences were conceived as activities on the sidelines of the ideal ruler’s world. In fact, a sultan’s political mission was often conceived and described in a complex network of meanings and connections, which often included a combination of mystic theology, mathematical sciences, history, and mythology.
In works of various formats and languages, treating near contemporaneous history with ancient mythologized history in the same narrative and in continuum, these works were fruits of a certain tradition of literature, a representative example of which is Ahmedi’s Iskendername written in the fourteenth century in Anatolia. Notwithstanding the particularities of these politically charged narratives with respect to the historical circumstances and personal tastes and skills of their authors and their immediate milieu of production, their synthetic contents and language have much in common. Above all, they reveal an intellectual and aesthetic environment informed by a shared body of esoteric and exoteric knowledge. It was this shared study of the works of thinkers such as the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Ibn Sina, and Ibn ‘Arabi that made the holistic view we observe possible and understandable to their original readers.
In this framework, my paper will be a case study to show the dominant role of knowledge, in particular Neoplatonic knowledge, in the making of Sultan Süleyman’s (r. 1520-66) legacy during his reign. I will demonstrate that using their proclaimed expertise in mystic theology as well as in the occult sciences, especially in astrology and lettrism, his court historians, ‘Arif and Eflatun, projected Süleyman as a quasi-prophet philosopher sovereign much like the prophet king Solomon he was named after. The sultan’s being the last transmitter of sacred knowledge to humanity was presented as part and parcel of the same idealized legacy as his military success, his ordering of state and society, and administration of justice.
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Mr. Hunter Bandy
This paper analyzes the production of a large collection of practical philosophy dating from 1054/1644 authored by an Iranian sayyid migrant to the Deccan Sultanate of Golkonda/Hyderabad, Mu'izz al-Din Ardistani (fl. 1640s), who sought patronage from the penultimate Qutbshahi sultan Abdullah (r. 1626-1672). Rather unknown in modern scholarship, Safavid historians who have documented the 17th century reaction against Sufism have concluded that one of the main anti-Sufi polemics (Hadiqat ul-shi'a) was originally an amended version of a lengthy 'Alid tradition-based work (Kashif al-haqq) produced in the late 1640s by Ardistani. This other large and largely unknown work of his called the “Qutbshahi Collection,” (Jung-i Qutbshahi) illustrates the ethical construction and habitus of an early-modern Persian sovereign who is at once Shi'i in creed but whose mode of governance receives universal sanction. A tripartite work—divided into a section on biography; a second on wisdom, manners, and knowledge; and a third section on the ethics of kingship— moral lessons are authorized through Hellenic legends of Alexander, occult stories of Hermes Trismegistus, Sufistic discourse, as well as lessons drawn from the Mahabharata (by way of Mughal redaction). In this regard it is quintessentially Deccan in its representation of a cosmopolitan approach to accepting practical wisdom from the Muslim, pre-Islamic, Hellenic, and Indic cultural backgrounds, which were all inflected in Deccan courtly settings. The author’s situation of Imamic traditions (akhbar) within the universalist legends demands our reconsideration of what it meant to be a Shi'i ruler in the 17th century, nearly half a century after the supposed initiation of the Safavid backlash against mystical and non-juridical claims to power under Shah ‘Abbas I. That this knowledge arrives from the hand of the very same scholar implicated in the acceleration of this backlash and making it a mainstream pursuit among the Iranian 'ulama, only further confounds the narrative of an increasingly “arrogant” and “hostile” Shi'ism promulgated during the 17th century. Situating this text within the lively Qutbshahi court of 1640s Golkonda/Hyderabad, I argue that the clothing of Shi'i tradition did not encumber the vision of a universal Persian sovereign. Rather, these accretionary layers of textual proof extended the wisdom of earlier visions of divinely-ordained rule and kingship, affirming an inclusive hagiographic binary of philosophically supported tradition that only later was attacked and perverted by Safavid jurists writing in Iran.
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Dr. James Pickett
In the centuries following the Mongol conquest of Eurasia, monarchs increasingly fashioned themselves as mystical scholar-kings with direct access to the divine. Bukhara and the neighboring amirates of the early modern and colonial periods were no exception in this regard. Central Asian rulers were characterized by foreign and local observers alike as pious and enlightened, sources of emulation for their community. However, Islamic scholars never fully accepted even the most erudite of philosopher kings as their equals, instead asserting their independent mediation of the monarch's sacred authority. This paper examines the ulama's continued suspicion of the very powers upon which they relied for livelihood and prestige. It complicates depictions of Islamic scholars as "quietist" and subservient by contending that the ulama's longstanding insistence on their moral independence from the ruler persisted even when monarchs claimed direct access to divine knowledge. The relationship between Islamic scholars and the monarch was symbiotic, but a struggle simmered beneath the surface as both sides claimed ultimate authority to speak for religion.
