The Islamic empires of the early modern world

GIANCARLO CASALE

In March 1591, a great battle took place at Tondibi, an important trading centerjust upstream from Timbuktu on the Niger River. On one side of the battlefield stood the rested and well-provisioned army of the Songhay ruler Askia Ishaq II, who had assembled a force of at least 10,000 troops—and by some accounts many times that number—to defend his kingdom from foreign invasion.

Thus, to any independent observer, the odds must have seemed to heavily favor the Songhay as the Battle of Tondibi commenced. And yet, like so many equally lopsided encounters from the history of European imperial expansion, it was not the native Songhay but the Moroccan invaders who were destined to emerge victorious. For although they found themselves outnumbered, exhausted and in unfamiliar territory, Juwdar Pasha's men also arrived at Tondibi with an important advantage: large quantities of gunpowder weapons, including muskets, mortars and even a battery of English artillery. Against an opposing army brandishing cudgels, arrows and poisoned-tipped javelins, the outcome of the battle was hardly ever in doubt.

The decisive role of gunpowder was not the only similarity between this Moroccan expedition and the contemporary imperial ventures of the Spanish and Portuguese, Dutch and English. Like them, the Moroccan campaign involved the conquest of a remote and previously inaccessible part of the world (in this instance, accomplished by crossing the desert rather than the sea).

So why, then, is the history of the Moroccan conquest of Niger nowhere to be found in standard narratives of early modern imperial expansion? Tempting as it may be to blame “Eurocentrism,” this explanation does not do justice to the depth of the problem. For, if anything, specialists of Islamic history have proven even less likely to take the Battle of Tondibi into account. Instead, following a long-established scholarly convention, their overwhelming focus has been on the accomplishments of the three early modern Muslim states traditionally deemed worthy of the label “empire”: the Mughals (or Timurids) of India, the Safavids of Iran and the Ottomans of the eastern Mediterranean.

When speaking of the Islamic empires, we are therefore faced with two basic quandaries that the example of Morocco helps to bring into stark relief. First, by too closely associating the history of the entire early modern Muslim world with the historical experience of only three “empires,” we risk over­simplifying a story that is in fact a good deal more geographically extensive, culturally diverse and politically dynamic than might otherwise be imagined. Second, by defining these three empires as first and foremost “Islamic,” we risk exaggerating the extent to which they should be considered, in certain fundamental or predictable ways, distinct from other early modern empires that were not Islamic.

Chronology, geography and demography

For all its limitations, one of the most compelling arguments in favor of Islamic empires as a category is that the early modern centuries as a whole are very much defined by the process of imperial expansion. At the beginning of the period, say around the year 1450, an imaginary traveler making the overland voyage from Europe to China would necessarily have passed through a bewildering number of small and parochially defined states—to such an extent that it was extremely unusual for someone to even attempt such a voyage. But by the year 1600, the entire middle belt of the globe (including, by this point, the New World) had been encompassed by just a handful of very large empires, all aware of each others' rival claims to imperial status and, to a greater or lesser extent, in direct contact with one another.

Within the confines ofWestern history, the turn of the sixteenth century is considered the moment in which this “Age of Empires” began, its origins heralded by the earliest Spanish conquests in the New World and simultan­eous Portuguese colonization of the Indian Ocean. Less often noted, how­ever, is the fact that these same years marked a moment of remarkable political transformation across the Muslim world as well, during which virtually all of the leading states of the early modern period first took shape.

In Iran, for example, the history of the Safavid Empire began with the enthronement of the teenaged Shah Ismail in 1501. Just three years later, the Mughal state was born with Babur's conquest of Kabul in 1504. Still further afield, the Shaybanid Khanate of Central Asia, the Sa‘adi dynasty in Morocco, the Sultanate of Aceh in insular Southeast Asia, and even the remote but formidable Kanem-Bornu Sultanate in Africa's Lake Chad region all owe their genesis to the same handful of decades clustered around the year 1500.

