by Amy Chua
Zheng He was a Chinese Muslim whose father and grandfather had been to Mecca. Yongle probably appointed him admiral because of his familiarity with foreign customs, particularly in Islamic countries. Because the Tang dynasty had sent expeditions abroad centuries earlier, Zheng He navigated with surprisingly accurate maps—one was longer than twenty feet and included detailed sailing directions as well as the names of African coastal cities like Mombasa and Malindi (both in modern-day Kenya). The hulls of Zheng He's ships had separate watertight compartments, allowing repairs to be made while the ship was still sailing. These compartments also held fresh water and fish to feed the many travelers.15
Zheng He's treasure ships were the largest in the world, capable of carrying 2,500 tons, and exceeding European ships in size and staff by a factor of ten. Onboard Zheng He's ships were
868 civil officers, 26,800 soldiers, 93 commanders, two senior commanders, 140 “milleriorns” [captains of a thousand men], 403 centurions, a Senior Secretary of the Board of Revenue, a geomancer, a military instructor, two military judges, 180 medical officers and assistants, two orderlies, seven senior eunuch ambassadors, ten junior eunuchs and 53 eunuch chamberlains.
This was in addition to an unspecified number of translators, scribes, interpreters, navigators, mechanics, negotiators, sailors, and cooks. The number of doctors and herb specialists alone totaled 180—the size of Vasco da Gama's entire crew. Unlike Colum-bus's crew, which had dirty drinking water and ate flour baked with sea water, Zheng He's men had “an abundance of grain, fresh water, salt, soya sauce, tea, liquor, oil, candles, firewood and charcoal.”16
Finally, the treasure ships also carried…treasure. Zheng He's ships brought back to the emperor the most valuable and exotic goods foreign rulers had to offer. But unlike the Mongols before them or the Portuguese after them, Zheng He's men did not plunder. Instead, they presented local rulers with symbolic gifts—colored silk, umbrellas, books, or calendars—in exchange for such rarities as “dragon saliva” (ambergris), prize horses, parrots, peacocks, sandalwood, gold, silver, “cat's eyes of extraordinary size, rubies and other precious stones, large branches of coral, amber and attar of roses” as well as strange “auspicious beasts” such as “camel-birds” (ostriches), giraffes, rhinoceroses, “gold-spotted leopards,” zebras, and lions.17
Then in 1424 it ended, almost as abruptly as it had begun. Emperor Yongle died, and the Ming government suspended all further voyages. After reluctantly allowing Zheng He to make one final expedition in 1433, the imperial court banned the construction of all oceangoing vessels. The great treasure ships were put into “storage,” eventually to rot away. Zheng He's sailors were reassigned to the Grand Canal, as tax collectors. Finally, an imperial edict prohibited the existence of any ship with more than two masts, and, astoundingly, the official records of Zheng He's expeditions were destroyed.
Many factors contributed to this “triumph of introversion.” Officially, the Confucian mandarins who locked away the treasure ships asserted that the expeditions were too expensive, but historians generally agree that this was at least in part a pretext to wrest power away from their rivals, the palace eunuchs, who controlled the imperial navy. Like the first Ming emperor, the Confucian bureaucrats were also conservative, hostile to commerce, and resistant to any social change, including overseas expansion. Most important of all was the renewed threat from the Mongols, who had regrouped after Yongle's death and begun invading Chinese territory.
In 1449, Mongol forces dealt a disastrous defeat to Ming imperial troops at a site called Tumu, now a truck stop two hours north of Beijing. Humiliatingly, the Mongols captured the Ming emperor, taking him to Mongolia. Although the Mongols returned the kidnapped emperor to Beijing the following year, the Tumu defeat permanently shifted Ming foreign policy. From that point on, the Ming emperors grew progressively more xenophobic, resurrecting the ancient conception of China as the only civilized society, surrounded on all sides by dangerous barbarians who had nothing valuable to offer. Obsessed with the threat of Mongol invasion, the Ming emperors tried to seal themselves in, rebuilding the Great Wall and repeatedly banning foreign trade and any contact with foreign nations. By 1500, imperial subjects were prohibited not only from building seagoing ships but from leaving the country.
