In the early 20th century, Sharif Jan Makhdum Sadr Ziyaʾ, a famous Bukharan scholar, explained his matrilineal heritage thusly:
Qazi Mirza Umid was one of ten ʿulamaʾ selected by Abu al-Fayz Khan [Tuqay-Timurid ruler of Bukhara, 1711–47] to be part of Hadi Khwaja's retinue sent in audience to Nadir Shah Afshar at the Charbakr mausoleum.Footnote 1 These ten [Bukharan Hanafi] scholars engaged in debate with ten skilled Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ on the issue of which sect embodied the truth.Footnote 2 Mirza Umid emerged from this engagement triumphant and proved the truth of Sunnism.Footnote 3 Nadir Shah saw fit to be merciful toward Abu al-Fayz Khan [who had just surrendered Bukhara]Footnote 4 and embraced the true Sunni sect.Footnote 5
Why would the scion of one of the most powerful scholarly families in Bukhara make a special point of tying his lineage to a foreign invasion already fading into distant memory? And since when did Nadir Shah Afshar, the understudied 18th-century Turko-Persian conqueror, “convert” to Sunnism at the hands of a people he had soundly defeated?Footnote 6 By the time Sadr Ziyaʾ wrote his memoirs, over a century and a half had passed since the murder of Nadir Shah scattered his armies, and the conqueror does not loom especially large in other writings of the late colonial period. Yet this particular conversion narrative bore curious resonance during Central Asia's long 19th century and the story served to justify the lofty status of numerous great families of Bukhara.Footnote 7 More importantly, this episode puts in stark relief changing conceptions of sect and religious community on the eve of colonialism.
The aforementioned conversion narrative is entirely absent in the secondary literature, and even the basic political history of Nadir Shah's empire—however short-lived—is misrepresented as a passing depredation in Central Asian history, a footnote in the rise of the Manghit dynasty of Bukhara (1747–1920).Footnote 8 Central Asia is hardly unique in this regard: Nadir Shah generally appears as a bit player during an age of “decline” and transition into colonialism; an inconvenient placeholder between Safavid and Qajar history; a catalyst to British dominance in India; and a momentary challenger to Ottoman control over its eastern provinces.
Yet vacillating memory of Nadir Shah's theological intervention into Central Asia's religious landscape has much broader implications, edging up against fluid historiographical debates on communalism, conversion, and genealogy.Footnote 9 Voluminous work has exposed the decisive role of colonial forms of knowledge in hardening communal boundaries,Footnote 10 but somewhat less research interrogates the nature of those boundaries during the precolonial period,Footnote 11 and still less engages these issues during the transition period of the the long 19th century.Footnote 12 Scholarship from a related vector has demonstrated the role conversion, or memory of conversion, can play in sanctifying a community and in assimilating it to a new environment.Footnote 13 And genealogy provides the connective tissue to the conversion event.Footnote 14
This article has several related goals. First, it emphasizes the importance of Nadir Shah's empire in Central Asian history, and ultimately in catalyzing a long 19th century of city-states throughout Eurasia and the Indian Subcontinent. In this formulation, the Manghit dynasty of Bukhara (1747–1920) was but one of many Afsharid successor states. Second, it contends that the rubble of Nadir Shah's empire proved fertile soil not only for new political dynasties, but for scholarly ones as well. The analysis focuses in particular on the line of Hadi Khwaja, whose origins are connected personally to Nadir Shah, and whose family dynasty prevailed for over a century up to the Bolshevik Revolution. This period was characterized by rising levels of Sunni–Shiʿa animosity, which necessitated the myth of Nadir Shah's conversion to Sunnism. This narrative in turn originated in Nadir Shah's much better-known efforts to establish Shiʿism as a fifth “Jaʿfari” legal school within the Sunni fold. The conversion narrative not only established the venerability of some of Bukhara's most influential families, but also grounded them and their successors as paragons of Hanafi Sunnism. Thus, the Afsharid Empire directly led to the rise of new scholarly dynasties and indirectly set the stage for the changing political-religious landscape that framed the memory of Nadir Shah.
THE MANGHIT DYNASTY OF BUKHARA AS AN AFSHARID SUCCESSOR STATE, ONE OF MANY
Before considering the memory of Nadir Shah amongst the Bukharan ʿulamaʾ, it is necessary to first expose a few key points of political history that have been ignored (or at least minimized) in the secondary literature. The central contention here is that the specter of Nadir Shah loomed large in the imaginations of Islamic scholars throughout the long 19th century precisely because the Turko-Persian conqueror's impact on the region was decisive and enduring. Moreover, his empire indirectly set in motion a number of changes in the political-religious landscape that profoundly shaped sectarian divisions over the ensuing long 19th century. This section, therefore, emphasizes the role of Nadir Shah in the inception of the Manghit dynasty and the lasting importance of his imperial project on the region.
