ISLAMIC SOCIETIES

TO THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
A GLOBAL HISTORY

IRA M. LAPIDUS
University of California, Berkeley
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Lapidus, Ira M. (Ira Marvin)
Islamic societies to the nineteenth century: a global history / Ira Lapidus.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-51441-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-73298-7 (paperback)
1. Islamic countries – History. 2. Islamic civilization 3. Islam – History. I. Title.
DS35.63.L36 2012
909′ .09767–dc23 2011043732

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ISBN 978-0-521-73298-7 Paperback

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 CHAPTER 36

ISLAMIC EMPIRES COMPARED

Each of the Islamic empires of West and South Asia – the Safavid, the Ottoman, and
the Mughal – had a unique history, but the three had many features in common.
They were all built on the combined heritage of past Middle Eastern imperial
Islamic societies and the heritage of Inner Asian, Mongolian, and Turkic political
institutions. In the Iranian tradition government was entrusted to hereditary rulers.
The Turkish conception of society was based on military competition. Rulership
in Turkish society was achieved by victory in battle and was maintained by active
struggle against rivals. In the three empires, Iranian traditions of kingship, social
hierarchy, and justice were combined with Turkish concepts of mythical heroes
and glorious ancestors.
Whereas Mongol and Timurid precedents called for partitioning an empire
among the sons of the ruler and allowed them to fight one another for power, the
Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals established, with some exceptions, a routinized
dynastic succession. Each empire was built around a patrimonial or household
government, elements of a centralized bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal assignment of
tax revenues to support the military and to carry on local administration, and finally
the extensive farming out of tax collection and other governmental functions to
create patronage networks that bound soldiers, provincial officials, and local nota-
bles to the central government. All three empires had the support of royal armies
(sometimes slave military forces and sometimes lower-class recruits), bureaucratic
personnel, provincial feudal and tribal notables, landowners, merchants, and reli-
gious elites. There were important differences in the weight and balancing of the
several bases of imperial power. The Ottomans probably had the most centralized
regime; the Mughals were notably more patrimonial and less bureaucratic; the
Safavid regime, the most patrimonial, was dependent on religious prestige and on
the support of administrative and tribal notables. From the fourteenth century, the
Ottomans relied on slave military forces; the Safavids introduced such forces in the

538
 Islamic empires compared 539

sixteenth century, but the Mughals by and large depended on freeborn Muslims
and Hindus.
The empires ruled diverse populations. The Ottoman Empire ruled over many
religious (Muslim, Jewish, and Christian) and ethnic (Greek, Romanian, Hungarian,
Tatar, Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic) groups. Armenians, Georgians, Turks, and
Afghans, as well as Persians and other ethnic and tribal peoples, made up the
Safavid population. The Mughal Empire embraced Hindus and many ethnic and
language groups.
The three great Asian-Muslim empires shared a common history and indeed
many elements of a common culture. They were the heirs of central Asian, Turkish,
Mongol, and, in particular, Timurid traditions of conquest and rule. Osman, Isma!il,
and Babur, the founders of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires respectively,
traced at least part of their lineage to earlier Turkic commanders or rulers, spoke a
Turkic dialect as their native language (Osman, Oghuz Turkish; Isma!il, Azerbaijani
or Azeri Turkish; and Babur, Turki or Chaghatay Turkish), and led Turkic troops
in conquests.
They all derived their historical legitimization from a mixture of pre-Islamic
Iranian, Roman, and Turko-Mongol imperial traditions. The rulers depicted them-
selves as conquerors (ghazis) in the name of Islam for their victories over Chris-
tians, Hindus, or heretical Muslims. They adopted the ancient Iranian titles of shah,
padishah or shahanshah. The Ottoman claim to power was enhanced by their
conquest of Constantinople and later of Egypt and the holy cities of Arabia, which
made them caliphs as well as Caesars. The Safavids leaned more heavily on the
religious claim to be Sufi masters, representatives of the imam, and infallible guides
to salvation.
All three empires perpetuated Persian as the high literary common language and
cultivated Perso-Islamic architecture, painting, and poetry. In urban design, they
all subscribed to the by then canonical assemblage of royal palace, Friday mosque,
bazaar, and royal tombs. They all drew on the Timurid love of gardens and garden
kiosks. The Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the !Ali Qapu and the Chihil Sutun palaces
in Isfahan, and the Agra fort and Shahjahanabad complex in Delhi were at once
residences for the imperial families, administrative centers, and pleasure resorts.
They constructed or endowed mosques, Sufi retreats, and schools; commercial
structures such as bazaars and caravanserais; and charitable institutions (such as
hospitals, kitchens, and fountains). The almost-universal design motif was a square
building with circular and/or semicircular domes.
The great Asian empires shared a common literary culture. Beginning in the
!Abbasid era and continuing through the Mongol and Timurid periods, Iranian
scholars, poets, and administrators developed a Persian-Islamic culture. Persian
language and literature became the dominant culture in the vast region from
Anatolia to Central Asia and India, linking the great Asian empires through the
travels of administrators, scholars, poets, and Sufis. Persian was the administrative
540 The global expansion of Islam from the seventh to the nineteenth century

