The Empires of the Near East and India

Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities

Hani Khafipour

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547840
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean. These three polities each encompassed a wide range of cultural and religious diversity, and interactions among the varied communities both within and across the empires contributed greatly to their flourishing. Yet present-day Anglophone scholarship and teaching with emphasis on the earlier periods of Islamic civilization tends to examine the empires in isolation and overlook their connected histories.

This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts from the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, accompanied by scholarly essays, that aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the early modern history of the Near East and India. In thematically organized sections, it presents texts that represent particular voices and experiences from each of the three empires. With a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and visual art, the volume sheds light on the many dimensions of the intertwined histories of these interconnected literate communities engaged in the religious, political, and cultural debates of their time. Texts investigate such varied topics as conversion in Safavid Iran; the politics of Ottoman imperial conquests; mystical piety at the Mughal court of India; occult sciences such as letter divination and astrology; and struggles for succession to the imperial throne. The readings include translator's notes, and each translation is preceded by a short essay providing the historiographical context for the source.

PART I. The Religious Landscape

1. Converts, Apostates, and Polytheists

The three empires presented in this book presided over one of the most religiously diverse stretches of land on Earth. The adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), Hinduism, and a host of antinomian and heterodox groups within those religions, encountered various degrees of support, toleration, or persecution from the political establishments. The sources selected for this chapter reveal some of the main issues facing non-Muslim communities in these three empires.

FIGURE 1.1 Mary and Jesus

The image is part of an album (muraqqaʿ) of Persian and Indian calligraphy and paintings, probably compiled in the nineteenth century. The album holds thirty-four illustrations, featuring works of miniaturists such as Abu al-Hasan, Manuhar, Dawlat, and Sadiqi. It includes portraits of rulers and the elite, as well as illustrations from older manuscripts such as Saʿdi’s Gulistan. Samples of the works of renowned calligraphers such as ʿImad al-Hasani, ʿAli Riza ʿAbbasi, Mir ʿAli, and ʿAbd al-Rashid al-Daylami that bear their signature add to the luster of this album.

Source: Album of Persian and Indian calligraphy and paintings. Walters Ms. W.668, fol. W.668.10b.

Date: Late sixteenth century–nineteenth century

Place of origin: Iran and India

Credit: Walters Art Museum

Conversion was a heated issue that occupied religious and political authorities of the time. Although most Muslim jurists agreed that forced conversion is not permitted in Islam, the fatwas (religious authoritative rulings) that follow reveal that when everyday sociopolitical concerns of religious minorities met imperial objectives of expansion and domination, the permissibility of conversion became a matter of the legal opinion of jurists in the imperial service. This was further complicated given the legal status granted to dhimmis (people of the book; that is, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, but not Hindus) living under Muslim rule. Through examination of fatwas in the Ottoman domain issued by the highest religious authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in the second essay Nikolay Antov demonstrates how leading jurists’ legal interpretations related to state policies regarding the Christian populations of Eastern Europe were maintained over the long term and consistently contributed to jurisprudential rigidity and an emerging legal conformism. Fatwas regulating the sociopolitical and economic activities of non-Muslim communities are a great source to investigate to learn how religious minorities attempted to negotiate their legal protection, expand their rights, and avoid persecution.

In the broader framework of imperial politics, conversion can be viewed as a societal issue, but it was also a very personal experience for those involved. The fear of persecution or exclusion from socioeconomic opportunities was a common reality for many members of minority communities. Those who converted did not experience immediate relief but rather felt great anxiety caused by a crisis of faith, doubt as to the true path to salvation in the afterlife, and ostracism by family and friends. In the first essay, Rudi Matthee explores the personal dimension of conversion through examination of a rare autobiographical account left behind by ʿAli Akbar, an Armenian Christian merchant of Isfahan (the Safavid Empire’s seventeenth-century capital) who converted to Shiʿi Islam. This extraordinary source offers us a window into the tormented mental world of a man who abandoned one faith and adopted another.

In contrast to the Ottoman Empire, which was in constant warfare with Christian powers, the Safavids and the Mughals tolerated the presence of Jesuit missionaries, with the latter ruling over a vast population of Hindu subjects. In fact, at times Mughal emperors such as Akbar and Jahangir and the Safavid Shah ʿAbbas exhibited a degree of religious tolerance rare for the era by any measure. Although the state’s lenient policies regarding religious minorities oscillated from time to time and necessitated original political solutions, disputations in matters of creed between Christian and Muslim theologians mirrored the contestations of the earlier centuries in central Islamic lands. Such issues as the perceived polytheistic nature of the Trinity and challenging the authorship of the Bible and the accuracy of the Gospels (and contrasting it to the superiority of the Qurʾan as an unaltered word of God) were evoked by the ʿulamaʾ to elevate the imperial religion over all others.