Details about the precise circumstances surrounding Muhammad Rahim Bey's rise as the founder of the Manghit dynasty are decidedly vague in the secondary literatureFootnote 15 —which is not surprising given that the Iranian and Bukharan sources on this sensitive episode are murky and contradict one another. The account in several of these sources goes something like this: after Nadir Shah subdued Abu al-Fayz Khan (the last Tuqay-Timurid dynast of Bukhara, r. 1711–47), the two rulers reached an accord by which Abu al-Fayz was confirmed as shah of Turkestan, Nadir Shah married Abu al-Fayz's daughter, Muhammad Hakim Khan (who had until then been ruling Qarshi as a quasi-independent governor) was appointed atalïq (sometimes synonymous with amīr al-umarāʾ, “head of the amirs”),Footnote 16 and Muhammad Hakim Khan's son, Rahim Bey, was placed at the head of 10,000 horsemen and sent away with Nadir Shah on his campaign to Khwarazm.Footnote 17 Most sources agree on these basic points. What is less clear is the nature of Nadir Shah's continued relationship with the region and how, exactly, one of his deputized generals—Rahim Bey Manghit—managed to take the throne for himself.
Early Manghit political history has been detailed elsewhere—most notably in Andreas Wilde's study of Bukharan dynastic chronicles.Footnote 18 My intervention in this section is to suggest that Nadir Shah maintained meaningful control over Transoxania even after most of his armies vacated the region in 1740, and that the rise of the first Manghit monarch—Rahim Bey—was the result of a successful struggle for the material resources of the Afsharid military machine, similar to many such contests that played out across Eurasia in the wake of imperial collapse. This geopolitical background is context for the hardening communal boundaries that followed, which are evident in the conversion narrative to be discussed subsequently.
From 1740 to 1747 Transoxania was integrated into the Afsharid Empire through tribute and political intervention; it was not simply conquered, pillaged, and then abandoned, as much of the literature would have it.Footnote 19 Afsharid rule of Central Eurasia was, of course, highly personalized and indirect, and it vacillated during that seven-year period in response to crises. However, these characteristics are present to various degrees in all premodern empires.Footnote 20 Nadir Shah's de jure sovereignty was recognized by reading the Friday prayer (khuṭba) and minting coins (sikka) in his name in 1740.Footnote 21 Although it is unclear whether these practices continued after Nadir Shah left the region,Footnote 22 they were implemented in 1747 as well to emphasize that Bukhara remained part of the empire.Footnote 23 More importantly, Nadir Shah maintained de facto control over Transoxania through the periodic collection of tribute and intervention into vassal politics.Footnote 24 Abu al-Fayz (the puppet Tuqay-Timurid ruler of Bukhara) continued to dutifully send requisitions (sūrsāt) even after the Afsharid armies had left the region.Footnote 25
Within the Afsharid Empire more broadly, Bukhara was no exception in this regard. When provinces ceased sending tribute, Nadir Shah dispatched armies to compel them to do so. For instance, in 1746 Mirza Nabat—the wālī and pādishāh of Badakhshan—was “persuaded” to pay two years in back taxes in the form of rubies at the value of one hundred thousand tūmān. As a reward for the tribute, Nadir Shah granted him the privilege of retaining the title pādishāh.Footnote 26 Similarly, Nadir Shah was constantly intervening in Khwarazmian politics, collecting tribute and picking favorites for the throne.Footnote 27 Put starkly, the Afsharid Empire was collecting material resources from Central Asian territories never successfully incorporated by the Manghits during the precolonial period and from a far more distant capital.
Moreover, Nadir Shah did not finish off the Tuqay-Timurid dynasty; rather, he temporarily resuscitated it. By the time Nadir Shah defeated Abu al-Fayz Khan in 1740, the khanate of Bukhara existed more in name than in fact. The early 18th century had witnessed a series of disastrous upheavals that allowed the Turkic military elite of the region to compete for indirect control of the throne and carve out independent territories.Footnote 28 After defeating Abu al-Fayz, Nadir Shah's first act was to send armed emissaries to secure the submission of outlying provinces such as Samarqand, Hisar, and Shahrisabz, which had enjoyed de facto independence for decades.Footnote 29 Although Nadir Shah most certainly stripped Bukhara of material and human resources by drafting troops for his campaigns, it was in fact Abu al-Fayz who suggested that the conqueror conscript certain troublesome tribal leaders in order to remove political competition.Footnote 30 Thus, rather than marking the end of the Tuqay-Timurid dynasty, the Afsharid invasion gave it a new lease on life, however fleeting. When Nadir Shah's Central Asian vassal was threatened by a series of rebellions in the 1740s—business as usual during the preceding decades—troops were sent to enforce Bukharan (and thus Afsharid) suzerainty over its hinterland.
