by Kevin Reilly
The Mughal Empire
If the Ottoman Empire brought a part of Christian Europe under Muslim control, the Mughal Empire incorporated most of India’s ancient and complex Hindu civilization within the Islamic world. Established in 1526 by yet another central Asian Turkish group, the Mughal Empire continued a 500-year-old Muslim presence on the South Asian peninsula; created a prosperous, powerful, and sophisticated state; and deepened the long encounter between Islamic and Hindu civilizations. For 150 years (1550–1700), successive Mughal emperors repeatedly went to war until they had conquered all but the southern tip of a normally fragmented subcontinent, ruling some 100 million people. In doing so, they laid the foundations for a united India that was later taken over by the British and after 1947 by the independent states of India and Pakistan.
Muslims and Hindus . The Mughal Empire represented a remarkable experiment in multicultural state building. Even more than their Ottoman counterpart, the Mughal Empire governed a primarily non-Muslim population and went to considerable lengths to accommodate its Hindu subjects. Its most famous emperor, Akbar (1556–1605), encouraged intermarriage between the Mughal aristocracy and leading Hindu families, ended discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims, patronized Hindu temples and festivals, and promoted Hindus into prominent government positions. He sought to solidify the empire by creating a cosmopolitan Indian Islamic culture that would transcend the many sectarian conflicts of Indian society rather than promoting an exclusively Muslim identity. As a part of this effort, Akbar invited leading intellectuals from many traditions to court for serious philosophical discussions that he introduced with this speech:
I perceive that there are varying customs and beliefs of varying religious paths. . . . But the followers of each religion regard . . . their own religion as better than those of any other. Not only so, but they strive to convert the rest to their own way of belief. If these refuse to be converted, they not only despise them, but also regard them as . . . enemies. And this caused me to feel many serious doubts and scruples. Wherefore I desire that on appointed days the books of all the religious laws be brought forward, and the doctors meet and hold discussions, so that I may hear them, and that each one may determine which is the truest and mightiest religion.9
Thus, Mughal India witnessed no single or officially prescribed Muslim culture such as existed in the Safavid Empire. Rather, a wide variety of Islamic practices competed with each other, and many of them received support from the state. Furthermore, elements of Islamic and Hindu/Buddhist culture blended in distinctly Indian patterns—in architecture, painting, poetry, and literature. Such blending was apparent in popular culture as well. Adherents of the Hindu devotional tradition known as bhakti and Islamic mystics known as sufis practiced similar forms of worship and blurred the otherwise sharp distinction between Islam and Hinduism. Hindus and Muslims sometimes venerated the same saints and shrines. Some Muslims even found a place in a Hindu-based caste system.
But this policy of accommodation and cultural blending incurred the opposition of some Muslim leaders who felt that Akbar and his immediate successors had betrayed the duties of a Muslim ruler and compromised the unique revelation granted to Muhammad. That opposition found expression during the reign of Aurangzeb (1658—1707), who reversed the conciliation of Hindus and sought to govern in a more distinctly Islamic fashion. Hindu officials were dismissed, some Hindu temples destroyed, and discriminatory taxes reimposed on non-Muslims. These actions weakened the tradition of religious toleration that had earlier balanced the multiple communities of the empire. Internal rebellion flared, pitting “Hindu” against Muslim, and regional power centers became more prominent as the central state lost power. Thus, the Mughal Empire, like the Ottoman, featured a significant cultural encounter with reverberations that have lasted into the twenty-first century.
An Expanding Economy . Mughal India’s experiment in multicultural state building was underwritten by impressive economic expansion. Its participation in the world of Islam fostered trade, and Indian merchants, perhaps 35,000 of them, conducted business in the major cities and some of the rural areas of Iran, Afghanistan, central Asia, and Russia.10 It was a commercial network fully as sophisticated as and much more extensive than those that Europeans created in Asia. At home, the Mughal Empire became a highly commercialized society, for its demand that peasants pay their land taxes in imperial coin rather than in produce required them to sell agricultural products on the market and to buy salt, iron, and other commodities. As late as 1750, India accounted for 25 percent of world manufacturing output, and its high-quality cotton textile industry dominated the markets of the world.
The Songay Empire
Yet a further center of Islamic political power lay in West Africa, where the Songay Empire took shape in the late 1400s around the bend of the Niger River and extended deep into the Sahara Desert. It was the latest and the largest of a series of West African empires based on trade in gold and salt across the desert. Like the Mughals in India, the Songay people were a minority ethnic group that ruled over a vast and diverse domain. The rulers and merchant elites in the cities—especially Timbuktu—were Muslim, but Islam had penetrated very little into the rural hinterlands. Therefore, Songay rulers, like the Mughals, had to constantly balance their allegiance to Islam with duties to traditional religious rituals and deities. Unlike the Mughal and Ottoman empires, Songay had not yet incorporated gunpowder weapons into its arsenals but relied on cavalry forces bearing swords and bows and arrows in which both horses and riders were protected with a thick armor of quilted cloth.
