Connected Histories of Early Modern Muslim Empires: Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans
Panel 051, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 19 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
After several centuries of political instability and fragmentation, the sixteenth century witnessed the rise of three enduring regional empires ruled by Muslim dynasties. The Ottomans in southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals (Timurids) in the Indian subcontinent simultaneously arose as sovereign dynastic powers which left indelible imprints on peoples and societies in these regions. Modern historiography has mainly examined these imperial polities as part of Turkish, Iranian, and South Asian national or "regional" histories, without much attention to the relationship among them. The papers in this panel collectively argue against this view by delineating the common strands of cultural and political history of the early modern world from which these empires emerged. The paper on "the Ottoman Debate on Universal Monarchy," for example, argues that classical Ottoman notions of sovereignty can only be understood by taking into account the international political conjuncture of the late sixteenth in which the Ottomans vied with their Safavid and Habsburg neighbors to the east and west, respectively. The paper on "Morisco-Ottomans Relations" analyzes these same trans-regional dynamics from the perspective of forcibly Christianized Iberian Muslim - Morisco - and their relationship with the Ottomans who were at this time defining their Sunni religious identity vis-u-vis the Shi'i Safavids. Moving eastwards, the paper on "the Safavid roots of the Mughal royal cult" examines how the Sufi symbolism and organizational techniques used by the Safavids in their conquest of Iran are critical for understanding the early period of the Mughal dynasty, which developed under the shadow of the Safavids. Finally, the paper on "enactment of Timurid kingship in Mughal India" shows how Timurids institutions of kingship from Central Asia were effectively mapped onto Indic symbols and rituals of monarchy in South Asia. Taken together, these papers will show how, in the early modern period, the emergent imperial entities of the Islamic world interacted and learned from each other as well as from their non-Muslim European and South Asian surroundings, and thus adapted similar institutional, organizational, and ideological techniques to different ends.
Traditional historiography explains the rise of the Ottomans as a world power mainly on the basis of two factors: the so-called Turkish and Muslim imperial tradition and military might of the dynasty. This paper aims to develop a critique of this ethno-centric and militarist view of Ottoman history through an examination of the wider political, social, and cultural processes and developments that played a role in the making of the Ottoman Empire.
More specifically, the paper focuses on the Ottoman debate on universal monarchy that first emerged after the conquest of Constantinople and examines the different parties, positions, and discourses of this debate as well as its evolution in time, from the second half of the fifteenth through the first decades of the sixteenth centuries. Through contextualizing the debate within the wider international political conjuncture in which the Ottomans vied with their Safavid and Habsburg neighbors for imperial supremacy and analyzing it against the background of the broader political and ideological currents of the time, imbued with expectations of renewal and reform, the paper establishes that the Ottoman critics of monarchy eventually lost their power and voice during the period under consideration. Those who believed in a stronger monarchy, which granted the ruler a wider control over the divine law and lives of his subjects, came to power in the 1520s and pushed for a political and military program which aimed to create a universal empire under the leadership of the Ottoman sultan.
The paper argues that the rise of new political community in Istanbul--itself an outcome of the rapid urban growth and expansion of the state power in the city after the conquest--which came to identify its welfare and survival with the well-being of the Ottoman monarchy, was the key factor in this transformation.
One of the little-studied subjects in the history of the early modern Mediterranean is the relationship between the forcibly Christianized Iberian Muslims--Moriscos--and the Ottomans. Although they were known as the "Ottoman Fifth Column" in the Iberian Peninsula and sought help from the Ottoman Sultans throughout the sixteenth century as the Spanish Monarchy imposed ever greater restrictions on expressions of their religious and cultural identity, the nature of the relationship between the Moriscos and their hoped-for saviors, especially in half century following the Second Revolt of Alpujarras in 1568-70 and after their final expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609-14, has not been systematically researched. And yet, this encounter between the heirs of the glorious medieval Islamic culture of al-Andalus and the new scions of Islam claiming caliphal honors, between Western and Eastern Mediterranean Islams, opens up exciting vistas into the nature of the religio-political trends and imperial aspirations in contemporary Islamdom.