Ultimately, this suzerainty over Central Asia came to an end with the death of Nadir Shah in 1747. Yet there were multiple Afsharid generals contending for regional dominance, and Rahim Bey Manghit did not simply formalize a mantle already in his possession. In 1746–47 a particularly threatening uprising by ʿIbad Allah Khatayi prompted Nadir Shah to appoint Bihbud Khan ChapushiFootnote 31 sardar of the entire province (mamlakat) of Turkestan and dispatch him to restore order—which he ultimately succeeded in doing.Footnote 32 It appears that Bihbud Khan was effectively Nadir Shah's heir apparent in Central Asia, or at least one of them.Footnote 33 In Manghit versions of this event, however, it is Rahim Bey, not Bihbud Khan, who takes the central role in the succession struggle, and his motive was not to preserve the integrity of the Afsharid Empire, but rather to avenge an act of sacrilege: around the year 1743, Muhammad Hakim Khan Manghit (Rahim Bey's father) died, leading to widespread rebellions in Transoxania.Footnote 34 Particularly odious were the deeds of the aforementioned ʿIbad Allah Khatayi, who in 1746 desecrated a Naqshbandi shrine in Miyankal.Footnote 35 Nadir Shah sent Rahim Bey at the head of an army of four thousand Qizilbash to assist Abu al-Fayz Khan and defeat ʿIbad Allah Khatayi, orders he carried out handily. Manghit chronicles do not attempt to write Nadir Shah out of Bukharan history, but they do elevate Rahim Bey over more important Afsharid generals such as Bihbud Khan. Some even go so far as to assert that Nadir Shah explicitly bequeathed the authority to rule Turkestan to Rahim Bey,Footnote 36 a rhetorical strategy shared by Afghan chronicles, for instance.Footnote 37
The events surrounding the Manghit ascension during the months preceding and following Nadir Shah's murder clarify even further the critical importance of the Afsharid imperial framework. In May of 1747—a little under two months before Nadir Shah was killed on 20 June 1747—a dispatch arrived at Bihbud Khan's fortification (sangur) outside of Bukhara from Nadir Shah's court indicating that Rahim Bey would be arriving imminently to ensure that Turkestan remained pacified, after which time the Manghit prince should return to the royal encampment. But the favor Nadir Shah had shown Rahim Bey went far beyond allowing him to temporarily return home: based on the testimony of Rahim Bey along with several other unnamed Turkic nobles to the effect that Abu al-Fayz was weak and therefore responsible for the unrest in Turkestan, Nadir Shah ordered that he be deposed and put under house arrest in favor of his twelve-year-old son, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin.Footnote 38 In effect, Rahim Bey had maneuvered the head of the Tuqay-Timurid dynasty—the ruling lineage for a century and a half—out of power through the threat of force from the Afsharid army. On 10 July 1747, when rumors of general chaos in Iran began to permeate Transoxania, Rahim Bey executed Abu al-Fayz.Footnote 39 All that remained between him and undisputed control of Bukhara was Bihbud Khan and his Qizilbash garrison.
Once Abu al-Fayz was executed, the struggle for control of Bukhara began—a contest ultimately decided by Afsharid troops. After an engagement in which one of Bihbud Khan's trusted commanders perished, a contingent of Afghans in his army slipped off in the night to join Rahim Bey's side. Shortly thereafter, on 21 July 1747, seven hundred Ottoman soldiers (who had been captured and recommissioned during Nadir Shah's western campaigns) followed suit.Footnote 40 With his forces dwindling, Bihbud Khan was forced to retreat.Footnote 41 Thus Nadir Shah's military organization allowed the Manghits to emerge as the victorious Afsharid successor state, one of many throughout the broader region.Footnote 42 The Afsharid imperial grid was the pivotal factor in the rise of the Manghit dynasty, just as it was in the Durrani dynasty in Afghanistan and the Zand dynasty in Iran.
CHANGING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OVER THE LONG 19TH CENTURY OF PERSIANATE CITY-STATES
The impact of Nadir Shah's conquest of Central Asia intensified during the ensuing decades, precipitating transformations in the region's religious and social landscape. Far from a fleeting depredation, the imprint of Nadir Shah's conquest deepened as the long 19th century wore on due to the indirect consequences of his empire. Even if Nadir Shah the man was eclipsed in local chronicles by the Manghit dynasts of Bukhara, structural changes resulting from his empire endured.
Most decisive of these developments was the definitive end of the Chinggisid dispensation in Central Asia, which had justified the rule of regional monarchs since the Shibanid conquest in 1500. This shift did not happen immediately.Footnote 43 Muhammad Rahim maintained a puppet Chinggisid khan on the throne until 1756,Footnote 44 a practice Timur had employed centuries earlier,Footnote 45 one his neighbors in Khiva would echo decades later,Footnote 46 and one his Uzbek brethren in Balkh had exploited even before Nadir Shah's conquests.Footnote 47 The Chinggisid legacy competed with that of the Timurids, that of the Safavids, and—briefly—even that of Nadir Shah himself, following his death.Footnote 48 Nevertheless, it was the Chinggisid lineage of the deposed Tuqay-Timurids that most vexed Manghit rulers, and the connection between the Afsharid-authorized deposition of Abu al-Fayz—the last Chinggisid who ruled Bukhara both in name and in fact—and the nullification of this claim to power is clear.Footnote 49
The new political tapestry of non-Chinggisid, Afsharid successor city-states in turn had profound implications in the religious realm. As Anke von Kügelgen in particular has demonstrated, this shift away from Chinggisid justifications for rulership prompted the Manghit dynasty to increasingly depict themselves as pious Islamic rulers.Footnote 50 This is not to imply that Islam was not an integral component in the ruling ideology of pre-Afsharid rulers,Footnote 51 nor is it to suggest that the legacy of Chinggis Khan evaporated along with his ruling bloodline.Footnote 52 It does mean, however, that the Manghits had fewer rhetorical options than their immediate predecessors, and that they were relatively more dependent upon the religious elite. Early Manghit rulers went about compensating for the Chinggis-sized chip on their collective shoulder in part by portraying themselves as ʿulamaʾ. Shah Murad (r. 1785–1800) and Amir Haydar (1800–27) in particular were remembered as exemplary scholars.Footnote 53 Ultimately, however, this increased orientation toward Islam as a ruling ideology rested on an alliance with the ʿulamaʾ.
