In 1412, after nearly five years of exchanging gifts and embassies across Asia, a letter from the Ming emperor Yongle (r. 1402–1424) arrived from Beijing at the Herat court of the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh (r. 1409–1447). Composed in Chinese, with Persian and Mongolian translations, the letter declared emperor Yongle's heavenly mandated, just, and impartial universal suzerainty. The Yongle letter praised in a condescending tone Shāhrukh's good government, and identified the Timurids as subordinate Ming vassals. It plainly stated that after Mongol rule (davr-i mughūl) had come to an end, Shāhrukh's father Temür (r. 1370–1405) had submitted to the Ming emperor. The letter commended Shāhrukh for following the example of his father and maintaining the steady flow of tribute to the Ming, and urged him to protect Ming interests in the thriving of trans-Eurasian trade.Footnote 1 Finally, to add insult to injury, the letter firmly “advised” Shāhrukh to resolve his discord with his nephew.
Unsurprisingly, Yongle's message was received poorly at the Timurid court. In his two response letters, one in Persian and the other in Arabic, Shāhrukh decisively rejected the Ming emperor's description of their relationship. He instead defined the relationship between Yongle's father, Hongwu (r. 1368–1398), and his own father, Temür, as having been one of “love and friendship,” not subordination, and he recommended that they follow that example. Shāhrukh's letters matched Yongle's condescending tone, and patronizingly “invited” him to convert to Islam and implement the Sharīʿa, Muslim law throughout Ming lands.Footnote 2
The greatest blow to the Ming demand for Timurid submission was dealt by the historical vision of Shāhrukh's letters. The Timurid ruler's Persian letter offers a concise Islamic salvific narrative. It begins by discussing the successive line of Abrahamic prophets sent by God in each generation to guide mankind, culminating in Muḥammad's prophethood, but then skips the next seven centuries to directly arrive at the thirteenth-century rise (khur ūj) of Chinggis Khan, his appointment of his offspring as rulers throughout Asia, and their subsequent conversion to Islam. The letter then shifts focus to the Ilkhans (r. 1258–1335), the Mongol dynasty that ruled Iran, Azerbaijan, and Iraq, and to whose territories and imperial apparatus the Timurids (1370–1507) now laid claim, and emphasizes the conversion of the Mongol Ilkhans Ghāzān (r. 1295–1304), his brother Öljeitü (r. 1304–1316), and Öljeitü’s son Abū Saʿīd (r. 1317–1335). Their righteous, just, and Sharīʿa-abiding rule was restored by Temür, who rose to power some decades after the Ilkhanid collapse. Shāhrukh surpasses his father by zealously enforcing justice and the Sharīʿa, and furthermore abrogating the Mongol court law (yarghu) and Chinggisid customary laws. The account ends with Shāhrukh urging Yongle to accept Islam. The second, Arabic letter complements this depiction of Shāhrukh. It identifies Temür's heir as the sultan who is assigned by God each age to use his supreme military might to enforce justice, order, and the command of the Sharīʿa universally, or, as the letter pointedly notes, as far as China. This was an implicit threat to the Ming.
The Timurids and the Ming, two successor polities that rose in the aftermath of the mid-fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol khanates in Iran (the Ilkhanate) and China (the Yuan, 1271–1368), deployed a variety of strategies to support and enhance their claims to succeed to the Chinggisid regional and Eurasian rule. They creatively, skillfully, and often successfully crafted and propagated their narratives of the rise, decline, and aftermath of the Mongol Empire, aiming to convince multiple constituencies—both within the territories they now claimed as their own and in rival neighboring polities—of their uncontested, exclusive inheritance of the Mongols’ legacy of Eurasian domination.Footnote 3 Yet the correspondence between Shāhrukh and Yongle revealed the tangible, practical limits of Ming and Timurid expansive aspirations toward Eurasia. Not only was the revival of the Chinggisid model of universal empire unattainable solely at the one end of Asia, but also, despite it being a shared experience, the Chinggisid heritage was interpreted very differently in the Sinitic and the Persianate spheres. The Mongols’ imperial claims and political rhetoric underwent extensive local processes of intercultural translation, adaptation, and elaboration, under both the Yuan and Ilkhanid rule, which yielded different results. This set limits on post-Mongol Eurasian inter-imperial commensurability.
Yongle's letter to Shāhrukh claimed that the Ming had succeed to the Mandate of Heaven, which granted him the right to rule over a territory essentially tantamount to the Chinggisid imperial domains, and that Ming superiority, modeled on the Mongol Yuan's earlier vision of universal rulership and expansive boundaries, mandated that the distant Timurids now concede to the position of Ming subordinates.Footnote 4 Shāhrukh's letters in response laid down the argument for his own succession to Chinggisid authority, through the Mongol Ilkhans to his father Temür, but did so by framing the Timurid inheritance within the Islamic salvific schema. The letters fashioned Shāhrukh into a divinely designated Muslim reformer king who followed a successive line of righteous Sharīʿa-adhering Muslim Mongol rulers who assumed their place after the line of Abrahamic prophets ended with Muḥammad. Although the letters do not explicitly state so, their account of Shāhrukh as a Sharīʿa-upholding reformer king closely resonates with Shāhrukh's identification by Timurid authors as the mujaddid, the centennial religious renewer sent by God each century, according to a tradition from the Prophet Muḥammad.
Recent scholarship argues that the rise of the Timurid Empire at the turn of the fifteenth century was a point of departure for an early modern age marked by new imperial, absolutist, and universalist Muslim ideologies. These ideologies offered an alternative, first, to the earlier restrictive, genealogical, and juridical Sunnī definitions of religious and political authority; and second, to the principle of lineage-based Chinggisid universal rule. The latter remained dominant in the eastern Islamic world in the decades after the Ilkhanate's disintegration, but began losing ground to new dynastic formulations with Temür's death in 1405.Footnote 5 This new vision of cosmic and imperial rulership came to the fore in extensive appropriations and elaborations of religious, messianic, and sacral-cultic titles and their wide circulation across early modern Muslim courts.Footnote 6 The adoption of the title of mujaddid, the centennial religious renewer, and the model of the religious reformer for Shāhrukh, alongside other Timurid experiments with Islamic titles to express new models of absolutist rulership, are accordingly interpreted as marking the beginning of a gradual yet decisive desertion of the Chinggisid legacy and its replacement with potent theories of Muslim emperorship and a new Timurid pedigree.Footnote 7 While Shāhrukh's letters to the Ming do indeed take note of Shāhrukh's abrogation of the Chinggisid court law, what is more significant is that they invoke his mujaddid-like kingship to make the opposite argument, in support of the Timurid inheritance of Mongol rule in Iran and Central Asia. By committing to the role of Sharīʿa-adhering Muslim rulers, Temür and Shāhrukh are envisioned in the letters not as turning their back on Chinggisid tradition but rather as succeeding to the illustrious Muslim Mongol Ilkhans, and through them, to Chinggis Khan's universal rulership.Footnote 8
This argument for Timurid-Ilkhanid continuity was not without basis, nor was it a fifteenth-century fiction. Shāhrukh's claim to the position of a universal reformer king was rooted in an earlier Ilkhanid Muslim-Chinggisid synthesis. That synthesis had been unfolding through many instances of experimentation and exchange since the Mongols’ conversion to Islam during the final decade of the thirteenth-century, if not the beginning of the Mongol invasions into the Islamic heartland decades earlier. In what follows, I argue that the process of translating and adapting Chinggisid sacral kingship had profound implications for the Perso-Islamic world. It set the course for the fashioning of new models of sacral and cosmic Muslim kingship that were expressed in the formulation of a new political vocabulary of imperial rule.
