The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam

A comparative study of the late medieval and early modern periods

Ali Anooshahr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781138780101
• eBook ISBN: 9781134041336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Ghazi Sultans were frontier holy-warrior kings of late medieval and early modern Islamic history. This book is a comparative study of three particular Ghazis in the Muslim world at that time, demonstrating the extent to which these men were influenced by the actions and writings of their predecessors in shaping strategy and the way in which they saw themselves.

Using a broad range of Persian, Arabic and Turkish texts, the author offers new findings in the history of memory and self-fashioning, demonstrating thereby the value of intertextual approaches to historical and literary studies. The three main themes explored include the formation of the ideal of the Ghazi king in the eleventh century, the imitation thereof in fifteenth and early sixteenth century Anatolia and India, and the process of transmission of the relevant texts. By focusing on the philosophical questions of 'becoming' and 'modelling', Anooshahr has sought alternatives to historiographic approaches that only find facts, ideology, and legitimization in these texts.

This book will be of interest to scholars specialising in Medieval and early modern Islamic history, Islamic literature, and the history of religion.

1 How Babur became a ghazi

The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments—one political, the other literary. He had survived with empty hands the frantic scramble for power among his kinsmen (the descendants of Timur) in Central Asia and their final annihilation at the hands of the Uzbek Shaybani Khan in the closing decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Instead, Babur managed to get himself to India and establish the so-called ‘Mughal’ dynasty there—hence his political reputation. Equally important was his composition of a book, an autobiographical memoir written in Chagatay Turkic. Both the genre and his language of choice were peculiar. To write a history book on one’s own life was uncommon enough before Babur, but to write history at all in Chagatay (and not Persian) was also an exceptional act. What Babur has bequeathed to posterity is the record of the thoughts of an educated prince, an uprooted wanderer and, finally, a ghazi. As such, the Baburnama provides the perfect medium for testing the impact and the nature of imitation of other ghazis on scripting, and self-fashioning in general.

What the memoirs reveal is striking. The memory of historical and epic heroes, but especially of former and contemporary ghazi kings, as preserved in assorted chronicles, did not merely leave its influence on the Baburnama. On entering Kabul (in modern Afghanistan) in the first decade of the sixteenth century, Babur began reading histories of various ghazis, and these books established as historical the places he visited, influenced his actions therein, and crept into his descriptions thereof. This most original of literary compositions is deeply interwoven with allusions to (or rather echoes of pages of) several other texts, many identifiable, and rather surprising in at least one case; surprising, because one of these books may have been a rare and unusual work of early Ottoman historiography. These texts must be identified and their interplay with Babur’s words and deeds closely examined. But before doing so, one must chart a path of approach to the Baburnama in order to overcome an inherent dilemma of the historical method.

Theoretical foundations

In analyzing Babur’s memoirs, one is often confronted with two possibilities. Either the text reflects the actions of the prince, in which case the literary references or the records of the imitations of historical figures reproduce what was actually taking place in India and Afghanistan; or it was written much later, and the actions of Babur were distorted and made to resemble the behavior of certain heroes of old. To some degree, the nature of the memoirs provides some answers to this challenge. The Baburnama contains examples of both possibilities. The text is divided into three sections. The first section takes place in Central Asia, and chronicles the prince’s youth in the Fergana valley and Samarqand. The whole of Part One was obviously written much later, and was highly edited. The second section portrays Babur’s life in Kabul. These pages are also mostly edited, but with a few notable exceptions. This suggests that Babur had probably begun writing his book while in Kabul, and managed to complete the first section and most of the second while simultaneously keeping a journal on his day-to-day affairs. The third part of the memoirs takes place in India, is very rough, and mostly resembles an unedited journal. So, one can say that what is reflected in the ‘Central Asia’ and ‘Kabul’ sections consists of later interpolations, and what is contained in the Indian sections survives in the form in which it was recorded at the same time as the actual events the book purports to describe. But we are still not freed from the tyranny of the dichotomy of text vs hors-texte. It is still quite possible that Babur merely recorded his deeds, even in his journal entries, as he would have wanted them to seem and not as they were, even if he had no chance to revise his notes subsequently.

But this binary opposition between ‘text’ and ‘outside of text’ is highly flawed. For one, if writing an autobiographical book is viewed as an act of self-inscription on pages, might it not be possible that this performance extended further and spilled into the world? Is it not conceivable that Babur inscribed himself on the leaves of liber mundi, ‘the book of the world’, simultaneously? Moreover, why should it be assumed that writing should reflect action and not the other way around? What if the memoirs and diary entries really served as a script, still based on what Babur had read but now deemed worthy of replication? The prince in this case could have written down what he thought he should do (say, during a battle-speech) the night before, and then gone out to perform it as an actor on the stage the following day. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, the dilemma of the historical approach rests on an arbitrary and artificial separation of reality and narrative.