The Songay Empire was short lived, collapsing in 1591 when it was confronted with an invasion from Morocco, and dissolved into a series of smaller states. But the disappearance of large-scale political structures did little to disrupt the long-established relationships that bound sub-Saharan Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea to the larger world of Eurasia. Continuing trans-Saharan trade links and the slow growth of Islam tied this part of Africa solidly into the web of Eurasian interactions. A Moroccan traveler, Leo Africanus, wrote about the Songay city of Timbuktu in 1526:
The shops of the artisans, the merchants, and especially weavers of cotton cloth are very numerous. Fabrics are also imported from Europe to Timbuktu, borne by Berber merchants. . . . The inhabitants are very rich, especially the strangers who have settled in the country. . . . There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, teachers and priests, all properly appointed by the king. He greatly honors learning. Many handwritten books imported from Barbary are also sold. There is more profit made from this commerce than from all other merchandise.11
Religious Vitality
and Political Decline
An Islamic World . Despite its division into various and sometimes hostile states and empires, the Islamic world remained also one world, united by the bonds of faith, by common scriptures, by historical memories, by the ties of commerce, by pilgrimage to Mecca, and by the travels of learned and holy men. Scholars and scribes, prayer mats and precious books, and officials and jurists made the journey between the heartland of Islam in the Middle East and its outlying peripheries in India, Southeast Asia, southern Europe, and West Africa.
Conversion . It was certainly not a static world. Together, the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Songay empires demonstrate the political vitality and expansiveness of the Islamic world even as Europe expanded into the Atlantic and beyond. The religious vitality of Islam was apparent in the continued spread of the faith both within and beyond the major Muslim empires. The Ottomans brought Islam to Anatolia (modern Turkey), and a modest number of European Christians in the empire converted as well. So did perhaps 20 percent or so of India’s population. More widespread Islamization took place in Southeast Asia, especially what is now Indonesia, and in the African savanna lands south of the Sahara. These conversions were encouraged by expanding networks of Muslim traders who carried the faith with them. Islamic mystics or holy men, known as sufis, often gained reputations for kindness,
divination, protective charms, and healing and in so doing facilitated conversion. The support of Muslim governments; the material advantages of a Muslim identity, including exemption from taxes on nonbelievers; and the general prestige of the Islamic world also attracted many into the “abode of Islam.” But conversion did not always mean a complete change of religious allegiance; rather, it often involved the assimilation of bits and pieces of Islamic belief and practice into existing religious frameworks.
The incompleteness of the conversion process and the blending of Islam with other religious practices created tensions in many societies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these tensions gave rise to movements all across the Islamic world seeking to purify the practice of the faith and to return to the original Islam of Muhammad. One of the most prominent was associated with a young Muslim theologian, Abd al-Wahhab, in mid-eighteenth-century Arabia. He called for a strict adherence to the shari’a, or the Islamic law code, and denounced the widespread veneration of sufis and of Muhammad’s tomb, both of which he viewed as potentially leading to idolatry and thus as threats to the absolute monotheism of authentic Islam. Although militarily crushed by Egyptian forces loyal to the Ottoman Empire, the revivalist impulse persisted and surfaced repeatedly throughout the Islamic world during the nineteenth century, from Africa to Indonesia, sometimes directed against local deviations from prescribed Islamic practice and at other times against growing European intrusion.
Decline of Islamic Empires . The case for religious reform was strengthened by the internal decline of the great Muslim empires during the eighteenth century. During that century, the Ottoman Empire substantially weakened and lost territory in wars with the Austrian and Russian empires, the Safavid Empire collapsed altogether, and the Mughal Empire fragmented and was increasingly taken over by the British. Muslims who understood history as the triumphal march of Allah’s faithful were dismayed by these setbacks, and some blamed them on a gradual process of decay and departure from the pure faith that had crept in as Islam adapted to various Asian and African cultures.
Modern historians offer other explanations. Some emphasize the declining quality of imperial leadership and internal conflicts that became more acute as opportunities for further expansion diminished. Muslim empires were also weakened by the growth of European oceanic trade routes that increasingly bypassed older land-based routes through the Middle East and deprived Islamic states of much-needed revenue. Others stress the cultural conservatism of Islamic societies. Accustomed to a near millennium of success and prominence in the Afro-Eurasian world, many elite Muslims remained uninterested in scientific and technological developments then taking place in an infidel Europe. In 1580, for example, conservative Muslims forced the Ottoman sultan to dismantle an astronomical observatory that was as sophisticated as any in Europe at the time. In 1742, they protested a recently established printing press as impious and successfully demanded its closure. An Ottoman official, Kateb Chelebi, responded with a warning against blind ignorance:
For the man who is in charge of affairs of state, the science of geography is one of the matters of which knowledge is necessary. If he is not familiar with what the entire earth’s sphere is like, he should at least know the map of the Ottoman domains and that of the states adjoining it, so that when there is a campaign and military forces have to be sent, he can proceed on the basis of knowledge. . . . Sufficient and compelling proof of the necessity for [learning] this science is the fact that the unbelievers [Christian Europeans], by their application to and their esteem for those branches of learning, have discovered the New World and have overrun the ports of India and the East Indies.12
For much of the early modern era, however, the Islamic world was a dynamic place with powerful and expanding empires bringing large areas of Christian, Hindu, and African civilizations under Islamic control. These empires prospered with their merchants active participants in world trade. Sophisticated cultures produced such magnificent works as the Taj Mahal in India and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. And the religion of Islam continued to grow throughout the Afro-Eurasian world. Clearly, Europeans had no monopoly on political or cultural expansion in the early modern world.
