Those who participated in the high politics of their state continued to find ways to deal with the evolving challenges to the legitimacy of the ruling families they served. A shared ethos of Muslim kingship with its pre-Islamic legacy, authoritative sources such as the Qurʾan and the hadith corpus and their varied interpretations, and the political language of Islam used to formulate responses to political crises, connected the political cultures of the three empires. This chapter includes the views of thinkers attached to the three imperial courts who attempted to articulate how their respective dynasts expressed their message of sovereignty and legitimized their rule to the people.
In the first essay, Hani Khafipour examines the Safavid house’s claim to religio-political authority during the formative period of the dynasty as revealed in the works of a sixteenth century Safavid courtier, the poet bureaucrat ʿAbdi Beg Shirazi. A strong legitimating pillar in Muslim kingship was having a revered line of descent. While many powerful houses of the era, such as the Ottomans and the Mughals, claimed to have had legendary ancestors in order to strengthen their legitimacy, the Safavid house alone claimed that they were descendants of the Prophet through his daughter Fatimah and cousin and son-in-law ʿAli, the first of the Shiʿi imams. This was a powerful statement when used for political ascendency. One can imagine in the European context how potent the idea would be if a political-military house could rightfully claim descent from Jesus of Nazareth. In his chronicle Addendum to History (Takmilat al-Akhbar), penned in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and excerpted below, ʿAbdi Beg demonstrates how the Safavid house viewed themselves as the legitimate rulers of the Muslim community.
In the second essay, Hüseyin Yılmaz examines the political thought of two sixteenth century scholars and jurists, Idris Bitlisi, who left Iran after the rise of the Safavids and was welcomed at the Ottoman court, and Hasan Kafi, who was a provincial Ottoman judge in the Balkans. Bitlisi became one of the most influential thinkers for the Ottoman Empire. In an era of competing imperial legitimacies, Bitlisi, in his The Law of King of Kings (Qanun-i Shahanshahi) excerpted here, attempts to recast the Ottoman universal claim to sovereignty by relying on a host of intellectual streams, including Sufism and the teachings of the philosopher al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191), the founder of an Illuminationist (Ishraqi) philosophical tradition.
The imperial judge, Hasan Kafi, almost a century later in his Elements of Wisdom for the Order of the World (Usulu’l-Hikem fi Nizami’l-Alem) shifts the burden of justice and social order away from the ruler and onto the society. By the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was nearly three hundred years old, and many political thinkers began to observe signs of decline in the power of the state and wrote about it. Hasan Kafi, for example, offers to reveal the causes as well as the solutions for the restoration of the Ottoman power and justice. In the Elements of Wisdom, part of which is translated below, he views the role of the ruler primarily as the guardian of the four social orders (men of sword, men of pen, the peasants, and craftsmen and merchants) and posits that unless the social orders are preserved based on the proven laws and tradition, and meritocracy upheld, the empire will face collapse.
As in the Safavid and Ottoman lands, the influence of Sufi thought on Mughal political ideology at the center of power was indeed immense. In the third essay, Azfar Moin explores the Mughal claims of sovereignty as reflected in the thought of the seventeenth century Sufi ʿAbd al-Rahman of the Chishti Order, who served as a spiritual adviser in the court of the Emperor Shah Jahan (d. 1666). The court and the Chishtis over the years had developed a symbiotic relationship in that the order legitimized the Mughal kingship while the court supported the order’s agenda for religious co-existence among Muslims, Hindus, and other religions—a tradition dating back to the thirteenth century and later upheld by Emperor Akbar (d. 1605) who adopted the famed Sufi master Shaykh Muʿin al-Din (d. 1236) as the dynasty’s spiritual patron. In his Mirror of Secrets (Mirʾat al-Asrar) excerpted and translated below, ʿAbd al-Rahman endorses the Mughal Emperor’s cosmological position as the second “Lord of Auspicious Conjunction” (the first Lord being the Mughal house’s ancestor, the powerful Central Asian conqueror Timur (d. 1405)) whose greatness was predestined and astrologically confirmed with the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter. Moreover, he praises the policy of Universal Peace (Sulh-i Kull) that Shah Jahan continue to uphold, a policy inaugurated by Emperor Akbar that occasioned a controversial realignment of Islam as the dominant faith vis-à-vis other religions of the empire.
FIGURE 4.1 The Coffin of Imam ‘Ali
This illustration from a mid-sixteenth century manuscript of the Falnama (Book of Omens) depicts an Anatolian spiritual legend according to which Imam ʿAli (shown veiled, leading the camel) predicts his own death and reveals the details of his funeral procession to his sons Hasan and Husain (the figures behind the hillside). He urges his sons not to seek answers from the veiled man. Unable to resist, they ask for the man’s identity and learn that it is indeed their father, who is carrying his own corpse to the grave.
Source: Folio from a Falnama (The Book of Omens) of Ja‘far al-Sadiq
Date: Mid-1550s–early 1560s
Place of origin: Attributed to Qazvin, Iran
Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Francis M. Weld, 1950. 50.23.2.