The Ming dynasty lasted until 1644, when ironically it was conquered not by the Mongols but by the Manchus, different “barbarians” from the northeast. Even after its mid-fifteenth-century turn inward, Ming China experienced periods of strong economic growth, fueled by its steadily increasing population and pockets of vigorous domestic commerce, particularly in the lower Yangtze valley and the southern regions of Fujian and Guangzhou.
But after the mid-fifteenth century, Ming China could not— and in many ways chose not to—compete on the world scene. Relative to the West, China declined technologically, forgetting many of its own inventions and never undergoing a scientific or industrial revolution of the kind that transformed Europe. At the same time, it allowed its once colossal navy to wither away, eschewing overseas expansionism and ceding domination of the world's oceans to the Europeans.18
THE MUGHAL EMPIRE: MUSLIM RULERS,
HINDU SUBJECTS
Ayodhya is a small town in northern India and, according to Hindu mythology, the birthplace of Prince Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, the perfect man, and the embodiment of truth and morality. On December 6, 1992, a Hindu nationalist mob armed with hammers and pickaxes tore down a five-hundred-year-old mosque in Ayodhya, claiming that it desecrated Rama's birth spot. The destruction of the mosque, built during the reign of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, triggered an outbreak of fierce Muslim-Hindu fighting across India. More than a thousand were killed by rioting mobs. For their part, Hindu extremists justified their attacks on the “children of Babur” as revenge for centuries of oppression under Muslim rule.
The Mughal Empire, which immediately preceded the British Empire in India, was founded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. (“Mughal” is the Persian word for “Mongol.”) At its peak, it ruled over the Indian subcontinent and parts of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the Ottoman sultans who ruled contemporaneously, the Mughal emperors were Muslims. Yet for two hundred years they ruled absolutely over more than one hundred million subjects, approximately 85 percent of whom were non-Muslims: principally Hindus, as well as Sikhs, Jains, and Christians.19 Today, Hindu nationalists insist that the Mughals were brutal, intolerant oppressors of their non-Muslim subjects. Were they?
It is true that Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, rode to power on a wave of bloody zealotry. To defeat the great Hindu Rajput kings, whose troops outnumbered his by as many as ten to one, Babur inflamed the passions of his Muslim soldiers by calling his war against the Hindus a jihad, or holy war. To demonstrate his own commitment to Islam, Babur had his entire wine collection poured onto the ground and his wineglasses and flagons smashed before his men. This act of sacrifice is said to have infused his men with religious fervor and brought them victory at the decisive Battle of Khanua. To be sure, it probably helped that Babur's men had firearms while the Rajputs did not. In any event, after days of slaughter, the Rajputs fled the battlefield, leaving Babur triumphant over northern India.
But Babur ruled for just four years (1526-30) before he died. The empire he left his son Humayun was fragmented, hostile to Mughal rule, and plagued with open rebellion from all quarters. Indeed, Humayun lost control of the Mughal Empire for fifteen years, during which time Afghan rulers occupied the throne (and established a surprisingly efficient tax collection network). Eventually, after years of exile in Persia, Humayun reconquered the empire in 1555. Just seven months later, however, the unfortunate Humayun, rushing to prayer, tripped over his robe and fell down several flights of stairs to his death.20
It was only under Humayun's son Akbar, and his next several successors, that the Mughal dynasty consolidated its power to become one of the greatest empires of the time. Not coincidentally, Akbar
and the other kings of the Mughal golden age were among the most religiously and ethnically tolerant rulers in the history of the pre-modern world. Indeed, without this turn to tolerance, it is highly unlikely that the Mughal Empire could have lasted as long as it did, or reached its dazzling heights of cultural grandeur. Conversely, the period of Mughal decline is associated with some of the most brutal episodes of ethnic and religious persecution in India's history.
As a boy-emperor, Akbar was guided first by an ambitious guardian and then by a clique led by his foster mother, Maham Anga. As Akbar grew older, he increasingly chafed at attempts to curb his authority. In 1560, at the age of seventeen, he forced his guardian to resign and supposedly sent him on a pilgrimage to Mecca (the guardian was murdered en route). When Maham Anga's son killed one of Akbar's ministers, Akbar ordered his foster brother thrown repeatedly from the roof of the palace into the courtyard until he died. Before he was thirty, Akbar had clearly established his strength at the court.
