The Millennial Sovereign recovers a shared world of sacred kingship that pervaded India, Iran, and Central Asia in early modernity. A. Azfar Moin argues that a Timurid-based social dispensation produced a particular type of sovereignty in which a ruler promoted his political claims largely through embodied spiritual practices. Beliefs about the turning of the Islamic millennium (1591–92 ce) played a key role in shaping this world, particularly the conviction that a messiah would emerge and usher in a new auspicious era. In this charged atmosphere, kings and their subjects alike looked to astrology, dreams, and omens to understand and lay claim to royal and religious authority. By carefully analyzing this realm of fused popular and esoteric millenarianism, Moin outlines a formidable challenge to the conventional narratives of Mughal and, to a lesser extent, Safavid history that is likely to surprise even specialists. Along the way, The Millennial Sovereign demonstrates several innovative methods of historical analysis that have the potential to alter how scholars access and make sense of the early modern past.
Moin devotes his first chapter to Timur (d. 1405) and pieces together the prevalent ideas concerning charismatic royal authority and the Islamic millennium that marked the rise of the Timurid cultural order (and the falling away of the Chinggis Khan world). His account of the Mughals in Chapter 2 begins with Babur, who founded the Indian Mughal Empire in 1526. Moin then proceeds chronologically through the next four Mughal rulers (Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan), devoting a chapter to each, and highlights how they all enacted power through Timurid-based spiritual practices and political ideologies. He periodically compares the Mughals to their Safavid counterparts and highlights connections between the two dynasties, such as Humayun's visit to the court of Shah Tahmasb. Moin carefully notes his interest in the social personas of kings rather than their private lives. This distinction allows him to avoid the pitfalls of personality-based history, a persistent predilection in Mughal historiography, and to rethink several key rulers as saintly, messianic figures.
The book's main strength and source of potential weaknesses are the same: it brings together ideas, concepts, sources, methodological approaches, and world areas typically treated separately. Moin threads together analyses of Safavid Iran, Central Asia, and Mughal India. This renders valuable insights, such as significant parallels between Shah Ismaʿil (founder of the Safavid Empire) and Babur, who are typically viewed as near opposites, the former an esoteric mystic and the latter a practical warrior. Moin convincingly shows how both operated in a world where interpreting dreams, paying attention to omens, and acting as a religious leader were essential to political success. Throughout the book, Moin contends that we must collapse the categories of saint and king, which overlapped more often than not in early modern India and Iran.
The Millennial Sovereign envisions sacred kingship as a social practice that depended on performance more than texts. For instance, Akbar, who represents the height of Mughal saint-kings for Moin, founded an imperial discipleship program, dīn-i ilāhī (“the Divine Religion” in Moin's gloss), that relied on a series of rituals to bind initiates to the king. Such groups often prompted controversy, and some contemporaries harshly condemned Akbar's actions (their writings are largely why we know about such activities today). But all agreed on a playing field where kings modeled themselves as saints. A variety of interacting factors shaped this milieu, including Sufi orders, local geographies, and other imperial claimants (most importantly the Safavids). Kings, although elite and sacred, acted within this bustling world of competing claims. In part, Moin's emphasis on “the everyday world of sacred kingship” seems designed to preempt the criticism that emphasizing the sacrality of rulers has long been a near obsession of Indological scholarship.
One of Moin's greatest accomplishments (which will hopefully be emulated by future scholars) is his use of a sweeping array of textual and visual materials. Moin recognizes early on that he has a problem of sources. We possess relatively few records of Mughal and Safavid tactile, bodily practices, and those that we do have generally assume a great deal about the interpretive social context. Moin takes a multipronged approach to overcoming this paucity of information. For his chapter on Timur, he focuses on the historical memory of this ruler as the “Lord of Conjunction,” a millennial title for the would-be world savior, rather than the nitty-gritty of what actually happened. In his treatment of the Mughals, he reads between the lines of the old favorites of historians, royal chronicles and memoirs, to reconstitute a largely oral, performative world where ritual and charisma were as pertinent to rulership as conquest and taxes. He also relies upon a diverse range of texts and objects that are typically thought to lay beyond the historian's gaze, including astrological and magic works, paintings (especially under Jahangir), and architecture (most notably under Shah Jahan). His anthropological approach to some of these materials, particularly images, may raise eyebrows among historians and art historians alike (for different reasons). In part, however, discipline-based challenges to his methodology prove one of Moin's more basic points: by sticking to established categories and disciplinary boundaries we miss crucial features of early modernity.
Many readers will likely be struck by Moin's approach to a time and place often situated squarely within Islamic history. The Millennial Sovereign consistently challenges the binaries typically deployed to understand Islamic societies, including orthodox and heterodox, local and universal, and Sunni and Shiʿi. Moin forcefully argues that such distinctions are, more often than not, anachronistic. Moreover, popular spiritual ideas, which we might think of as highly unorthodox today, cut across sectarian, social, and religious lines in both the Safavid and Mughal polities. For example, Moin traces how sovereigns of both dynasties relied on notions of cyclical history and transmigration of the soul, as well as correctly interpreting strange occurrences. When discussing such concepts in the context of 16th- and 17th-century India, Moin introduces the important corrective that we need not assume that the Mughals adapted these ideas from Hindu thought when they were part of their Timurid heritage.
In Moin's view, the audience for the performance of sovereignty shifted depending on the particular act. At various points, the Mughal rulers acted with an eye to their soldiers, the Safavid kings, a small group of inner disciples, and/or the Indian population at large. Moin occasionally recovers how groups that are typically sidelined in imperial chronicles and modern historiography, such as women, witnessed and participated in the enactment of kingship. In his final two chapters, on Jahangir and Shah Jahan respectively, Moin describes a model in which kings, like saints, presented one set of ideas to the public and another to an elite group of followers.
Moin concludes with the ascension of Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir (r. 1658–1707), a king frequently portrayed as a religious zealot who inaugurated the downfall of the great Mughal Empire. One wishes that Moin had continued his narrative through Aurangzeb's reign and thus joined the increasing number of scholars who are reconsidering this crucial chapter of Mughal history. Another desideratum, perhaps to be fulfilled in future research, is a discussion of how Moin's detailed account of sacred kingship connects with other recent treatments of Mughal power that focus on networks, cross-cultural interactions, and literature. The Millennial Sovereign leaves the reader wanting more. It is a valuable contribution to the field that ought to compel scholars to reevaluate key assumptions regarding kingship and sainthood in Mughal India.