As David Carr has pointed out, those who have made the greatest challenge to the relationship between (historical) narrative and reality ‘out there’ have all basically concluded that ‘the ideas of beginning, middle, and end are not taken from experience: they are not traits of real action but effects of poetic ordering’.¹ In other words, it is generally averred that narrative is a cultural literary artifact at odds with the real.²

This statement could not be farther from the truth. In life, we are constantly striving, with varying degree of success, to occupy the storyteller’s position with respect to our own lives.³ We constantly see ourselves, and interpret events, in narrative terms. When someone asks us what we are doing, we are expected to come up with a story, complete with beginning, middle and end; a recounting that is description and justification all at once.⁴ When we encounter events, even at a most passive stage, we interpret them and anticipate what is to come against the backdrop of a past which we have already processed in a narrative framework. To illustrate by analogy, using the German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s famous example, ‘the beauty of a fugue simply cannot be accounted for without consideration of the listener’s expectation or even surprise (surprise is of course meaningless without having first an expectation of something other than what occurs)’.⁵ The same anticipation, as derived from the myriad of narratives that people continuously internalize since childhood, affects reality as we experience it and, simultaneously, how we create reality by our actions following our interpretations. What this means for Babur is that we cannot simply place a wedge between his text and his deeds, for both were equally influenced by the narratives to which he had been exposed. His actions, and the description of his actions, would be equally susceptible to what he read. In sum, shedding light on the interplay of other narratives (such as the tales of ghazis) with the text of Babur’s memoirs is fundamentally interrelated to understanding his actions as well.⁶

Babur and literature

First, then, if the impact of heroic and ghazi lore on Babur is to be investigated, it is necessary to take into account Babur’s relationship with literature in general. Throughout his book Babur would use literary quotations, as many authors do, to express his points more clearly or to give support to a statement he made; however, he also seems to have considered literature as possessing a somewhat trans-temporal truth-value—describing events and human emotions before they would actually occur. For, when confronted with a particular circumstance, Babur would remember an appropriate literary excerpt that he thought pertained to the matter at hand. This remembrance would in turn make him behave in a manner consistent with the conceptual baggage that the specific quotation was loaded with. This means that what Babur had read and memorized would help him identify what he perceived, and then in turn would provide him with guidelines for how to act subsequently. Later, as he wrote about the occurrence, or as he revised his notes on it, with the advantage of hindsight, he would augment his descriptions with more quotations from literature. A famous passage in the Baburnama exemplifies this process well. It is the description of Babur’s first feeling of love, which he experienced at about the age of nineteen. It reads:

During this time there was a boy from the camp market named Baburi. Even his name was amazingly appropriate. [Verse]: I developed a strange inclination for him. Rather I made myself miserable over him. Before this I had never felt a desire for anyone, and neither did I listen to talk of love or affection, nor would I speak of such things … Occasionally Baburi came to me, but I was so bashful that I could not look at him in the face, much less freely converse with him. In my excitement and agitation, I could not thank him for coming, much less complain of his leaving … One day, during this time of infatuation, a group was accompanying me down a lane, and all at once I found myself face to face with Baburi. I was so ashamed I almost went to pieces. There was no possibility of looking straight at him or of speaking coherently. With a hundred embarrassments and difficulties I got passed him. This line by Muhammad Salih came to my mind. [Verse]: I am embarrassed every time I see my beloved. My companions are looking at me, but my gaze is elsewhere. It is amazing how appropriate this line was. In the throes of love, in the foment of youth and madness I wandered bareheaded and barefoot around the lanes and streets and through the gardens and orchards, paying no attention to acquaintances or strangers, oblivious to self and others. Poem: When I fell in love, I became mad and crazed. I never knew this to be part of loving beauties. Sometimes I went alone like a madman to the hills and wilderness, sometimes I roamed through the orchards and lanes of town, neither walking nor sitting within my own volition, restless in going or staying. [Verse]: I have no strength to go, no power to stay. You have snared us in this state, my heart.⁷

These lines are certainly suggestive, to say the least. It has often been noticed by modern scholarship for its stark confessional nature. But so far only Stephen Dale has drawn attention to the importance of poetry here, indicating how Babur expresses his emotions quite evocatively by filtering them through the medium of poetry.⁸ This, however, brought Dale to the conclusion that in this way Babur approached the level of early modern European autobiographers of the Italian Renaissance and even Pascal. Surely the Timurid prince would have relished such comparisons. But Dale’s analogies do little in positively contributing to our understanding of Babur’s sentences.