But establishing his authority over the empire was a far more difficult feat. To prevent his kingdom from splintering, Akbar had to hold in check a formidable array of rivals. These included the recently deposed Afghans, Persian and central Asian noblemen, the Hindu Rajputs and Marathas, and the Muslim princes of Lodi.
Akbar's solution was one part shrewd diplomacy, one part multicultural copulation. Like Alexander the Great—but on a much greater scale because of the size of his harem—Akbar married into the families of his rivals. Perhaps his greatest success in this vein was his marriage to the eldest daughter of the Raja of Amber, one of the fiercely independent Hindu Rajput kings. The practice of a Hindu princess marrying a Muslim sultan was an uncommon but not unknown practice on the subcontinent. Akbar, however, went further. He allowed Princess Jodhabai to remain a Hindu and to worship at a Hindu shrine within his palace; occasionally Akbar himself participated in the rituals. This unusual tolerance encouraged other Rajput chiefs to negotiate entry into the imperial elite by offering their daughters as marriage partners for the emperor. By the time of Akbar's death he had more than three hundred wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from south Indian kingdoms, Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.
Marriage created alliances with the wives’ male relatives, who could be called upon for support and assistance. Through such alliances, Akbar won the loyalty of thousands of Rajput warriors while preventing the rise of a Rajput insurrection. The Rajputs benefited as well. They became imperial generals and administrators; many grew influential enough to control their own fiefdoms. A few Rajput rulers resisted the Mughals—and paid a terrible price. The great Rajput fortresses of Chittor and Ranthambore crumbled before Mughal armies, often led by fellow Rajputs.
Akbar's patronage extended to men of all faiths. Though illiterate himself, he (like his distant relation Khubilai Khan) strove to fill his court with men of arts and learning. Among his courtiers the nine most illustrious were known as the navratna, or nine jewels of the Mughal crown. Four of these “nine jewels” were Hindu. They included Akbar's finance minister, his military commander, his counselor and court jester, Raja Birbal, whose witty exchanges with the emperor live on today in folktales, and the legendary Hindu singer-composer Tansen. It is said that when Tansen sang his ragas—a complex musical form with no equivalent in the West—day became night, and clouds burst into rain.
Akbar was fascinated by comparative theology. In 1575 he constructed an immense hall to house debates on religion. Participants eventually included Muslim clerics, Hindu saints, Jain monks, Parsi priests, and even Jesuit missionaries from the Portuguese colony of Goa. In the tolerant atmosphere of the time, Sikhism, a syncretic religion combining elements of Hinduism and Islam, emerged in the region of Punjab. Folk culture also saw a merging of customs, ceremonies, and myths. The Bhakti and Sufi movements within Hinduism and Islam, respectively, each combined beliefs from both religions and called for the unity of God. (Even today, Hindus make pilgrimages to Muslim shrines at Ajmer and Fatehpur Sikri, while Muslims often pray to local Hindu deities, such as Sitlamata, the goddess of smallpox.) Indeed, in the Hindu songs and poetry of the period, Akbar, although Muslim, was often compared to the Hindu god Rama—the same Rama, ironically, in whose name Hindu nationalists tore down the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992.
Akbar believed in sharing his religious enlightenment with his fellow rulers. In a letter he dictated in 1582 to Philip II of Spain, he said:
As most men are fettered by bonds of tradition, and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers, ancestors, relatives and acquaintances, everyone continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated, thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. Therefore we associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions, thus deriving profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations.21
There is no record of a reply from King Philip, who, as we have seen, was busy extinguishing Protestant heresy and overseeing the “Council of Blood” in Holland.