Thus, the early modern period should be considered an Age of Empires in a truly global sense, as political life across both the Old and New Worlds was redefined by the emergence of a dynamic and interactive system of compet­ing trans-regional states. And far from lying at the political margins of this process, the lands of Islam found themselves at the vital center of this imperializing world. With the possible exception of Spain (and, by some criteria, Muscovy), the states that witnessed the most impressive territorial and demographic expansion, at least through the mid-seventeenth century, were not the empires of Europe, but rather the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids.

At the same time, however, there existed such disparities in territory and demography among these three states that one wonders whether they can all

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13.i Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires

be meaningfully included in the same category. In the Mughal Empire, population estimates from the early seventeenth century run well upwards of ιoo million people, comprising nearly a fifth of the world's total and placing Mughal India on a par with Ming China as early modern humanity's most populous state. But the Ottoman Empire, while encompassing a roughly equivalent geographical area, was much more sparsely settled, with at most 25 to 30 million inhabitants.

These disparities are matched by another area of marked demographic divergence: the percentage of these empires' subjects who were actually Muslims. In the ostensibly Islamic state of Mughal India, for example, Muslims were never more than a sizeable minority, living together with a heterogeneous population of which the diverse group termed “Hindus” were the most numerous. In the Ottoman lands, Muslims probably remained a minority until some point in the sixteenth century, when a combination of conversion and territorial expansion tipped the overall demographic balance in their favor, although Orthodox and Armenian Christians continued as the majority in many parts of the empire. Safavid Iran is once again an outlier, the only one of the three states with a large Muslim majority from the beginning. But even the Safavids ruled, throughout their history, over significant minorities of Jews, Zoroastrians and Armenian Christians.

Finally, what of the many Muslims who lived outside of these three states? Here, population figures range from speculative to non-existent. But allowing for such uncertainty, it still seems likely that the population of Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, China and particularly Southeast Asia were in the aggregate equal to or possibly larger than the total Muslim population of the Mughal, Ottoman and Safavid states. In other words, even at the period of their greatest extent, most of the world's Muslims probably lived outside of the three Islamic empires, just as most of the people who lived inside these empires, when counted in the aggregate, were not Muslim.

Thus, rather than Islam per se, it is the ability of these empires to accom­modate and in some instances even to encourage confessional diversity under Islam's banner that stands as a hallmark of their rule. This confessional diver­sity is also perhaps their most striking contrast with the states of early modern Europe and their colonies in America.

Land tenure, state revenues and imperial elites

If there is one key to explaining these empires' success in maintaining their rule over such diverse populations, it can be found in their unique system of land tenure, an area in which—in contrast to the realms of demography and geography—all three empires display a high degree of cohesiveness. This system fundamentally shaped the ways in which both political and economic power were organized across their territories. But in order to understand how, we must first temporarily lay aside our own modern expectations—and terminologies—about what constitutes “ownership” and “property.”

Unlike the norms governing ownership of agricultural land most common in the early modern West, the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids all employed a land tenure system that might be described as a three-leveled “layer cake,” according to which legal title to the land, the right to collect rent and the right to actually use the land were intentionally kept separate. At the top of this layer cake was the state itself, to which many categories of agricultural land were deemed to exclusively belong. Ironically, however, this exclusive form of titular ownership deprived the state of one of the most important privileges normally associated with owning land: the right to sell it to someone else. Meanwhile, at the bottom layer were the peasants who actually occupied the land. Since they were often not owners of their plots in a legal sense, they too were deprived of the ability to buy and sell them. But what they did enjoy were usufruct rights to work the soil and, in most cases, to pass their plots on to their descendants in perpetuity. So they too, in their own way, could claim a certain “inalienable” right to the land.

Finally, between these two layers lay the class with the most tenuous claims to landed property: the rent collectors, who enjoyed the privilege, but not the right, of extracting a pre-established surplus (either in cash or in kind) from a given tract. In some ways, their position was not so different from that of the landlord of a modern rent-controlled apartment. But unlike a landlord, they had no actual title to any property, and their claims to revenue were neither permanent nor inheritable. Instead, their revenue assignments were granted—and could be altered, augmented or revoked—at the ruler's pleasure. Even life-term appointments, while by no means uncommon, were rendered null and void upon the death of a sovereign unless reconfirmed by his successor.