My focus here is the early stages of this process at the Ilkhanid court in Iran during the thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries. Anne Broadbridge has surveyed and analyzed the manifestation of Ilkhanid ideological claims in the diplomatic exchanges between the Ilkhans and their rivals, the neighboring Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria (r. 1250–1517), mainly through the rich Mamluk corpus of Arabic historical writing. She has charted the Ilkhanid transition from emphasizing the Chinggisid descent-based, divine right to elaborating their own claim to supreme Muslim sovereignty, combined with Mongol imperial traditions.Footnote 9 Here I will highlight instead Ilkhanid discourses on kingship as they evolved in a diverse array of texts, produced mainly in Persian and in a range of genres including history, poetry, and theology. These texts were largely intended for internal Ilkhanid court readership or circulation within the Ilkhanate.
CHINGGISID SACRAL KINGSHIP
Before examining how Mongol imperial claims came to be negotiated, reinterpreted, and elaborated in the Perso-Islamic sphere, we must address a historiographical challenge that they pose, namely that the Mongols’ vision of their mission of world conquest and universal rule was largely articulated by authors who were not themselves Mongol. Such messages were composed in an assortment of languages, of regions that Mongols either ruled directly or threatened to conquer. We therefore often end up grappling with observations about the Mongols based on claims the Mongols reportedly made to conquered or “yet to be conquered” peoples. We need to consider whether these add up to a clearly structured steppe ideology or are instead ad hoc responses—a gradually developing set of propositions—that were expressed and shaped by various agents of the Mongols or representatives of the populations they threatened.Footnote 10 That said, the Mongols’ reliance on intermediaries should not lead us to assume that the Mongols lacked agency.Footnote 11 We must consider the Mongol ideological apparatus in relation to the broader pattern they exhibited in their approach to the conquered.Footnote 12
The Mongols considered the religious traditions and spiritual resources of conquered peoples in the same way they viewed their cultural wares, human talents, and technological innovations.Footnote 13 They selectively appropriated and adapted those religious and political institutions to which they ascribed prestige and power or which they deemed useful for securing cooperation.Footnote 14 They also absorbed traditions that were compatible with their own conception of their heaven-granted rule and that therefore could enhance their claims to continuity with the imperial founder and inheritance of his sacral authority.Footnote 15 Put differently, the Mongols welcomed “innovation through assuming continuity.”Footnote 16 The subsequent process of reinterpretation, elaboration, and assimilation of the Mongols’ political rhetoric and assertions into local, sedentary traditions had its most extensive manifestation under the Yuan and later the Ming in China, and under the Ilkhans and then the Timurids in Iran and Central Asia. It would be a mistake to understand this as a departure from Mongolian norms due to the nomadic conquerors’ acculturation or submission to some superiority of the conquered sedentary cultures, since in fact it continued earlier Mongolian practice.
Research indicates that, either by the end of Chinggis Khan's life or under his son Ögödei's reign (1229–1241), a relatively coherent and clearly articulated message about the Mongols’ legitimacy as world-rulers, based on Chinggis Khan's affinity with heaven, had been forged and was being widely propagated.Footnote 17 The Chinggisid affinity with heaven was commonly expressed in the following two-part Mongolian formula: möngke tengri-yin küchün-dür; qa'an-u suu-dur (“By the might of Eternal Heaven; by the good fortune of the Qa'an”).Footnote 18 Variations of such succinct formulaic statements are found in the Mongols’ ultimatums and revolved around two main legitimizing assertions, which had their roots in steppe imperial legacies.Footnote 19 The first was that heaven (tenggeri in Mongolian) selected Chinggis Khan and conferred upon him its blessing and protection, as well as an exclusive mandate to universal conquest and domination. The second was that Chinggis Khan possessed a special good fortune (suu in Mongolian), which further confirmed his identity as heaven's chosen one and guaranteed his predestined success as the fortunate, universal emperor.Footnote 20 Johan Elverskog suggests that these statements amounted to a “political theology of divine right” that sanctified Mongol rule through a tripartite relationship between heaven, Chinggis Khan, and a ruling offspring. Chinggis Khan, who had initially received heaven's favor and the divine right to rule, confers them upon his next chosen descendant.Footnote 21
In this immanentist vision of Mongol kingship,Footnote 22 the connection to Chinggis Khan and his heaven-derived lineage becomes the locus of sacred power, the main effective channel for claiming divine support and legitimizing one's rule. This relationship with Chinggis Khan was cultivated and enhanced through a shifting range of practical avenues that included maintaining the cultic reverence for and ritualized connection to the imperial founder;Footnote 23 claiming privileged descent within the Chinggisid line;Footnote 24 demonstrating adherence to Chinggis’ real or fictive policies and assertions as expressed in his yasa (the Mongol code of law attributed to him) and to his mission of world conquest;Footnote 25 and finally, imitating and embodying the divinely inspired traits attributed to the imperial founder. These traits, themselves subject to change and reinterpretation, might include Chinggis Khan's supra-mundane intelligence and his intuitive, divine knowledge—a “sense of right” and premonition—that were attained through an unmediated, personal communion with heaven.Footnote 26 In addition to their inheritance of heaven's blessing through the link to Chinggis Khan, the Mongols claimed that heaven's favor could not be secured or assumed solely through ritual, confessional, or genealogical means; heaven's appointment of the ruler had to be proven by empirical demonstrations such as the candidate's military and political success.Footnote 27 The intricate and often combustible relationship between these two elements—inheritable authority and personally demonstrated charisma—yielded contradictory and overlapping structures for deciding succession and inflicted intense succession struggles on the empire and its successor khanates.Footnote 28
Religious interlocutors and cultural mediators from conquered peoples strove to demonstrate to their Mongol overlords the efficacy of their sedentary traditions in order to translate and reinforce their patrons’ claims to succeed to this mode of heaven-derived kingship.Footnote 29 These same cultural brokers sought to gain access to and influence with the Mongol rulers, in addition to wealth and stature. Further, they saw the Mongols’ appreciation of ritual expertise and intercultural translation and their interest in appropriating local traditions as opportunities to persuade them to convert or to strengthen their earlier conversion and commitment. Yet the Mongols understood their conversion differently: they did not consider religious affiliation exclusive, as limiting potential affiliations with or borrowing from other religious systems.Footnote 30 And even when they did take up other religions, those religions remained subservient to the divinely favored Chinggisid rule.