This turn toward the ʿulamaʾ came during a period in which that very social group was undergoing profound change, a change that was also arguably an indirect result of the Afsharid interregnum. Just as Nadir Shah's invasion constituted the death knell of Chinggisid rule in Central Asia, in India it was a fatal blow to Mughal rule.Footnote 54 This humiliation in turn fueled the rise of the aggressive, expansionist, shariʿa-minded Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi order. As Juan Cole puts it: “Sunni notables of Delhi watched the decline of the Mughal Empire, as first the Hindu Marathas and then the British East India Company reduced the Mughal emperor to a figurehead. Crisis-stricken Sunni ulama asked with anguish if the Deity had visited these calamities upon them as punishment for lapses in the way Sunnis practiced Islam.”Footnote 55 In earlier centuries, Sufi traffic had flowed primarily from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, but in the 18th century the direction reversed, and Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi proselytizers began arriving in Bukhara exactly when the Turkic elite's reliance on them had become more pronounced.Footnote 56 These Naqshband-Mujaddidis were initially resisted by rival Sufi orders and Turkic nobility alike,Footnote 57 but by the third Manghit ruler, Shah Murad, they were firmly entrenched in the halls of power.Footnote 58 Concurrent with this alliance (and perhaps consequent of it) were reforms to the taxation system to better align it with the letter of the shariʿa,Footnote 59 for instance, and a boom in madrasa construction.Footnote 60
This imagined return to Islam coincided with heightening Shiʿa–Sunni tensions and likely played a role in causing them, although Bukhara's sizable Shiʿi community has not received sustained scholarly inquiry. Extensive literature has revealed the role of colonialism and European categories of knowledge in sharpening communal boundaries,Footnote 61 and while Russian rule may well have affected conceptions of the Shiʿa–Sunni divide in Central Asia (the issue has never been investigated),Footnote 62 the discussion that follows provides evidence of growing sectarian differentiation dating to the 19th century.Footnote 63 Although it would be a mistake to overemphasize the rigidness of the Shiʿa–Sunni divide,Footnote 64 even as late as the early 20th century, Central Asian chroniclers of the 18th century took Nadir Shah's affiliation quite seriously, describing his Qizilbash warriors as “enemies of religion” (dushmanān-i dīn) and justifying the conflict as a jihad against blasphemers.Footnote 65 One chronicler of the 1830s wrote: “from the time of Timur until [Nadir Shah's conquest of] 1740, the world-conquering shahs have been Muslims (ahl-i Islām), and an infidel like Nadir Shah had never sat upon the world-sheltering throne.”Footnote 66 By the 19th century Central Asia witnessed forced relocation of Iranian Shiʿa to Bukhara and sporadic communal violence.Footnote 67 Blurry boundaries between communities equally reverent of the House of the Prophet hardened into rival communities through the discourse of blasphemy.Footnote 68
This background explains why Nadir Shah's formative role in Central Asian geopolitics became more problematic as the long 19th century wore on. It also explains why later chroniclers marginalized the role of Nadir Shah in the rise of the Manghits as well as the strained relationship of the ʿulamaʾ with the memory of that same Turko-Persian monarch. This brings us to the curious conversion narrative of Nadir Shah and the ʿulamaʾ who benefited from it.
THE LEGENDARY CONVERSION OF NADIR SHAH TO SUNNISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
This new sectarian terrain posed a retrospective problem for scholarly dynasties that owed their genesis to Nadir Shah, a figure increasingly seen as an Iranian, Shiʿi ruler as the 19th century progressed. This tension is put into stark relief in varying accounts of Nadir Shah's relationship with Sunnism, usually revolving in some way around the figure of Hadi Khwaja “Eshan Ustaz” (d. late 18th century).