China Outward Bound
While expanding Muslim empires dominated the Middle East and South Asia in the early modern world, China was the engine of expansion in East Asia. Early modern China was heir to a long and distinctive civilization, a sophisticated elite culture informed by the writings of Confucius, an ethnically homogeneous population compared to India and Europe, and long periods of political unity under a succession of powerful dynasties. Headed by an autocratic emperor, these dynasties governed through a prestigious bureaucracy recruited from a landowning elite by competitive written examinations.
Early modern China, governed by the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties, was an impressive place. Its state, according to one recent historian, was “arguably the strongest, most centralized, most stable of the early modern empires.”13 It presided over an economy that was able to support a fourfold increase in its population from 75 million in 1400 to 320 million in 1800 while generating standards of living, life expectancies, and nutritional levels that were among the highest in the world at the time. Achieving this remarkable record involved tripling the area of land under cultivation, developing more productive techniques of farming, and assimilating American crops, such as corn and the sweet potato. The growing population also pushed forward the long-term process of internal colonization in which Chinese settlers occupied sparsely populated and often hilly lands south of the Yangtze River. This in turn provoked frequent hostility from non-Chinese groups in the south, such as the Miao, Yao, and Yi peoples, who were increasingly assimilated into Chinese culture.
China and the World
While often depicted as a separate and even isolated civilization, China had long interacted with a wider world. During its early Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), China was the eastern terminus of the trans-Eurasian Silk Road trading network. Buddhism initially penetrated China during these centuries and became a major cultural force in the country. Furthermore, the enormous presence and attractiveness of Chinese culture ensured that elements of that civilization—Confucianism, Buddhism, artistic and architectural styles, administrative systems, and elite culture—spread to adjacent regions such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Chinese armies invaded Korea and Vietnam and fought repeatedly with the nomadic peoples to the north and west who had long represented the chief threat to China’s security. The Mongols under Genghis Khan were the most successful of these northwestern nomads, conquering Peiking (Beijing) in 1215. Mongols ruled all of China for almost a century (1279–1368). Chinese merchants established themselves in many of the ports of East and Southeast Asia. Chinese influence (and sometimes political control) penetrated westward into central Asia and north of the Great Wall into the lands of various nomadic peoples. And Chinese products, such as silk and ceramics, and technologies, such as papermaking, printing, and gunpowder, spread widely beyond China itself.
The Tribute System . Thus, an interacting world in eastern Asia, centered on China, paralleled an interacting Islamic world centered on the Middle East. What normally held it together, however, was not a common religious tradition but the so-called tribute system, in which the non-Chinese participants ritually acknowledged the superiority of China and their own dependent status by sending tribute to the emperor and “kowtowing” before him. In return, they received lavish gifts and much-desired trading opportunities within China. It was clear to everyone that this was no equal relationship.
New Forms of Chinese Expansion . Much of this persisted into the early modern era, but Chinese patterns of expansion also took new shape in three new ways. First, in the early fifteenth century, China undertook a series of massive though short-lived maritime voyages into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Second, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China vastly extended its territorial reach to the nort
h and west, bringing a variety of peoples under Chinese colonial rule and roughly doubling the size of the Chinese state in the process. Finally, China incorporated the large offshore island of Taiwan, settling it with many thousands of Chinese immigrants. All this marks China as a major center of expansion in the early modern era and invites comparisons with similar processes in the Islamic and European worlds.
A Maritime Empire Refused:
The Ming Dynasty Voyages
In the fall of 1405, a fleet of some 317 vessels departed Nanjing, then the capital of Ming dynasty China, bound for Calicut on the west coast of India. The largest, called “treasure ships,” measured some 400 feet in length and 160 feet wide and carried 24 cannon and a variety of gunpowder weapons. The crew of this enormous fleet numbered over 27,000, about half of them seamen and soldiers but including also military commanders, ambassadors and administrators of various ranks, medical officers and pharmacologists, translators, astrologers, ritual experts, and skilled workmen. This was the first of seven such expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited major ports in Southeast Asia, southern India, the Arabian Peninsula, and the East African coast, projecting Chinese power and influence throughout the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean basin. And then, quite abruptly, the voyages stopped. The building of large ships ended, and the Chinese fleet declined sharply. In 1525, an imperial edict ordered the destruction of all oceangoing ships. Even the official records of the earlier maritime voyages disappeared. “In less than a hundred years,” wrote a recent historian of these voyages, “the greatest navy the world had ever known had ordered itself into extinction.”14