Under the Yuan, the Mongols’ claim to heaven's selection of Chinggis Khan and his offspring was subsumed into the Confucian structure of the Mandate of Heaven. That allowed the Ming dynasty to assert that they had restored Yuan rule in China, and for a short while under emperor Yongle, to claim for themselves the Chinggisid model of universal domination of Eurasia. The Ming argued that the Yuan dynasty had lost heaven's favor through poor government and depravity, but now it was the turn of their own just and impartial rule.Footnote 31 Tibetan Buddhists, too, incorporated the Mongols into a karmic model of universal emperorship (the cakravartin, the wheel-turning sage king) that through the Dharma reaffirmed Chinggisid exceptionalism, and moreover reinforced and sanctified the Yuan family's relationship with their forefather Chinggis Khan.Footnote 32
In Ilkhanid Iran, the special good fortune that was bestowed upon, and employed and redistributed by the Chinggisids found compatible political structures, mainly in the Iranian “royal glory” (farr) and the Muslim “good fortune” (davlat).Footnote 33 Still, unlike Buddhism or Confucianism, Muslim (Sunnī) culture by the thirteenth century had yet to develop a parallel, dominant, and readily available structure of Muslim sacred kingship that was not bound to, or restricted by, the Sunnī genealogical and juridical definitions for the transmission of divine authority. This is striking considering that Muslim courts and sultans had ample resources for adapting a Muslim model of sacred kingship long before the Mongol period, given the Islamic assimilation of the Persianate political tradition (and its resonant strands of divine kingship and absolutism), the spread of Sufism (with its direct channels to the divine), and the institution of the caliphate (which drew on the Hellenistic mold of sacral monarchy).Footnote 34 Yet in the post-Mongol period we witness experimentations and elaborations on claims to sacral emperorship that, in their expansiveness, ingenuity, audacity, and diffusion, surpassed those of any other period of Islamic history.Footnote 35
Scholars suggest that the Mongol conquests and rule contributed to the emergence of a new mode of sacral Muslim kingship in the early modern period by creating a vacuum of Islamic authority through the Mongols’ annihilation of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad in 1258. In this view, by ending the caliphate the Mongols shattered “the political and religious framework of the majority Sunnī Islam,”Footnote 36 and inaugurated an unprecedented era of constitutional crisis that later Muslim thinkers toiled to resolve.Footnote 37 Others have observed that the Mongol invasions created social and political conditions that made people more receptive to alternative—messianic, Sufi, and Shīʿī—structures of authority that were more adaptable than the Sunnī caliphal model.Footnote 38
Here I seek to refine this “crisis thesis” by showing that the fashioning of the early modern model of sacral kingship was equally, if not primarily, shaped by the earlier experimentation with a new Chinggisid-Islamic synthesis in Mongol-ruled Iran. This Ilkhanid-sponsored project of translating, adapting, and re-conceptualizing the Chinggisid claim to divine privilege set the path for fashioning a new discursive realm of Islamic kingship. It was marked by, among other aspects, the unprecedented royal appropriation of religious and messianic titles such as the mujaddid, the centennial renewer of Islam.
MONGOL MUJADDIDS
The mujaddid tradition emerged from within specific scholarly circles to legitimize the teachings of ninth-century jurist al-Shāfiʿī’ (d. 820). It was not a central concept in medieval Islamic religious thought, and functioned mainly as an honorific title bestowed unsystematically on religious scholars.Footnote 39 Starting in the fifteenth century, when its significance grew among religious and intellectual scholars and it was ascribed additional, eschatological connotations, it gained enthusiastic audiences within court circles.Footnote 40 The tradition offered rulers an established legitimizing discourse of religious renewal and reform (tajdīd).Footnote 41 Jalāl al-Dīn Qāyinī (d. 1434–1435), Herat's market inspector, was the first to apply the tradition to Shāhrukh, and he linked the latter's status as the centennial renewer of the ninth Hijri century to his campaign to restore Sharīʿa order.Footnote 42 Like later Timurid authors, Qāyinī also related Shāhrukh's mujaddid position to his rejection of Chinggisid law in favor of Islamic law and his adoption of an anti-Chinggisid stance.Footnote 43
Shāhrukh's embracing of the mujaddid tradition had precedence in the Mongol court in the early fourteenth-century Ilkhanate. The Ilkhanid vizier Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318) is mainly known for his world history, the first of its kind in the Islamic world, but he was also a prolific author in other fields, especially theology. The vizier was the first to experiment with the religious tradition, in the introduction to his Book of the Sultan,Footnote 44 a lengthy treatise that answers the Muslim Mongol ruler Öljeitü’s questions about prophethood and revelation. In the introduction, Rashīd al-Dīn lists the main proofs (bar āhīn) for the Ilkhan Öljeitü’s exceptional rank of sacral kingship. The first is the tradition transmitted from the Prophet Muḥammad, “God will send to this community at the turn of every century a person who will strengthen its religion.”Footnote 45 He cites here the mujaddid tradition nearly verbatim, but replaces “renew” (yujaddid) with “strengthen” (yuqawwī). The vizier describes the ruler Öljeitü, not as a centennial renewer, but instead as a centennial “strengthener of religion.”
