Foundation by Bābur

Although the Mongol-Timurid legacy influenced the Ottoman and Ṣafavid states, it had its most direct impact on Bābur (1483–1530), the adventurer’s adventurer and founder of the third major empire of the period. Bābur’s father, ʿUmar Shaykh Mīrzā (died 1494) of Fergana, was one among many Timurid “princes” who continued to rule small pieces of the lands their great ancestor had conquered. After his father’s death the 11-year-old Bābur, who claimed descent not only from Timur but also from Genghis Khan (on his mother’s side), quickly faced one of the harshest realities of his time and place—too many princes for too few kingdoms. In his youth he dreamed of capturing Samarkand as a base for reconstructing Timur’s empire. For a year after the Ṣafavid defeat of the Uzbek Muḥammad Shaybānī Khān, Bābur and his Chagatai followers did hold Samarkand, as Ṣafavid vassals, but, when the Ṣafavids were in turn defeated, Bābur lost not only Samarkand but his native Fergana as well. He was forced to retreat to Kabul, which he had occupied in 1504. From there he never restored Timur’s empire; rather, barred from moving north or west, he took the Timurid legacy south, to a land on which Timur had made only the slightest impression.

When Bābur turned toward northern India, it was ruled from Delhi by the Lodī sultans, one of many local Turkic dynasties scattered through the subcontinent. In 1526 at Pānīpat, Bābur met and defeated the much larger Lodī army. In his victory he was aided, like the Ottomans at Chāldirān, by his artillery. By his death just four years later, he had laid the foundation for a remarkable empire, known most commonly as the Mughal (i.e., Mongol) Empire. It is more properly called Indo-Timurid because the Chagatai Turks were distinct from the surviving Mongols of the time and because Bābur and his successors acknowledge Timur as the founder of their power.

Bābur is also remembered for his memoirs, the Bābur-nāmeh. Written in Chagatai, then an emerging Islamicate literary language, his work gives a lively and compelling account of the wide range of interests, tastes, and sensibilities that made him so much a counterpart of his contemporary, the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).

Reign of Akbar

Süleyman’s and ʿAbbās’s counterpart in the Indo-Timurid dynasty was their contemporary, Akbar (ruled 1556–1605), the grandson of Bābur. At the time of his death, he ruled all of present-day India north of the Deccan plateau and Gondwana and more: one diagonal of his empire extended from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal; the other, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. Like its contemporaries to the west, particularly the Ottomans, this state endured because of a regularized and equitable tax system that provided the central treasury with funds to support the ruler’s extensive building projects as well as his manṣabdārs, the military and bureaucratic officers of the imperial service. For these key servants, Akbar, again like his counterparts to the west, relied largely on foreigners who were trained especially for his service. Like the Janissaries, the manṣabdārs were not supposed to inherit their offices, and, although they were assigned lands to supervise, they themselves were paid through the central treasury to assure their loyalty to the interests of the ruler.

Although Akbar’s empire was, like Süleyman’s and ʿAbbās’s, a variation on the theme of the military patronage state, his situation, and consequently many of his problems, differed from theirs in important ways. Islam was much more recently established in most of his empire than in either of the other two, and Muslims were not in the majority. Although the other two states were not religiously or ethnically homogeneous, the extent of their internal diversity could not compare with Akbar’s, where Muslims and non-Muslims of every stripe alternately coexisted and came into conflict—Jacobites (members of the miaphysite Syrian church), Sufis, Ismāʿīlī Shīʿites, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuits, Jews, and Hindus. Consequently, Akbar was forced even more than the Ottomans to confront and address the issue of religious plurality. The option of aggressive conversion was virtually impossible in such a vast area, as was any version of the Ottoman millet system in a setting in which hundreds if not thousands of millets could be defined.

