1.The Venture of Islam

2. The Venture of Islam ~~ ~Conscience and History in a Warld Civilization MARSHALL G. S. HODGSONVOLUME THREETHE GUNPOWDER EMPIRES AND MODERN TIMESTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON 3. To John U. Nef and to the memory of Gustave E. von Grunebaum in admiration and gratitudeSome of the material in these volumes has been issued in a different form in Introduction to Islamic Ciuilization (volumes I, 2, 3. Copyright 1958, 1959 by The University of Chicago), in A History of Islamic Ciuilization (Copyright 1958 by Marshall G. S. Hodgson), and in an earlier version of The Venture of Islam (volumes I, 2. Copyright 1961 by Marshall G. S. Hodgson). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press. Ltd. London 1974 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1974 Paperback edition 1977 Printed in the United States of America ISBN: Vol. 1. 0-226-34683-8 (paper); Vol. 2. 0-226-34684-6 (paper); Vol. 3. 0-226-34685-4 (paper)030201 00LCN: 73-872431112 13The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanance of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.@ 4. CONTENTSVOLUME III List of ChartsviL~~~~~BOOK FIVE: Second Flowering: The Empires of Gunpowder Times Prologue to Book Five I. The $afavi Empire: Triumph of the Shl'ah, 1503-1722 II. The Indian Timuri Empire: Coexistence of Muslims and Hindus, 15 26- 1 70 7 III. The Ottoman Empire: Shari'ah-Military Alliance, 15171718 IV. Before the Deluge: The Eighteenth Century1 3 16BOOK SIX: The Islamic Heritage in the Modern World Prologue to Book Six I. The Impact of the Great Western Transmutation: The Generation of 1789 II. European World Hegemony: The Nineteenth Century III. Modernism in Turkey: Westernization IV. Egypt and East Arab Lands: Revival of the Heritage V. Iran and the Russian Empire: The Dream of Revolution VI. Muslim India: Communalism and Universalism VII. The Drive for Independence: The Twentieth Century Epilogue: The Islamic Heritage and the Modern Conscience A Selective Bibliography for Further Reading Glossary of Selected Terms and Names Index to Volume IIIv59 99 134 163 165 176 223 249 272303 333 357 411 443 449455 5. CHARTSVOLUME III BOOK FIVEDevelopments in the Oikoumene, 1500-1700 Islam beyond the Heartlands, 150-1698 The $afavi Empire and Its Successors to 1779 The Indian Timun Empire to 1763 The Ottoman Empire to 1789 Developments in the Oikoumene, 1700-18008-10 12 56-57 96 13 2 135BOOK SIXThe Islamic Heritage in the Modern World, 1800-195168-75MAPSVOLUME IIIThe Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries The ~afavi empire, 1500-1722 The Indian Timur! empire, 1526-1 70 7 The Ottoman empire, 1512-1718 The Islamic lands before nineteenth-century European expansion The central Mediterranean through India, mid-nineteenth century The Muslim world after the Versailles Conferencevi20 36 94 115 143 234 359 6. BOOK FIVESecond Flowering: The Empires of Gunpowder Times The end of everything should direct the means: now that of govern11tent being the good of the whole, nothing less should be the aim of the prince. -Wm. Penn 7. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVEThe three centuries after about 1500 CE are most obviously important for us because they form the immediate background of our own age. The Islamdom that entered into Modern times was that which took shape in these centuries. Moreover, that Islamdom was not just one society among several nonWestern civilizations. It was the one society that had come the closest to playing the world-dominating role which (as it turned out) the West was actually to play. If one includes the Christian and Hindu and Buddhist peoples then ruled by Muslims or enclaved by them, it is the society that lies back of the bulk of the present Islamo-Asian 'developing' sector of the world. Apart from China and its neighbours, Islam looms more or less large in the background of most of the present low-investment areas of the Eastern Hemisphere; and it is the Islamdom of just these recent centuries which, historically, has been most relevant to their present posture. But these centuries are important also, in a less accidental way, as increasing our understanding of the potentialities and limitations of the Islamicate civilization as it had developed during the Middle Periods. The successful synthesis of the Earlier Middle Period, in which the Shar'i conscience, together with ~ufism, seemed to have worked out a social pattern that met the most essential conditions for an ongoing (and very expansive) social life, had led on by its very success to a triumph of the conservative spirit. Though its inner contradictions had also opened the way to diverse disruptive tendencies of the Later Middle Period, the conservative spirit was not substantially again put in question. That spirit became the setting within which Muslim individuals had to labour, and the Muslim conscience had to find expression. Meanwhile, the pattern of society and culture that had been formed after the fall of the"High Caliphal state came to some crucial impasses by the age of Mongol prestige. As earlier frameworks for cultural creativity were filled in, the conservative spirit itself seemed to be imposing limitations on any possible new creativity; in the arts and even in scholarly inquiry, one could fear that Muslims were becoming trapped in a style cycle if not in ideological stultification by the Shar'i spirit. Even more serious could appear the inability of Muslims to form enduringly legitimate governments. True legitimacy was confined to the Sharl'ah, which had come to be associated with an almost apolitical social order, to which, as well as to the Sharl'ah itself, the political heads and their garrisons were almost an alien intrusion. The problem of establishing legitimate government was presumably compounded by the basic economic problem of wastage of resources especially in the Arid Zone. To these impasses the new age found answers without essentially breaching the conservative spirit. The answers carried their own dilemmas, but mean-3 8. 4SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESwhile, one of the greatest periods of human achievement blossomed out of the midst of the conservative spirit. At the start of the sixteenth century, a general realignment of political forces among all the Muslim peoples afforded an opportunity for extensive political and then cultural renewal. It had major cultural consequences almost everywhere, which largely determined the history of the two or three centuries following. Some of the most important long-run tendencies in Islamicate society were reversed. There was a brilliant renewal of political and cultural life. From the viewpoint of those who looked ~o absolutist government and the high culture that went with it, Islamdom could seem finally to have come into its own. But in the light of a more specifically Islamic conscience, the renewal failed. For on a different level of consideration, the conservative spirit posed a deeper problem, not so readily solved. Governments might forge for themselves a civic legitimacy which gave them durability. The culture of the wealthy might find ways to flourish despite apparently coming to the end of the road. But the Islamic ideals did not necessarily find their fulfillment therein. It was, indeed, in part the continuing pressure of the Islamic vision that produced the new dilemmas to which the new answers were to lead. If the Islamic ideals were to be fulfilled, a more basic renewal was required. This was indeed felt passionately, if unhistorically, by the many would-be reformers as well as by those, more pessimistic, who acquiesced in the status quo. On conscience and traditionThe beginning of the period stands out clearly for us. The realignments of gunpowder times (at the start of the sixteenth century) introduced two interdependent reversals of historic trends: one negative and one positive. In 1500, Islamdom was expanding over the hemisphere as a relatively integral cultural and political order. Despite considerable diversity of language, custom, artistic tradition, and even religious practice, the unity of the Dar aI-Islam was a more significant fact politically than the existence of any of the states within it, which were of a local and in many cases a transient character. By 1550, a major blow had been dealt to the cosmopolitan comprehensiveness of Islam. Even on the religious level, the Muslims were divided by a newly embittered religious quarrel between Shl'is and Jama1iSnnoIs. More important, great regional empires were going far to forge their separate cultural worlds, partitioning among themselves all of what may be called by this time the central zone of Islamdom-the whole zone from the Balkans to Bengal. Outside these regional empires, in the Southern Seas and in the Volga basin, Muslims found themselves more threatened by infidels than at any time since the Mongol conquests, and looking to the new empires of the more central zone for support. But on the positive side, the weakening of the apolitical cosmopolitan unity 9. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVE5was compensated by a partial solution to the problem of governmental legitimacy. The empires which, by 1550, were dividing up the greater part of Islamdom, heirs to the ideals of the military patronage state, were able to assert a considerable measure of political legitimacy within their own spheres. If it was under the primacy of the market-place culture that the international Islamicate cosmopolitanism had developed, it was largely under courtly auspices that the several regions asserted their relative cultural autonomy. The very fact that these empires were taking a major part in forming the social and cultural life of Islamdom within their domains allowed new forms of integration to be attempted within each of them. At least within their boundaries, a certain rapprochement took place between government, the representatives of the Shari'ah law, and popUlar Muslim institutions. Whatever reduction in economic resources may have supervened in the mid-Arid Zone in the preceding centuries was compensated, on the level of Islamicate high-cultural life generally, by the spread of the society, of the area in which Muslim activity could be initiated and patrons found. It was presumably on the basis of these new possibilities that spiritual renewal should have taken place. But the new order did not really answer to the old Shar1i vision nor even to a ~ufi vision. Along with the establishment of the new agrarian empires, social mobility seems to have decreased, and if a certain peace and security prevailed, these hardly reflected what those who longed for the promised Mahdi would regard as justice for ordinary mankind. What is required for the vision of persons of conscience to be effective where the conservative spirit has triumphed?-that is, where the vision is maintained within a framework of mutual expectations among which truly fresh departures are not allowed for, and yet confronts new historical problems, never presupposed by its inherited forms? Perhaps a tradition of conscience that is inwardly trapped, in that it has limited the range of its vision within finite formulae, must necessarily become trapped externally also in the shifting demands of a life and history to which it has itself imparted movement. At this point I want to reaffirm a guiding principle of my enquiries. Even under the auspices of a conservative spirit, the response of the individual sensibility, particularly as it is focused in a point of conscience, remains one of the ultimate roots of history. We may characterize three sorts of individual acts. First, some are historically accidental-the product of personal talent or self-interest or fancy-and cancel each other out (thus if one man gains by accepting a bribe, another will gain by reporting him and another by purging corruption from among all his employees). Then some are historically cumulative-because they answer to group interests, economic, aesthetic, or even spiritual, they reinforce each other (thus in some settings, the contrast between official demands and actual administrative possibilities is such that bribery becomes the only alternative to impasse, and all will connive in it). But finally, some must be called historically creative: at the interstices in 10. 6SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESthe play of .group interests, where pressures for two courses seem equally balanced, a personal imagination may be able to introduce new constructive alternatives which will in the end alter even the cast of group interests (thus when an administrator is baffled, he may turn to that idealistic assistant who is too honest personally to become chief, but whose imagination may suggest a way of so involving the employees in their work that the pattern of work is transformed and the need for bribes disappears). Accidental acts may be decisive in the short-run, and indeed fill the works of some historians, but can generally be disregarded over the long run of history: sooner or later, an accident in one direction will be balanced by one in another direction. Cumulative acts (those where such cancelling out does not occur) are to be accounted for by tracing each set of interests back to' its ecological context (including here the effects of past social events and the current configuration of expectations); we must indeed study the play of interests down to the last cynical observation. What I have called creative acts, those that take effect less by being reinforced by other acts in the same interest than by opening up new possibilities to which other persons respond positively, are to be set off for their long-term moral significance. They supervene on a very individual basis and are, in a sense, accidents; they must needs meet at least latent group interests or they will have no effect; yet they do not merely fit into an existent pattern of interests as it stands: they lead back not to the ecology as such but to some thrust of autonomous integration within an individual-some principle of inherent growth. Such acts are far harder to pin down, and some historians hesitate to take them seriously at all. Even in the life of Mu1)ammad, once indifferent chance and whim have been given their due, the temptation is to reduce the outcome to the play of cumulative historical interests, leaving no room for the impress of fresh creativity ('God', perhaps?) acting through his conscience. Especially in the periods we are now to study, properly creative acts become hard to detect. They are disguised, and even stifled, first by the pressure of the conservative spirit, then by the overwhelming external pressures that seemed to ruin the whole civilization, and finally in more modern times by the rush of events which seem to enlist everyone in predictable stands on one side or the other. Yet even here, I am convinced, the individual creative conscience has been at work. The most evident promise in our period for a new beginning in Islamic religion (and in the social destinies of Islamdom) was widely felt to rest in the Shi'ah. The vigorous Shri movements were full of millennial hopes, at the time of the great realignments as much as ever. The core of the lands of old Islam between Nile and Oxus turned to the movement enthusiastically; but the Shi'i empire that grew out of this ferment became increasingly Shari'ahminded in temper and, despite its spectacular splendour, left its peoples almost as ridden with poverty and injustice as it had found them. To the west in the European-based Ottoman empire and to the east in the 11. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVE7Indic Timuri empire, Islam was on relatively new ground, ruling a population which in majority was not Muslim. Here Shi'ism came to playa minor part and the hope of the Islamic conscience flowed chiefly in other channels. More truly than the Shi'ah, Falsafah had its great chance: in bureaucratic agrarian empires it could see its hopes for ordered stability and prosperity partially fulfilled, and in some places in this period a Muslim Falsafah, allied with ~ufism, seemed about to reduce the specifically Islamic vision to playing a role in a larger Philosophic outlook and in this form make the vision successful. The greatest hopes of this kind were centred on Akbar of India and his succ.essors, though they played some role in the other two empires; but Falsafized Islam proved unable to carry the elan of a more specifically Islamic impetus, and was rejected by most Muslims. In the Ottoman empire it was Sunni Sharrah-mindedness (again not untouched by Falsafah) that had its chance: it seemed capable of achieving the political position it had failed to achieve in the time of al-Ma'mun; and it very nearly did so-but at the expense of the central-military strength which such a position presupposed. In different ways, the limiting effects of religious communalism took their toll. In each of the two empires in newer terrain the Muslim system of rule failed to integrate crucial elements of the non-Muslim population into itself, partly just because of the form taken by the hopes of men of conscience; a:nd drew to a moral stalemate as definite as that in the Safavi empire itself. Strong political institutions were indeed erected in all three areas, endoved with coherence and continuity unprecedented since classical 'Abbasi times, and for a time a considerable level of general prosperity was achieved; and collectively, Islamdom was at the peak of its political power. But finally, when the institutions of the great empires had run their course, they underwent the decline in central power every agrarianate bureaucratic state seems to have been subject to as it accumulated commitments; and they failed even to match the standard of effective durability perennially set by the ancient Sasanian empire. By the eighteenth century, each of the empires was disintegrating, prosperity was again slipping away, and even aesthetic and intellectual expression was in noticeable decline everywhere. This was partly due to outside forces; but the society showed little resistance to them. At the end of the eighteenth century, these outside historical forces intervened to cut short this particular period; but it could already be suspected that though the period was one of great brilliance, the inherited dilemmas had not been fully solved. 1 The end of the period was as sharply marked as its beginning, and it marked at the same time the end of any further opportunity for spiritual renewal within the agrarianate conditions which had prevailed since the time 1 My 'The Unity of Later Islamic History', Journal of World History, 5 (1960), 879-9 I 4, sketches some of the points developed in this book. Unfortunately, it underestimates the achievements among Muslims of the later periods and overestimates the degree to which one can read the great technical transformations of the period as resulting from a comparative 'vigor' in the Occident. 12. Beginnings of Reformation Consolidation of political sovereignty by W. European monarchs Roman Inquisition15 1 9-22Ottomans conquer Egypt and Syria from MamluksShah Isma'n founds ~afavi empire, introduces Shi'ism as state religionCentral Oikoumene1500-1700Accession of Sultan Suleyman (to 1566), expansion and definitive institutional development of Ottoman empireMagellan circumnavigates the globe15 1 715131509Henry VIII of England (to 1547)Vasco da Gama rounds Cape of Good Hope, enters Indian Ocean14971502Christians conquer Granada; Muslims and Jews emigrate to N. Africa and lands of Ottoman empire; Spanish Inquisition Columbus sails Atlantic1492EuropeDevelopments in the Oikoumene,Ottomans take Rhodes Babur establishes Mughal empire after Battle of Panipat Ottomans besiege Vienna15 2215 2 915261520Portuguese traders reach South ChinaFar East 13. Francis Xavier, Jesuit missionary, preaches in India, Japan, and Indonesia1603Tokugawa shogunate founded (to 1867), Japan closed to foreign influences, seafaring forbidden, local Christian population persecutedJesuit missionaries in ChinaDutch begin to seize Portuguese holdings160rDutch begin to arrive in Indian trade15981590SAccession of Shah 'Abbas (to 1629), zenith of Safavi empire, magnificent court at I~fahanOttomans take CyprusUnification of Japanese archipelago under the Shogun Hideyoshi, expulsion of Christian missionariesHenry IV of France (to r610)Portuguese weakened in India; English seize Spanish and Portuguese ships15 8915 8715 80s157015 6 6Accession of Akbar (till r605), zenith of Mughal empire Ottoman-Portuguese naval warfare in Indian Ocean155 6Philip II of Spain (to 1598)Ottomans subjugate HungaryPortuguese establish :first European commercial-colonial empire15431542 14. Central OikoumeneOttomans take Crete from Venice[6991689 Treaty of Carlowicz, first major Ottoman diplomatic reversal, Hungary ceded to Austria168 3Glorious Revolution, assertion of English parliamentarianismOttomans fail in second siege of Vienna16811688Ottomans cede Kiev to Russia16691661Awrangzeb (to 177), last strong Mughal emperor1659Louis XIV of France (to 1715)Koprulii viziers temporarily revitalize declining Ottoman empireFriedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (to 1688)Europe165616441640Far EastTreaty of Nerchinsk, Russian-Chinese trade stabilizedManchu conquest of China and overthrow of Ming dynastyDevelopments in the Oikoumene, 150o-17oo-contd. 15. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVEIIof the Sumerians. Gradually in the latter part of the period new world forces had come to make themselves seriously felt. At the end of the eighteenth century, with overwhelming suddenness, the Christian European peoples made themselves the key political, economic, and cultural force in almost all parts of Islamdom. But this was not simply the ascendancy of one group of peoples over against another, of one culture over against another, such as had recurred so often during the expansion of Islamdom. Now the world was confronting-in the new sorts of investment that were introducing the Modern Technical Age-a new level of historical life, which had changed the fundamental conditions of action for all cultures and all religions, including those of the Occident itself. Any further effort at renewal would have to be on a radically different basis.Rivalry with the Occident In no other period does the history of Islamdom become so nearly identified with the history of the world as in this period of the great empires. Up to this point, it could be regarded as a microcosm of world history: all the major events affecting world history at large affected it, all the problems one must face in understanding world history period by period one must face in understanding the history of Islamdom in particular. And one could add that lrano-Semitic history was more than typical: it held a singularly central position. By this period, however, Islamdom had expanded so far that, though probably less than a fifth of the world's population were Muslims, yet the Muslims were so widely and strategically placed that the society associated with them did embrace in some degree the greater part of citied mankind; 'microcosm' is no longer just the word for Islamdom. World history and Islamicate history had become very hard to disentwine. (We will find lslamdom, therefore, a very revealing point of departure for understanding the advent and meaning of the Modern Technical Age in a global perspective.) The identification of Isiamicate with vorid history can be illustrated most graphically in the tendency of Islamdom to break up into distinct regions-India, the Nile-to-Oxus region, (eastern) Europe, and, further afield, the central Eurasian steppe, the sub-Saharan Sudan, the Far Southeast-each of which tended to develop an Islamicate life of its own, consistent with its own historic position in the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene and with its own local traditions. It is almost as if the old articulations of the Oikoumene had reasserted themselves, only now all, or most of them, under the umbrella of Islam. This is one way of looking at the relative self-sufficiency of the new regional empires. But, as we have noted, there were two major regions of the Oikoumene that had not come in under the umbrella; one of them, the Occident, was coming to playa specially important role in the world during this period-and to a large degree 'the world' meant lslamdom. The reaction of Islamdom to the 16. 12 SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESIslam beyond the Heartlands,150-15 101511-1610150-159 1 1517-1801 157-22160 9-87 169 81500-1698Three strong empires, Osmanli (Ottoman), ~afavi, and Timur! of India (Mughal), dominate the central lands of Islam; religion, culture, and economics are moulded within these political structures; beyond them, peripheral areas assume their own distinctive Islamic life (see detailed lists for the three major empires) Establishment of Portuguese domination of oceanic trade in the Indian Ocean (Vasco da Gama reaches India, 1498; Portuguese defeat Egyptian Mamluks at Diu in Gujarat 1509; Portuguese defeat Ottoman-Gujarati forces, 1538) Mu1}.ammad Shaybani, khan of a Siberian Mongol state, eliminates remains of Timuri power and establishes Ozbeg rule in Transoxania, noted for Sunni Orthodoxy and cultural quiescence Five Saldi sharifs establish IAlid rule in Morocco; first defending the land against Portuguese attack, establishing a sovereign position at the expense of the Marinids (1544), and finally expanding Moroccan power over W. Africa Songhai empire replaces the Mali as dominant power in Niger Sudan Rausa confederation predominant east of the Niger Sultan IAli Mughayat Shah establishes power of Acheh kingdom in N. Sumatra Fall of Hindu Majapahit kingdom in E. Java; replaced by Muslim power Replacement of Bahmanids in the Deccan of India with five rival dynasties, of which Bijapur becomes Shri Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga conquered by Russians The Muslim Deccan dynasties unite in overthrowing the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar in the south, last stronghold of old Hindu culture Timbuctu, conquered by Morocco (till 1612) loses its prosperity and intellectual pre-eminence under Arab pashas IAdil-Shahi dynasty of Bijapur and Quib-Shahi dynasty of Golkonda, after fall of other Deccan kingdoms, divide S. India between them, till conquest by Mughals; rise of Urdu literature Resurgent power of (Khariji) sultanate of Musat drives Portuguese from Zanzibar, major commercial centre of E. Africa 17. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVE13new role of Occidentals in the citied parts of the world was not simply one example of how the citied world reacted: it was the larger part of that reaction. To the Occidentals out to make their way in the world, the great threat at home was 'the Turk' and the great rivals abroad were always 'the Moors', from Morocco to the Philippines and the ports of China. Correspondingly, Muslims, who had always tended to despise Occidentals as forming one of the lesser blocs in the civilized world, and most of whom had very little awareness of the Occident at all, began in all regions (and not merely, as before, in the Mediterranean) to see Christian Europeans and especially west Europeans as a group to be reckoned with-sometimes as enemies, sometimes as producers of admirable articles of trade or even art, but in any case as one of the major human blocs. Even in the sixteenth century, when on the whole the Europeans were not yet a major threat to the expanding power of Islamdom, the great florescence of the Occident in Renaissance times had had far-reaching effects. First, it had sent the Occidentals into all the oceans. Though in most of the new land areas they had reached they had scarcely penetrated behind the coasts (in this period, the Occidentals were almost but not quite unmatchable at sea, but had few special advantages on land), they had nevertheless found radically new sea-routes which allowed them to escape the long-standing limitations of the Oikoumenic geographical configuration which had conferred on the Nileto-Oxus region its central role. These routes could bring them into the Southern Seas without touching either the Red Sea or the Euphrates, and could even bring them to the eastern end of the Southern Seas by sailing west and crossing or skirting a whole new landmass. Perhaps more important, from the new lands they had brought, not only to Europe but to the rest of the AfroEurasian Oikoumene, a series of new plants and even animals, some of which were to change the economy of many lands; more important economically than the popular tobacco was maize, a remarkably efficient fodder plant. And they had brought vast amounts of silver and gold to upset the currency structure of the whole Oikoumene. In this last point, they did not, perhaps, inject more precious metals into Oikoumenic commerce than had the Chinese a few centuries earlier, but (perhaps because the Occident was already more closely tied economically to most of the othel Oikoumenic lands than ever China had been) they injected them more suddenly and directly, sometimes with ruinous consequences for such classes as had fixed incomes. It is not to be ruled out that the new activity of the Occident may have contributed to the changes in the balance of social power within Islamdom that can be seen at the time of the rise of the new regional empires in the sixteenth century, with their more agrarian and aristocratic colouring. Slight shifts in a delicate social balance can make possible changes of large import. Yet an internal dialectic can be more readily traced or posited, which was doubtless at most supplemented by external pressures. Even in the subsequent changes visible from the end of the seventeenth century, in which the 18. 14SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESrole of a transformed Occident was to be far more evident, an internal evolution with roots in Islamicate history will be found to account for much of what happened. Muslims, indeed, were little conscious of all the channels whereby the new Occidental activity was affecting them in the sixteenth century. They took the rivalry less seriously than did the Occidentals. But at least some of them were aware that whereas before in the Chinese court no astronomers could rival the Muslim astronomers, now the upstart Occidentals could do as well and perhaps better; and some were aware that whereas before, if an artist wished exotic inspiration, it was to things Chinese he should turn, now a new Occidental style of painting charmed and troubled the tastes of the most perceptive Muslim patrons. Thereafter, from the end of the sixteenth century on, the Occidentals gradually grew from prominent rivals into an overwhelming world force, which ended by sapping the strength of all Islamdom. We shall study what was happening to the West later. Meanwhile, we must note that if the great empires that arose in this period proved unable in the end to solve some of the basic problems of agrarianate-level society as they were posed, and failed to satisfy the Islamic conscience, it was not merely an internal impasse that they confronted: increasingly the world, and that means especially Islamdom, was confronting a radically new situation, embodied in its relation to the new West but not reducible simply to a confrontation of peoples; a situation in which no agrarianate society was any longer left to itself to solve its agrarianate dilemmas.Two types of florescence However inadequate was the Islamicate renewal from the aspiring viewpoint of a keen Islamic conscience or from the retrospective viewpoint of a world historian, in its own setting the age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was one of the greatest in Islamdom's history. The artistic, philosophic, and social power and creativeness of the age can be symbolized in the spaciousness, purity-and overwhelming magnificence of the Taj Ma1).all at Agra. In some sense there was a great florescence. But it was not a period when all traditions are put into question, when old traditions are fused and recast into a series of new ones, in which everything is to be discovered and built anew. Indeed, very few Islamicate traditions were drastically modified. The great figures and events invoked as authoritative by the Muslims of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the same as had been invoked for generations before; in the most central aspects of the civilization they went back to the beginning of Islamic times. It was a florescence in which the conservative spirit as it had been expressed in the Later Middle Period was not explicitly called into question; it was a florescence within established lines of tradition, rather perfecting than launching 19. PROLOGUE TO BOOK FIVE15theIne Such a florescence shows a very different face from the sort of florescence-for instance, that of High Caliphal times or, in large measure, that of the Occidental Renaissance-where new channels of creative activity are being opened up, where the accent is rather consciously on innovation, even drastic innovation, and where, for a time, the usual conservative spirit of agrarianate-Ievel society is damped down. If it was a florescence, it was one oddly hard for us to appreciate. The splendour of the age is unmistakable-it would have been yet more obvious had it not been beclouded by the decline of the eighteenth century and the subsequent debacle, which caused Muslims and Westerners alike to look with suspicion on all that seemed to lead up to that. Yet when the age is approached in detail it is more or less inaccessible, and not solely because of the subsequent clouding. The poetry of the time long was ignored by most Moderns, and the philosophy hardly less so; even the painting, while inevitably admired, has not seemed so clear as the painting of the Timuri time. The social structure, in all three empires a very complex balance of many elements, is only beginning to be appreciated. Even the military power of the Muslim states, while necessarily wondered at, has sometimes seemed some sort of miracle, perhaps to be explained by the accident of the birth of a series of geniuses, if not by some atavistic ruthlessness of ex-nomadic savages. Perhaps we may say that this florescence was not one of origination, such as we have seen before, but rather one of culmination in a culture long already mature. Far from launching into 'new' paths, the poetry (for instance) made use of its long heritage to give it resources of complexity and subtlety which made it a delicately precise instrument in a way that a new tradition of poetry, dependent only upon its current efforts, could never be. But this makes the poetry practically unintelligible to the outsider. So, I suppose, it must have been with the whole culture of the time. Once one has learned to understand some basic premises and essential points of method, Tabari or even al-Farabi is fairly readily accessible to any reader. Mulla ~adra, a philosopher of this period, seems to require in his reader a mind stocked with all that has gone before, or his points will not emerge. He need not be the less important for that. 20. The~afaviEmpire: Triumph of the Shi'ah, IS03-1722The military patronage states of the Later Middle Period, growing out of Mongol notions of greatness, had begun to take advantage of the political openings that appeared in a politically amorphous network of personal contracts and patron relations presided over by the Shari'ah and by the amirs. In contrast to China, where the Mongol notions of empire had little future, in Islamdom they found excellent soil. Such notions could fully mature and create great stable bureaucratic empires only after gunpowder weapons and their specialized technology attained a primary place in military life. This happened between about 1450 and 1550. The new empires that resulted all had some degree of Mongol tradition in their backgroundeven the Ottomans had first appeared under Mongol overlordship-and their institutions bear considerable family resemblance. But they were not merely the culmination of the military patronage state. To some degree, I think, they marked a resurgence in Islamdom of ideals associated with agrarian predominance: of the ideal of the great absolute monarch, in particular, and of stable class stratification, as against the universal egalitarianism embodied in the Shari'ah and given paradoxical expression in the international political order of the amirs. The contrast shows but a slight shift of emphasis, for even the amlrs' states had been essentially agrarian, yet it is perceptible. In the Ottoman empire in Europe and the Indo-Timurl empire in India, a strongly agrarian outlook was only natural; but even the central empire, the ~afavi empire, though the Sawad no longer played a significant economic role (the Iraq was more important for its shrines from the past than for its current agricultural production), seems to have been marked by an unusually great investment in irrigation works on the Iranian plateau itself. However, this is largely conjectural. We know next to nothing of $afavi economic and social history. The change was introduced almost abruptly by a series of events which were focused, naturally enough, in the central lands of old Islam. The most spectacular event was the rise of the Safavi: empire itself and its imposition of Shi'ism in the centre of Islamdom. This rise, then, coincided with a series of other events, some of which were in part repercussions of the ~afavi: movement: the expansion of the Ottoman state into a major empire, the erection of the Timuri empire in northern India, the Ozbeg conquests in the16 21. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE17Oxus basin, and, further afield, the Russian conquests in the Volga regions, the Portuguese penetration into the Southern Seas, and the renewal of 'Alid government in Morocco and thence across the Sahara. Cumulatively these changes amounted to a far-reaching realignment of political forces. The realignments of gunpowder times: the PortugueseIn the Later Middle Period gunpowder was used for a variety of minor purposes-including military ones-in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. From generation to generation its military usefulness was improved almost everywhere. From being of value chiefly for the noise it could make as a means of causing fright-perhaps its original purpose-it came to be used for the propulsion of missiles; in the fifteenth century it was gradually replacing, at least in the Muslim lands and in Christian Europe, the older siege machinery for the purpose of breaking down walls. About 1450, simultaneously among the Ottoman Turks in eastern Europe and among the western Europeans, artillery was shown to be a decisive weapon in siege warfare, and the value of the isolated fortress declined rapidly. Artillery soon became a major factor in field battles as well; meanwhile, hand guns, which an individual foot soldier could carry.. were developing in western Europe to such a point that at the end of the century, there, the infantrymen armed with hand guns had become a decisive military arm. The hand-gun troops seem to have been a specially European development; they early had a central role in both Muslim and Christian Europe; they spread more gradually in other parts of Islamdom. But the command of siege and field artillery quickly came to be of fateful significance politically throughout the Dar aI-Islam. The military use of gunpowder, in its various forms-as is often the case with a basically new weapon-called for a variety of reorganizations in the pre-Modern armies; therewith it put in question any elements of the social pattern that had depended upon the military organization. This did not necessarily mean that old military orders must always give place to new ones; it did mean that there was a crucial struggle in many cases between old corps wishing to retain their special privileged character and new corps that might be in a position to upset this; and adaptability in the use of new weapons would often be decisive in such struggles. 1 Moreover, the implications of the changes in weapons were not restricted entirely to military organization. The relative expensiveness of artillery and the relative untenI An excellently cautious discussion of the problems that arose in the Mamhik state of Egypt and Syria is presented by David Ayalon in Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to a Mediaeval Society (London, 1956). Since Mamluk rule was carried on to a large degree by an actual military oligarchy, the reigning sultans, who perceived the importance of firearms, had more difficulty in introducing them effectively than did other fulers, being forced to relegate them to secondary corps without adequate support. 22. 18SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESability of stone fortresses gave an increased advantage over local military garrisons to a well-organized central power which could afford artillery-not always a decisive advantage, to be sure. Perhaps at least as important was that gunpowder weapons seemed to imply, evidently from the start, a continuous development of new techniques; already in thirteenth-century China, military invention followed invention at an unprecedented pace. Those had an advantage who could afford to be abreast of the latest improvements. (This was a foretaste of characteristics of technical specialization which were later to mark off Modernity.) Such advantages for rulers with resources brought with them extensive possibilities for general political change. Gunpowder was doubtless not the one great decisive factor in the political and social-and ultimately cultural-realignments that occurred in the three generations following 1450; but it played a distinctive role, and perhaps was the most easily identifiable single occasion for them. Probably almost as important was the secular change of balance within Islamdom as a whole between the lands of old Islam in the mid-Arid Zone and the newer lands, often more stably agrarian, which now loomed large in the total Islamicate society-and even the secular deterioration of agricultural prosperity between Nile and Oxus. Nor can we ignore such more specific events as the Portuguese interference in Indian Ocean trade and the advance of Muscovite Russian power. But techniques of gunpowder played a role in both Portuguese and Muscovite advances. The increasingly zealous growth of tariqah Shi'ism among the Turkic tribes, which also played a role, was itself perhaps a reaction to the political plight of Islamdom in the Later Middle Period. We are not yet in a position to understand the full background of the realignments which took place in the Islamicate society after the advent of gunpowder as a principal weapon. Some of their consequences are easier to trace. We have already noted some consequences of the new situation in the Maghrib and the west Sudanic lands: consequences that can be traced largely to the new role of gunpowder in building empires. The Portuguese and Castillian advance in Spain and across onto the Maghrib coast had transformed the Maghrib's politicshenceforth it was no longer Berber-sprung dynasties from the interior that were to rule there, but representatives of the cities and their armed forces. The greater part of the Maghrib, following the interests of its ports, turned to the Ottomans. But in the far west of the Maghrib, in Morocco, where the agricultural hinterland went deeper and the chief cities were well inland, the Portuguese thrust evoked a more independent reaction. The Maghribi sharifs (descendants of the Prophet-and more particularly of that Idrisid family under which Morocco had first maintained its independence against the upstart 'Abbasids) had been coming to represent the piety of Islam as disseminated from the cities, in emulation or rivalry with the tariqah piety that was also spreading among the tribes. Under the leadership of a family of sharifs, the Moroccans rallied their forces to repel the Portuguese from their 23. THE SAFAVI E~IPIRE19coasts-and incidentally to rebuff Ottoman attempts at rounding out their own hegemony. The new SharUian empire in turn, well armed and victorious at home, had found an outlet for its energies in an unprecedented expedition (1591) across the Sahara into the Sudanic lands, where gunpowder weapons were a disastrous novelty. We have noted that this expedition led to the ruin of Timbuctu. However, the economic base of the Sharlfian empire, isolated between the Atlantic and the Sahar~, was not great enough to sustain its forces and to rebuild its conquests. The Atlantic trade to Guinea, monopolized by the Portuguese, more and more rivalled that of the Sahara to the same southern regions. The Sudan was left to its own devices, saddled with a persistingly disruptive new military class; and Morocco itself relapsed into a jealous independence. A more far-reaching consequence of the new day, and particularly of the Portuguese thrust, was the realignment of forces in the Southern Seas. The advent there of the Portuguese was spectacular, though in itself it had only limited long-term effects. During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had not only opened trade with the Guinea coast, but pushed down considerably south of the Congo along the western African coast. In 1498 Vasco da Gama was able to sail round the south coast of Africa, so linking the Portuguese trade routes on the west coast with the Arab trade routes long established on the east coast of Africa; and so launching the Portuguese into the trade of all the Southern Seas, which was already linked with that of the east African coast. From 1501, the Portuguese Christians established the pious policy of ruining Muslim trade in the Indian Ocean. Or, to speak more realistically, they tried to cut off that part of it that led up the Red Sea to Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Venice, which Lisbon now saw as its great commercial rival; and to exact protection money from any other shipping that could be sufficiently terrorized. In the surprise of their first advent, they had some success. Seafaring in the Atlantic had led the Portuguese to develop more powerful naval equipment than prevailed in the Indian Ocean, where long runs were less necessary (only Chinese vessels were as large and strong, or even larger). This technical advantage, together with a vigorous home government, more than counterbalanced the effect of their distance from their bases in West Africa. Conditions of the Later Middle Period had not favoured concerted Muslim political action. Trade in the' Southern Seas was largely in the hands of numerous more or less independent Muslim trader cities, over which the inland powers had relatively little control in many cases. In an area like Malaysia, for instance, the chief figure in the town, the 'sultan', was likely to be essentially a merchant, who might even monopolize the trade of a given port and rule that port, and sometimes was also able to control other ports at a distance. Into this picture the Portuguese traders fitted with ease. And without concerted Muslim action, they were in a position to put the Muslims on the 24. 2020/I6050408QJ0I()o C~E,'200 I1400'200 400 600IA'N1II 600 ' t 800m/.1000 d)() km. , 800The Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries70IfIliN D 1 AN Portuguese (P) Dutch (D) British (B) French (F)European trade settlements 25. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE21defensive. The relatively low cost of an all-water route without middlemen, together with the exclusive control over it the Portuguese exercised for three generations, enabled them to tap concertedly most of the growing Occidental market. Hence what was in itself a small kingdom could become the commercial outlet of what amounted to a large empire; Lisbon had commercial resources far greater than anyone Muslim port. The common discipline which a corporative spirit allowed the Portuguese kingdom to exercise over its merchants-which ensured that the Portuguese continued to act as a single power even remote from home-was reinforced by a Christian fanaticism in men used to anti-Muslim crusading in the western Mediterranean, so that they felt a special solidarity in hostility to all the various nationalities of Muslim traders. Then they had incidental advantages. At first, in some cases, not only their naval equipment but also their artillery seems to have been better than that then in use in the Southern Seas, where gunpowder weapons were only then being introduced from the lands farther north. And their west African bases were as inaccessible to the stronger Muslim land empires as the inland strongholds of those empires were to the sea-based Portuguese. In sum, the Portuguese played the role of a gunpowder empire in the Southern Seas, being able to turn the technical advantages of centralization in the new military age to as good use at sea as did the other empires on land. In consequence, the Portuguese proved stronger at sea than anyone Muslim power that faced them, especially westward from Ceylon, while the several interested Muslim powers were never able to maintain an adequately lasting coalition against the intruders. In 1508, the Mamluks and Gujanltis had together defeated the Portuguese; but in 1509, at Diu in Gujarat, the allied fleet was destroyed. By then the Mamluk regime was in serious trouble at home, and this defeat was never retrieved. By 1511 the Portuguese were established with their own fortified trading posts at Hormuz (at the mouth of the Persian Gulf), Goa (on the west coast of the Deccan), and Malacca, at the straits leading into the South China Sea. In 1538 an Ottoman-Gujarati coalition broke up too soon to prevent another Portuguese victory, which confirmed the Portuguese position. The Portuguese held, for the most part, only a certain number of key ports here and there; most ports continued in Muslim (or Hindu) hands, either independent or subject to inland rulers. Muslims, Hindus, and Chinese continued to maintain an important trade. But the Portuguese were powerful enough to prevent, for some time, any long-distance trade that seriously rivalled their own exports to Europe, and in particular to cut down drastically the trade up the Red Sea to Egypt. (Some of this seems to have been diverted to the Persian Gulf and overland routes; but even the Red Sea trade was restored within the century.) A severe.. if chiefly temporary, blow was dealt to Muslim power in the Southern Seas and to some areas of Muslim mercantile prosperity, especially that of Egypt and certain Arabian cities. 26. 22 SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESThe decisive effect on Islamicate life of the Portuguese arrival in the Southern Seas has been much exaggerated in European historical writing, as I see it, for three reasons. First, the oceanic expansions of the time had decisive impact on the western Europe of the time; and Europeans have tended to read the rest of world history as a function of European history. (Moreover, Western sources naturally tell us more about Western than about other activity.) Second, the seventeenth-century advent of Dutch, English, and French did come to have, after a time, truly momentous import; and, since the Portuguese were, in some sense, the forerunners of these later movements, the significance that Western traders had in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is projected back to the beginning of the overall development. (In a purely Western perspective, it is hard to see the difference in world-historical role between a gunpowder empire such as the Portuguese, based on a development almost universal in citied life at the time, and the later Western sea empires based on radically new departures no longer shared with the rest of the world.) Finally, the effects on Muslim lands seem to have been greatest precisely in those lands nearest the West, in the eastern Mediterranean, which, for reasons that have been cited elsewhere, have tended to stand for the whole of Islamdom in the minds of many Western scholars. 2 The realignments: the land empires (I498-I526)Meanwhile, a decisive series of events, coming at a crucial point in military development, crystallized a new alignment of great land empires. The enthusiastic Turkic Shitism which had been gathering force during the fifteenth century among various tariqah orders in the region around Azerbaijan and Anatolia launched a movement which at the time attracted far more attention among most Muslims than did the Portuguese coup. The leaders of the ~afavi tariqah at ArdabH had cultivated good relations with Shri elements far and wide, especially among Turkic pastoral tribes, and led many of them in ghazi raids against the Christian Georgians and Circassians of the Caucasus region. They had also managed to make an enemy of the most powerful family in the whole area, the chiefs of the A~-1}oyunlu CWhitesheep') tribal dynasty, sultans in Mesopotamia and western Iran. In 1500, Ismatn, the sixteen-year-old heir to the ~afavi pirship, was able to muster 1 The failure of the Portuguese to fulfill their goals in Malaysia is summarily portrayed by Bernard H. M. Vlekke in Nusantara: A History of Indonesia (rev. ed., The Hague, 1959), chap. IV. For the continuing importance of Muslim trade through the sixteenth century, see, for instance, Hendrik Dunlop's introduction to his Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Oostindische compagnie in Perzie (s' Gravenhage, 1930). It is Jacob C. van Leur, however, who effected the revision of former ideas about the sixteenth century in the Southern Seas, in Indonesian Trade and Society (The Hague, 1955). M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between I500 and about I630 (The Hague, 1962), has modified but not reversed his conclusions. 27. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE23sufficient followers to set out to avenge his father's death at A~-~oyunlu hands; by 1503 he controlled not only Azerbaijan, where he placed his capital at Tabriz, but all western Iran and the Tigris-Euphrates basin. He was now not only pir but shah, king. Isma'il and his followers had chiliastic expectations. It is said that some of his men expected to be invulnerable in battle in virtue of his presence. Upon the populations he subjected, vhether Turks, Persians, or Arabs, Shah Ismci'il imposed the Shi'i creed, where necessary with vigorous persecution: the invocation in the public Friday ~alat worship was to be said in Sh1'i form, and religious notables had to curse Abu-Bakr and 'Umar as usurping the rights of 'Ali to succeed Mu1).ammad. He evidently expected not merely to establish Sh1'i rule, but actually to wipe out ]ama'i-Sunnism-an aspiration the Shi'ls had scarcely attempted to realize before. Moreover, he apparently hoped to do this eventually throughout Islamdom. Going beyond old A~-~oyunlu territory accordingly, by 1510 he had attacked and killed Shaybani Khan, who had newly united the area of the former Timuri states of Khurasan and the OXllS basin under his Ozbegs; with this blow, Isma'il absorbed Khurasan and points southeast, pushing the Ozbegs north of the Oxus. (Isma'il is said to have filled out Shaybani's skull with gold and made it a drinking cup.) In the Ottoman domains to the west, Isma'll already had numerous Turkic followers, called '~iznbash', 'Red Heads', from their red sectarian headgear. These rose in his support in 1511. But here he was blocked. In 1512 the reigning Bayezid was deposed (as we have seen, at the will of the Ottolnan leaders) by his son, SeHm, fitly called SeUm the Inexorable (or in an old rendering, 'the Grim'); he bloodily suppressed the 5hl i rising and soon led his troops against Isma'il himself. Isma'il planned only defensive measures for the present-indeed, he could do no more; in 1514, when the Ottomans advanced, his artillery was still engaged in the east. He was badly defeated at Chaldiran, not far from Tabriz. Isma'il had attempted to counter the Ottoman superiority in artillery and infantry with bold cavalry manoeuvres, but luck went against him. However, subsequent fighting also was mostly favourable to the Ottomans. While SeHm occupied little of Isma'il's territory permanently, Isma'll had to give up any hope of pushing his own campaigns further west. In the territories that he did conquer, however, he erected a zealously Sh1'i state. ]ama'i-Sunni tariqahs were dispossessed, losing their khaniqahs and endowments, and Sunni 'ulama' were executed or exiled. 5h1'i scholars (notably Arabs) were brought in from east Arabia, Syria, or wherever they could be found, to teach the new creed to the population. The work was so well done that despite serious weakness in the dynasty following Isma'il's death (in 1524), his state (commonly called the 'Persian Empire') held together on a Sh1'i basis for more than two centuries and left the territories he had conquered permanently Shi t On the other hand.. in Ottoman Anatolia 28. 24SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESand in the Ozbeg Syr and Oxus basins, the Shi'i minority was severely persecuted and forced underground. Islamdom was now sharply and definitively divided into Shi'i-majority and Sunnt-majority areas, each unprecedentedly intolerant of the presence of the opposite minority. The civil unity of the Dar aI-Islam' was severely crippled. In his campaign against Isma1il, the Ottoman SeHm had been opposed by the Mamlftks of Egypt. In 1516 SeHm marched into Syria against them. Here again his use of field artillery carried the day (supplemented by treachery which betrayed the cavalry manoeuvre designed to outflank it). But here, despite last-minute resistance by Mamluks and Arabs in Cairo, the campaign resulted in a permanent occupation of Syria, Egypt, and even western Arabia. The Mamluk state in these areas had been losing strength for generations; the loss of revenue from shipping, because of Portuguese activities, had added to its troubles. It was now replaced by a state with far wider resources and commitments. The growing Ottoman state, in special contrast to the weakening Mamlftks, had become an increasingly strong naval power. Its fleets were seizing control of the east Mediterranean from the Italian cities. At almost the same time as the conquest of Egypt, the Ottomans received the allegiance of important naval forces in the Maghrib, where help was needed against Spanish aggression. The net result was that the Ottoman empire almost tripled its area in one generation, to stand for three centuries as the great Muslim power of the whole Mediterranean region. The empire adapted to this wider sphere the unusually solid institutions it had developed on the frontier in Anatolia and the Balkans. Though its control of the ne'er provinces was never so close as in the old ones, yet on the highest social levels, at least, it succeeded in moulding in an imperial pattern the social and cultural life of all its peoples. It was within the guiding lines established by the Ottoman empire that lived henceforth most Arabs, western Turks, and various neighbouring Muslim peoples. At the same time, north Indian Islamdom received a nev political establishment. The opening steps in this development ?ere closely linked with some aspects of the rise of the ~afavls. One of the late Timurid petty rulers, Babur, fleeing the Ozbeg conquest of the Oxus basin, had sufficient repute (and support from his closest followers) to take control of the remains of Timnr! power at Kabul in the Afghan mountains; further, he had sufficient ambition and skill, using that mountain kingdom as base, to intervene in the troubled politics of the Delhi sultanate and seize power in a part of northern India. Like Isma'll-with whom he was allied against the Ozbegs-he typified the fragmentary and adventurous character of the political life of the Middle Periods; but he also represented the Mongol ideal of the patronage state and, like Isma'il, he helped to establish a state which went far to reverse the old atomized political life. The Lodi dynasty at Delhi seems not to have escaped the local overcommitments that had handicapped previous 29. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE25rulers at Delhi. In 1526, at Panipat, on the northwest approaches to Delhi, Babur defeated the Delhi armies (partly with the aid of good field artillery) and there was no rallying to the Ladi cause. He ascended the throne of Delhi, which he reinvigorated. But by 1530 he was dead; despite some striking military successes, his sons quarrelled and were soon driven out (1540). Only in 1556 did one of them come back to seize the throne of a north Indian empire which was already developing in the centralizing direction Babur's line was to encourage. Babur (himself an accomplished Turkic author) had not, then, himself actually given form to that empire; but he contributed to it a dynastic tradition which-when its supporters later returned to power-enhanced the empire's prestige and its resources and also strengthened the active ties of Indian society with the highest cultural circles of the west and the north. Thus major empires were carved out by three dynasties. All of them dated back into the fourteenth century, and so possessed a power base more deeply rooted than that of mere military adventurers. The Ottomans already possessed a substantial state; the $afavids, authority in an extensive and militant tariqah; and the Timurids of India, the prestigious heritage of Timur. To these must be added at least the Ozbeg empire north of the Oxus, likewise going back to the Ozbeg state in Khwarazm and its Mongol heritage. These dynasties were in a position to consolidate imperial power during the realignments of gunpowder times; and they were subsequently distinguished not only for the extent and durability of their empires but also for the effectiveness of their absolutist rule. They spread yet more widely the tendencies toward a military patronage state that I have suggested even the Ottomans were adopting at the end of the fifteenth century. At the same time, the lineaments of that sort of state-as I see it-were being renewed and modified in the new empires. The new empires were able in large areas, by the sixteenth century, to reverse the tendency toward isolation and neutralization of the amirs by Islamicate society. This is partly, I suppose, because the Sunn! synthesis of the Earlier Middle Period was inherently unstable-the local evolution, within the system, of so relatively stabilized a structure as that of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, and the movements of tariqah Shl'ism in opposition, all indicate that the delicate balance could produce both its own overextensions and its own antagonists. The military patronage state was a natural response to the possibilities of exploiting the decentralized contractualistic society, once the patterns of that society were well established. But that major bureaucratic empires could be re-established as an outcome of these tendencies-not only in Europe and India but even (a bit later) on old Irano-Semitic territory-suggests further pressures at work. I have suggested three components in what has seemed to me the relative insecurity of agrarian power in the mid-Arid Zone: the relative sparseness of agriculture, making centralized agrarian-based power more difficult to 30. 26SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESmuster; the precariousness of cultivation in marginal areas and of control over peasants; the potential rivalry with pastoralist power. The effects of these conditions were presumably partially counteracted, by the time gunpowder weapons became militarily decisive, in at least two ways: through the technical demands of gunpowder weaponry itself, and through limitations, to which gunpowder contributed, upon long-distance nomadism. Hence part of the basis for the decentralized, contractualistic, cosmopolitan Islamicate society was undermined. I have already mentioned the advantage gunpowder might bring to rulers with special resources. By the fifteenth century, when it became a dominant force in warfare, the new constant technical innovation could determine overall governmental patterns. In any case, only central authorities were in a position financially to keep up to date. Even where gunpowder was minimally used, as in forces depending largely on cavalry, political expectations could be moulded by the ever more prevailing temper. At the same time, the increasing subjection of the ruling strata in the steppe nomadry to economic and cultural norms derived from citied society was reducing the likelihood of vast steppe empires, the most potent source of concentrated pastoral power; and possibly, before the widespread use of hand guns, the added prestige and durability artillery gave to central powers may have strengthened their hands against even local nomads. One can conjecture that such changes account for the relative effectiveness of the new absolutisms. With the restoration of some degree of bureaucratic centralization and dynastic stabilization, the typical Islamicate contractualist norms of society generally tended to be altered in tone, if not done away with. Social mobility apparently tended to decrease, at least in some areas. In the Ottoman empire guilds probably became stronger and less flexible than Islamdom had known them before, while in India many Muslims remained organized in castes, though without the full restrictions of Hinduism. Such local continuities are not surprising. But even in the ~afavi empire, centred in old lrano-Semitic territory, it may be that guilds became more tightly organized; certainly dependence on the state increased. What I have called 'military patronage states' never formed a single pattern, but at some points I think I can see common effects on such states from the specialcircumstances of the age. Alreadyin the Later Middle Periods, such thrusts toward autonomy as might seem to have been budding in the cities were curbed; under the gunpowder empires, cities were under relatively close bureaucratic control. Central supervision and intervention probably reached its peak in the Ottoman empire. The development of a central bureaucracy, in principle as an arm of the monolithic and all-inclusive army, was carried so far, on the other hand, that the ruling family waned in significance. Universally the head of the family was assigned the prerogatives of caliph; but the other members of the family had little independent opportunity-and indeed might find themselves repressed as a threat to central 31. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE27unity. This necessarily called for a certain modification in patterns of succession. The succession at the centre was necessarily linked to questions of succession throughout the society; hence it was bound eventually to be assimilated to the patterns of succession to lesser office prevailing among those many persons on whose support any centre depends. In at least two of the later military patronage states, when the central power was more jealously maintained than ever it was in the Middle Periods, the rule of succession by armed contest, reasonably congenial to Islamicate tradition, was formalized. Succession by designation by the predecessor (the natural alternative) was consciously ruled out-it was said that succession was in the hands of Godso that a father could not intervene on behalf of one son and exclude the equal rights of the others. All that a father could legitimately do was to give one son a position of military advantage over the others when the father's death was approaching. This was repeatedly recognized by Timurid monarchs in India; even when the Timurid Awrangzeb stated his preference that one son should succeed, he acknowledged that his other son still had an equal right to the sovereignty. The principle was embodied in an Ottoman qanun rule. The ~afavid rulers recognized the applicability of the principle to their neighbours: the emperor retained at I~fahan a third rebellious son of Awrangzeb until his father should die, when a contest would be legally in order. (The Safavls themselves seem to have preferred a more peaceful contest in an assembly of the chief courtiers to choose which son would succeed after the monarch's death.) Though such a principle sometimes entailed anticipatory contests in the father's lifetime, yet in the absence of any formal mechanism of election like the Mongol kuriltay assembly, it seems to have ensured at once a direct military role in basic decisions and to have preserved, by common consent, the unity of an empire, without division among sons as had tended to happen in earlier military patronage states. Of the many state formations that arose out of all these events of the time of realignments, the most significant culturally was that which arose in the lands of old Islam, the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian highlands. Here the central Islamicate cultural traditions received their greatest further development; here the new flowering of the culture had at once the greatest continuity with the past and the greatest brilliance of new discoveries and new departures. The Shtf, foundations of the~afav;'stateI t has been commonly said that the ~afaviddynasty re-established, after nine hundred years of foreign interruption, the old Persian empire of the Achaemenids and Sasanids; or else, more recently, thatthe~afaviddynastymarked the emergence of 'Persia' as a national state in the modern sense. Each notion is founded on a valid point. The Safavl empire was a more adequate 32. 28SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOVDER TIMESheir to the Sasanian empire, in its absolutist administrative and cultural ideals, than any since the classical 'AbbasI empire. Again, it was the ~afavi state that worked out the main lines along which the subsequent monarchy has continued to be defined, having its capital in the western Iranian highlands, gathering under one rule at least the western Iranian and Azeri provinces, and above all establishing an official Shi'ism. This has been the context within which the most important of the modern Iranian nationalisms grew up. But any such notion of a specially 'national' character in the ~afavi state harks back chiefly, I feel sure, to two mistaken identifications, formerly in vogue: that of Islam with the Semitic 'race' (and with the Sunnism of the Mediterranean Arabs), and that of Shi'ism with a 'reaction against Islam' on the part of the 'Aryan' Persians. (Hence the 'Abbasi empire is usually omitted, as not 'Persian', from the Achaemenid-Sasani-~afavisequence.) Stripped of these racialist presuppositions, the notion loses its plausibility. Just as the ~afavi empire can be regarded as a restoration of the Sasanian empire only by an analogy that leaves out of account the whole inner development of Islamicate civilization, so it can be regarded as an anticipation of nationhood in the modern sense only at the cost of disregarding some of the most crucial features that go tq make up the modern nation-state, and in particular the problems that yet faced those who, later, did wish to make of Persia a modern nation-state. Writers used to cite it as a paradox that Isma'il, ruler of 'Persia', wrote his verse in Turkic, while his rival, SeHm, ruler of 'Turkey', wrote his verse in Persian. The paradox springs only from a misuse of the term 'Persia' for the ~afavi empire, which included Persians, Turks, and Arabs equally, and the term 'Turkey' for the Ottoman empire, an even more unfortunate misnomer. In itself there is nothing paradoxical in the leader of a tribal grouping writing in the popular tongue, Turkic, while the head of an established state writes in the cultivated tongue, Persian. The significance of the ~afavi empire lies neither in a racial restoration nor in a racial anticipation, but in the breakdown of the political decentralization of the Middle Periods not only in the more heavily agrarian regions of India and Europe but even in the heart of the Arid Zone itself. 3 3 The confusions that can arise through the various popular misconceptions about territory and race can become very involved. A respectable (and not untypical) historian, Laurence Lockhart in the Fall of the Safavt Dynasty (Cambridge University Press, 195 8), p. 67, can write that the 'Persians' of the ~afavi era had 'sadly degenerated' from Sasani times in having no merchant fleet, since they held the sea in horror-and yet note that the Arabs 'on both sides of the Persian Gulf' took readily to the sea-evidently not questioning whether it made sense to imply that the Persian- and Turkic-speaking landsmen of I!?fahan had 'degenerated' from sea-loving ancestors who may once have spoken some Iranian tongue on the shores of the Gulf. All this nonsense presupposes popular stereotypes. To justify such statements, one would have to go through a chain of arguments which, once stated explicitly, looks like a parody. One must identify with a given name (however accidental) a single language, culture group, and patrilineal race-and often enough what is called vaguely a single 'country'. Because in the nineteenth century the northern shores of the Gulf were assigned (largely by European 33. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE29Ismacn and his followers, of course, were no more conscious of building a more absolutist state than of building a Persian nation. Theirs was a state of the military patronage type. Within the ruling establishment, one can draw no sharp lines between military and civilian: it was all the monarch's household, and the whole establishment served a military function pre-eminently, though to this end it had also to administer its lands. Men who were primarily military, c men of the sword', usually Turks, could turn up readily in what were primarily unsoldierly administrative functions, especially on the level of high policy; for the whole state was regarded as their proper province. At the same time, lmen of the pen', normally ITajiks', that is Iranians or Arabs, who were expected to be subordinated to the Turkic cmen of the sword', might turn up in military functions once they had managed to rise high enough in the establishment to meddle in policy. We find even qaQis following such a path. And at first, the ~afavi state does not seem to have pushed the pattern to any more developed phase. 4 In particular, there was neither explicit policy nor even actual administrative practice that could assure the $afavl state, in its beginnings, any different prospects from those of the states that had preceded it in the area. Despite the far-reaching shifts in the political balance of power that followed upon Shah Isma1il's career of conquest and fanaticism, the ~afavi state as it emerged rested on bases superficially very similar to those of the I~ara 1}oyunlu and the A~-~oyunlu states. There also, as with the ~afavis, the ruling power had been based on Turkic tribes from the highlands between Anatolia and Iran; it had been military in orientation; and even (in the case of the ~ara-~oyunlu) Shi'i. Yet in each of these three points, the ~afavi state differed crucially. The state was not merely Turkic. Though it was based on Turkic tribal powers, these were held together by a mystical allegiance which at the same time tied them to certain urban populations, notably to the devotees of the decree) to 'Persia', then on the one hand whatever had once ever been there, from the time of the Elamites on. was implicitly 'Persian'; and on the other hand, 'Arabs' there were necessarily. by implication, recent intruders. However, 'Persia' is not only supposed to be an eternal territory; it is also imagined as an eternal state; hence if a Pahlavispeaking government in the Iraq had made use of naval pover, they were IPersians' who were not afraid of the sea. But, of course, 'Persians' are also a patrilineal 'race'; the modern 'Persians' must be descendants of the men of the Sasanian court and of their sailors (while the 'Arabs' of the Persian Gulf are not, of course); so the men of I!?fahan have 'degenerated' in no longer loving the sea and in allowing the 'Arabs' to take over! (Cf. note 16 in Book One, chap. I.) 4 What is valid in such an analysis I ove to Martin Dixon-what is invalid. to my own ignorance. abetted by his failure to publish. The hostility of the I>:izilbash to a Persian, i.e., a non-military vizier, and other tendencies within the $afavi administrative system at this period are analyzed by Roger M. Savory; note: 'The Principal Offices of the $afavid State during the Reign of Isma.'il 1', BSOAS. 23 (1960). 91-105; 'The Principal Offices of the $afavid State during the Reign of Tahmasp I'. BSOAS. 24 (1961); and 'The Significance of the Political Murder of Mirza Salman'. Islatnic Studies (Karachi). 3 (1964), 181-91. Note that the office of vakil. personal representative, occurred also under the preceding Turkic dynasties. 34. 30 SECOND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMES$afavls at Ardabll and elsewhere. It was not a tribal confederacy on the usual lines, but a religious fraternity which made use of tribal links but could set them aside at need in favour of a higher calling. Then the dynasty did not merely favour the Shl'ah; it seriously set about enforcing conversion to the Shl'ah upon the whole population. In doing so, it broke up or weakened major sections of the old local ruling elements by attacking their financial bases, and helped to establish new ones. Accordingly, it was not merely military. By virtue of its special appeal to the Shl'i faith, already, it implied a certain civilian commitment; this was increased when the economic pattern of urban institutions was shifted into Shl'i hands, creating a vested interest in the permanence of the dynasty which was tied to an interest in peace and prosperity. At first, the state seemed hardly stronger than its predecessors; but with time all these points of difference made themselves felt. It survived difficulties that would have wrecked a purely tribal military regime. It survived them long enough so that eventually-later than either the Ottoman or the IndoTimuri states, it seems-it was able to establish a full-fledged bureaucracy based on gunpowder military forces. Though the majority of the population from Nile to OXllS seems to have been lamali-Sunnl in 1500 (in the strongly 'Alid-loyalist way of Sunnism by that time), the Twelver Shl'ah was very strong in some areas, especially since the spread of tariqah Shi'ism in the Mongol period. It was especially strong in the Iraq, around the Shl'i shrines at Karbala' and Najaf, new cities which had arisen precisely as Shl'l pilgrimage centres and had taken the place of Ktlfah; it continued dominant in such towns as Qum, which had been Shl'l from the beginning. But there were by now strong shi'i factions in many other places. We have noted that during the fifteenth century, for instance, the great rival factions that divided I~fahan were no longer I:Ianafls and Shafills, but Jama'i-Sunnis and Shl'ls. And in the course of the century, the Shl'i leading families seem to have gained more and more an upper hand over their Sunni rivals. As with the Guelph and Ghibelline parties in Italian cities, a hereditary partisanship was not always a matter of abstract ideals. Nevertheless, the Shl'l party does seem to have remained especially hospitable to hopes of general reform, and hence well-disposed to attempts at political innovation. Such hopes were expressed, for instance, by the Shiel families who led I~fahan into supporting a rebel grandson against the Timurid, Shahrukh-a rebellion then crushed in blood, but presaging the future. Ismalil had, then, two sorts of Shl'l support: the Shl'ism of the tribes, not only $ftfi in feeling but often deviating widely from the norms of the Shar'j 'ulama'; and the Shl'ism of the great city families, no doubt also of a $ftfl cast, but relatively bourgeois and Sharl'ah-minded in many cases, though still willing to look to a new social order within these limits. In the first decade or so of Isma'il's reign, the state was founded firmly upon the position of Isma'U as murshid-e kamil, the 'perfect [~ufi] master', 35. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE3Iassisted by his subordinate pirs and khaUfahs, to whom were devoted the loyal Turkic tribes of murids, the ~izilbash, who were fulfilling their spiritual discipline in following his military commands. Isma'il's chief executive officer was a personal representative who expressed as much Isma'il's leadership as chief of the ~afavi tariqah as he did his administrative powers over the subjected territories. The head of the civil administration had regularly, under the preceding Turkic rulers, been a civilian (and naturally a Persian); but when, after his power was well established, Isma'il chose a Persian for his personal representative, with power not only over the administration but over the relations of the murids to their murshid-e kamil.. it was clear that he was depending less than fully on the ~izilbash tribal amlrs. When this personal representative was made commander in chief of an expedition against the Ozbegs, in resentment the ~iznbash leaders deserted the commander and allowed him to be killed. Already there was clearly tension between the I~izilbash Shi'i amlrs on the one hand and the urban, largely Persian-speaking Shi'i leadership on the other. Isma'll himself, as a young man, lived very much in the atmosphere of the extremist tariqah Shi'ism of the $afavi-supporting tribes. His own verses proclaim him a locus of Divinity for his times, as a descendant of the Twelver imams; and honour the imams themselves in ways that more cautious Shi'is could find exaggerated. There is no indication that he changed his sentiments; but toward the end of his life, especially after further westward expansion was checked at Chaldiran in I5I4, he moved increasingly to break up the power of the great ~izilbash amirs and to put civilians into positions of trust. When he died, in I524, leaving as heir Tahmasp, a boy of ten, the amirs were still able to regain control of the state; but after a decade of their infighting, Tahmasp was able to find the support he needed to take power personally and renew the enhancement of the civilian authority which his father had initiated. Tahmasp (ruled about I533-76) was not an outstanding ruler. He seems to have been competent in his post, but to have been inactive of temperament and personally rather mean. He was highly refined in his aesthetic tastes, giving a further impulse to the patronage of the arts which became a $afavi hallmark; but he perpetuated the tradition of barbarous cruelty in acts of public revenge, which since Mongol times had been intensified even beyond the common Agrarian Age usage. In his hands the $afavi state was not strong enough to gain back some lands, notably the sacred cities of the Iraq.. which Isma'il had held but which had been lost at Chaldiran or later. The capital had been moved from Tabriz, in Azerbaijan, to the more purely Persian Qazvin. Yet the state did maintain its power in much of the subCaucasian highlands (the movement's original home) and swayed in addition the greater part of all the Persian-speaking lands, including most of Khurasan. When the Indian Timurid ruler, Humayun, had to flee Delhi and come back to Kabul, where his father, Babur, had founded his power, he found it 36. 32SEeo ND FLOWERING: THE EMPIRES OF GUNPOWDER TIMESuseful and perhaps necessary to appeal to the protection of Tahmasp, even at the cost of professing Shi'ism for the time being. The $afavi empire was indisputably one of the three great Muslim powers, markedly more solidly seated than the :B:ara-~oyunlu and A~-~oyunlu states had been. The solidity of $afavi power seems to have depended largely on Tahmasp's success in diversifying the basis of that po,ver. He continued, certainly, to rely on the I>.izilbash tribes (but now appealing to their support more as padishah 'emperor', than as pir); he also could count on the newly dominant Shi'i factions in the cities, who depended on the dynasty for their position (there was a substantial body of Sunni exiles waiting to return from just across the border, in the first generation at least). But in the course of his reign he depended more and more, in addition, on substantial numbers of new converts, either captives or free men, from the Christian Caucasian lands into which Isma'il, like his ancestors, had carried raids. These new Muslims, loyal only to the dynasty, formed a substantial counterweight to the official tribal support. In earlier Islamic times, dynasties had built special support for themselves by drawing upon socially rootless elements to support their central absolutist power against the embarrassing claims of their original supporters. This tendency had resulted, gradually, in the whole ruling stratum being more or less Turkic in the greater part of the Muslim lands, because the most obvious reservoir of socially rootless military elements was the slave supply from the central Eurasian steppe. But by now the world-historical configuration had changed. The steady expansive pressure of agrarianate society was engulfing even the steppe. With the advance of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian cultural patterns, no part of central Eurasia was left open without some sort of established, large-scale political control; the tribal leadership was becoming an aristocracy with interests tied to those of the merchants of towns as remote from the older centres of civilization as Sibir on the Irtysh river, seat of a Muslim khanate. The steppe was no longer a free, heathen, inexhaustible source of slaves as well as of migrant tribes; it was controlled by Mongol or ex-Mongol khanates with their own interests. Since" within the older Muslim lands the Turkic tribal groups had by now established for themselves an increasingly customary place, with their own local ties and interests, the conditions that had led to a universal Turkizing of the military classes were fading away. Instead ,the great Muslim empires of th~ sixteenth century turned to less homogeneous sources for their unattached troops. Despite a Turkic veneer, as early as the fourteenth century the Mamlftk regime in Egypt had turned for its new slave recruits largely to the Caucasian landsespecially to Circassia. The Ottoman empire looked to voluntary converts from foreign Christendom and to conscripted youths from their own subject Christian population; the Indian Timurids made use both of foreign Muslims and of local Hindus, often unconverted, to broaden their base. The $afavis, already under Tahmasp, likewise made use of elements 37. THE SAFAVI EMPIRE33external to the class system of their society; they used Christian converts, notably Armenians, and converted Caucasian captives, Circassians and especially Georgians. Such men not only formed troops but also rose to high positions of responsibility. But unlike the central Eurasian Turks, they did not have a homogeneous language or cultural background. A new homogeneity was given them, compounded of a Shi'i allegiance which set them off from rival imperial elites, and a Persian culture of which they could claim to rule the home ground. (In this sense, the empire became distinctively Persian.) The best of the young captives vere given an excellent education, which included Persian poetry as well as archery, to put them in the full stream of the best Islamicate culture. Consistently with the new awareness of the high value of the fine arts, they were even taught painting, so as to develop their taste. EffectsCJ/ the Shi,li, ascendancyThe establishment of Twelver Shilism as dominant allegiance in a major part of Islamdom led, vithin the area, to new emphases and forms in piety on the levels both of the high culture and of the folk culture; and it even erected a certain cultural barrier between the Shi'i and the Jamali-Sunni areas. This barrier showed itself politically in the chronic hostility that set the ~afavis at odds with both the Ottomans and the Ozbegs-though indeed, at most, Shi'ism only exacerbated conflicts such as had been taking place before. Perhaps the same barrier was not without influence upon the ~afavi policy of alliance with both the Portuguese in the south and then the Russians as they extended their trade into the Caspian sea; a policy that materially undermined the Ottoman struggle against those same Christian povers. Some travellers high in Sunni circles even hesitated to take a route through ~afavi territory for fear of harassment. Perhaps more significant was the rise of an intellectual barrier between the lulama' of Shili and of Sunni areas: thus Najaf in the Iraq, a city of madrasahs which came to be the most important Tvelver Shi'i intellectual centre, had little communication with the great Azhar madrasah mosque in Cairo; and the Shi'is of East Arabia had little with the Shafilis of I:IaQramawt in the south. (In India, however, Shl'is and Sunnls still mingled fairly freely under a tolerant Sunnl regime.) Yet the barrier was never very high. The I~fahan school of philosophy, impregnated with Shi'ism as it was, was read everywhere among those concerned; so was the new style of poetry developed in the $afavi empire. The bigoted (and Shari'ah-minded) lulama' who stood for rigid separation between Shi'i and Sunni almost always played a secondary role. But within Shi'i territory, the new allegiance proved to have pervasive effects. These show some remarkable parallels to the contemporary Protestant reform in northern E