To a surprising extent, Akbar did not favor Muslims. In war, he crushed resisting factions with the same brutality whether they subscribed to Hinduism or Islam. He attacked corruption among the Muslim clergy and initiated sweeping reforms equalizing land privileges for holy men of all persuasions. Along with Muslim festivals, he celebrated Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Defying orthodox Islamic law, he granted non-Muslims permission to repair their temples and to build new places of worship. He also decreed that Hindus who had been forced to convert to Islam could reconvert without being subject to the death penalty. Most dramatically, in 1579 Akbar abolished the jiziya, a mandatory tax levied exclusively on non-Muslims.
Akbar reigned for fifty years (1556-1605) and is known to this day as the Mughal Empire's most successful ruler. Many of his chief advisors were Persian, and the philosophy, painting, and literature of the period all reflect his deep appreciation of Persian culture. His greatest failure was his attempt to create a new “order of faith” called Din-i-Ilahi, supposedly incorporating elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. Akbar's objective, it seems, was not to displace existing creeds but rather to establish “a sort of universalist religion, literally religion of God rather than of Muhammad, Christ or Krishna” but demanding “unquestioning loyalty to the person of Akbar” himself. Din-i-Ilahi found few takers in the empire, or even within the emperor's own family. Its establishment outraged orthodox Muslim leaders, who regarded it as heresy and attempted a revolt. The imperial champion of universal tolerance crushed this revolt ruthlessly.22
The next two Mughal emperors generally continued Akbar's policies of religious tolerance. Akbar's eldest son and successor, Ja-hangir, was so religiously eclectic that the English ambassador remarked, “His religione is his owne invention.” Like his father, Jahangir held public discussions on religion. He particularly enjoyed the sparring between Jesuit priests and Muslim clerics, often slapping his thighs in appreciation of a point scored. On one occasion he met with an eminent Hindu ascetic in his cave, and was profoundly moved. “Sublime words were spoken between us,” Jahangir later wrote. “God almighty has granted him an unusual grace.” Meanwhile, Jahangir's consumption of pork and wine, forbidden by Islam, seemed to grow during the holy month of Ramadan.
Jahangir was also deeply drawn to Christianity, although more for its ceremonial aspects than its doctrine. He attended Mass every Christmas Day and occasionally borrowed a Christian church to hold a banquet. While he never converted to Christianity—he believed that the idea that Christ was the son of God was as absurd as the Hindu belief in reincarnation—he permitted three of his grandsons to do so and held a grand public procession in Agra to celebrate their baptism. Jahangir not only allowed Jesuits to preach freely within the empire; he gave them a stipend of fifty rupees a month from the imperial treasury.
Jahangir's successor Sh
ah Jahan (“Ruler of the World”) is most famous for the breathtaking Taj Mahal, the mausoleum he erected for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Built by 20,000 workers over a period of two decades, the white marble monument combines Persian and Indian architecture as well as synthesizing Hindu and Muslim motifs. Under Shah Jahan's rule, the word Mughal came to embody cultural grandeur. It helped that he was probably the richest man in the world at the time and that he had a penchant for extravagance. Sparing no expense—indeed to the point of fiscal irresponsibility—he ordered magnificent forts, palaces, and mosques constructed across the empire. For himself he commissioned the famous Peacock Throne, a gem-encrusted masterpiece wrought out of 2,500 pounds of pure gold, said to be the single costliest treasure made in the last thousand years.
Shah Jahan continued to allow non-Muslims within the empire to practice their religion, but he was more orthodox and less accommodating than his predecessors. Reversing his grandfather Ak-bar's policy, he prohibited non-Muslims from repairing or building new temples. He banned Muslims from converting to other religions while providing stipends to non-Muslims who converted to Islam. At the same time, Shah Jahan initiated a number of military forays into central Asia and Safavid Persia's territories. These expensive and largely unsuccessful attempts at expansion not only drained the imperial treasury; they nearly extinguished the previously robust flow of Persian immigrants into India.23
In 1658, the Mughal Empire came into the hands of Aurangzeb Alamgir, the third son of Shah Jahan. Aurangzeb became emperor after killing his eldest brother, Darà—whose head he sent on a platter to their dying father. Darà had been an intellectually curious, open-minded scholar with a strong interest in Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, and Christianity as well as Islam. As Aurangzeb explained, “The fear of seeing the Muhammadan religion oppressed in India if my brother Darà ascended the throne” was what compelled him to seize power.