The mujaddid tradition seems to have been well-known in Ilkhanid intellectual circles. Another contemporaneous Ilkhanid court historian designated Rashīd al-Dīn—vizier, historian, and Shāfiʿī theologian—as the centennial renewer (mujaddid) of the eighth Hijri century.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, the vizier's choice to change the tradition from the “renewer” to the “strengthener” seems to have been due less to his “own claim” to the rank than to his wish to adapt and repurpose for a new, royal purpose a tradition that at this stage was still most familiar as an honorific scholarly title.Footnote 47 This appears to have changed later in the fourteenth century as court circles quickly became more familiar with the tradition.Footnote 48
Like later authors, Rashīd al-Dīn provided his rationalization for identifying Öljeitü as a “mujaddid king.” He understood the tradition to allot a measure of cyclical salvific time, as did the aforementioned Timurid market inspector Qāyinī, who argued that Shāhrukh was the centennial renewer because his righteous reign began in 1408–1409 (811 Hijri), exactly nine centuries after the Prophet's hijra.Footnote 49 Rashīd al-Dīn argued that Öljeitü deserved the title since his auspicious reign was preceded by a century during which “not even a single strengthener (muqavv ī) of the religion of Islam” had appeared, and the Muslim world had succumbed to moral decay and the resurgence of the idol worshipers and non-believers. The “light-emitting” Öljeitü effaced “the traces of these unbelievers” and his enthronement was greeted by a surge in Mongol conversion to Islam.Footnote 50 In addition to the idea of Öljeitü’s divine appointment, the vizier's revised mujaddid tradition was also compatible with the Mongol understanding of Chinggisid rule as predestined. As reported by the Mongol Secret History and repeated in the Mongol ultimatums to European leaders, Chinggis Khan's rise and rule were predicted by a prophecy delivered from heaven to the shaman Teb Tenggeri.Footnote 51 Rashīd al-Dīn's identification of Öljeitü as a preordained reviver king justified Ilkhanid rule based on a Muslim prophetic tradition instead of a Mongol prophecy. Muḥammad, in other words, assumed Teb Tenggeri's role. The vizier assimilated the Mongols into the Islamic salvific schema by reinterpreting and reinforcing their claims to predestined and divinely supported government.Footnote 52
A similar portrayal of Ilkhanid rule as preordained stands at the center of the earliest conversion narrative of Öljeitü’s brother and predecessor, the Ilkhan Ghāzān. This account appears in an early iteration of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Blessed History of Ghāzān, but was probably authored by another fourteenth-century Ilkhanid court historian named ʿAbd Allāh al-Qāshānī.Footnote 53 According to this providential conversion narrative, the Mongol amir and Muslim convert Nawrūz (d. 1297) persuaded Ghāzān to convert to Islam on the eve of his battle with his senior cousin over the throne. He proclaimed that Ghāzān was the great king expected by religious scholars and predicted by astrologers (aṣḥāb-i nujūm va arbāb-i taqv ī m) to appear around the year 1291 (690 Hijri).Footnote 54 The king's guidance would strengthen Islam and revive (tāzah va ṭar ī shavad) the weakened (mundaris gashtah) Muslim community, and his prolonged rule would restore utopian justice. Nawrūz reported that he became convinced that prince Ghāzān was this predestinated king by “the impressions of the shining forehead (jab ī n-i mubī n) of the prince,” and argued that “were the prince to convert to Islam and adhere to the tenets and tracts of the faith, he would certainly be the ruler of the age (ūl ī al-amr-i ʿ ahd).”Footnote 55
The Mongol commander concluded his speech with the statement, “The religion of Islam, which has been weakened by its subjugation to the infidel (kuffār) Tatars and the domination of the tyrants and hypocrites (ẓ ālimān va fāsiqān), will be revived through the prince's [Ghāzān's] support.”Footnote 56 This reveals the way in which the author shaped Ghāzān's conversion account to respond to, and moreover correct, earlier apocalyptic impressions arising after the Mongol invasions. The phrasing evokes an important paragraph in an early thirteenth-century celebrated Sufi manual, The Path of God's Bondsmen. In that work, Najm al-Dīn Rāzī Dāya (d. 1256) referred to the well-known comparison of the king to the shepherd who protects his flock of sheep, his subjects, from the evil wolves.Footnote 57 The wolves, he explained, are the accursed polytheists (kuffār-i malā ʿ īn), “who have become powerful (mustavlī) during these hard times.”Footnote 58
Rāzī further contextualizes this parable in the prelude to his Sufi manual, where he describes in similar terms the Mongols’ (kuffār-i tatār) attacks in 1220 and their subjection (istīlā) of the eastern Islamic world. Arguing that the Mongol invasions were God's punishment for the ingratitude and corruption of the Muslims, Rāzī claims that the chaos and massacres “resemble only the catastrophes that shall ensue at the End of Time (fitnahā-yi ākhir al-zamān) as foretold by the Prophet.”Footnote 59 As proof of the Mongols’ role as the prophesized doomsday villains, he points to the horrific fate of his hometown of Rayy. He urges the political leaders of his age to join in union and protect the Muslims from the developing catastrophe (fitna), and warns that if they disregard their fundamental obligation as Muslim kings and shepherds, “Islam will be completely eradicated” and capitulate to infidelity. Ghāzān's conversion narrative echoes Rāzī’s work, but it swaps out the penitential, apocalyptic interpretation of the Mongol conquests for a new providential narrative.Footnote 60 Thus, the convert-to-be Ghāzān himself “answers” Rāzī’s plea from half a century earlier and reverses the decline of Islam at the hands of his Mongol ancestors. Ghāzān's conversion-enthronement, therefore, restarts Islamic time that had been suspended half a century earlier with the Mongol conquest of Baghdad (1258).Footnote 61
The author of Ghāzān's conversion narrative might also have been playing with messianic resonances in his description of the anticipated utopian justice. His statement that “from the inclusiveness of the justice of this king, the sheep will be protected from the harm of the wolf” was reminiscent of statements made in Persianate works of advice literature by pre-Islamic Iranian monarchs who epitomized the Iranian ideal of just kingship,Footnote 62 as well as descriptions of the utopian justice the eschatological redeemer would enforce.Footnote 63 Whereas Rashīd al-Dīn cast Öljeitü as a centennial “converter king,” Qāshānī continued the project of earlier Ilkhanid authors who justified Ilkhanid rule by fashioning their Mongol overlords into another cycle of Iranian monarchyFootnote 64 and by further aligning Ilkhanid rule with Perso-Islamic governmental norms.Footnote 65
In addition to its possible reliance on The Path of God's Bondsmen, Ghāzān's conversion narrative appears to be linked with the second letter Ghāzān's chancery issued to the commanders of Syria during his short-lived occupation of Damascus (1299–1300).Footnote 66 This letter also foreshadows Shāhrukh's response to the Ming emperor with which I began this article. It begins with a succinct Islamic salvation history that positions the Ilkhan and his Syrian campaign as continuing the successive missions of Abrahamic prophets: “In every age (zam ā n), the turn of time (al-dawr) requires that God, may He be exalted, send a prophet to guide the world and direct man toward the right path….” Yet, it says, after prophethood ceased with Muḥammad, whenever decay and oppression spread and the Muslims turned their backs on the Sharīʿa, “God brought forth an individual from amongst those in authority (ū l ī al-amr) who would strengthen the religious matters, reproach all the beings, and forbid them from wrong….”Footnote 67 The letter then describes the Mongols’ sincere and miraculous conversion to Islam as God's response to the Mamluks’ corrupt rule, tyranny, and hypocrisy.