language of the Safavid and Mughal empires and deeply influenced Ottoman court
language as well. Inspired partly by ancient Iranian and Hindu literature and partly
by Arabic literature, the empires created a rich corpus of religious literature, poetry
and stories, history, mathematics, medicine and science, political commentary, and
wisdom (adab) for educated gentlemen. The great figures in this tradition were Fir-
dawsi (d. 1020), Nizami Ganjavi (d. 1209), Sa!di (d. 1291), and Hafiz (d. 1388/89) in
Iran; Rumi (d. 1273) in Anatolia; Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (d. 1325) in Delhi; and Jami
(d. 1492) in Herat. Only in the sixteenth and later centuries did Ottoman Turkish
(literary Turkish strongly influenced by Persian) begin to displace Persian; in the
eighteenth century Urdu (Persianized Hindi written in the Arabic script) displaced
Persian as the dominant literary language in India.
In all three empires, poets were summoned to court to entertain and praise the
ruler and to compose poetry for military victories, birthdays, and royal celebrations.
Through their poetry, they expressed political, religious, and erotic concepts. From
Europe to southern India, poets used similar literary conventions, meters, rhymes,
images, and forms adapted to the particular linguistic, cultural, and political circum-
stances of each empire. The ghazal was the universal form to express courtly love,
especially the exquisite suffering of unrequited love. Firdawsi’s Shah-nama, a his-
tory of Iranian kings, and Nizami’s Khamsa, five romantic epics, were universally
admired.
Painting, mainly illustrations for literary works, was supported by emperors.
Manuscript illustration, dating back to the Persian renaissance of the !Abbasid era,
was developed by the Mongols and Timurids and enshrined in royal workshops
by the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. All the regimes patronized variations on
a common artistic heritage.

ASIAN EMPIRES AS ISLAMIC STATES

Each of the empires validated itself by the combined patronage and suppression of
Muslim religious activities and movements. All three empires sponsored schools,
mosques, Sufi retreats (khanaqas), and shrines. They appointed judges to apply
Islamic law. The Ottomans and the Safavids organized and controlled scholars
(!ulama") through state-organized hierarchies, but the Mughals patronized Islamic
scholarship without attempting to bureaucratize the scholars.
Despite the Sunni-Shi!i divide, these regimes endorsed a similar educational
curriculum. Both Sunni and Shi!i scholars agreed that knowledge was divided into
religious sciences and rational sciences. The former incorporated Quranic exegesis,
traditions, Arabic grammar and syntax, law, and jurisprudence. The latter included
logic, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. Theology could be placed in either
category. For both the Safavids and the Ottomans, law and jurisprudence were the
central subjects of study and were critical to administration. Mystical knowledge
 Islamic empires compared 541

was also cultivated in all three empires. Ibn al-!Arabi’s doctrine of the unity of
being (wahdat al-wujud) – the concept that God is the only reality and that the
created world is an emanation of the divine essence into material existence – had
followers in all the empires and beyond. The Persian poetry of Jami and later
poetry in many regional languages (such as Sindhi, Punjabi, and Bengali) diffused
his theosophy.
By the 1600s and 1700s, Ottoman scholars were emphasizing the transmitted
religious subjects rather than the rational sciences. The emphasis in the Mughal
and Safavid empires was changing from the rational sciences and mysticism to the
transmitted religious subjects (such as hadith). In all regions, Sufism was suppressed
or reoriented to stress fulfillment of worldly social obligations. In the Mughal
Empire, however, the theosophy of Ibn al-!Arabi and the pursuit of the rational
sciences was not attacked and displaced until well into the nineteenth century.
International scholarly networks linked the several empires to one another and
to the wider Islamic world. The Safavids brought Arab Shi!i scholars from Syria, the
Lebanon, and Bahrain to Iran; Shi!i families and networks spread from Iraq and
Iran to India, reaching from the coasts of the Mediterranean to central India. Sunni
scholars and Sufis were also linked in international networks. Pilgrimage and study
in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina created ties among scholars from the several
regions of the Ottoman Empire, including Arabia, Cairo, Damascus, and Iraq. The
reform (tajdid) movement was at the core of the Islamic revival and resistance
to Sufism and to the theosophy of Ibn al-!Arabi in the seventeenth and later cen-
turies. Naqshbandi Sufis maintained connections among Inner Asian, Indian, and
Arabian Muslim reformers and activists. Sufi brotherhoods were established in all
the empires, and some had branches in several regions, especially the Khalwatiyya
in the Ottoman Empire and the Qadiriyya and the Naqshbandiyya in the Ottoman
and Mughal empires.
In the decline of all three empires, tribal forces, provincial officials, and local
notables arrogated an increasing share of political power and economic resources.
Everywhere central governments were thwarted and starved by their provincial
clients, but they would come to very different fates. The Safavid Empire would
collapse in the early eighteenth century. In 1722, the Safavid dynasty was extin-
guished, and Afghan warriors took control of Iran. By the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the Mughal Empire was effectively reduced to a small North Indian state.
The Mughal dynasty would eventually be eliminated by the British in 1858. The
Ottoman dynasty was the longest lived. By the late eighteenth century, it was no
longer a military threat to other European powers, but the dynasty survived until
1924, when it was replaced by the Turkish republic.
The common factor in the demise of the empires has long been thought to
be economic competition and conquest by European powers. Yet the impact of
commerce was mixed. Although the Ottoman and Mughal regions were exposed
542 The global expansion of Islam from the seventh to the nineteenth century

to competition from European manufactures, trade with Europe also stimulated

demand for and exports of many local products. Nor was European military con-
quest the cause of their decline. The Safavids were crushed by Afghans rather than
Europeans. The Mughal Empire was dismembered by both regional powers and
the British. The Ottomans were most exposed to European encroachment, but the
empire maintained its territorial core until World War I. In the decline and fall of
these empires, internal factors played the critical role.