In the final essay of the chapter, Corinne Lefèvre examines and translates a debate that took place in the intimate audience hall of the Mughal emperor Jahangir between the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and the Muslim jurist ʿAbd al-Sattar, who later compiled them in the collection Majalis-i Jahangiri. Jahangir, following in the footsteps of his father Akbar, was keenly interested in all matters of faith, and even the abrogation of the Qurʾan was not off limits in these nightly debates. Muslim-Christian disputations at the Mughal court were highly polemical and had the benefit of centuries of doctrinal scaffolding, but when it came to Hinduism, a great degree of inquisitiveness and interest dominated the discourse, which is revealed in Emperor Jahangir’s conversation with a Brahman translated in this essay. Audrey Truschke’s essay in chapter 3 further demonstrates this inquisitiveness by exploring Jahangir’s debate with a Jain monk in which the emperor questions the merits of the monk’s ascetic practices.

I. Confessions of an Armenian Convert

THE I‘TIRAFNAMA OF ABKAR (ʿALI AKBAR) ARMANI

RUDI MATTHEE

The past decade or so has seen a surge in scholarly interest in the topic of conversion in early modern Middle Eastern and Islamic history. The Ottoman Empire has received most of the attention in this expanding field.¹ To the extent that modern scholarship has addressed religious conversion in Iran, it has focused on the early Islamic period, the first centuries following the seventh-century Arab invasion and occupation, with a specific emphasis on the question of the poorly documented conditions under which, over time, the local population turned to the Muslim faith.² For the subsequent period, the eight centuries between the reign of the Seljuqs and the late Qajar dynasty, virtually no scholarship exists on the issue.³ As a result, we are largely in the dark about the process of Islamization in Iran following the decline of the Seljuqs.

The period of the Safavids, the dynasty that ruled Iran from 1501 until 1722, is no exception to this state of affairs. We are well informed about the actual efforts by the Safavid elite to become acquainted with the formal tenets of Twelver-Shiʿism, and we have multiple sources for contemporary debates between the representatives of the various religions that made up Iran at the time. But we know little about the actual process by which a majority Sunni population turned to one adhering to the Shiʿi variant of Islam other than that it was accompanied by a great deal of pressure and violence. It was a gradual process that remained incomplete, and even in the late Safavid period a large Sunni minority continued to exist on the periphery.⁴

The situation is somewhat better in the case of non-Muslims, especially Christians, who converted to Islam in Safavid times. Here we have to distinguish between large-scale conversion, which was often forced and instrumental in nature, and individual cases of those who saw the light and submitted to Allah.

The case of the Christian Caucasus clearly falls into the first category. With the subjugation of large parts of the southern Caucasus, comprising Shirvan, Armenia, and Georgia, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Safavids added significant numbers of Christians to their subject population. Under Shah Tahmasb (r. 1524–1576) 30,000 Georgians are said to have been moved to Iran, and Iskandar Beg Munshi speaks of the settlement of 130,000 Georgians into Safavid territory in the wake of Shah ʿAbbas I’s 1616 expedition into the Caucasus.⁵ Toward the end of that ruler’s reign (1587–1629), more than 30,000 Georgian soldiers are said to have served in the Safavid army. At the same time, allegedly “not a household in the entire Persian Empire” was without Georgian slaves, men and women.⁶ By the 1680s, 20,000 Georgians—including Daghestanis and Circassians—were said to be living in Isfahan alone.⁷

As for Armenians, their numbers in Isfahan increased significantly when Shah ʿAbbas I deported thousands from the town of Julfa on the Aras River in Armenia to his new capital in 1604–1605. New Julfa, the suburb that the shah had constructed for them, by the mid-seventeenth century housed perhaps 30,000 Armenians, a substantial minority in an urban area totaling up to 500,000 people.⁸

Called gulaman-i sarkar-i khassa (slaves of the royal household), the Georgians and Armenians brought from their ancestral homelands to the Safavid metropole were made to convert to Islam as part of their recruitment, as a service nobility loyal to the shah, before they could assimilate into the Safavid society as army personnel and administrators. Such transformations thus were largely instrumental and situational, and the Georgians especially seemed to have worn their Islam rather lightly.⁹ With exceptions, the actual act of conversion remains anonymous and thus is beyond our ken.¹⁰

We are slightly better informed about non-...