by Tamim Ansary
In the course of his wandering, Babur and his band came over a rise in the hills and saw a charming city tucked into a crack of a valley below. Babur fell in love again, this time with Kabul. And Kabul, he tells us, returned his affection: the citizens hated their own ruler and begged Babur to be their king instead. Does this sound like a conqueror’s implausible propaganda? Maybe so, but I can tell you that Kabul’s affection for Babur lingers to this day. The public gardens he built overlooking the city remain a favorite park, and his grave up there is still a beloved shrine.
Babur was crowned king of Kabul in 1504, and now he had a base. He considered and rejected another attempt on Samarqand. He and his advisers decided to head south, instead, as so many other Turko-Mongol conquerors had done before. Babur entered India with ten thousand men and the sultan of Delhi met him on the plains of Panipat with one hundred thousand. Ten to one odds—the stuff of legends! What’s more, the sultan had a thousand elephants, but Babur had an advantage too: firearms. The new technology trumped the old biology as Babur routed the sultan and took possession of Delhi. Like the Ottomans and the Safavids, the Moghuls overwhelmed their enemies because they were fighting spears and arrows with bullets and cannonballs. The third of the three great Muslim “gunpowder” empires was now on the map.
The Moghuls, even more than the Safavids, benefited from a series of long-lived and brilliant rulers. Just six men saw the empire through its first two hundred years. Most were passionate, romantic, and artistic. At least three were military geniuses. One was a poor administrator, but his wife Nur Jahan ruled from behind the throne, and she was the fiery equal of the best Moghuls—a savvy businesswoman, a poet and patron of the arts, an extraordinary sportswoman, and one of the most cunning politicians of her age.
Only one of the six was a dud, and that was Babur’s son. It took this drunkard ten years to lose the entire empire his father had built. While he was on the run through the mountains of Afghanistan, however, his beloved wife gave birth to a boy who would become Akbar the Great, the most remarkable monarch of his age, a contemporary and equal of England’s Queen Elizabeth. His father managed to win his throne back just in time for Akbar to celebrate his twelfth birthday as a prince. Shortly after that, his father heard the call to prayer when he was standing at the top of a staircase in his library and had a sudden inspiration to reform his life. He hustled down to start living as a saint but on the way down tripped and broke his neck, which put his teenaged son on the throne.
Akbar consolidated his grandfather’s conquests, extended them, and set his whole empire in order. These achievements alone would have made him an important monarch, but Akbar was much more than a conqueror.
Early on, he recognized his empire’s key weakness: a small group of Muslims was attempting to rule a vast population of Hindus, whom Muslims had been sacking, pillaging, looting, and killing since the days of Sultan Mahmud the Ghaznavid, some five centuries earlier. Akbar attacked this flaw with a principle he called sulahkul, “universal tolerance.” To prove his sincerity, he married a Hindu princess and declared her first son his heir.
Akbar opened all government positions to Hindus on equal terms with Muslims. He abolished a punitive tax Muslim rulers of this region had long imposed on pilgrims visiting Hindu shrines. Akbar also eliminated the jizya, the Qur’anic tax on non-Muslims. He replaced both with a land tax that applied uniformly to all citizens, high and low. Virtually no other state in the world at this time taxed the nobility, but Akbar broke the mold. He also ordered his troops to protect the shrines and holy places of all religions, not just Islam.
This great Moghul emperor abolished the standing military aristocracy on which his predecessors had depended and set up an administrative system in which every official was appointed and could hold office for only a specified period, after which he had to move on to a new job in another place. Essentially, Akbar pioneered the concept of term limits, interrupting a process that had produced all too many troublemaking regional warlords in the past.
Born and raised a Muslim, Akbar certainly considered himself a Muslim monarch, but he was deeply curious about other religions. He called leading Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and others to his court to explain and debate their views while the emperor listened. Finally Akbar decided every religion had some truth in it and no religion had the whole truth, so he decided to take the best from each and blend them into a single new religion he called Din-i Illahi, “the God Religion.” The doctrines of this new religion included, first, that God was a single, all-powerful unity; second, that the universe was a single integrated whole reflecting its creator; third, that every person’s first religious obligation was to do no harm to others; and fourth, that people could and should model themselves on Perfect Lives, of which many examples existed—Mohammed provided such a model, said Akbar, and so did the Shi’i imams. Akbar went on to suggest modestly that he himself provided yet another.
Ablaze with fervor for his new religion, Akbar built a whole new city dedicated to it. Constructed of red sandstone, Fatehpur Sikri rose in the desert around the grave and shrine of Akbar’s favorite Sufi mystic. The main building here was the private-audience hall, a single large room that had a high domed ceiling and only one element of furniture: a tall pillar connected by catwalks to balconies along the walls. Akbar sat atop this pillar. People who wanted to petition the emperor addressed him from the balconies. Courtiers and other interested parties listened from the floor below.
It’s a testament to Akbar’s charm and majesty that no one revolted against him for trying to promulgate his new religion, but the religion did not take. It wasn’t Muslim enough for Muslims or Hindu enough for Hindus. Fatehpur Sikri didn’t last, either: its water sources dried up and the city withered.