A striking feature of Ghāzān's conversion narrative and this letter is that both employ the title of ū l ī al-amr (ruler) to describe the figure of the periodically sent Muslim reviver king.Footnote 68 The title is derived from the Qur'anic “authority verse” (Qurʾān 4:59)Footnote 69 that was mostly referenced to testify to the requirement of full, unconditional obedience to the appointed political leaders of the community.Footnote 70 Indeed, both the conversion account and the letter link the verse to the Mongol demand for full submission.Footnote 71
The title ū l ī al-amr is also used in each of the texts to integrate the convert Ghāzān and the Mongols into the Islamic “rhythm of salvation.”Footnote 72 Thus, the letter envisions Ghāzān as continuing a successive line of rulers who are periodically and continuously sent by God to chastise the believers and undo the recurring corruption of the faith, as the successive chain of Abrahamic prophets had done before. Like Shāhrukh's message to the Ming emperor, the salvific narrative in Ghāzān's letter ignores the caliphate and its historical claim to succeed the Prophet Muḥammad, and presents political leaders or kings, rather than the caliphs or the religious scholars (ʿ ulam ā ’), as the true upholders of the Sharīʿa in the post-Muḥammad age. The apparent audacity of such a claim should not distract us from the letter's underlying message that the Mongol invasions, rule, and conversion to Islam had all unfolded within Islamic salvific history, and were part of a recurring providential design to restore Islam and the Muslims to pristine glory.
ILKHANID MAHDīS AND LORDS OF AUSPICIOUS CONJUNCTION
In addition to theological works, histories, and letters, the Ilkhanid experimentation with a mixture of messianic allusions, Iranian ideals of just kingship, and prophecy was also carried out in court poetry. The Shīʿī court poet Abū Sulaymān al-Banākatī (d. 1329–1330) preserved in his history specimens of his own poetry.Footnote 73 A qaṣīda in praise of Ghāzān, for which the poet was awarded the title “king of poets” at the Ilkhan's celebration (Ūjān, 1302), reads:
The poem identifies the Mongol ruler Ghāzān as the mahdī whose arrival is predicted by the Prophet. The poet does not elaborate Ghāzān's messianic role. Rather than the eschatological redeemer, the mahdī title signifies Ghāzān's personification of the ideal Islamic sovereign, just as the poet's praise for the magnanimity, justice, and benevolence of the “Pādshāh Ghāzān” reveals the Mongol ruler's embodiment of ideal Iranian monarchy.Footnote 75 These verses also entwine the themes of heaven, good fortune, and prophecy. The Ilkhan's rise and rule are foretold by the Prophet Muḥammad, and materialized through Ghāzān's share of good fortune from ʿAlī, echoing both Teb Tenggeri's prophecy and Chinggis Khan's unique good fortune.Footnote 76
The court poet was not alone in associating Ghāzān's heavenly supported and predestined rule with the salvific arrival of a mahdī. Nearly three decades after his victory over his cousin and his enthronement, the Ilkhanid-Anatolian historian Karīm al-Dīn Aqsarāʾī in his history, Night Time Narratives and Keeping up with the Good, depicted the final clash between Ghāzān and his rival cousin Baidu as an apocalyptic battle scene from the “Hour of Calamity.”Footnote 77 He described Ghāzān as the Lord of Auspicious Conjunction (ṣā ḥ ibqirān), the like of which had never been seen before. Although he refrained from explicitly identifying Ghāzān with the mahdī title, he portrayed his victory as overturning the fitna, the distortion of the natural order that had resulted from Baidu's satanic and tyrannical emergence (khurūj), which signaled “the darkness of the day of resurrection (qiyāma).” The mahdī-like Ghāzān is a reformer king who restores Islam to its previous glory, vanquishes the idol worshipers and Buddhists, and reinstates utopian justice.Footnote 78
It is significant that a narrative that alludes to the Ilkhan's role as a mahdī-reformer king assigns Ghāzān the auspicious title ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, Lord of Auspicious Conjunction. This title, which had pre-Islamic Iranian roots, indicated the fortune of a ruler whose birth or rise coincided with, and was therefore also predetermined by, a major planetary conjunction (qirān), most notably that of Saturn and Jupiter. Prior to the Ilkhanid period, the title appears intermittently in poetry and panegyrics, mainly from the Ghaznavid and Saljūq courts.Footnote 79 The ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān became especially prevalent in court circles from the fifteenth century onward as the title became further entwined with the figure of Temür and his patrimony of world conquest. This astrologically derived title was charged with additional messianic and millenarian significance in the early modern period due to the impending great conjunction of 1583 (991 Hijri) that marked the end of a 960-year-long cycle that started around the time of the Prophet Muḥammad's birth, in 571, and therefore coincided with the turn of the Hijrī millennium.Footnote 80
The pairing of the two titles, the Lord of Auspicious Conjunction and the eschatological redeemer (mahdī),Footnote 81 is also found in a contemporaneous Anatolian account: according to The Feats of the Knowers of God, a hagiography of Rūmī (d. 1273) and his descendants, when the Mongol governor of Anatolia, Temürtash (d. 1327), reconquered the city of Konya in 1323, he proclaimed: “I am the ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān; why indeed, I am the mahdī of [the end of] Time.”Footnote 82 Temürtash's statement in this eyewitness account relates to the Mongol governor's short-lived revolt against the Ilkhan Abū Saʿīd, during which the Mongol governor reportedly proclaimed himself mahdī (1322–1323).Footnote 83 That governor was the aforementioned Aqsarāʾī’s patron, to whom the Anatolian historian dedicated his Night Time Narratives. Behind Aqsarāʾī’s “messianic” depiction of the Ilkhan Ghāzān as the ideal Perso-Islamic ruler and Muslim reviver king was the author's wish to encourage his current patron, the rebellious Mongol governor, to follow the historian's model of the ideal Muslim sovereign, on which he imprints the figure of Ghāzān.Footnote 84
The coupling of the titles of mahdī and ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān in these accounts from the 1320s onward indicates the progressing assimilation of the Mongols’ claim to divine mandate into Islamic salvific temporality and historicity. From the astrologically ascribed ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān to the prophetically preordained “mujaddid” (“strengthener of religion”), to the Qur'anically assigned “ruler of the age” (ū l ī al-amr), and finally, the ultimate reformer, the mahdī, Ilkhanid cultural brokers appropriated religious and messianic titles that espoused a similar vision of Islamic political authority. This new type of Muslim kingship was assigned through direct divine intervention in human history (or through cosmic determinism) and bypassed the earlier, restrictive definitions for the transmission of divine authority and legitimacy: hereditary succession to the Prophet (the caliph or the Shīʿī Imam) or the juridical reasoning and authority of religious scholars and jurists.Footnote 85 As Christopher Atwood explains, the Mongols rejected the idea of a “binding address of divine favor.” Heaven's favor was not limited to one cult or individual, nor could it be assured through adherence to a specific ritual practice or dogma. Divine favor was revealed only through empirical proof in the form of political and military success.Footnote 86 It was their reaffirmation of the ruler's personal and unmediated, cosmic or divine selection that made the mujaddid, ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, and mahdī compelling choices for reconstructing, in Islamic terms, the Chinggisids’ assertions about sacred kingship. The result was an entirely new Perso-Islamic-Mongol synthesis.