For obvious reasons, this system provided central governments with an unusual amount of control over the distribution of revenues from agricul­ture, far and away the largest and most productive sector of the economy in each of the three empires. And it is therefore no surprise that agricultural revenue assignments became the primary mechanism used by the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids to pay their soldiers, staff their bureaucracies and otherwise finance their imperial infrastructures.

In the Ottoman case, the best documented of the three, the basic unit of land assignment was known as a timar, and was put to work in the following way: at the initial conquest of a given territory, a cadastral survey would be carefully conducted and the land divided up, with each timar receiving a particular designation, based on its size, which corres­ponded to a specific pay grade in the Ottoman hierarchy. These would then be assigned to various individuals according to their rank, with good performance and seniority resulting in reassignment to a new timar with a higher pay grade, and poor performance resulting in the reverse. Collectively, the class of people who made their living in this way were known as the ‘askeri or “military class,” but included those in the court system, the chancellery and other professions that hardly qualified as “military” in the strict sense. Everyone else, expected to pay taxes rather than to benefit from government largesse, belonged to the re‘aya, or the “flock” of protected subjects.

We find almost exactly the same institution at work in the Mughal Empire, but expressed through a different terminology: timars were instead known as jagirs (and associated with a comparatively more intricate hierarchy of ranks), their holders were known as jagirdars, and the people under their protection were once again referred to as “the flock.” Similarly, in the Safavid state, the basic unit of assigned land was known as an iqta‘. Here, however, while the basic distinction between “the military class” and “the flock” still held, the rankings and pay grades were less elaborately organized, and the system as a whole less comprehensively implemented.

Regardless of its variant forms, the basic goal of this system was every­where the same: to ensure that the richest agricultural lands eventually reverted back to state control, thereby preventing the emergence of either a hereditary landed gentry or an independent agricultural bourgeoisie. To this end, the central governments of each empire made quite self-conscious efforts to regularly circulate to different parts of their realm the revenue assignments of their most powerful underlings, in order to prevent them from developing regional power bases, hereditary claims or independent estates that might be used to challenge the authority of the sovereign. But in doing so, they also provided the material basis for the formation of truly “imperial” elites, who became deracinated by this system from the ethnic, regional and tribal affiliations of their birth, and developed a sense of self wholly dependent on their place in an evolving imperial hierarchy.

To a considerable extent, this unique structure of land tenure was there­fore the glue that held together these large and heterogeneous states, which otherwise might have been easily pulled apart by the powerful centripetal forces of linguistic and confessional diversity. As a measure of the system's flexibility, ethnic minorities, non-Muslims, foreigners and (as we shall discuss in more detail below) even slaves were routinely integrated into the imperial elite through these revenue assignments—frequently receiving preferential treatment and rapid promotion not despite, but because of, their lack of any base of support beyond the ruler's largesse.

Equally surprising, such policies seem to have been accepted as a matter of course by even the most established insiders, among whom it was exceedingly rare to hear complaints about the concentration of ownership in the hands of the state or the deracination of local elites that this entailed. If anything, political theorists, jurists and other elite commentators of the day were prone to denounce departures from this system as instances of tyranny, and to portray the monopoly of redistributive power by the sovereign as the epitome of “just rule.”

In fact, this collective enthusiasm on the part of the three empires' elite literati presents its own set of interpretive challenges, by providing an idealized picture that, if taken at face value, can lead us to overstate both the extent to which state ownership was actually instituted and its uniform­ity. In reality, there were any number of ways that, either formally or informally, land could pass out of state control. Ordinarily, for example, state rights extended only to tilled fields of grain, not to residential dwellings, commercial real estate or land with significant capital improvements (includ­ing orchards and vineyards) that were considered private property. And even tilled fields could be permanently alienated from state control by means of the Islamic institution of the waqf or permanent pious endowment— commonly used as a sort of tax shelter by the well heeled (including powerful female landholders) in all three empires.

