Ink and gold leaf representation of the long-ruling sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Süleyman I, as a young man. Nakkas Osman/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images
After the death of Timur in 1405, power began to shift from migrating peoples to sedentary populations living in large centralized empires. After about 1683, when the last Ottoman campaign against Vienna failed, the great empires for which this period is so famous began to shrink and weaken, just as western Europeans first began to show their potential for worldwide expansion and domination. When the period began, Muslim lands had begun to recover from the devastating effects of the Black Death (1346–48), and many were prospering. Muslims had the best opportunity in history to unite the settled world, but by the end of the period they had been replaced by Europeans as the leading contenders for this role. Muslims were now forced into direct and repeated contact with Europeans, through armed hostilities as well as through commercial interactions, and often the Europeans competed well. Yet Muslim power was so extensive and the western Europeans such an unexpected source of competition that Muslims were able to realize that their situation had changed only after they no longer had the strength to resist. Furthermore, the existence of several strong competitive Muslim states militated against a united response to the Europeans and could even encourage some Muslims to align themselves with the European enemies of others.
In this period, long after Islamdom was once thought to have peaked, centralized absolutism reached its height, aided in part by the exploitation of gunpowder warfare and in part by new ways to fuse spiritual and military authority. Never before had Islamicate ideals and institutions better demonstrated their ability to encourage political centralization or to support a Muslim style of life where there was no organized state, be it in areas where Islam had been long established or in areas where it was newly arrived. The major states of this period impressed contemporary Europeans; in them some of the greatest Islamicate artistic achievements were made. In this period Muslims formed the cultural patterns that they brought into modern times, and adherence to Islam expanded to approximately its current distribution. As adherence to Islam expanded, far-flung cultural regions began to take on a life of their own. The unity of several of these regions was expressed through empire—the Ottomans in southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the eastern Maghrib, Egypt, and Syria; the Safavids in Iran and Iraq; the Indo-Timurids (Mughals) in India. In these empires, Sunni and Shi‘ite became identities on a much larger scale than ever before, expressing competition between large populations. Simultaneously Shi‘ism acquired a permanent base from which to generate international opposition. Elsewhere, less formal and often commercial ties bound Muslims from distant locales. Growing commercial and political links between Morocco and the western Sudan produced a trans-Saharan Maghribi Islam. Egyptian Islam influenced the central and eastern Sudan. And steady contacts between East Africa, South Arabia, southern Iran, southwest India, and the southern seas promoted a recognizable Indian Ocean Islam, with Persian as its lingua franca. In fact, Persian became the closest yet to an international language; but the expansion and naturalization of Islam also fostered a number of local languages into vehicles for Islamicate administration and high culture—Ottoman, Chagatai, Swahili, Urdu, and Malay. Everywhere Muslims were confronting adherents of other religions, and new converts often practiced Islam without abandoning their previous practices. The various ways in which Muslims responded to religious syncretism and plurality continue to be elaborated to the present day.
This was a period of major realignments and expansion. The extent of Muslim presence in the Eastern Hemisphere in the early 15th century was easily discernible, but only with difficulty could one have imagined that it could soon produce three of the greatest empires in world history. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Balkans to Sumatra, Muslim rulers presided over relatively small kingdoms; but nowhere could the emergence of a world-class dynasty be predicted. In Andalusia only one Muslim state, Granada, remained to resist Christian domination of the Iberian Peninsula. The Maghrib, isolated between an almost all-Christian Iberia and an eastward-looking Mamluk Egypt and Syria, was divided between the Marinids and Hafsids. Where the Sahara shades off into the Sudanic belt, the empire of Mali at Gao was ruled by a Muslim and included several Saharan “port” cities, such as Timbuktu, that were centres of Muslim learning. On the Swahili coast, oriented as always more toward the Indian Ocean than toward its own hinterland, several small Muslim polities centred on key ports such as Kilwa. In western Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula the Ottoman state under Sultan Mehmed I was recovering from its defeat by Timur. Iraq and western Iran were the domains of Turkic tribal dynasties known as the Black Sheep (Kara Koyunlu) and the White Sheep (Ak Koyunlu). They shared a border in Iran with myriad princelings of the Timurid line and the neo-Mongol, neo-Timurid Uzbek state ruled in Transoxania. North of the Caspian Sea, several Muslim khanates ruled as far north as Moscow and Kazan. In India, even though Muslims constituted a minority, they were beginning to assert their power everywhere except the south, which was ruled by Vijayanagar. In Islamdom’s far southeast, the Muslim state of Samudra held sway in Sumatra, and the rulers of the Moluccas had recently converted to Islam and begun to expand into the southern Malay Peninsula. Even where no organized state existed, as in the outer reaches of Central Asia and into southern China, scattered small Muslim communities persisted, often centred on oases. By the end of this period, Islamdom’s borders had retreated only in Russia and Iberia, but these losses were more than compensated by continuing expansion in Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Almost everywhere this plethora of states had undergone realignment and consolidation, based on experimentation with forms of legitimation and structure.