THEOLOGIES OF AUSPICIOUS KINGSHIP
The vizier Rashīd al-Dīn's theological and historical writings present the most extensive and ingenious Ilkhanid effort to forge a cohesive theory of Islamic sacral kingship to mediate the Chinggisids’ unique affinity with heaven. The key work for his experimentation with a theologically and scripturally grounded model of sacral kingship is his treatise on “prophetology,” Book of the Sultan. He begins it by situating the exceptional class of kings within a hierarchical system: “Although the rank of kings does not reach the rank of prophethood, nonetheless, in accordance with His order ‘Obey Allāh, and obey the Messenger, and those in authority from among you (ūl ī al-amr minkum)’ [Qurʾān 4:59], He [God] gave the absolute kings (mu ṭlaq pādishāhān) a relation (nisbat) to the prophets and even to Himself.” Yet, not all kings are made equal. Some rulers are Lords of Auspicious Conjunction (ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān), kings who are not only “just, perfect, and wise,” but also “have a further, intimate relationship (khu ṣū ṣ iyyat) and affinity with God,” and are, therefore, predestined to achieve greatness.Footnote 87
The vizier was the first to systemically employ ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān to label a new rank of sacral kingship. He uses the title to translate and redefine the Chinggisids’ special good fortune (suu) and the idea of the fortunate (suutu) Chinggisid line.Footnote 88 For example, in his third polemical anti-Buddhist treatise, the vizier says he explained to the Sultan Öljeitü that there are individuals who have “perfect sacred souls (nuf ūs-i kāmila muqaddasa), like the souls of the prophets, the saints (avliyā) and the ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān kings, and such kings are like your [Öljeitü’s] excellent ancestor Chinggis Khan and his descendants such as the King of Islam [Öljeitü], that the stars have no influence over their perfect souls.”Footnote 89 The vizier identifies here the Chinggisids as a dynasty of auspicious ṣ ā ḥ ibqirāns whose good fortune protects them from ominous celestial patterns. In another instance, from his historical masterpiece The Compendium of Chronicles (Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh), the vizier claims that Öljeitü was a ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, “the like of which had never been seen before, in no prior age (qarn ī),” since his reign (davr-i salṭanat) was auspiciously attained without the shedding of blood or fierce opposition as had been the case with his predecessors.Footnote 90 As the vizier points out, the meaning of the ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān Öljeitü’s Mongolian name—“auspicious, blessed”—indicates his possession of this special good fortune.Footnote 91 Öljeitü is not awarded the title of ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān for his unprecedented success in the battlefield or repute as world conqueror, as the title would be interpreted from the fifteenth century onward,Footnote 92 but instead for his unopposed rise to the Ilkhanid throne due to his auspicious inheritance.
In fashioning Öljeitü’s sacred image, the vizier also draws on the title's roots in pre-Islamic Iranian traditions. He writes that, as ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān kings, the Ilkhan Öljeitü and his ancestor Chinggis Khan join the glorious line of divinely aided (mu ’ ayyad min ʿ ind Allāh) Iranian monarchs, such as Iskandar (Alexander the Great, 356–323 BC) and Anūshirvān (r. 531–579).Footnote 93 The association of Öljeitü with the figure of the famous, just Sasanian philosopher king Anūshirvān is, moreover, germane to Rashīd al-Dīn's self-portrayal as the exemplary vizier. In several instances, the vizier-physician Rashīd al-Dīn compares himself to Anūshirvān's mythic, wise, minister-physician Buzurgmihr, who is presented as having been the only person able to answer Anūshirvān's difficult questions and wise riddles, a claim that Rashīd al-Dīn often repeats regarding his own relationship with his Mongol patron.Footnote 94
The vizier's most pressing concern in his introduction to Book of the Sultan is to define the relationship between Öljeitü’s rank of exceptional ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān kingship and the prophets. Rashīd al-Dīn enumerates in detail Öljeitü’s extraordinary feats (karāmāt), from his miraculous birth and his protection of the realm from drought and ominous celestial signs to his ability to read the minds of his men and predict their future actions. He compares the ruler's early manifestations to the early childhood feats of the prophets. He argues that just as prophets and saints only gradually (bi-tadrīj) receive full revelation (va ḥy) and inspiration (ilh ām), respectively, so too, Öljeitü’s rank gradually and progressively grows, so that “insight (firāsat) and inspiration reach his [the Ilkhan's] blessed mind.” He defines the Ilkhan as a saintly king possessing both “the rank of sainthood (vilāyat, ṣāḥib karāmāt) and the rank of rulership (ūlū al-amrī).”Footnote 95 In another treatise, in which Rashīd al-Dīn answers his patron's question about the unique properties of kings in comparison to those of the prophets, he explains that there exists a hierarchy of ranks within the category of absolute kings and sultans (mu ṭlaq mulūk va-sal ā ṭ īn). Some of these ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān kings are held in such high regard that they receive “different kinds of inspirations (ilhām),” each according to his specific capacity and aptitude.Footnote 96
The concept of divine inspiration (ilhām) plays a significant role in the vizier's fashioning of Öljeitü’s special relationship with God as related to, but also distinct from, that of the prophets, who receive divine revelation (va ḥy). Among the divinely inspired traits that came to be attributed to the imperial founder Chinggis Khan were supra-mundane intelligence and an intuitive, divine knowledge attained through a personal communion with heaven that required no intermediacy of established clerics or scriptural experts. The transfer of heaven's favor from Chinggis Khan to his chosen successor hinged on the latter displaying the personification of those same attributes. Since in the Mongol worldview sedentary religious traditions were all “mutually transparent and compatible,”Footnote 97 they were also all subservient to the Chinggisids’ heavenly supported rule and subject to their superior intellect. Chinggis Khan's heirs were, therefore, presented as untutored prodigies who, with no previous learning or training in the great scriptural traditions, could intuitively replicate them and also intervene and correct them.Footnote 98