Beyond these legal means, sovereigns routinely entered into more informal arrangements with vassals, erstwhile antagonists and powerful underlings, along the way granting autonomy or unofficial hereditary landholding rights of various kinds as opportunity or necessity dictated. This was especially prevalent in areas controlled by tribes of pastoral nomads, since these lands— as pasturage rather than cultivated fields—in any case fell outside the purview of “state land.”

Finally, even in areas under the most direct state control, there was a tendency over the centuries to experiment with alternative forms of land tenure, including new ways of monetizing the agricultural economy. By the seventeenth century, for example, it became standard practice in the Ottoman Empire to simply auction off timars as tax farms, and then to use the proceeds of these auctions to pay soldiers and other state servants directly in cash. Thus, as in so many other aspects of Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal history, the success of the land tenure system lay in its pragmatism and flexibility, rather than any rigorous adherence to abstract principles of state ownership.

Islamic law, slave elites and “Oriental Despotism”

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the specter of “Oriental Despotism” lurked behind virtually every serious discussion of the political, social and economic histories of the early modern Islamic empires. According to this venerable paradigm, especially cherished by students of Marx and Weber, the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids stood as archetypes of a political and economic system defined by the unadulterated exercise of sovereign author­ity. Unrestrained by an independent judiciary, the institutions of civil society or any other check on their executive power, the rulers of these empires were thought capable of depriving subjects of their property, their liberty and even their lives on any pretext, thereby reducing them to a wretched status equivalent to slavery. Among other more immediately distasteful consequences, this despotic form of government was thought, in the long run, to have made impossible the accumulation of private wealth and the development of institutions necessary for a modern “rational” state, dooming their economies to stagnation and eventual collapse.

While continuing to play a powerful role in the popular imagination of the Islamic empires, “Oriental Despotism” has in recent years fallen some­what out of favor among scholars. Instead, attention has increasingly turned to the shari‘a, or Islamic law, as the key to understanding the basic patterns of social and economic life in these empires—and the reasons for their perceived divergence from the road to modern Western capitalism. According to this newly resurgent view, the shari‘a could—and did—provide a convenient legal cover for a ruler's arbitrary exercise of power (the system of “Islamic land tenure” providing a case in point). But as a divinely sanctioned legal system immutable to change, the shari‘a also thwarted development in more gentle but still insidious ways, by preserving a series of outmoded rules, customs and practices that were inimical to the emergence of a free- market economy and a modern bureaucracy. These included, to name just three of the most commonly cited examples, a prohibition on collecting interest, a refusal to recognize the legal personhood of corporations and an enforcement of strict inheritance laws that required family patrimonies to be broken apart.

Without discounting such arguments out of hand—some of which we will have occasion to return to in a subsequent section—we must carefully guard against the temptation to describe the shari‘a as a legal system inherently hostile to either property rights or economic exchange, much less as one that sanctioned despotic rule as a matter of course. Quite to the contrary, virtually all canonical interpretations of shari‘a from the early modern period emphatically prohibited a just ruler from seizing the property of his subjects (be they Muslim or non-Muslim). They also severely circumscribed the ruler's ability to impose taxes on his subjects' income, to restrict the flow of either domestic or international trade, or to levy import or transit tariffs at anything other than a fixed rate established by the shari‘a itself. Even in the realm of criminal law, the limitations on sovereign power were extreme: capital punishment, for example, was strictly forbidden for all but a handful of narrowly defined offenses (mainly limited to the categories of apostasy, adultery and sedition).

On the whole, then, the shari‘a provided subjects of the early modern Islamic empires with a range of legal protections to their lives and livelihoods that were, in many respects, decidedly more comprehensive than those enjoyed by their contemporaries in either Western Europe or East Asia. In fact, rather than giving free rein to despotic rule, the considerable set of legal restrictions imposed by the shari‘a required Muslim rulers who wished to circumvent them to resort to an institution that is among the most disorienting from the modern perspective: slave elites.