Although later accounts veer toward the mythological—no less revealing for our purposes here—the conversion narratives grew out of an actual encounter between Hadi Khwaja and Nadir Shah. According to an untitled, anonymous travel account written by someone apparently present for the events in question,Footnote 69 in August 1743 Hadi Khwaja—along with a party of fellow Sunni, Central Asian ʿulamaʾ—set out from Bukhara to visit the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, both especially sacred in Shiʿism.Footnote 70 The travel account does not specifically say so, but he was answering an empire-wide call to assemble scholars to resolve the Sunni–Shiʿa divide.Footnote 71 On the way, Hadi Khwaja also visited a shrine in Mashhad that had been endowed with Shiʿi significance by the Safavid dynasty only in the previous century or so, though none of this was unusual behavior for a Sunni Muslim—especially at that early date.Footnote 72 More remarkable is what transpired once Hadi Khwaja arrived in Iraq, parts of which were then controlled by Nadir Shah. After visiting the shrines of Adam, Moses, and ʿAli, located in Najaf, Hadi Khwaja entered into a religious disputation (munāẓara) with a group of Qizilbash mullas outside of the shrine complex following the afternoon (pēshīn) prayer.Footnote 73 The scholars debated the exigencies of religion (żarūrīyāt-i dīn) until the Qizilbash were persuaded to Hadi Khwaja's side (qāʾil shudand), though allowances were made for those facets of their Shiʿi beliefs not intrinsically at odds with Sunnism.Footnote 74 According to an Ottoman observer, it was in fact Hadi Khwaja who was coaxed out of his stubbornly anti-Shiʿa position by an Afghan colleague in attendance, but either way, Nadir Shah's position prevailed.Footnote 75 Having arrived at this accord, the next day, “the Sunni and Qizilbash mullas gathered together at the front of the tomb complex, where they wrote and sealed a document asserting that Shiʿism was within Islam.”Footnote 76
Hadi Khwaja's accord with the Qizilbash scholars makes a great deal of sense within Nadir Shah's broader efforts to secure acceptance of Shiʿism within Sunni Islam. Scholars of Iranian history have portrayed Nadir's theological efforts exclusively in relation to the Ottoman Empire. Nadir Shah exhorted the Ottoman sultan to recognize Shiʿism as the fifth juridical school (maẓhab) of Islam, to be known as the Jaʿfari school after the sixth Shiʿi imam. In exchange, Shiʿa would renounce certain practices particularly offensive to Sunnis, such as the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs.Footnote 77 Although Nadir Shah's primary preoccupation was indeed the Ottoman Empire, the Sunni ʿulamaʾ who actually signed off on his agenda (such as Hadi Khwaja and colleagues, but also a delegation of Afghans) overwhelmingly hailed from territories he had conquered.Footnote 78 The text of the Najaf accord signed by Hadi Khwaja's delegation explicitly cedes Nadir Shah final authority in punishing anyone throughout his empire who fails to abide by the agreement and continues to persecute Shiʿa.Footnote 79 Thus the Council of Najaf bore importance as a tool not only of diplomacy, but also of imperial integration.
These efforts ultimately came to naught, but Hadi Khwaja's role in justifying them proved extremely lucrative. After Friday prayer in Kufa with his new Qizilbash colleagues, Hadi Khwaja proceeded to Karbala where he visited the shrine of Husayn and was honored with a personal audience with the shah. According to Hadi Khwaja's account, Nadir Shah showered him with unprecedented hospitality while they drank tea together.Footnote 80 More concretely, whoever transcribed the travelogue scribbled in the margin that Hadi Khwaja was given six thousand rupees and all of his fellow Bukharan companions were given two thousand.Footnote 81 At the end of the account, the author further added in the margins that in December 1744 Hadi Khwaja was appointed military judge (qāżī-yi ʿaskarī) of Bukhara—the first step in his family's dominance of the city-state's highest religious posts.Footnote 82
This terse travelogue stands as our earliest account of Hadi Khwaja's relationship with Nadir Shah. That it is an eyewitness account and fits with our understanding of Nadir Shah's theological ambitions is indicative of authenticity. However, later, substantially altered versions of the encounter between Nadir Shah and Hadi Khwaja are no less revealing of the event's symbolic importance for the fortunes of scholarly dynasties in subsequent decades.
Certain changes in the depiction of this debate are already present in Muhammad Sharif's Taj al-Tawarikh (Crown of History),Footnote 83 a chronicle commissioned by Amir Haydar Manghit in ca. 1800. The most important change is the lack of compromise or conciliation with Shiʿism: Sunni victory is total. In this version, the Qizilbash Mulla BashiFootnote 84 made a fool of himself through spurious deployment of the Hadith, and Nadir Shah was fully convinced of his treachery.Footnote 85 Nadir Shah went on to issue a decree (wathīqa farmūda) that all should recognize the rightness of the Sunni path, which prevailed from the foundation of Islam until the perversions of Shah Ismaʿil (the founding Safavid ruler, r. 1501–24).Footnote 86 Nonetheless, many of the details resemble those of the briefer Safarnama (Travelogue): the disputation also takes place in Najaf,Footnote 87 though in this version Nadir Shah himself is present, having summoned scholars from all corners of his empire to determine the true maẓhab.Footnote 88 The Taj al-Tawarikh also makes special note of the rewards (including Indian rupees) handed out to the victorious Sunni ʿulamaʾ. The text does not mention Hadi Khwaja specifically, but it does single out one ḥażrat-i ēshān ustād as particularly deserving of recompense.Footnote 89 Although this was a fairly common title of ʿulamaʾ in Central Asia, it was one used in other texts to refer specifically to Hadi Khwaja.Footnote 90
Most later accounts preserve the climactic Sunni–Shiʿa debate with Nadir Shah as arbiter, but shift the encounter to an earlier date and the location to the Charbakr shrine outside of Bukhara. According to Muhammad Hakim Khan's Khoqand-centric Muntakhab al-Tawarikh (Selections from History), composed in the 1840s, after Nadir Shah crossed the Oxus he camped his massive army at Charbakr, which left the militarily weak Abu al-Fayz Khan (r. 1711–47) at a loss. Conferring with his advisers, Abu al-Fayz determined to greet Nadir graciously and—after fruitlessly dispatching several ambassadors (ïlchī)—sent a wise Sufi named Eshan Imla to meet the Iranian shah.Footnote 91 Impressed, Nadir treated the Eshan with great honor, and as a result of their discussions of religion, Nadir Shah repented and forsook the Shiʿi maẓhab in favor of Sunnism. Thanks to Eshan Imla's intervention, Bukhara was compensated for its military subjugation with a theological victory.Footnote 92 Instead of appearing as an arbiter above the religious disputes, as in previous versions, here Nadir Shah's personal conversion to Sunnism is emphasized. Also as with previous versions, in this one Nadir Shah rewarded the scholar handsomely with an assortment of jewels (khalīṭa-ʾi jawāhir). In contrast with the characterization of Hadi Khwaja in the Safarnama, however, the author is careful to clarify that Eshan Imla had no use for the trappings of temporal power and immediately gave the jewels away to his servant (kafsh bardār, lit. “shoe carrier”).Footnote 93 Following the Eshan's intervention, Abu al-Fayz was able to secure peace with Nadir.
