While many have studied the variegated aspects of warfare in Islamic history, the performative, cosmological, and aesthetic dimensions of it have escaped closer scrutiny. This panel considers these aspects through the rubric of the Persian word for fighting, “razm.” In the eastern Islamic world, “razm” was paired with its corollary “bazm” (feasting) to mark the performance of monarchy. This panel considers the representations, situations, and adaptations of warfare and fighting from Anatolia to Southeast Asia, stressing the utility of razm as a shared ethos and aesthetic of warfare from before the Mongol conquests to the period of European imperialism.
The first panelist investigates the kingdom of a 14th century Anatolian scholar king, Burhan al-Din of Sivas (d. 1398), and his use of razm to legitimate his rule. Based on a variety of textual and material sources, this panelist demonstrates how Burhan al-Din employed an understanding of warfare wherein the mere actions of charge, attack, procession, and persistence served to alchemically transform the king’s body into an elixir that bound his kingdom together.
Moving away from the metaphysical and towards the historiographical, the second panelist examines how Hatifi’s (d. 1521) Timurnama represents Timur’s conflict with Toqtamish Khan nearly a century earlier. The panelist argues that this representation centers the ethics of fraternal oaths in the proper conduct of razm, wherein the opposing party is shown enmity because of their lack of fidelity.
Responding to the geographies of warfare, the third panelist considers the rise of open squares in the post-Mongol world as performance spaces of razm and martial prowess. From Tabriz to Isfahan, the panelist turns to architecture and material culture to argue that the pageantry of royal campgrounds were such integral parts of political power that they themselves became the focal points of inter-dynastic patronage and warfare.
The fourth panelist expands the geographical scope of the discussion to the Malay world, examining the genealogies of guns, transregional Sufi figures, and the continuity of martial cultures focused on Ali from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Tracing the manuscripts of itinerant Sufis who claimed Arab lineage, this presentation portrays the vast social worlds within which guns and their elemental composition were given religious significance under colonial rule.
This panel brings together a geographically and methodologically diverse group of panelists who critically engage with the history of warfare in the eastern Islamic world, showing its transregional continuities and permutations over time.
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Ali Karjoo-Ravary
This paper investigates the role of warfare and jihad in establishing Burhan al-Din Ahmad of Sivas (d. 1398) as an ideal king in Eastern Anatolia. Without a strong claim to the throne, Burhan al-Din's imperial project stressed performance above all, and warfare, both literally as well as metaphorically, was an integral part of it. Born to a line of kadis, Burhan al-Din ascended the local bureaucracy of the Eretnid kingdom, former vassals of the Ilkhans in Baghdad, until he crowned himself in August of 1381. He successfully consolidated and gathered his small kingdom, fighting off not only local rivals, but also Timur, the Mamluks, and the early Ottomans. In the last four years of his rule, after 14 years of struggle and warfare, his court produced four manuscripts which serve to represent Burhan al-Din as the perfect equilibrium of the twin principles of Persianate kingship, feasting and fighting ("bazm wa razm") and thereby the embodiment of God's majesty and beauty ("jalal wa jamal").
Burhan al-Din drew on the theories of Ibn al-'Arabi to argue for an understanding of razm as jihad, both alchemical and metaphysical, whereby the performative and affective aspects of attack, resoluteness, and marching enacted a process through which the king's body was transformed. This transformed body, displayed in the gatherings of feasting, became the elixir through which the kingdom was maintained. This performative understanding of razm extended to not only jihad and ghaza, but even linguistically related terms that draw on the Arabic root meaning of struggle and exertion, such as ijtihad and mujahida, respectively covering both the legal and spiritual domains. Drawing on far older paradigms, any "oath-breaker" thus became an infidel against whom warfare, whether real or metaphoric, was lawful. This was not to suggest that he did not register that most of his enemies were Muslim, and in fact, his reticence to identify his razm as ghaza and his celebration of adjacent ghazis, even when at war with them, was tied into his performative reading of jihad. This performative reading allowed for the king's self-exertion in multiple dimensions to serve as a validating framework for a monarch who, otherwise, lacked the more straightforward arguments of his contemporaries.
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Golriz Farshi
The Mongol invasions of Iran saw the ascension of a new and foreign force that was both unknown to locals and unfamiliar with the terrain of Iran. Although the city of Tabriz was largely spared from the onslaught, its subsequent location as the capital of the Ilkhanid empire brought forth might and prestige as well as lasting transformations to the urban development and landscape of the city. An important example of this was a newfound appreciation for open spaces that were primarily used for military exercises or encampments.
The seventh Ilkhan, Ghazan Khan (d. 1304), built himself a mausoleum outside of the walls of the city of Tabriz that was flanked on all sides by gardens and pasturelands, fully equipped for feeding encamped soldiers. The mausoleum soon became a growing suburb of the city, called Ghazaniyya, where subsequent Khans and Turkmen rulers would set camp whenever they reached Tabriz. It also inspired multiple imitations, such as Uzun Hassan’s (d. 1478) construction of Sahib Abad on the northern banks of the Mihran River, a large square that was used for administrative, social, cultural and military activity. Ghazaniyya itself was so well known and ideally situated as a military campground that, in later times, the Ottomans used it as a staging ground for invading Safavid domains. This strategic significance led Abbas I (d. 1629) to finally tear it down, only to create his own post-Mongol open space, the Naqsh-i Jahan square in his capital, Isfahan.
Naqsh-i Jahan square represents the culmination and fusion of Mongol and Persianate conceptions of legitimacy. In it, razm, military prowess, and might on the battlefield manifest in open spaces of performance within the confines of Persianate courtyard architecture and gardens. The long lasting success of such open spaces was the result of this fusion, allowing Turko-Mongol norms of ever-present itinerant armies and encampments, processions, and the open performance of military exercise to mesh into the urban fabric of Persianate cities. This paper demonstrates that in post-Mongol Tabriz and its imitators, the performance of razm in such open spaces was as intimately tied to the performance of legitimacy as the minting of coins, the patronage of religious orders, the reading of the khutbah in one’s name, and the expression of benevolence to the poor.
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Dr. Terenjit Sevea
This paper focusses on Islamic manuscripts of peripatetic 'Arab' Sufis who were technological heirs of the prophet Muhammad and gurus of hand-held firearms along the modern Straits of Malacca. Particular attention is paid to how these 'Arab' Sufis and their texts serve as microcosms of broader social worlds wherein guns and their metals had attained distinctly religious definitions, and wherein Sufis were venerated and professionally employed for their esoteric firearms expertise, miracles, charms and supernatural negotiations. Heirs of Muhammad in the Malay world were ideally placed to mediate guns and warfare, as heirs of the Prophet's esoteric science and a 'new Qur'an'. As a range of extant Jawi manuscripts tell, Sufis were pivotal to propagating gun expertise, to employing and domesticating ‘foreign’ metals and western guns from Ottoman Turkey, Europe and America. Moreover, these Sufis who were plugged into circuits connecting them to gun-makers, smugglers, hunters and revolutionaries, were employed for their arts of bullet craftsmanship, Islamic marksmanship and hunting ‘kafirs’. This talk presents facets of my explorations into the economics of colonization, tapping and guns, and the performance of Sufi sainthood, across the early modern and modern Indian Ocean.