For all its counterintuitive qualities, the basic principle behind elite slavery is relatively simple. Since slaves were not afforded the same legal guarantees as their free-born compatriots, those who belonged to the ruler were com­pletely subject to his authority. Unlike free men and women, slaves could not marry or produce legitimate offspring without the sovereign's permission, could be punished or even summarily executed at his pleasure and, unless emancipated, could expect all of their property to revert to his possession upon their death.

But crucially, this lack of legal rights did not imply the kind of degraded social standing that one would normally associate with slavery. Instead, as

individuals who “belonged,” in the most literal sense of the word, to the household of the ruling dynasty (including, importantly, the women of the imperial harem), royal slaves enjoyed a uniquely intimate relationship with power that, unmediated by legal restrictions, translated into an elevated status superior to that of ordinary men. In this sense, the Marxist-Weberian paradigm of the Oriental Despot, with all of its concomitant implications about the lack of individual rights or the absence of the rule of law, can be said to derive from a basic misunderstanding of the role of slavery in early modern Islamic states.

Because of the way in which this “peculiar institution” was articulated through the shari‘a, royal slavery also dovetailed with the system of Islamic land tenure in a crucial way: by providing a legal justification for the general tendency, already alluded to above, to target foreigners and other political outsiders for incorporation into the imperial elites. Specifically, the Qur'an itself unambiguously forbids the enslavement of any Muslim, as well as any non-Muslim who lives as the subject of a Muslim ruler. This meant, in theory, that slave elites had to be continually replenished from stocks of able­bodied and culturally adaptable non-Muslims who hailed from beyond the borders of the Muslim world. Juwdar Pasha, the Spanish-born slave who led the Moroccan army to victory at the Battle of Tondibi, provides us with a perfect illustration of the life trajectory of just this type of individual.

All too often, however, the need for royal slaves outstripped this inher­ently limited and unpredictable pool of recruits. As a result, rulers inevitably turned to alternative strategies to ensure a stable supply of slaves to run their empires—strategies that, in one of history's great ironies, were often themselves illegal by the standards of the shari‘a.

Perhaps the most famous example of just this type of extralegal practice is the Ottoman devsirme (literally “collection”). Beginning as early as the fourteenth century, the Ottoman state began to designate certain Christian villages of the empire, predominantly in the Balkans, as being subject to a periodic levy of young boys. These were selected according to pre­established standards of mental and physical fitness, and they were separ­ated from their families and forcibly converted to Islam. Most were then sent to live in agricultural areas of Anatolia, where they were hardened by farm work, taught to speak Turkish and then went on to become Janissaries (literally “new troops”), the Ottomans' elite military corps of slave infantry. But for the best and the brightest, a different future awaited. After another round of selection, these lucky few were sent to the Sultan's palace, where they were raised in his household, trained in the palace academy and then began a cursus honorum leading to the upper echelons of the Ottoman imperial establishment.

For nearly 200 years, from the mid-fifteenth until the early seventeenth centuries, the overwhelming majority of the Ottoman Empire's viziers, generals, naval commanders and even its architects, engineers and master artisans were products of this system, as the state systematically passed over free-born Muslims for these positions in favor of its slaves. And yet, from a strictly legal standpoint, the devfirme stood in flagrant violation of two of the most basic and inviolable Qur'anic precepts: the injunction against the enslavement of a ruler's protected non-Muslim subjects; and the prohibition against the forcible conversion of non-Muslims.

Even so, the devfirme is known to have been originally instituted—and wholeheartedly endorsed—by ranking members of the Ottoman religious elite or ‘ulema, and to have continued for generations without any serious legal challenges being raised within the empire. Furthermore, when the devfirme was eventually phased out, it was replaced by a new convention equally at odds with canonical understandings of the shari‘a: beginning in the seventeenth century, Ottoman administrators began to classify all members of the “military class” (composed, by this time, predominantly of native Muslims) as “slaves” (kul) simply by virtue of their service to the state. In a manner quite distinct from the original intent of the devfirme, this enabled the formation of a new, hereditary and self-reproducing class of free-born Muslims who came to monopolize the Ottoman bureaucratic and military establishment—but who, in exchange for these privileges, became subject to confiscation and to summary execution at the Sultan's will.

