In his now classic study of Ottoman criminal law, Uriel Heyd included an appendix in which he examined the chapters dealing with criminal law from the best known fiqh compilation from Mughal India - the late seventeenth-century al-Fatawa al-‘Alamgiriyya. Heyd did not elaborate on his decision to include this comparative appendix, but this comparative approach is quite rare in modern scholarship on both Ottoman and Mughal legal history. Ottomanists who study the empire’s legal history have rarely looked east, and to a large extent their Mughalist colleagues have not looked west. This is quite surprising given the publication of several comparative works on the so-called “Gunpowder Empires” since the 1970s, beginning with the publication of Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam. My paper addresses this historiographical lacuna and presents a blueprint for a study of Islamic law in the central and western Asia in the early modern period by pointing out several important similarities between the legal histories of the Ottoman and the Mughal empires. In particular, I seek to explore the adoption of an official school of law, or of specific branches within the Hanafi school, by each of the dynasties, and to examine the administrative and institutional practices that enabled this adoption. Although the association of a specific branch within the school with a specific dynasty contributed to the emergence of local traditions and authorities across the eastern Islamic lands, my paper also examines the connections and contacts between these traditions and the shared legal culture that spanned both empires. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that both the Ottoman and the Mughal Empires should be studied in a broader analytical framework, that of the eastern Islamic world in the post-Mongol period. This framework would enable us to account for the differences between the empires, but also to trace the connections between their political and legal traditions, practices, and vocabularies.

Al-Azhar’s role (est. 972) as an important center of Islamic learning, while routinely acknowledged in academic scholarship, remains “a phenomenon of arrested development,” historiographically isolated from the trans-imperial interconnection that characterized the early modern world. Located in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Cairo, a major trading post in the Eastern Mediterranean, al-Azhar was a nodal point in a network of teaching institutions and centers through which the traffic of contact and exchange passed. The mention of epithets (nisbas) like “al-Hindi” in the Ottoman court records of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Cairo represent historical traces of the movement of people, texts, and ideas between the Mediterranean Basin and the Indian Ocean. The general acceptance and mobility of international scholars into the Cairene knowledge economy is exemplified in the person of Shaykh Shihab al-Din b. Abi al-Abbas Ahmad b. al-Shaykh Muhammad b. al-Shaykh Shihab al-Din al-‘Abbadi al-Hindi. Hailing from a long line of religious scholars connected to al-Hind, Shihab al-Din was an imam of the Taybarsiyya madrasa at the turn of the seventeenth century, one of three Mamluk madrasas attached to the complex of al-Azhar. This paper will map a family tree of Muslim scholars stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Eastern Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries using a set of hitherto unstudied teaching certificates (icazetnames; ijazas) issued by Azhari teachers that were found in libraries in Cairo and Istanbul, Ottoman court records from Egypt (sicils), and Ottoman and Mughul-era biographical dictionaries. It will offer some preliminary thoughts on how the study of trans-imperial networks of Muslim scholars can be used as a heuristic framework not only for investigating the broader cultural connections that grew out of robust trade networks between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (connections that had been established under the Fatimids in the 10th century), but also for charting interconnections across the imperial and geographical boundaries of the Mughal and Ottoman empires. The implication of reconstructing trans-imperial networks of Muslim scholars will be to connect the changing contours of the early modern Islamic knowledge economy more solidly with Cairo’s position as an entrepôt par excellence for international trade with Yemen, Arabia, India, and the Far East.

My paper examines intellectual exchange between the early modern Ottoman and Mughal Empires, in particular the circulation of knowledge and the role of translation between Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. This paper questions the narrative of early modern knowledge flowing from Europe into Asia. Based on a comparative study of the manuscript libraries of the Ottoman and Mughal realms, with a particular focus on the former Mughal court library now held at the British Library as the “Delhi Collection,” I will argue the following: (1) The development of the Hanafi ‘ulum naqliyya (religious sciences), especially in the areas of grammatology and fiqh, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Ottomans and Mughals were engaged in a lively exchange of scholars and scholarship, which shaped the nature of education and the development of legal treatises in both the Ottoman and Mughal spheres. (2) Much of the transmission of scientific knowledge (in particular, mathematics and astronomy) in the early modern Mughal court did not involve input from Europe, but rather was a process of translation between Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. In comparative perspective, Ottoman mathematics and astronomy during this period also did not necessarily derive from ‘European’ science, but developed previous Arabic and Persian-language scholarship. When translations of European works did play a role in the development of Ottoman and Mughal science, my paper will address the complex diachronic processes of transmission that often built on earlier Arabic texts; specific translations will be discussed as an example of this phenomenon (for example, a previously unknown Arabic translation of mathematician Clavius’s work, made at the Mughal court under Aurangzeb: I.O. Islamic 1308, British Library). While the first part of my paper examines a direct process of exchange between Ottomans and Mughals in the arena of the ‘ulum naqliyya, the second half of my paper compares the Ottoman and Mughal approaches to mathematical and scientific knowledge and finds similarities in their approach to this material that assigns European scientific treatises a smaller role than current historiography allows in Ottoman and Mughal intellectual life. These two arguments will help to direct the scholarly gaze away from historical comparisons with Europe and toward the rich and lively scholarly exchange between Asian empires.

The mention of Ottoman and South Asian relations often conjures up images of Ottoman warships off the Gujarati coast or that of the Mughal emissaries arriving at the lands of Rum. Needless to say, the cultural and intellectual exchanges between the learned Muslims of these two important corners of the Islamic world were just as vibrant as the political ones. More importantly, the former extended well beyond the early modern period as the present paper will attempt to show. The point of origin for the paper is a group of alchemical manuscripts presently housed at the Oriental Manuscripts Library & Research Institute (OMLRI) in Hyderabad. What renders this particular group of manuscripts unique among other collections in India with a substantial number of works on alchemy and chemical sciences is the unusually high count of books and treatises that had been composed in the Ottoman Empire. The paper will draw on my recent research at the OMLRI, which has revealed that a single individual was responsible for the arrival of this group of manuscripts in Hyderabad around the turn of the twentieth century. The identity, writings, and travels of the said individual, who had been a resident of Najaf prior to his move to Hyderabad, will constitute the central part of the paper. These issues, however, will also be used as a springboard to comment on the wider social and cultural context of the aforementioned group of manuscripts. Among them are the Ottoman relations with the Nizamate of Hyderabad, the Arab as well as the lesser-known Rumi community in the Deccan, and the continued practice of Jabirian alchemy in both the Ottoman Empire and South Asia into the early twentieth century.