But Akbar’s ideas had not sprung full-blown out of nothing. Movements to blend the best of Islam and Hinduism had been percolating on the subcontinent since Babur’s days, with mysticism providing the point of intersection. In 1499, for example, a man named Nanak had a religious experience that led him to declare, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” Although born Hindu, he reached toward Sufism and devoted his life to rejecting and repudiating the caste system. He launched a tradition of spiritual techniques transmitted directly from master to initiate, echoing both Hindu masters and Sufi saints. Guru Nanak’s followers ended up calling themselves Sikhs, a new religion.
A contemporary of Guru Nanak’s, the illiterate poet Kabir, was born of a widowed Hindu mother but raised by a family of Muslim weavers. He began spouting lyrics celebrating love in a spirit that smacked of both Sufism and Hinduism, and scribes recorded his utterances. The lyrics have survived to this day.
While folk mystics in Moghul India were producing passionate lyrics rooted in oral traditions, court poets were elaborating a complex metaphysical style of Persian-language poetry. At the same time, Moghul artists were developing their own more robust version of the painted “Persian” miniatures and illuminated books.
Moghul creativity reached its apogee in architecture, which managed to combine the solid majesty of Ottoman styles with the airy lightness of the Safavid. The fifth Moghul monarch Shah Jahan was himself a genius in this field. In his time, he was called the Just King, but few today remember his many political or military achievements: what they remember about him is his consuming love for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, “ornament of the palace,” who died shortly after Shah Jahan began his reign. The grieving emperor devoted the next twenty years to building a mausoleum for her: the Taj Mahal. Often called the most beautiful building in the world, the Taj Mahal is a masterpiece as singular and universally famous as the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. What’s astounding is that the artist responsible for this tour de force had a day job running an empire, for while many architects and designers contributed to the Taj Mahal, it was the emperor who oversaw every detail of its construction: his was the master eye.8
Shah Jahan’s son A
urangzeb, the last of the great Moghuls, had no artistic leanings. Music, poetry, and painting left him cold. His passion was religion, and nothing irritated him more than the tradition of tolerance his family had pioneered in the subcontinent. Toward the end of his father’s reign, he went to war with Shah Jahan and seized power. He had the old man clapped in a stone fortress, where the old emperor lived out his life in a one-room cell with a single window too high for him to see through. After his death, however, his jailers found a small mirror affixed to one wall. In that mirror, it turned out, from his bed, Shah Jahan could view the outside world and the only thing he could see out there through that one high window was the Taj Mahal.
Restoring orthodox Islam to a position of privilege in the Moghul empire was Aurangzeb’s obsession. He was a military genius equal to his great grandfather Akbar, and like Akbar he ruled for forty-nine years, so he had time and power to work deep changes in the subcontinent.
The changes he sought and wrought were exactly the opposite of those promoted by his great-grandfather Akbar the Great. He reinstated the jizya. He reimposed special taxes on Hindus. He had his security forces demolish all new Hindu shrines. He expelled Hindus from government positions and went to war with the Rajputs, semiautonomous Hindu rulers in the south, in order to bring them more firmly under the power of his Moghul government and the Muslim clerical establishment, India’s ulama.
Aurangzeb also tried to exterminate the Sikhs. Guru Nanak had been a resolute pacifist, but Aurangzeb’s persecution transformed the Sikhs into a warrior sect whose sacred ritual objects ever since have included a long, curved knife carried by every pious Sikh man.
Even though the last of the Moghul titans was a grim zealot, this dynasty cut a fiery swath through history, and at its peak, around the year 1600, it was surely one of the world’s three greatest and most powerful empires.
Indeed, in the year 1600, a traveler could sail from the islands of Indonesia to Bengal, cross India, go over the Hindu Kush to the steppes north of the Oxus River and back down through Persia, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor to the Balkans, and then back across or around the Black Sea through the Caucusus region and south through Arabia into Egypt and then west to Morocco, and always find himself in a generally familiar world permeated by a single coherent civilization—in much the same way that a modern traveler roaming from San Francisco to London and all across Europe would find himself in a generally familiar civilization with a German flavor here, a Swedish flavor there, a Spanish, British, or Dutch flavor somewhere else.
Yes, that seventeenth-century traveler through the Muslim world would encounter diverse local customs and come across a variety of languages, and yes, he would cross borders and present paperwork to officials working for different sovereign powers, but everywhere he went, he would find certain common elements as well.
In all three of the great Muslim empires and their satellite regions, for example, he would find that Turks generally held political and military power. (Even in Safavid Persia, the ruling family was actually ethnically Turkish and so were many of the Qizilbash.) Throughout this world, the traveler would find that the educated literati tended to know Persian and the classic literature written in that language. Everywhere, he would hear the azan, the call to prayer, chanted in Arabic at certain times of day from numerous minarets, and he would hear Arabic again whenever people performed religious rites of any kind.