After the Ottoman state’s devastating defeat by Timur, its leaders had to retain the vitality of the warrior spirit (without its unruliness and intolerance) and the validation of the Shari‘ah (without its confining independence). In 1453 Mehmed II (the Conqueror) fulfilled the warrior ideal by conquering Constantinople (soon to be known as Istanbul), putting an end to the Byzantine Empire, and subjugating the local Christian and Jewish populations. Even by then, however, a new form of legitimation was taking shape. The Ottomans continued to wage war against Christians on the frontier and to levy and convert (through the devsirme) young male Christians to serve in the sultan’s household and army, but warriors were being pensioned off with land grants and replaced by troops more beholden to the sultan. Except for those forcibly converted, the rest of the non-Muslim population was protected for payment according to the Shari‘ah and the preference of the ulema (the Turkish spelling of ulama), and organized into self-governing communities known as millets. Furthermore, the sultans began to claim the caliphate because they met two of its traditional qualifications: they ruled justly, in principle according to the Shari‘ah, and they defended and extended the frontiers, as in their conquest of Mamluk Egypt, Syria, and the holy cities in 1516–17. Meanwhile, they began to undercut the traditional oppositional stance of the ulema by building on Seljuq and Mongol practice in three ways: they promoted state-supported training of ulema; they defined and paid holders of religious offices as part of the military; and they aggressively asserted the validity of dynastic law alongside Shari‘ah. Simultaneously, they emphasized their inheritance of Byzantine legitimacy by transforming Byzantine symbols, such as Hagia Sophia (Church of the Divine Wisdom), into symbols for Islam, and by favouring their empire’s European part, called, significantly, Rum.
The classical Ottoman system crystallized during the reign of Süleyman I (the Lawgiver; ruled 1520–66). He also pushed the empire’s borders almost to their farthest limits—to the walls of Vienna in the northwest, throughout the Maghrib up to Morocco in the southwest, into Iraq to the east, and to the Yemen in the southeast. During Süleyman’s reign the Ottomans even sent an expedition into the southern seas to help Aceh against the Portuguese colonizers. In theory, Süleyman presided over a balanced four-part structure: the palace household, which contained all of the sultan’s wives, concubines, children, and servants; the bureaucracy (chancery and treasury); the armed forces; and the religious establishment. Important positions in the army and bureaucracy went to the cream of the devsirme, Christian youths converted to Islam and put through special training at the capital to be the sultan’s personal “slaves.” Ulema who acquired government posts had undergone systematic training at the major medreses (madrasahs) and so in the Ottoman state were more integrated than were their counterparts in other states. Yet they were freeborn Muslims, not brought into the system as slaves of the sultan. The ruling class communicated in a language developed for their use only, Ottoman, which combined Turkic syntax with largely Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It was in this new language that so many important figures demonstrated the range and sophistication of Ottoman interests, such as the historian Mustafa Naima, the encyclopaedist Kâtip Çelebi, and the traveler Evliya Çelebi. The splendour of the Ottoman capital owed not a little to Süleyman’s chief architect, the Greek devsirme recruit Sinan, who transformed the city’s skyline with magnificent mosques and medreses.