Fascinatingly, we find service to the state being used in almost exactly the same way to justify the dispossession and summary execution of jagirdars and other members of the elite in the contemporary Mughal Empire. But in the Mughal case, while it was equally common for elites to celebrate their devotion and total subjection to the ruler in terms of “slavery,” they seem to have done so only in a metaphoric sense, without ever feeling the need to rationalize their system with explicit reference to the shari‘a. Just how this was possible in an avowedly Islamic state is a subject that we are now ready to explore in somewhat more detail.

Power, sovereignty and orthodoxy

As the above discussion has hopefully made clear, it is inherently misleading to think of the shari‘a as a legal system that, through its unyielding

The Islamic empires of the early modern world conservatism, dependably served as a buttress for authoritarian rule. At the times and places in which it did serve this function, it did so only by means of a considerable amount of flexibility and creativity on the part of its practi­tioners. And because it could just as easily be turned against sovereigns to impose limitations on their autonomy, rulers had every incentive to look for alternative bases for their legitimacy—and to fall back on the shari‘a only when these proved inadequate.

Of these alternatives, the first in importance can be labeled “Messianism,” with the proviso that the Messiah of early modern Islam was associated with divinely inspired leadership in this world (in the model of the Prophet Muhammad) rather than eternal salvation in the next world (in the model of Christ). The resulting possibilities for messianic politics were therefore wide ranging, and are particularly well illustrated in the rise to power of Shah Ismail I, the scion of a distinguished line of Sufi mystics before he became the founder of the Safavid dynasty. Ismail's political career, in fact, began early in life when he was hailed by followers as the Mahdi or “rightly guided one,” a messianic figure sent by God to restore justice and, through his divinely inspired rule, usher in a new and everlast­ing age of peace and prosperity. This extraordinary status allowed Ismail, at least for a time, to claim a kind of transcendent authority that rendered the shari‘a—a legal system designed for a world of imperfect men and equally imperfect rulers—obsolete.

By its very nature, Messianism provided a powerful but volatile basis for legitimacy, heavily dependent on individual charisma and difficult to main­tain across generations (or even over the lifetime of an individual ruler). This volatility naturally led sovereigns to consider a second alternative, which offered the promise of greater permanence and stability. This option, at some risk of anachronism, might be defined as “Secularism,” and counted among its earliest adopters the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed “the Conqueror.” Following his conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed began to style himself “Roman Emperor” (Kayser-i Rum) as well as “Great Khan” (Kha-Khan or Khaqan), thereby bringing together in his own personage the most important pre-Muslim imperial traditions of both the Mediterranean and the Central Asian steppe. From this basis, he then began to legislate through the Kanun, a secular legal code of his own creation drawn from a combin­ation of dynastic custom and royal prerogative. Like the millenarian claims of Shah Ismail, this provided him with a way of transcending the limitations on executive power embodied in the shari‘a. But rather than simply abrogat­ing Islamic law through his own (potentially fleeting) messianic charisma, the

Kanun offered Mehmed a way to permanently formalize his rule according to a completely separate set of codified legal principles.

Of course, Messianism and Secularism were by no means mutually exclusive foundations of sovereignty. Both provided paths around shari‘a that, with a bit of creativity, could reinforce one another. And by making appeals to universal justice or to the great imperial traditions of the pre- Islamic past, both could also serve a legitimizing function—in a way that the shari‘a alone never could—in the eyes of subjects (and foreign rulers) who belonged to faiths other than Islam. For this reason, it is in the Mughal Empire, with by far the most confessionally diverse population of any early modern state, where we find the most comprehensive and enduring combin­ation of both Messianism and Secularism.