Rashīd al-Dīn was neither the first nor the last to struggle to address this aspect of Chinggisid authority. The idea that Chinggis Khan possessed a divinely inspired intellect and a direct communion with heaven, as well as his position as a law-maker ruler, naturally lent themselves to comparisons between Chinggis Khan and prophetic figures.Footnote 99 Aside from the Damascene scholar Ibn Taymīya's (d. 1328) notorious lamentation that the Mongols venerated Chinggis Khan as a prophet despite his dubious origins,Footnote 100 several, mainly Arabic Mamluk accounts indicate the popularity of the notion that Chinggis Khan had an affinity with prophethood or was aspiring to become a prophet.Footnote 101 In the Ilkhanate, the Jewish vizier Saʿd al-Dawla (d. 1291) allegedly claimed that the Öljeitü’s father, the Buddhist Ilkhan Arghūn (r. 1284–1291), “had inherited prophethood from Chinggis Khan.” His intention seems to have been to use the notion of prophetic inheritance to support his patron's claim to his succession to Chinggis Khan's special connection to heaven, and thereby reaffirm his rightful succession to the throne of the Ilkhanate.Footnote 102
Another example is found in a history written by Muḥammad Shabānkāraʾī (d. 1337) in which he attributes Chinggis Khan's remarkable success as world conqueror to God's favor, arguing that had he been Muslim, “one could have said that he had a share in prophethood (az nubuvvat bā bahra būdah ast).” However, a few lines later the author adds, “One can say that government and kingship (salṭanat va-mamlakat) culminated (khatm shud, literally “sealed”) in [the Chinggisids], just as prophethood was sealed with Muḥammad.”Footnote 103 This implies that Chinggis Khan's near-prophetic status was due to the conqueror's close, unmediated relationship with God. However, like Rashīd al-Dīn, Shabānkāraʾī also distinguishes Muḥammad's prophethood from Chinggisid kingship. The Chinggisids held a distinct position of kingship that was parallel to, though not identical with, Muḥammad's special rank as the “Seal of Prophethood.” The idea that Chinggis Khan embodied the ultimate model of kingship and surpassed all other mythic kings with his intelligence, cunningness, justice, and natural disposition toward kingship was established early on by the Ilkhanid historian Juvaynī (d. 1283), whose history became the model that later Ilkhanid authors such as Rashīd al-Dīn strove to emulate.Footnote 104
Rashīd al-Dīn's theological writings tread a fine line between attributing to Öljeitü miraculous feats and divine gifts such as divine intuition, and clearly and decisively differentiating his patron's sacral position from that of the prophets. Thus, he argues that through his divine intellect and natural disposition the Mongol ruler was able, with no previous study or knowledge, to arrive at brilliant theological speculations unattainable by others. To further explain his patron's unique intellectual aptitude, he introduces the notion of “natural knowledge” (ʿ ilm-i fiṭr ī), which he illustrates with the illiterate (ummī) Prophet Muḥammad, whose “gift” of illiteracy was a mark of his attainment of full human perfection (mu ṭlaqan kam āl-i insānī). He presents this as supporting evidence for the unlearned Öljeitü’s remarkable, divinely inspired intellect and absolute kingship.Footnote 105
In his political theology, Rashīd al-Dīn builds on the influential twelfth-century Ashʿarite theologian and exegetist Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī’s (d. 1210) theory of the human perfection of the Prophet Muḥammad. Fakhr al-Dīn “reconciled ancient and Islamic philosophical ideas about the soul's perfection with Sunni ideas about prophetic guidance” to imagine a hierarchy of human souls, at the highest level of which are the perfect souls of the prophets.Footnote 106 Due to their intellectual and moral perfection, the prophets are endowed with a distinct aptitude to guide and perfect the souls of the imperfect, the rest of mankind.Footnote 107 Rashīd al-Dīn presents the Ilkhan Öljeitü as possessing a luminous and sacred soul (nafs-i qudsī), through which divine wisdom reaches his subjects and the masses. He notes, too, that the Ilkhan has the ability to perfect and guide others, the vizier Rashīd al-Dīn included, toward deeper understandings of theological and philosophical issues.Footnote 108
Rashīd al-Dīn reconstructs Öljeitü’s exceptional kingship as a reflection of Muḥammad's extraordinary prophethood. He situates Öljeitü’s supreme position within a hierarchical system of kingship that parallels Muḥammad's position in Fakhr al-Dīn's hierarchy of human intellectual and moral perfection. Bolstering Öljeitü’s sacral kingship in theology, Rashīd al-Dīn promotes the image of his patron as the champion of reason, “the king of kalām,”Footnote 109 and as further proof that Öljeitü’s insights are of divine origin he repeatedly states the proverb, “The words of kings are the kings of words” (kalām al-mulūk mulūk al-kalām).Footnote 110
Rashīd al-Dīn expands Fakhr al-Dīn's hierarchal system of sacred souls by introducing a new rank of “philosopher-kings”—the auspicious ṣ ā ḥ ibqirāns—as a separate conduit of divine inspiration running parallel to prophethood and sainthood. He thereby resolves in his political theology the incongruity between the Islamic dogma of the finality of prophethood with Muḥammad and the Mongols’ understanding of the Chinggisids as blessed with a direct and continuous link to God. Muḥammad's prophethood, however, sets limits on the Chinggisid claim to divine access: Öljeitü’s unmediated divine inspiration can only come second to Muḥammad's mediated divine revelation.Footnote 111 Öljeitü’s new rank of Muslim kingship therefore comes at a hefty price for the Mongol ruler: it is premised on his recognition of the exceptionality and finality of Muḥammad's prophethood—a core tenet of the Muslim faith—and therefore his conceding to limits on his own divine sovereignty. Expanding the sacred hierarchies of Islam, Rashīd al-Dīn constrains and contains his Mongol patrons’ immanentist impulses and claims to near-divinity, and in the process safeguards his own position, and more generally that of his fellow scriptural experts, as intermediaries between the Mongol rulers and the divine.