Even in North Africa and the Fertile Crescent, where Ottoman rule was indirect, the effect of its administration, especially its land surveys and millet and tax systems, could be felt. Remnants of the Ottoman system continue to play a role in the political life of modern states such as Israel and Lebanon, despite the fact that Ottoman control had already begun to relax by the first quarter of the 17th century. By then control of the state treasury was passing, through land grants, into the hands of local a‘yan, and they gradually became the real rulers, serving local rather than imperial interests. Meanwhile discontinuance of the devsirme and the rise of hereditary succession to imperial offices shut off new sources of vitality. Monarchs, confined to the palace during their youth, became weaker and participated less in military affairs and government councils. As early as 1630, Sultan Murad IV was presented by one of his advisers with a memorandum explaining the causes of the perceived decline and urging a restoration of the system as it had existed under Süleyman. Murad IV tried to restore Ottoman efficiency and central control, and his efforts were continued by subsequent sultans aided by a talented family of ministers known as the Köprülüs. However, during a war with the Holy League (Austria, Russia, Venice, and Poland) from 1683 to 1699, in which a major attack on Vienna failed (1683), the Ottomans suffered their first serious losses to an enemy and exposed the weakness of their system to their European neighbours. They signed two treaties, at Carlowitz in 1699 and at Passarowitz in 1718, that confirmed their losses in southeastern Europe, signified their inferiority to the Habsburg coalition, and established the defensive posture they would maintain into the 20th century.
Ink and gold leaf representation of the long-ruling sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Süleyman I, as a young man. Nakkas Osman/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images
The Safavid state began not from a band of ghazi warriors but from a local Sufi tariqah of Ardabil in the Azerbaijan region of Iran. The tariqah was named after its founder, Shaykh Safi al-Din (1252/53–1334), a local holy man. As for many tariqahs and other voluntary associations, Sunni and Shi‘ite alike, affection for the family of ‘Ali was a channel for popular support. During the 15th century Shaykh Safi’s successors transformed their local tariqah into an interregional movement by translating ‘Alid loyalism into full-fledged Imami Shi‘ism. By asserting that they were the Sufi “perfect men” of their time as well as descendants and representatives of the last imam, they strengthened the support of their Turkic tribal disciples (known as the Kizilbash, or “Red Heads,” because of their symbolic 12-fold red headgear). They also attracted support outside Iran, especially in eastern Anatolia (where the anti-Ottoman Imami Bektashi tariqah was strong), in Syria, the Caucasus, and Transoxania. The ability of the Iranian Shi‘ite state to serve as a source of widespread local opposition outside of Iran was again to become dramatically apparent many years later, with the rise of the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic republic in the late 1970s.
By 1501 the Safavids were able to defeat the Ak Koyunlu rulers of northern Iran, whereupon their teenage leader Isma‘il I (ruled 1501–24) had himself proclaimed shah, using that pre-Islamic title for the first time in almost 900 years and thereby invoking the glory of ancient Iran. The Safavids thus asserted a multivalent legitimacy that flew in the face of Ottoman claims to have restored caliphal authority for all Muslims. Eventually, irritant became threat: by 1510, when Isma‘il had conquered all of Iran (to approximately its present frontiers) as well as the Fertile Crescent, he began pushing against the Uzbeks in the east and the Ottomans in the west, both of whom already suffered from significant Shi‘ite opposition that could easily be aroused by Safavid successes. Having to fight on two fronts was the most difficult military problem any Muslim empire could face. According to the persisting Mongol pattern, the army was a single force attached to the household of the ruler and moving with him at all times; so the size of an area under effective central control was limited to the farthest points that could be reached in a single campaign season. After dealing with his eastern front, Isma‘il turned west. At Chaldiran (1514) in northwestern Iraq, having refused to use gunpowder weapons, Isma‘il suffered the kind of defeat at Ottoman hands that the Ottomans had suffered from Timur. Yet through the war of words waged in a body of correspondence between Shah Isma‘il and the Ottoman sultan Selim I, and through the many invasions from both fronts that occurred during the next 60 years, the Safavid state survived and prospered. Still living off its position at the crossroads of the trans-Asian trade that had supported all previous empires in Iraq and Iran, it was not yet undermined by the gradual emergence of more significant sea routes to the south.
The first requirement for the survival of the Safavid state was the conversion of its predominantly Jama‘i-Sunni population to Imami Shi‘ism. This was accomplished by a government-run effort supervised by the state-appointed leader of the religious community, the sadr. Gradually forms of piety emerged that were specific to Safavid Shi‘ism; they centred on pilgrimage to key sites connected with the imams, as well as on the annual remembering and reenacting of the key event in Shi‘ite history, the caliph Yazid I’s destruction of Imam al-Husayn at Karbala’ on the 10th of Muharram, AH 61 (680 CE). The 10th of Muharram, or ‘Ashura’, already marked throughout Islamdom with fasting, became for Iranian Shi‘ites the centre of the religious calendar. The first 10 days of Muharram became a period of communal mourning, during which the pious imposed suffering on themselves to identify with their martyrs of old, listened to sermons, and recited appropriate elegiac poetry. In later Safavid times the name for this mourning, ta‘ziyyeh, also came to be applied to passion plays performed to reenact events surrounding al-Husayn’s martyrdom. Through the depths of their empathetic suffering, Shi‘ites could help to overturn the injustice of al-Husayn’s martyrdom at the end of time, when all wrongs would be righted, all wrongdoers punished, and all true followers of the imams rewarded.
The state also survived because Isma‘il’s successors moved, like the Ottomans, toward a type of legitimation different from the one that had brought them to power. This development began in the reign of Tahmasp (1524–76) and culminated in the reign of the greatest Safavid shah, ‘Abbas I (ruled 1588–1629). Since Isma‘il’s time, the tribes had begun to lose faith in the Safavid monarch as spiritual leader. Now ‘Abbas appealed for support more as absolute monarch and less as the charismatic Sufi master or incarnated imam. At the same time, he freed himself from his unruly tribal emirs by depending more and more on a paid army of converted Circassian, Georgian, and Armenian Christian captives. Meanwhile, he continued to rely on a large bureaucracy headed by a chief minister with limited responsibilities, but, unlike his Ottoman contemporaries, he distanced members of the religious community from state involvement while allowing them an independent source of support in their administration of the waqf system. Because the Shi‘ite ulama had a tradition of independence that made them resist incorporation into the military “household” of the shah, ‘Abbas’s policies were probably not unpopular, but they eventually undermined his state’s legitimacy. By the end of the period under discussion, it was the religious leaders, the mujtahids, who would claim to be the spokesmen for the hidden imam. Having shared the ideals of the military patronage state, the Ottoman state became more firmly militarized and religious, as the Safavid became more civilianized and secular. The long-term consequences of this breach between government and the religious institution were extensive, culminating in the establishment of the Islamic republic of Iran in 1978.
‘Abbas expressed his new role by moving his capital about 1597–98 to Esfahan in Fars, the central province of the ancient pre-Islamic Iranian empires and symbolically more Persian than Turkic. Esfahan, favoured by a high and scenic setting, became one of the most beautiful cities in the world, leading its boosters to say that “Esfahan is half the world.” It came to contain, often thanks to royal patronage, myriad palaces, gardens, parks, mosques, medreses, caravansaries, workshops, and public baths. Many of these still stand, including the famed Masjed-e Shah, a mosque that shares the great central mall with an enormous covered bazaar and many other structures. It was there that ‘Abbas received diplomatic and commercial visits from Europeans, including a Carmelite mission from Pope Clement XIII (1604) and the adventuring Sherley brothers from Elizabethan England. Just as his visitors hoped to use him to their own advantage, ‘Abbas hoped to use them to his, as sources of firearms and military technology, or as pawns in his economic warfare against the Ottomans, in which he was willing to seek help from apparently anyone, including the Russians, Portuguese, and Habsburgs.
Under Safavid rule, Iran in the 16th and 17th centuries became the centre of a major cultural flowering expressed through the Persian language and through the visual arts. This flowering extended to Safavid neighbour states as well—Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Indo-Timurids. Like other Shi‘ite dynasties before them, the Safavids encouraged the development of falsafah as a companion to Shi‘ite esotericism and cosmology. Two major thinkers, Mir Damad and his disciple Mulla Sadra, members of the Ishraqi, or illuminationist, school, explored the realm of images or symbolic imagination as a way to understand issues of human meaningfulness. The Safavid period was also important for the development of Shi‘ite Shari‘ah-minded studies, and it produced a major historian, Iskandar Beg Munshi, chronicler of ‘Abbas’s reign.
None of ‘Abbas’s successors was his equal, though his state, ever weaker, survived for a century. The last effective shah, Husayn I (1694–1722), could defend himself neither from tribal raiding in the capital nor from interfering mujtahids led by Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (whose writings later would be important in the Islamic republic of Iran). In 1722, when Mahmud of Qandahar led an Afghan tribal raid into Iran from the east, he easily took Esfahan and destroyed what was left of central authority.
Although the Mongol-Timurid legacy influenced the Ottoman and Safavid states, it had its most direct impact on Babur (1483–1530), the adventurer’s adventurer and founder of the third major empire of the period. Babur’s father, ‘Umar Shaykh Mirza (died 1494) of Fergana, was one among many Timurid “princes” who continued to rule small pieces of the lands their great ancestor had conquered. After his father’s death the 11-year-old Babur, who claimed descent not only from Timur but also from Genghis Khan (on his mother’s side), quickly faced one of the harshest realities of his time and place—too many princes for too few kingdoms. In his youth he dreamed of capturing Samarkand as a base for reconstructing Timur’s empire. For a year after the Safavid defeat of the Uzbek Muhammad Shaybani Khan, Babur and his Chagatai followers did hold Samarkand, as Safavid vassals. But, when the Safavids were in turn defeated, Babur lost not only Samarkand but his native Fergana as well. He was forced to retreat to Kabul, which he had occupied in 1504. From there he never restored Timur’s empire. Rather, barred from moving north or west, he took the Timurid legacy south, to a land on which Timur had made only the slightest impression.
This 16th-century work by an Indian artist shows Mughal emperor Babur with his son Humayan. Dip Chand/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images
When Babur turned toward northern India, it was ruled from Delhi by the Lodi sultans, one of many local Turkic dynasties scattered through the subcontinent. In 1526 at Panipat, Babur met and defeated the much larger Lodi army. In his victory he was aided, like the Ottomans at Chaldiran, by his artillery. By his death just four years later, he had laid the foundation for a remarkable empire, known most commonly as the Mughal (i.e., Mongol) Empire. It is more properly called Indo-Timurid because the Chagatai Turks were distinct from the surviving Mongols of the time and because Babur and his successors acknowledge Timur as the founder of their power.
Babur is also remembered for his memoirs, the Baburnameh. Written in Chagatai, then an emerging Islamicate literary language, his work gives a lively and compelling account of the wide range of interests, tastes, and sensibilities that made him so much a counterpart of his contemporary, the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).
Süleyman’s and ‘Abbas’s counterpart in the Indo-Timurid dynasty was their contemporary, Akbar (ruled 1556–1605), the grandson of Babur. At the time of his death, he ruled all of present-day India north of the Deccan plateau and Gondwana and more: one diagonal of his empire extended from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal; the other, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. Like its contemporaries to the west, particularly the Ottomans, this state endured because of a regularized and equitable tax system that provided the central treasury with funds to support the ruler’s extensive building projects as well as his mansabdars, the military and bureaucratic officers of the imperial service. For these key servants, Akbar, again like his counterparts to the west, relied largely on foreigners who were trained especially for his service. Like the Janissaries, the mansabdars were not supposed to inherit their offices, and, although they were assigned lands to supervise, they themselves were paid through the central treasury to assure their loyalty to the interests of the ruler.
Although Akbar’s empire was, like Süleyman’s and ‘Abbas’s, a variation on the theme of the military patronage state, his situation, and consequently many of his problems, differed from theirs in important ways. Islam was much more recently established in most of his empire than in either of the other two, and Muslims were not in the majority. Although the other two states were not religiously or ethnically homogeneous, the extent of their internal diversity could not compare with Akbar’s, where Muslims and non-Muslims of every stripe alternately coexisted and came into conflict—Jacobites (members of the monophysite Syrian church), Sufis, Isma‘ili Shi‘ites, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuits, Jews, and Hindus. Consequently, Akbar was forced even more than the Ottomans to confront and address the issue of religious plurality. The option of aggressive conversion was virtually impossible in such a vast area, as was any version of the Ottoman millet system in a setting in which hundreds if not thousands of millets could be defined.
In some ways, Akbar faced in exaggerated form the situation that the Arab Muslims faced when they were a minority in the Nile-to-Oxus region in the 7th–9th centuries. Granting protected status to non-Muslims was legally and administratively justifiable, but, unless they could be kept from interacting too much with the Muslim population, Islam itself could be affected. The power of Sufi tariqahs like the influential Chishtis, and of the Hindu mystical movement of Guru Nanak, were already promoting intercommunal interaction and cross-fertilization. Akbar’s response was different from that of the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi. Instead of institutionalizing intolerance of non-Muslim influences and instead of hardening communal lines, Akbar banned intolerance and even the special tax on non-Muslims. To keep the ulama from objecting, he tried, for different reasons than had the Ottomans and Safavids, to tie them to the state financially. His personal curiosity about other religions was exemplary; with the help of Abu al-Fadl, his Sufi adviser and biographer, he established a kind of salon for religious discussion. A very small circle of personal disciples seems to have emulated Akbar’s own brand of tawhid-i ilahi (“divine oneness”). This appears to have been a general monotheism akin to what the hanifs of Mecca, and Muhammad himself, had once practiced, as well as to the boundary-breaking pantheistic awareness of great Sufis like Rumi and Ibn al-‘Arabi, who was very popular in South and Southeast Asia. Akbar combined toleration for all religions with condemnation of practices that seemed to him humanly objectionable, such as enslavement and the immolation of widows.
For half a century, Akbar’s first two successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, continued his policies. A rebuilt capital at Delhi was added to the old capitals of Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, site of Shah Jahan’s most famous building, the Taj Mahal. The mingling of Hindu and Muslim traditions was expressed in all the arts, especially in naturalistic and sensuous painting; extremely refined and sophisticated design in ceramics, inlay work, and textiles; and in delicate yet monumental architecture. Shah Jahan’s son, Dara Shikoh (1615–59), was a Sufi thinker and writer who tried to establish a common ground for Muslims and Hindus. In response to such attempts, a Shari‘ah-minded movement of strict communalism arose, connected with a leader of the Naqshbandi tariqah named Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi. With the accession of Aurangzeb (ruled 1658–1707), the tradition of ardent ecumenicism, which would reemerge several centuries later in a non-Muslim named Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, was replaced with a stricter communalism that imposed penalties on protected non-Muslims and stressed the shah’s role as leader of the Muslim community, by virtue of his enforcing the Shari‘ah. Unlike the Ottoman and Safavid domains, the Indo-Timurid empire was still expanding right up to the beginning of the 18th century, but the empire began to disintegrate shortly after the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, when Safavid and Ottoman power were also declining rapidly.
The 17th-century Mughal-built Taj Mahal in Agra, India, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world. Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images
Between the 15th and the 18th century the use of coffee, tea, and tobacco, despite the objections of the ulama, became common in all three empires. Teahouses became important new centres for male socializing, in addition to the home, the mosque, the marketplace, and the public bath. (Female socializing was restricted largely to the home and the bath.) In the teahouses men could practice the already well-developed art of storytelling and take delight in the clever use of language. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa laylah), the earliest extant manuscripts of which date from this period, and the stories of the Arabian hero ‘Antar must have been popular, as were the tales of a wise fool known as Mullah Nasr al-Din in Persian (Nasreddin), Hoca in Turkish, and Juha in Arabic. The exploits of Nasr al-Din, sometimes in the guise of a Sufi dervish or royal adviser, often humorously portray centralized absolutism and mysticism:
Nasr al-Din was sent by the king to investigate the lore of various kinds of Eastern mystical teachers. They all recounted to him tales of the miracles and the sayings of the founders and great teachers, all long dead, of their schools. When he returned home, he submitted his report, which contained the single word “Carrots.” He was called upon to explain himself. Nasr al-Din told the king: “The best part is buried; few know—except the farmer—by the green that there is orange underground; if you don’t work for it, it will deteriorate; there are a great many donkeys associated with it.”