The question here is, in what way does this passage exemplify the interplay of literature with Babur’s thoughts and actions, as well as with his writing? It is absolutely crucial to remember that this passage belongs to the first third of the memoirs covering Babur’s frenetic adolescent years in Central Asia. These pages, as stated before, were most likely written later and were heavily edited. This means that at the time of writing/editing of these parts (probably in Afghanistan or India), but while or before composing the last portions in India (the unedited journals), Babur had begun to see his life as an imitation of literary art. Specifically, the following is what he does.

Obviously, the first verse quoted above (‘I developed a strange inclination for him’) speaks for Babur and gives articulation to his earliest emotion of love which made him embarrassed at the time and even seems to have blocked his hand from writing about it in retrospect. So while in the prose sentence Babur mentions only the boy and the coincidence of the link between their names, it is by means of the verse quotation that he begins to confess his love or his ‘strange inclination for him’, as he calls it. What follows confirms and reinforces the sense of embarrassment implicit in the opening sentence, but overcome by the line of poetry. The description of his general state of confusion and mortification at seeing the boy leads to the overwhelming encounter with the object of his affection in the presence of a group of friends. Once again he makes a break out of this deadlock by means of a line of poetry that expresses his predicament: (‘I am embarrassed every time I see my beloved’). But this line is different from the other poetic extracts in that it forms part of the original memory and is not a later insertion. He says expressly that this line came to his mind during the incident. So, literature not only helped Babur to express his meaning more directly, but also had a strangely prophetic function (‘ajab

vāqi‘ boldi), being written in advance describing events that were yet to occur. Lastly, it can be seen how, when faced with a situation, his memory would immediately search the database of his prior readings and present him with a fitting citation (bu baytı

keldi).

What follows after the first few lines is a particularly revealing depiction. In a close interplay between poetry and prose, Babur narrates his behavior after this occurrence. It appears that Babur enters a mental state already formed by his reading of (Sufi) love poetry. He then acts according to the implicit prescriptions of this kind of literature (playing the role of the distraught lover who loses all care for public opinion), before describing it using a language permeated by this poetic vocabulary. Again, it must be remembered that these last lines might very well be later additions. However, for our purposes, what matters is that by the time Babur was in Afghanistan and India, composing this very episode, he had begun seeing his life through a literary lens. Whether he had always, since early youth, felt and acted in conjunction with literature is not directly relevant here.

He says that he began walking barefoot and bareheaded in alleyways and gardens like a madman, losing the distinction as well as the consideration for self and stranger (öz ve ghayr). These two states are of course the condition of being ‘mad and crazed’ (bīkhud va dīvāne, literally ‘having lost oneself’ and ‘crazed’) in the line of poetry that ensues. The prose passage subsequent to this line, up to ‘through lanes and towns’, reinforces the ideas just summarized by the verse. The last prose part immediately preceding the concluding verse expands on this theme of distraught madness and wandering, but it takes its cue from the lines of verse that proceed from it. The phrase ‘restless in going (barmaq) or staying (turmaq)’ in the prose part parallels exactly ‘I have no strength to go (barur), no power to stay (turar)’ in the poem.

This passage, then, quoted above and describing Babur’s first experience of love around the age of nineteen, provides a clear example of the profound role played by literature in the prince’s self-perception—at least when he was writing these sections, if not at the time of the actual events. Babur would use a quotation from literature not just to give expression to an implicit point or to sum up the gist of his meaning in a passage. His readings, as they were stored in his memory, would come to his mind through associations with some particular situation with which he had been confronted. These remembered excerpts of course had come with a context, or at least were loaded with certain conceptual baggage which would in turn induce him to behave in a particular fashion—or at any rate make him interpret his actions that way later. Finally, his language of narration would bear the mark of those textual excerpts. All these points are of course immensely relevant in his performing the role of the ghazi king.

Babur and ghazi lore

A close analysis of those portions of the memoirs that betray the influence of his historical readings follows the pattern established above. On entering a new region, Babur would look for signs to orient himself in that foreign environment. These signs or landmarks would be extracted from certain books of history that he had read previously, or that had begun to consult in order to familiarize himself with his new setting. But the identification of these landmarks or signs was not a neutral act. They were not mere objects that appeared to the independent subject; they had historical events associated with them. So, for example, a river was not merely a river, it was a place where a particular ghazi sultan of a previous age had ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 How Babur became a ghazi
• 2 Disclaiming Tamerlane’s inheritance, and the rise of the Mughal Empire
• 3 The origins of the ghazi king
• 4 Inventing the image of the founder king
• 5 The triad of kings
• 6 Tatars and Ottomans
• 7 The ghazas of Sultan Murad II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography