Islamic+Gunpowder+Empires+(1350's+-1918)

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 * Islamic Gunpowder Empires**
 * 1300 – 1650**

Terms to know:

Anatolia Persia India khan Eurasia Ottoman Empire Mehemet II Constantinople //janissaries// Safavid Empire Mughal Empire Akbar

In the late 15th century, a group of three empires was carved out of the areas of **Anatolia**, **Persia**, and **India** that took their organizing principles and systems of government legitimacy from Islam. The nature of the new rulers of these empires, though, was forged in cultures born in the steppes of Eurasia and completely foreign to the concepts that informed Islam. Thus the three most powerful empires in the world during the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were products of cultural and ethnic mixing that produced dynamic but stable political, social, and religious systems able to martial great wealth and human resources.

The cultural heritage of the people who would become rulers of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires was born on the steppes of Eurasia – northern Russia, Mongolia, Manchuria. These cultures, variously known as Mongols, Huns, Tatars, Hsiung-nu, Turks, etc., were originally nomadic herders, and among the first to domesticate the horse. They were generally tribal in social organization, with a single group rarely exceeding 40 people. When a number of groups got together, the group chiefs would elect a group leader – a sort of first among equals who was known by the Mongols as a **khan**. It was these peoples who participated in the creation of what we now know as the Mongol Empire between 900 and 1300 – an empire that spanned most of **Eurasia**, from China to Russia and Turkey, and has never been surpassed as the greatest land empire ever to exist. The descendants of leaders of these groups were the ones who would become the rulers of the empires mentioned above. They would bring nomadic ideas of rule, and of military prowess to areas inhabited by Muslims, and in order to be seen by those Muslims as legitimate rulers, would adopt Islam, and adapt it to their needs as rulers.

The first, longest lived, and most powerful of these empires was the **Ottoman Empire**. The Ottomans had been a minor unit in the Seljuk Turkish Empire that existed on the Anatolian Peninsula between 1198 and 1308. Their position on the border with Europe gave them much practice in warfare, and led, eventually, to their being able to defeat their overlords, the Seljuks, and control Anatolia by 1400. By 1453, an Ottoman Sultan, **Mehemet II**, had conquered the Byzantine Capitol City, **Constantinople**, and made it his own capital, after rebuilding it, and renaming it Istanbul. The government that Mehemet and his successors created and refined was a marvel of cultural mixing that was at once dynamic, powerful, and stable.

Ottoman rule was based on several theoretical "legs" that provided legitimacy for the rule of the Ottoman Sultan, and by extension authority for his administration. The reason that such theoretical legitimacy was so crucial for the Ottomans was because of the multi-ethnic nature of their empire, combined with the fact that they had conquered it, and therefore were not its "natural" or long-established traditional rulers. If they wanted to rule effectively without having to resort to destabilizing force at every turn, they quickly realized that they would have to convince their subjects of their right to be at the top of the heap. To do this, one of the first things the Ottoman rulers did was to accept Islam as their religion. This was because Islam was already the predominant religion in the area when they conquered it. Since Muslims believe that government must be both informed by, and in service to Islam, only an Islamic Sultan could claim legitimacy.

However, and just as critically, the Ottomans came from a nomadic steppe tradition of rulers who got their job through physical and mental prowess, and thus had the power to absolutely command all subjects without reference to a law beyond themselves. These absolute rulers, then, needed to use Islam to create a state, and needed to change Islam to help them rule in the way they wanted to. In the process of fusing these two systems, then, both were changed dramatically.

Prior to the arrival of the Seljuk, and then the Ottoman Turks, the area of Anatolia, and all of Arabia, most of West Africa, Persia, parts of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe had been a part of the first Islamic Empire, ruled by the Caliphs who followed Muhammad. The caliph’s duties included defending Islam, protecting trade and the Holy Land, and enforcing the law of the Qur’an. Qur’anic law, though, was interpreted by non-government scholars known as //Ulama// who did their work for the glory of God, and not for pay from anyone. These //Ulama// also did their work in councils in order to minimize the possibility of error. The Caliph, in short, while nominally the leader of the Islamic world, was largely its policeman, and little more.

This kind of role for a ruler was not what the Ottomans had in mind. They therefore set up their entire system for the purpose of appropriating Islam in the service of their state, rather than using their state in the service of Islam. The problem was simply one of how to get authority to tax and to make the laws, and how to have that authority accepted by all of those being ruled.

In order to take advantage of the fact that the majority of people in the empire were Muslims, the Ottomans not only became Muslims themselves, but fabricated a genealogy, and a series of stories, that attempted to prove a direct family link to Muhammad. With that done, the Ottomans then set about co-opting the Ulama so as to gain the power to make laws, and setting the various classes of the society one against the other so as to maximize loyalty to the sultan, and minimize the of organized resistance.

First, upon conquering a territory, the Ottomans would immediately claim all land for the Sultan, and then return the land to the nobles who had lived on in prior to conquest as a sort of perpetual leasehold – that is, the local aristocracy was allowed to keep their land, and all of the people who had worked it before, and even to keep their power, provided they swore allegiance to the sultan and provided soldiers for his army in later conquests. In return, the sultan guaranteed the lands of the local aristocrats, and allowed them to become a part of his court through marriage, personal friendships, jobs, etc. It would certainly have been impossible for the sultan to be successful with this if he had been a non-Muslim. His religion, then, opened doors for him in most places that he conquered, because most of those he conquered were Muslim as well. This created an upper class with common beliefs, a common language for communication (Arabic), and common economic and social goals, all of which they shared with the sultan.

But to keep these aristocrats in power, the sultan also employed an army of slave soldiers known as **//janissaries//**. The janissaries were non-Muslim boys received by the sultan’s government in the //devshirme// – a kind of tax levied mostly on the Christian subjects of the empire who lived in the Balkans in Eastern Europe. These boys were taken to Istanbul and trained in three languages, fighting arts, accounting, government, literature, history, and of course, Islam and the Qur’an. They were slaves, but well paid for their services, well educated by the government, and given everything they had by the sultan from their earliest years. They were thus loyal only to the sultan, and so could defend him in the event that the aristocracy revolted. The janissaries were the only soldiers given gunpowder weapons. Many also worked at the highest levels of the army and the government as advisors, and retired to large estates provided by the sultan himself. They were thus set in opposition to the aristocrats, and provided support and legitimacy to the sultan. The final opposition was the most important. The Ottoman sultan’s primary responsibility was not to himself, his army, or the aristocrats, but to the common people of his empire. Popular support was considered crucial to the ability of the sultan to rule, and so the sultan took very seriously his responsibility to protect ordinary people from the power and corruption of the aristocratic class. Suleiman II went so far as to disguise himself and visit administrative and legal hearings to be sure that commoners were given fair treatment. When he found corruption, he convicted the perpetrators immediately, and there was no appeal. The punishment was either severe beating or death, and even close friendship with the sultan could not change the outcome. This protective role ensured that the common people would see the sultan as their only true protector, and so set them in opposition to the aristocrats.

In this system, it seems clear, the most important indicator of social position is one’s relationship to the sultan. This was defined outright through a system that assigned everyone in society a military rank. That rank controlled wages, taxation, social status, and employability for everyone, whether soldier or not. Similar ranks were assigned to the //Ulama//, who, because this was an Islamic state, still had control over the interpretation of the law. Interestingly, the //ulama// were also paid according to their rank, and their rank was often assigned based on how well their interpretations of the Qur’an suited the needs of the sultan’s government. Through this system, the sultans were able eventually to get //Ulama// to agree that there were some areas which Qur’an-ic law did not address – such as collection of taxes to provide government services – for which laws might properly be made by the government. This gave the sultans the loophole that they needed to make law as well as enforce it, even in an Islamic state.

It seems clear then, that while the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state; Islam served the state, rather than the state serving Islam. Islam provided legitimacy for the sultan, a common system of beliefs that allowed aristocrats of various ethnicities to accept the sultan and his goals as their own, a framework for the recruitment and training of his most loyal soldiers, and finally a legal loophole through which the sultan could rule in the Turkic tradition, through making law, rather than simply enforcing it.

The **Safavid Empire** that grew up in Persia (Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and part of Afghanistan) was somewhat different from the Ottomans in both theory and practice. First of all, however, the Safavid rulers set about making themselves acceptable to the local population by accepting Islam, just as had the Ottoman rulers. Just like the Ottomans, they fabricated a genealogy that proved they were related to Muhammad. They took this one step further, however, and linked themselves to the line of Imams descended directly from Muhammad. They did this by suggesting that the 12th Imam, who had disappeared while still a young man, had started a family in Asia, of which they were descendants. The first Safavid ruler to conquer the territory of Persia was a 14-year-old boy by the name of Ismael (Shah Ismael – Shah being the title the Safavids used for "emperor").

Ismael lived up to the legend of descent from Muhammad in his exploits. He was apparently quite devout, and seemed also to be unable to lose a military campaign. His "red cap" army was absolutely devoted to him, and took extreme risks in his name.

Ismael established the first Safavid Capitol City in Isfahan, and went on to rule according to Islamic principles. His claim to descent from the 12th Imam meant, of course, that he had to rule according to Shiite, rather than Sunni principles of Islam, and he and his successors were often quite brutal in forcing their subjects to become Shiite Muslims (the majority had been Sunni prior to the Safavid arrival). To do this, subjects often were required to prove their change by cursing the names of the first three Caliphs – an act akin to asking a Catholic to walk on the Crucifix. These extreme measures were unpopular, and the Safavids thus had to rule largely through the power of their elite "red cap" military, and through currying the favor of the landed elite that also provided cavalry.

The Safavid system, because of its conservative extremism, was very creative when it came to theology and ideology. One of the major questions of the day concerned how one understands the truth of the Qur’an, rather than simply seeing it as a book. The Ishraqi school related Plato’s allegory of the cave to the idea of a true believer’s seeing the light. Once the light is seen, when a true believer reads any Qur’an, he sees the True Qur’an – not the form that requires interpretation, but the Truth itself – this kind of mystical enlightenment allowed not for faith, but for absolute knowledge of the Truth – a really devout Muslim, it suggested, could know the truth simply through devotion.

The **Mughal Empire** of India was altogether different again in the way Islam was incorporated into its practice of the state. However, again, there were similarities in that Islam was adopted to create legitimacy.

However, once the Mughals had conquered large parts of India down to the Deccan, they realized most of the inhabitants of the subcontinent were not Muslims, but Hindus. In order to maintain legitimacy after this most recent expansion, **Akbar** (r. 1556 – 1605), third Mughal Emperor was extremely tolerant of other religions. Akbar was interested in spirituality, and often enjoyed having scholars from numerous faiths into his conference chambers to hold debates on the merits of each other’s religions.

Recognizing that to rule a Hindu majority with a Muslim minority would mean having to find some common ground, and that required giving Hindus a vested interest in working with the government. With that in mind, Akbar first designated Hindus (unlikely as it seems) as "people of the book" – protected peoples who could not be persecuted because of their religious beliefs. He then opened government jobs to Hindu as well as Muslim administrators, thus giving the Hindu population the sense that it was also a part of the ruling system, and so buying off Hindu loyalty. He then eliminated the poll tax that non-Muslims must pay, making all subjects, in a sense, fiscally equal regardless of religious beliefs. At one point, Akbar even created his own religion – a synthesis of what he thought was best about Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and several other faiths. As most members of any faith had strong views about what was correct and what was not, Akbar’s attempt to gain legitimacy by creating his own religion failed. But it shows quite clearly the way that Akbar perceived religion in general and Islam specifically. For Akbar, Islam was a tool to serve the stability of the state, and so was subordinated to the needs of the state.

Akbar’s successors, Jahangir, Jahan, and Aurangzeb gradually changed that outlook. Each was somewhat more interested in Islam than his predecessor. Thus, by the rule of Aurangzeb (r. 1659 – 1707), the emperor had reinstated the poll tax on non-Muslims, removed Hindus from government posts, revoked the Hindu status as "people of the book," and even promoted actively the destruction of Hindu temples and their replacement with Mosques. Persecution of Hindus was tolerated, if not official policy, and the state became fully Muslim in character.

While Aurangzeb was a strong enough ruler to hold India together despite this persecution of the majority of his subjects, later rulers were not, and by 1857, India had broken up into a multitude of different states ruled through the various cultures and belief systems of the majority inhabitants, and while a Mughal Emperor still sat on the throne, the English Queen actually ruled the subcontinent through a system of divide and conquer. Islam, then, contributed to the systems of legitimacy that all three of these "gunpowder empires" employed. Most simply, that was because most of the residents of the areas these governments ruled were Muslims, and they would accept no government as legitimate that was Muslim. However, the steppe culture which all three of these ruling groups came from assisted them in every case in the project of bending Islam to fit state needs. Back to Hist 152 Page