As this narrative evolved over the course of the 19th century, the emphasis on conversion became more pronounced, as did the agency of Hadi Khwaja. As Devin DeWeese has illustrated in a different context, the act of conversion simultaneously assimilated elements increasingly understood to be outside the fold (Shiʿism) and sacralized a new community of scholars (Hadi Khwaja and his descendants).Footnote 94 Sadr Ziyaʾ’s account of the event (quoted at the start of this article), composed in the early 20th century, combined elements of the Safarnama, the Taj al-Tawarikh, and the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh. In this version, Nadir Shah crossed into Transoxania not to conquer, but for the express purpose of visiting the Naqshbandi shrine at Charbakr. He sent a letter to Abu al-Fayz boasting that: “seizing this city would be incredibly easy for me. My only pretension in coming here is to visit (zīyāra) Hazrat Eshan Imla.”Footnote 95 Ziyaʾ asserted that Nadir Shah was secretly a Sunni all along (ẓāhiran shīʿī wa-bāṭinan ahl-i sunnat)—which is why he wanted to meet Eshan Imla in the first place.Footnote 96 Later in his history, however, Ziyaʾ inserts into the narrative ten ʿulamaʾ alongside Eshan Imla in the audience with Nadir Shah at Charbakr—Hadi Khwaja foremost among them. As in the Safarnama and Taj al-Tawarikh, we find a theological debate between Sunni and Shiʿi scholars, though this time taking place in Charbakr, just as in Muntakhab al-Tawarikh. Moreover, rather than serving to legitimate Nadir Shah's theological agenda uniting the Sunni and Shiʿi sects, in this version (as in the Taj al-Tawarikh) the Sunni victory is absolute, with the Bukharan scholars convincing the Shiʿa of the ultimate truth of Sunnism (ḥaqqat-i maẓhab).Footnote 97 Ultimately, Ziyaʾ contradicted his own assertion of Nadir's secret Sunnism by claiming that Nadir Shah too embraced the Sunni maẓhab as a result of this religious debate.Footnote 98
The evolution of this conversion narrative over the course of the long 19th century reveals both the lasting impact of the Afsharid imperial project detailed in the first section and mounting sectarian tensions. Nadir Shah's empire facilitated exchange, including between scholars, and his theological ambitions left a lasting imprint on the memory of families of ʿulamaʾ in the region. What originated in his attempt to integrate Shiʿism into the Sunni fold, however, morphed over time into his own conversion to Sunnism as facilitated by the Bukharan ʿulamaʾ, which transformed the memory of his initial patronage into an asset rather than a liability. As the next section will demonstrate, that memory was not just an idle story: it empowered Hadi Khwaja's family in particular for over a century.