In some ways, Akbar faced in exaggerated form the situation that the Arab Muslims faced when they were a minority in the Nile-to-Oxus region in the 7th–9th centuries. Granting protected status to non-Muslims, even those who were not really “Peoples of the Book” in the original sense, with an organized religion of their own, was legally and administratively justifiable, but, unless they could be kept from interacting too much with the Muslim population, Islam itself could be affected. The power of Sufi ṭarīqahs like the influential Chishtīs, and of the Hindu mystical movement of Guru Nānak, were already promoting intercommunal interaction and cross-fertilization. Akbar’s response was different from that of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maḥdi. Instead of institutionalizing intolerance of non-Muslim influences and instead of hardening communal lines, Akbar banned intolerance and even the special tax on non-Muslims. To keep the ulama from objecting, he tried, for different reasons than had the Ottomans and Ṣafavids, to tie them to the state financially. His personal curiosity about other religions was exemplary; with the help of Abu al-Faḍl, his Sufi adviser and biographer, he established a kind of salon for religious discussion. A very small circle of personal disciples seems to have emulated Akbar’s own brand of tawḥīd-i ilāhī (“divine oneness”). This appears to have been a general monotheism akin to what the ḥanīfs of Mecca, and Muhammad himself, had once practiced, as well as to the boundary-breaking pantheistic awareness of great Sufis like Rūmī and Ibn al-ʿArabī, who was very popular in South and Southeast Asia. Akbar combined toleration for all religions with condemnation of practices that seemed to him humanly objectionable, such as enslavement and the immolation of widows.

Continuation of the empire

For half a century, Akbar’s first two successors, Jahāngīr and Shah Jahān, continued his policies. A rebuilt capital at Delhi was added to the old capitals of Fatehpur Sikri and Agra, site of Shah Jahān’s most famous building, the Taj Mahal. The mingling of Hindu and Muslim traditions was expressed in all the arts, especially in naturalistic and sensuous painting; extremely refined and sophisticated design in ceramics, inlay work, and textiles; and in delicate yet monumental architecture. Shah Jahān’s son, Dārā Shikōh (1615–59), was a Sufi thinker and writer who tried to establish a common ground for Muslims and Hindus. In response to such attempts, a Sharīʿah-minded movement of strict communalism arose, connected with a leader of the Naqshbandī ṭarīqah named Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī. With the accession of Aurangzeb (ruled 1658–1707), the tradition of ardent ecumenicism, which would reemerge several centuries later in a non-Muslim named Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, was replaced with a stricter communalism that imposed penalties on protected non-Muslims and stressed the shah’s role as leader of the Muslim community, by virtue of his enforcing the Sharīʿah. Unlike the Ottoman and Ṣafavid domains, the Indo-Timurid empire was still expanding right up to the beginning of the 18th century, but the empire began to disintegrate shortly after the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, when Ṣafavid and Ottoman power were also declining rapidly.

Between the 15th and the 18th century the use of coffee, tea, and tobacco, despite the objections of the ulama, became common in all three empires. Teahouses became important new centres for male socializing, in addition to the home, the mosque, the marketplace, and the public bath. (Female socializing was restricted largely to the home and the bath.) In the teahouses men could practice the already well-developed art of storytelling and take delight in the clever use of language. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa laylah), the earliest extant manuscripts of which date from this period, and the stories of the Arabian hero ʿAntar must have been popular, as were the tales of a wise fool known as Mullah Naṣr al-Dīn in Persian (Nasreddin), Hoca in Turkish, and Juḥā in Arabic. The exploits of Naṣr al-Dīn, sometimes in the guise of a Sufi dervish or royal adviser, often humorously portray centralized absolutism and mysticism:

Naṣr al-Dīn was sent by the King to investigate the lore of various kinds of Eastern mystical teachers. They all recounted to him tales of the miracles and the sayings of the founders and great teachers, all long dead, of their schools. When he returned home, he submitted his report, which contained the single word “Carrots.” He was called upon to explain himself. Naṣr al-Dīn told the King: “The best part is buried; few know—except the farmer—by the green that there is orange underground; if you don’t work for it, it will deteriorate; there are a great many donkeys associated with it.”