This paper will explore the relationship between the Ottomans and the Moriscos in the context of the imperial and confessional polarization in the early modern Mediterranean and the wider Islamic world, between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs on one hand, and the Ottomans and the Safavids on the other. The connecting themes will be the issues of the Islamic millennium and the expectation of the Last Judgment as well as the debate over the nature of the "true religion" and right to imperial title. The paper will compare the developments within Morisco, Ottoman, and Safavid Islams in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and situate them within the broader contemporary religio-political debates. It will also look at the role of the Morisco refugees to Istanbul in the Ottoman domestic agenda in the context of the tensions between Islam and Christianity and Sunnism and Shiism.
The Mughal and the Safavid empires took shape at the same time and from the same cultural milieu. Yet they are rarely studied together. Divided by area studies that place Safavid Iran in Middle East and Mughal India in South Asia, our understanding of early sixteenth century imperial formation in these interconnected regions remains fragmented. Few have paid attention to the fact that Babur, the "founder" of the Timurid (Mughal) dynastic realm in India, had in his early years served as a vassal to the Safavid Shah Ismail, the Sufi king who claimed to be the promised mahdi (messiah). In fact, Babur had to put on the Twelve-gored "taj" of the Safavid devotees, the Qizilbash (Red Heads) named after the color of their headgear. This signified among other things Babur's accepting Shah Ismail as his pir (spiritual guide). Babur's period of Safavid discipleship is conveniently missing from his famous memoirs due to a gap in the manuscript. This paper examines the effects of Babur's discipleship on the development of Mughal rituals of kingship. Was Humayun's invention of a "taj" for his inner circle, featuring the number seven, a mimicry of Safavid practice and a way to break away from the shame of Safavid discipleshipS Was the later creation of an Akbari royal cult a repeat of this ritual process These are the unexplored questions I take up in this paper. Using a variety of sources such as poetry, painting and royal letters from the Safavid realm as well as memoirs, courtly panegyrics and texts on magic from the Mughal domains, I argue that processes of imperial formation in India and Iran were tightly interconnected in this period as each dynastic realm competed for territory, material wealth and human resources. In this competition, the two nascent empires learned from each other. Specifically, contact with early Safavid politics was critical to shaping later Mughal religious and political policies in India. Thus, a rethinking of early Mughal-Safavid interaction should lead to a rethinking of the classical Mughal period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
The elaborate and distinctive understanding of culture and legacy which had been developed, at times deliberately and self-consciously, over a hundred years of Timurid rule in Central Asia, would shape the Timurid royal court in India. In the case of the Timurid refugee elites who founded Mughal dynastic rule in India, survival and collectivity hung in the balance; without re-stabilizing, the dynasty would fail. The means of resolving this was to fabricate a shared bond which bound the community together culturally around a universally recognizable and legitimate kingship.
Certain markers of kingship were universally recognized among the Timurid northern Indian elites: Turani and Persian noblemen, as well as local Muslims, easily and comfortably recognized the regular, deliberate references to the Mughal dynasts as "just kings," benevolent and tolerant, dispensing justice and charity. The basis of Timurid legitimate kingship in Transoxiana would come to be developed into an immutable Mughal political-philosophical platform of rule, which may explain the highly resistant Timurid character of Mughal political and cultural ethics.
Yet a critical part of establishing Timurid kingship in India required the homogenization and tightening of the loose strands that made up the diverse cultures of the region. In producing the emergent "Mughal" imperial identity, local as well as imported understandings of ethical and legitimate kingship were astutely culled, modified and fused. This paper explores not only the ways in which the Mughal dynasts asserted a classical Persio-Islamic model of kingship, interpreted through specifically Timurid systems of ethics and rule, but also how they grew very quickly to adapt their existing models to local non-Timurid, even non-Muslim, models of legitimate kingship. In this way, an adaptation of the Hindu tradition of offering darshan, the formal ritual viewing of deities and kings, came to play a critical role at the Mughal imperial court, in establishing the Timurid-Mughals as legitimate and "just" kings within and across the disparate religious and political communities they had come to rule.