OPPORTUNITY FROM UPHEAVAL: NADIR SHAH AND THE GENESIS OF HADI KHWAJA'S FAMILY DYNASTY
Thus Hadi Khwaja likely did perform a theological service for Nadir Shah, but the memory of that service changed radically over the long 19th century as the Sunni–Hanafi gaze toward Shiʿism became increasingly strained. Hadi Khwaja, along with a cadre of peers,Footnote 99 morphed from Afsharid servants into champions of Hanafi Islam, thereby fulfilling the role of mythological ancestor sacralizing a discreet community of descendants. As this section will demonstrate, that memory proved a powerful force indeed, as Hadi Khwaja's new scholarly dynasty perpetuated itself all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Piecemeal genealogies and hagiographies connected Hadi Khwaja's ancestors to that foundational conversion event, as well as to the Prophet and numerous saintly figures.Footnote 100
Hadi Khwaja “Eshan Ustaz” was most likely a scholar of some prestige before the events described above, but no reference is made to influential ranks held by prominent forebears, so it is impossible to know for sure.Footnote 101 However, the social, material, and political benefits that emerged from putting his religious expertise at the service of Nadir Shah allowed him to perpetuate a family dynasty on his own merit. Following the execution of Nizam al-Din Husayni in 1785,Footnote 102 Hadi Khwaja was elevated to his deceased colleague's recently vacated chief judgeship (qāżī-yi kalān) and was appointed shaykh al-Islam,Footnote 103mudarris/akhūnd Footnote 104 of the prestigious Kokaltash madrasa, and personal tutor of Shah Murad Manghit (r. 1785–1800).Footnote 105
Hadi Khwaja's son, Muhammad ʿAtaʾ Allah (d. 1795–96) became a force in his own right, certainly in no small part due to the fact that his father managed to pass on all three of his major positions: shaykh al-Islam, qāẓī-yi kalān, and mudarris of Kokaltash.Footnote 106 Not only was he connected to the new crop of elite scholars embroiled in the rise of the Manghit dynasty through his father, he was also a disciple of Muhammad Siddiq, a member of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya who emigrated from India and rose to the top of the Dihbidi branch of order.Footnote 107 Moreover, ʿAtaʾ Allah was inducted into that order by the aforementioned Eshan Imla, whose role in the Nadir Shah conversion legend eclipsed that of Hadi Khwaja in some accounts.Footnote 108 Suggestively, Eshan Imla's legacy does not seem to extend much past his own lifetime, and the sources do not speak of any heirs to his legacy from his own family. In contrast, hagiographical sources make much of ʿAtaʾ Allah taking up Eshan Imla's spiritual legacy. One such source states that when ʿAtaʾ Allah was fifteen years old, his father, Hadi Khwaja, entrusted him over to Eshan Imla, stating: “Muhammad ʿAtaʾ Allah is your servant [ghulām].” To this, Imla responded: “ʿAtaʾ Allah is my child.” Thus ʿAtaʾ Allah was symbolically adopted into the genealogy of Eshan Imla, who was also held to have participated in the legendary conversion of Nadir Shah.
Just as Hadi Khwaja had passed on his authority to his offspring, ʿAtaʾ Allah ensured that the family's prestige lived on in future generations.Footnote 109 ʿAtaʾ Allah's son Rahmat Allah was appointed raʾīs, then mudarris,Footnote 110 and ultimately succeeded his father as shaykh al-Islam. Fittingly, one of the madrasas in which Rahmat Allah taught was none other than Damulla Muhammad Sharif—the very institution that had been endowed by Eshan Imla's follower using the treasure given by Nadir Shah.Footnote 111 He also tapped into the memory of the conversion narrative from another direction by marrying the daughter of one of the attested participants in the Council of Najaf.Footnote 112 Rahmat Allah's promising career was cut terminally short by some variety of plague (al-wabāʾ al-ʿām) in 1807–8,Footnote 113 but not before the Turkic–scholarly alliance was cemented with a marriage between Rahmat Allah and one of Shah Murad's daughters.Footnote 114
Rahmat Allah's untimely demise did not, however, spell the end of Hadi Khwaja's legacy, as ʿAtaʾ Allah's other son, Eshan Sharif Khwaja, inherited all of the positions held by his forebears: qāżī-yi kalān, shaykh al-Islam, mudarris/akhūnd of Kokaltash madrasa,Footnote 115 and personal tutor of the khan, in this case Nasr Allah (r. 1827–60), who appointed him at the astonishingly young age of thirty-five.Footnote 116 Sadr Ziyaʾ noted the poetic symmetry between the Manghit dynasty and Hadi Khwaja's line thusly: “These three renowned members of the ʿulamaʾ of a single hue (bi'yak'rang) and of a single repose (bi-yak'qarār) were in the respective ages of three powerful shahs appointed to great ranks and mighty titles.”Footnote 117
Hadi Khwaja's prestige continued to elevate his descendants even after Eshan Sharif Khwaja's death. Eshan Sharif Khwaja's son, Buzurg Khwaja, served Amir Muzaffar (r. 1860–85) in the most serious way possible by taking up arms and joining the Bukharan military resistance against the Russian Empire, which was ultimately quashed in 1868. He was rewarded for his service with the rank of ṣadr (an honorary title) and the position of muḥtasib (sometimes translated as “censor”).Footnote 118 Another son, Fayz Allah Khwaja, served as military mufti (muftī-yi ʿaskarī) and was granted the rank of ṣudūr (another honorific).Footnote 119