THE THREE ISLAMIC EMPIRES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Everywhere he went, not just in the three empires but in the outlying frontier zones such as Indonesia and Morocco, society would be permeated with a web of rules and recommendations that shaded up into law and down into the practices and rituals of everyday life with no border between the two. And every society would have its ulama, that powerful, self-regenerating, unelected class of scholars, and they would have an influential grip on daily life. Everywhere, the traveler would come across Sufism and Sufi orders as well. Merchants and traders would have an elevated status, but it would be lower than that of bureaucrats and officials connected to the court, itself a distinct and significant class in society.
Passing through the public realm, the traveler would see very few women. Throughout this world stretching from Indonesia to Morocco, he would have found society divided to a greater or lesser extent into public and private realms, and women would have been sequestered in the private world, while men exercised near total possession of the public realm.
What women the traveler did see in the public world—shopping, for example, or going from one house to another on a visit—would probably have a garment of some kind at least obscuring and perhaps covering their faces. If he saw women with uncovered faces, he would know that they belonged to the lower classes: they might be peasants, for example, or servants, or laborers of some kind. Whatever the women might be wearing, it would not expose their arms, legs, or cleavage, and they would wear a head covering of some kind.
Men’s clothing styles would differ from place to place, but everywhere the traveler went, men’s heads, too, would be covered, their garments would be loose rather than form fitting, and they would wear something that would not permit their crotches to show when they prostrated themselves in the prayer ritual.
Throughout this world, calligraphy would have prestige as an art form, representational (as opposed to abstract and decorative) art would be rare except in illuminated books, and the spoken and written word would be honored.
Every city the traveler passed through would be like a collection of villages without many big through-streets; none would be set up on the checkerboard pattern of Hellenic cities. Every neighborhood would have its own bazaar, every city its spectacular mosques, and the mosques would always feature domes and minarets and would very commonly be decorated with glazed mosaic tiles.
If the traveler struck up a conversation with some stranger in this world, he would find that he and this stranger shared certain mythological references: both would know the leading personalities of the Abrahamic tradition—Adam, David, Moses, Noah, and so on; both would also know not just all about Mohammed but also Abu Bakr, Omar, Ali and Othman, and they would have impressions of and opinions about these personalities. They would share knowledge of major events in history as well; they would know, for example, about the Abbasids and the Golden Age over which they presumably presided, and they would know about the Mongols and the devastation they wrought.
In 1600, in fact, ordinary folks anywhere in this world would have assumed that the Muslim empires and their adjacent frontier territories were in fact “the world.” Or, to quote University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson, “In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim.”9
The Martian would have been mistaken, of course; the course of history had already tipped, because of developments in Europe since the Crusades.
11
Meanwhile in Europe
689-1008 AH
1291-1600 CE
THE LAST CRUSADERS fled the Islamic world in 1291, driven out by Egypt’s mamluks, but in Europe residues of the Crusades persisted for years to come. Some of the blowback came from those military religious orders spawned by the Church of Rome. The Templars, for example, became influential international bankers. The Knights Hospitaller took over the island of Rhodes, then moved their headquarters to Malta, from which place they operated more or less as pirates, looting Muslim shipping in the Mediterranean. The Teutonic Knights actually conquered enough of Prussia to establish a state that lasted into the fifteenth century.
Meanwhile, Europeans kept trying to launch new campaigns into the Muslim world too, but these were ever more feeble, and some dissipated along the way, while others veered off on tangents. The so-called Northern Crusade ended up targeting the pagan Slavs of the Baltic region. Many little wars against “heretical” sects within Europe, whipped up by the pope and conducted by this or that monarch, were also labeled “
crusades.” In France, for example, there was a long “crusade” against a Christian sect called the Albigensians. Then there was Iberia, where Christians kept on crusading until 1492, when they overran Granada finally and drove the last of the Muslims out of the peninsula.
The crusading spirit persisted in part because over the course of the real crusades, a new motivation had entered the drive to the east: an appetite for trade goods coming from places like India and the islands beyond them, which Europeans called the Indies. One of many desirable goods to be found in India was an amazing product called sugar. From Malaysia and Indonesia came pepper, nutmeg, and many other spices. Chefs of the High Middle Ages put spices in everything they cooked—often the same spices in savories and desserts; they just liked spices!1
The trouble was, the Crusades stoked an appetite for the goods but also separated European merchants from those goods by creating a belt of anti-Christian hostility that stretched from Egypt to Azerbaijan. European businessmen couldn’t get past that wall to trade directly with the source: they had to deal with Muslim middleman. It’s true that Marco Polo traveled to China in this period, but he and his group were just one anomalous band, and Europeans were amazed that they had made it all the way there and back. Most, in fact, didn’t believe he had really done it: they called Marco Polo’s book about his adventures “The Millions,” referring to the number of lies they thought he had packed into it. Muslims owned the eastern shores of the Black Sea, they owned the Caucasus mountains, they owned the Caspian coastline. They possessed the Red Sea and all approaches to it. Europeans were forced to get the products of India and the Indies from Muslim merchants in Syria and Egypt, who no doubt jacked the prices up as high as the market would bear, especially for their European Christian customers, given the ill will from all that happened during the Crusades, not to mention the fact that the Farangi Christians had aligned themselves with the Mongols.