When the Ottomans expanded through the southern Mediterranean coast in the early 16th century, they were unable to incorporate Morocco, where a new state had been formed in reaction to the appearance of the Portuguese. The Portuguese were riding the momentum generated by their own seaborne expansion as well as by the fulfillment of the Reconquista and the establishment of an aggressively intolerant Christian regime in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula. In Morocco it was neither the fervour of warriors nor Shi‘ite solidarity nor Timurid restoration that motivated the formation of a state; rather, it was a very old form of legitimacy that had proved to be especially powerful in Africa—that of the sharifs, descendants of Muhammad. It had last been relied on with the Idrisids; now the sharifs were often associated with Sufi holy men, known as marabouts. It was one such Sufi, Sidi Barakat, who legitimated the Sa‘di family of sharifs as leaders of a jihad that expelled the Portuguese and established an independent state (1511–1603) strong enough to expand far to the south. Meanwhile, the greatest Muslim kingdom of the Sudan, Songhai, was expanding northward, and its growing control of major trade routes into Morocco provoked Moroccan interference. Invaded in 1591, Songhai was ruled as a Moroccan vassal for 40 years, during which time Morocco itself was experiencing political confusion and instability. Morocco was reunited under Isma‘il (ruled 1672–1727), an ‘Alawite sharif. A holy family of Sijilmassa, the ‘Alawites were brought to power by Arab tribal support, which they eventually had to replace with a costly army of black slaves. Like the Sa‘dis, they were legitimated in two ways: by the recognition of leading Sufis and by the special spiritual quality (barakah) presumed to have passed to them by virtue of their descent from the Prophet through ‘Ali. Although they were not Shi‘ites, they cultivated charismatic leadership that undermined the power of the ulama to use the Shari‘ah against them. They also recognized the limits of their authority as absolute monarchs, dividing their realm into the area of authority and the area of no authority (where many of the Amazigh tribes lived). Thus, the Moroccan sharifs solved the universal problems of legitimacy, loyalty, and control in a way tailored to their own situation.
While the Sa‘di dynasty was ruling in Morocco but long before its incursions into the Sahara, a number of small Islamic states were strung from one end of the Sudanic region to the other: Senegambia, Songhai, Aïr, Mossi, Nupe, Hausa, Kanem-Bornu, Darfur, and Funj. Islam had come to these areas along trade and pilgrimage routes, especially through the efforts of a number of learned teaching-trading families such as the Kunta. Ordinarily the ruling elites became Muslim first, employing the skills of Arab immigrants, traders, or travelers, and taking political and commercial advantage of the Arabic language and the Shari‘ah without displacing indigenous religious practices or legitimating principles. By the 16th century the Muslim states of the Sudanic belt were in contact not only with the major Muslim centres of the Maghrib and Egypt but also with each other through an emerging trans-Sudanic pilgrimage route. Furthermore, Islam had by then become well enough established to provoke efforts at purification comparable to the Almoravid movement of the 11th century. Sometimes these efforts were gradualist and primarily educational, as was the case with the enormously influential Egyptian scholar al-Suyuti (1445–1505). His works, read by many West African Muslims for centuries after his death, dealt with numerous subjects, including the coming of the mahdi to restore justice and strengthen Islam. He also wrote letters to Muslim scholars and rulers in West Africa more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) away, explaining the Shari‘ah and encouraging its careful observance.