As with Nadir Shah's conquest, the Russian subjugation of Bukhara altered the political landscape, once again creating new opportunities for new families of scholars. As Stéphane Dudoignon has demonstrated, the Russian-enabled Bukharan conquest of the mountainous eastern provinces resulted in the influx of scholars from territories such as Kulab. The presence of these new competitors, particularly the descendants of Ibn Bayza Khatlani, allowed the amir greater leverage over more established lineages such as that of Hadi Khwaja.Footnote 120 Until the Bolshevik conquest of Bukhara in 1920, the Bukharan amirs tended to rotate the position qāżī-yi kalān between the descendants of Ibn Bayza Khatlani (the Kulabi faction) and Sadr Ziyaʾ’s Bukharan faction of ʿulamaʾ—the latter of which was separate from that of Hadi Khwaja, but similarly rooted in Bukhara. In this context the relinquishment of Hadi Khwaja's family hold on Bukhara's top positions open to the ʿulamaʾ is understandable. However, it is worth noting that Sadr Ziyaʾ’s maternal grandfather, Sabir′jan, was one of Hadi Khwaja's students, so the two lines were intertwined in terms of intellectual pedigree.Footnote 121
Even if the top judicial positions were dominated by other families of ʿulamaʾ during the colonial period, Hadi Khwaja's successors were hardly left out in the cold. The seal of a third, perhaps younger son of Eshan Sharif Khwaja, Muhammad ʿAlim Khwaja, turned up on court documents he stamped as a qāżī in Charjuy and Qarshi during the 1880s, having attained the honorary rank of ṣudūr.Footnote 122 Likewise, ʿAbd Allah Khwaja “Tahsin” carried on the tradition of his uncle (several steps removed) Fayz Allah Khwaja by holding the post of military mufti (muftī-yi ʿaskarī) during the reign of ʿAbd al-Ahad Khan Manghit (r. 1885–1911), though he was descended from Hadi Khwaja via Rahmat Allah's line rather than Eshan Sharif Khwaja.Footnote 123 He was also employed on the qāżī circuit, serving as judge in the provinces of Wabkand and Waghanza, and was honored with the rank of urāq—as well as ṣudūr and ṣadr—during the course of his career.Footnote 124
If one considers Hadi Khwaja's intellectual and patronage ties comprehensively, his legacy remained vibrant well into the colonial period. Although his last direct descendent to hold the top judicial post appears to have been his grandson, the aforementioned Eshan Sharif Khwaja, one of Hadi Khwaja's students—Damulla ʿInayat Allah Khwaja “Qazi-yi Kalan Taht-i Minari” (Chief Judge Beneath the Minaret)—rose to the position of qāżī-yi kalān under Nasr AllahFootnote 125 and had assumed the full suite of top posts (shaykh al-Islam, mudarris/akhūnd of Kokaltash madrasa) by the reign of Amir Muzaffar (r. 1860–85).Footnote 126 Like his predecessors, he cemented his political alliance with the khan by personally tutoring Amir Muzaffar.Footnote 127
Hadi Khwaja's line—both intellectual and familial—truly did constitute a dynasty in its own right, passing on spiritual authority like a baton for well over a century. As with other family dynasties, genealogies and hagiographies emphasized his family's descent from the Prophet and individual achievements. The legendary conversion of Nadir Shah served as one further pillar buttressing the family's authority, anchoring the lineage to a particular place (the Charbakr shrine outside of Bukhara, by the conversion narrative's final incarnation), and burnishing its Sunni-Hanafi credentials in an age when sectarian boundaries between Sunni and Shiʿa were sharpening. All of Hadi Khwaja's successors accessed this foundational event through the production and reproduction of texts, which genealogically connected later members of the scholarly dynasty to their forebears, collapsing chronology just as the narrative itself collapsed geography.
CONCLUSIONS
The Afsharid Empire proved ephemeral, but Persianate Eurasia's “even longer” 19th century was in many ways defined by it. North of the Oxus, the conquest marked the end of the appanage system characterized by Chinggisid rule. South of the Oxus, the territories of Afghanistan emerged as independent units, rather than frontiers of the Iranian and Indian political orbits (also due in no small part to the vacuum created by Anglo–Russian imperial rivalry). New dynasties such as the Durranis, Qajars, Manghits, and Qongrats engaged in expansion and state building, and the ensuing century was characterized by an overlapping tapestry of independent and semiautonomous city-states. The transformative impact of the Afsharid Empire extended beyond geopolitics, in Central Asia leading to increasing emphasis on shariʿa-minded religiosity by the ruling dynasty and greater reliance on the ʿulamaʾ. Meanwhile, an influx of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi proselytizers from India—reeling from the implosion of the Mughal Empire—pushed the ʿulamaʾ towards scripturalist Islam. This in turn prompted scholarly dynasties to tie their origins to Nadir Shah's conversion to Sunnism, a legend that originated from actual encounters between religious elite and the conqueror, but morphed into a defense of sectarian purity.
Upheaval brought new opportunities for patronage and consequently the establishment of new scholarly dynasties as well. Robert McChesney has remarked upon the propensity of the ʿulamaʾ to establish family dynasties thusly: “The amirs come and go, houses and dynasties rise and fall but the ulama with their intellectual traditions, schools, ideologies and disciplines continue to evolve and keep alive the contributions and legacies of the founding intellects as well as their worthiest successors down through the ages.”Footnote 128 Certainly, many families of scholars weathered even the most turbulent of crises, and Hadi Khwaja's descendants were very keen to emphasize the family's venerability, but even the most ancient of houses had to start somewhere. The auspicious alignment of stars heralded not only the rise of a world conqueror (ṣāhib qirān), but a realignment of the political and social landscape throughout the fragments of his empire.