There are several striking affinities between the way Rashīd al-Dīn uses the title of ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, Lord of Auspicious Conjunction, in his theological reworking of Mongol sacred kingship and how Buddhist monks employed the cakravartin, the model of the Buddhist universal emperor, to mediate and reinforce Chinggisid kingship.Footnote 112 Both titles denote a category of supra-moral universal cosmocrators, Buddha-like or Muḥammad-like kings, a status attained through the ruler's moral and intellectual self-perfection.Footnote 113 Both the cakravartin and the ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān were also used to reinforce claims of continuity with the empire's founder Chinggis Khan.Footnote 114 Moreover, just as the Buddhists anchored Chinggisid sacral kingship in a new moral order grounded in a transcendent heaven instead of the Mongols’ fearsome and amoral tenggeri,Footnote 115 so too does the Muslim vizier transpose Chinggisid sacral authority into an Islamic soteriological framework.Footnote 116 These two similar assimilative approaches to the displacement of the Mongols’ heaven—with Muḥammad or with the Dharma—reflect a wider, common, and recurring pattern at the Mongol courts. The Mongols were keen on religious traditions, institutions, and symbolic forms that would not only award them prestige and spiritual power, but also support and enhance their own claims to legitimacy—their sacral kingship and its link to the dynastic founder. Buddhist and Muslim cultural brokers took full advantage of their patrons’ expectations and needs. Rashīd al-Dīn's crafting of a new Islamic political theology, therefore, was part of a broader, cross-Eurasian process in which Chinggis Khan's heaven-sanctioned rule was being replaced with alternative, “local” forms of cosmocracy. The success of Buddhists and Muslims in converting the Mongol rulers, especially when compared to the failed proselytizing efforts of Christians, who were far less inclined or equipped to accommodate the supernatural pretensions of potential royal converts,Footnote 117 can be attributed to the ability of Buddhism and Islam to harness, or fashion and fit, their own models of sacral kingship.Footnote 118
CHINGGISID-MUSLIM SACRAL KINGSHIP AFTER THE MONGOLS
Thirteenth- through fourteenth-century Ilkhanid experiments with Mongol notions of sacral kingship provided later, early modern imperial courts and authors ample resources, including a formidable yet flexible repertoire of religio-political constructs, symbols, and titles. These structures were reinterpreted to fit with new philosophical, mystical, and occultist formulations of Islamic sovereignty, and express and reinforce the claims of new Turkic-Mongol patrons to sacral stature and spiritual and cosmic roles as Muslim emperors.
Fifteenth-century Timurid historians eagerly adopted the title of ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān to describe Temür's auspicious kingship and success as world conqueror. Elaborating the vision of a ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān kingship still further, Timurid secretaries, literati, intellectuals, and occult specialists used detailed horoscopes to attribute Temür's rise to specific heavenly conjunctions. They imbued the Timurid model of sacral kingship, which the figure of Temür posthumously came to personify, with additional messianic and millenarian significance.Footnote 119 The title of ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān became so closely associated with Temür's sacral persona that, from the fifteenth century on, nearly any designation of a ruler as ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān would signify a claim to Temür's legacy of imperial rule in its various iterations.Footnote 120 This model of kingship would be further expanded and disseminated through a “dual astrological-lettrist ideological platform” that intermingled occult sciences, astrological machinations, and Sufi paradigms to support claims that later Perso-Muslim courts and Turkic-Mongol rulers emulated and elaborated.Footnote 121 The notion that the Chinggisids possessed divine intellect was also adopted and altered to support the claims of Timurid princes that they were spiritually perfected philosopher kings who possessed the capacity, like Rashīd al-Dīn's representation of Öljeitü, to directly contribute to the most pressing intellectual and scientific debates of their time.Footnote 122
The mujaddid tradition was also expanded, and ascribed new elaborate and creative explanations that legitimized the ruler's identification as the centennial religious renewer. A ruler's birth or ascension to the throne were made to accord with patterns of cyclical decline and renewal or with the career and life of the Prophet. Like the ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, the mujaddid came to denote the king's predestined and direct divine appointment.Footnote 123 This repurposing of religious epithets and traditions and their transformation into potent vessels of royal and imperial power anchored the early modern fashioning of new royal selves in Islamic epistemological and hermeneutic frameworks. It firmly rooted an emergent “discursive realm” of Islamic kingship within Muḥammad's divine revelation and Islam's salvific program.Footnote 124
Scholars view the proliferation of ṣ ā ḥ ibqirān, mujaddid, and other religious titles such as the mahdī, the Sufi qutb (pole), and the caliphFootnote 125 among Timurid and subsequently Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman court authors, as going hand in hand with the fifteenth-century disengagement from the lineage-based Chinggisid model of authority, if not as signifying the near-full desertion of the Mongol legacy and its replacement with an alternative, potent Muslim theory of sacral kingship.Footnote 126 However, the Timurid model of sovereignty was in large part a reiteration, a successful “rebranding” and elaboration, of the earlier Ilkhanid project of incorporating and adapting the Mongol claim to govern through heaven's favor and Chinggis Khan's supreme auspiciousness.Footnote 127 Like Shāhrukh's portrayal as a Sharīʿa-upholding king in his letter to the Ming emperor, the fifteenth-century sanctification of Temür expressed Timurid continuity with, not its break from, the Chinggisid legacy, even if Temür's fame might overshadow Chinggis Khan's reputation as the invincible world conqueror.
CONCLUSIONS
In The Millennial Sovereign, Azfar Moin argues that Timurid and subsequent Mughal and Safavid claims to a sacral mode of kingship were based, not on the imposition of a specific “ideology on the masses,” but rather on a ruler successfully “pouring himself” into preexisting “mythic molds … shaped by collective imagination and social memory”: “the hero, the saint, and the messiah.”Footnote 128 Yet, in Ilkhanid Iran this was a reciprocal process: Mongol rulers were not simply poured into received Islamic and Iranian molds; instead, symbols and titles were selectively appropriated and transformed into potent vessels that could accommodate a vision of kingship that matched the Chinggisid version of a universal, heaven-derived rulership. The result of this Ilkhanid experimentation with Chinggisid sacral kingship was a subtle and intricate interplay between thaumaturgic and salvific claims, between accommodation of Mongol rulers’ immanentist impulses and their monotheistic containment and constraint. Even when they did not fully come to fruition, Ilkhanid experiments with Mongol-Muslim kingship, and especially Rashīd al-Dīn's unique political theology, suggest that the overall trajectory of this court-based project was not so much divine kingship under an “Islamic guise” as it was a sacral mode of kingship fully set into Islamic scriptural, salvific, and transcendentalist frameworks. The Mongols desired to collect, annex, and assume local religious and political traditions and institutions that could express and enhance their own legitimizing claims. In pursuing this goal, they set in motion a process of assimilation that inevitably led to their own integration into the Perso-Islamic world. It also facilitated the formation of new political discourses that enabled divinized forms of kingship to inhabit the Islamic monotheistic world.