Other efforts to improve the observance of Islam were more militant. Rulers might forcibly insist on an end to certain non-Muslim practices, as did Muhammad Rumfa (ruled 1463–99) in the Hausa city-state of Kano, or Muhammad I Askia, the greatest ruler of Songhai (ruled 1493–1528). Often, as in the case of both of these rulers, militance was encouraged by an aggressive reformist scholar like al-Maghili (flourished 1492), whose writings detailed the conditions that would justify a jihad against Muslims who practiced their faith inadequately. Like many reformers, al-Maghili identified himself as a mujaddid, a figure expected to appear around the turn of each Muslim century. (The 10th century AH began in 1494 CE.) To the east in Ethiopia, an actual jihad was carried out by Ahmad Grañ (c. 1506–43), in the name of opposition to the Christian regime and purification of “compromised” Islam. Farther to the east, a conquest of Christian Nubia by Arab tribes of Upper Egypt resulted in the conversion of the pagan Funj to Islam and the creation of a major Muslim kingdom there. Although most indigenous West African scholars looked to foreigners for inspiration, a few began to chart their own course. In Timbuktu, where a rich array of Muslim learning was available, one local scholar and member of a Tukulor learned family, Ahmad Baba, was writing works that were of interest to North African Muslims. Local histories written in Arabic also survive, such as the Ta’rikh al-fattash (written by several generations of the Kati family, from 1519 to 1665), a chronological history of Songhai, or al-Sa‘di’s Ta’rikh al-Sudan (completed in 1655). By the end of the period of consolidation and expansion, Muslims in the Sudanic belt were being steadily influenced by North African Islam but were also developing distinctive traditions of their own.
A similar relationship was simultaneously developing across another “sea,” the Indian Ocean, which tied South and Southeast Asian Muslims to East African and south Arabian Muslims the way the Sahara linked North African and Sudanic Muslims. Several similarities are clear: the alternation of advance and retreat, the movement of outside influences along trade routes, and the emergence of significant local scholarship. There were differences too: Indian Ocean Muslims had to cope with the Portuguese threat and to face Hindus and Buddhists more than pagans, so that Islam had to struggle against sophisticated and refined religious traditions that possessed written literature and considerable political power.
The first major Muslim state in Southeast Asia, Aceh, was established around 1524 in northern and western Sumatra in response to more than a decade of Portuguese advance. Under Sultan Iskandar Muda (ruled 1607–37), Aceh reached the height of its prosperity and importance in the Indian Ocean trade, encouraging Muslim learning and expanding Muslim adherence. By the end of the 17th century, Aceh’s Muslims were in touch with major intellectual centres to the west, particularly in India and Arabia, just as West African Muslims were tied to centres across the Sahara. Because they could draw on many sources, often filtered through India, Sumatran Muslims may have been exposed to a wider corpus of Muslim learning than Muslims in many parts of the heartland. Aceh’s scholarly disputes over Ibn al-‘Arabi were even significant enough to attract the attention of a leading Medinan, Ibrahim al-Kurani, who in 1640 wrote a response. The same kind of naturalization and indigenization of Islam that was taking place in Africa was also taking place elsewhere; for example, ‘Abd al-Ra’uf of Singkel, after studying in Arabia from about 1640 to 1661, returned home, where he made the first “translation” of the Qur’an into Malay, a language that was much enriched during this period by Arabic script and vocabulary. This phenomenon extended even to China. Liu Zhi, a scholar born around 1650 in Nanjing, created serious Islamicate literature in Chinese, including works of philosophy and law.
The Great Mosque, Palembang, Sumatra, Indon. Richard Allen Thompson
In the early 17th century another Muslim commercial power emerged when its ruler, the prince of Tallo, converted. Macassar (now Makassar) became an active centre for Muslim competition with the Dutch into the third quarter of the 17th century, when its greatest monarch, Hasan al-Din (ruled 1631–70), was forced to cede his independence. Meanwhile, however, a serious Islamic presence was developing in Java, inland as well as on the coasts; by the early 17th century the first inland Muslim state in Southeast Asia, Mataram, was established. There Sufi holy men performed a missionary function similar to that being performed in Africa. Unlike the more seriously Islamized states in Sumatra, Mataram suffered, as did its counterparts in West Africa, from its inability to suppress indigenous beliefs to the satisfaction of the more conservative ulama. Javanese Muslims, unlike those in Sumatra, would have to struggle for centuries to negotiate the confrontation between Hindu and Muslim cultures. Their situation underscores a major theme of Islamicate history through the period of consolidation and expansion—that is, the repeatedly demonstrated absorptive capacity of Muslim societies, a capacity that was soon to be challenged in unprecedented ways.