In this Mughal synthesis, fully elaborated during the reign of Akbar “the Great” (r. 1556 to 1605), a good part of the apparatus of state was reconfigured along the lines of a devotional mystical order. Many members of the elite—of all faiths—were understood to be not merely servants of the ruler, but his spiritual disciples, pursuing a path towards mystical enlightenment through their service to his divinely inspired person. In this way, Akbar assumed a status akin to a messianic ruler, whose authority closely approximated that of Shah Ismail in Iran. But at the same time, Akbar's millenarian charisma was consolidated and bureaucratized through an elaborate set of rituals, regulations and rankings, all formalized and preserved in a massive compen­dium known as the A'in-i Akbari or “Regulations of Akbar.” In this respect, Akbar followed in the footsteps of Mehmed the Conqueror rather than Shah Ismail, by formulating an alternative legal basis for Mughal rule analogous to the Ottoman Kanun.

Due to the unusual success and longevity of this Mughal synthesis, Akbar and his descendants today enjoy a reputation for syncretism and heterodoxy, while their Ottoman and Safavid contemporaries are imagined to have been staunch defenders of Sunni and Shiite “orthodoxy.” But in reality, the confessional path of all three empires was equally winding and unpredictable, only to be straitened and sanitized in retrospect. It was through just such an act of selective memory and wishful thinking, for example, that later gener­ations of shari‘a-minded intellectuals in the Safavid Empire portrayed the antinomian millenarianism of Shah Ismail as “Shiite”—-just as they would paper over the fact that, a half century later, Ismail's grandson and namesake, Shah Ismail II, actually embraced Sunnism during his brief reign in the 1570s. In a similar vein, the earliest Ottoman sultans, who ruled before their empire's long and polarizing conflict with the Safavids, are known to have

The Islamic empires of the early modern world openly endorsed a whole range of messianic myths and ritual practices that their own religious establishment would later denounce as “Shiite heresy.” And like both the Mughals and the Safavids, the Ottomans too, as they bobbed and weaved around the constraints of the shari‘a, rarely hesitated to draw from the language and ritual of Sufi mysticism.

In consequence, rather than imagining these empires as defined from their inception by Sunnism, Shiism or syncretism, these categories should be understood as the outcome rather than the starting point of a shared process of inter- and intra-state legitimation—in much the same way that the distinc­tion between “Catholic” and “Protestant” emerged, during exactly the same centuries, out of the competitive state system of the early modern West. In each of the three Islamic empires, in fact, we can identify a strikingly parallel historical trajectory, as the heterodoxy and experimentation of early periods gradually gave way to an emphasis on conservatism and uniformity in later years.

Thus, in Safavid Iran, the ecstatic millenarianism of Shah Ismail was eventually transformed into the legalistic and bureaucratic Shiism of Shah Abbas—turning Iran, in the process, into a predominantly Shiite society for the first time in its history. In the Ottoman Empire, the eclectic “secularism” of Mehmed the Conqueror gradually gave way to an ideology in which enforcing the shari‘a—and defending it from the pernicious influence of Shiism—became the essential raison d’etre of the Ottoman state. And in Mughal India, the famously ecumenical and charismatic rule of Akbar would eventually succumb, during the second half of the seventeenth century, to the comparatively austere and shari‘a-minded Sunni legalism of his great-grandson Aurangzeb.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the long-term consequences of this shared path to state-sponsored orthodoxy, which permanently redefined the terms of Muslim religious and political identity in ways that are rarely acknowledged today. Far from being a primordial aspect of Muslim society— or, for that matter, a recent construct of colonial Western modernity—it was in the early modern Islamic empires in which the all-encompassing, overtly politicized and oppositional dichotomy between Sunnis and Shiites was first given modern form.

Gunpowder empires and the military revolution

Alongside Islamic land tenure, Oriental Despotism and Islamic law, there are few subjects more closely associated with the early modern Islamic empires

than gunpowder. Indeed, for a previous generation of historians, these three states' technical mastery of gunpowder weapons was considered their signature achievement, explaining their collective success to such an extent that they were frequently referred to as the “gunpowder empires.” More recently, scholars have raised doubts about these weapons' singular import­ance, emphasizing instead the three empires' continued reliance on more traditional military units (such as heavy cavalry), as well as their highly developed competence in the more prosaic realms of logistics and supply. Even so, there is little room to dispute that the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids all proved early and enthusiastic adopters of gunpowder weapons, inevitably reshaping both the nature of their own power and their relation­ship with the world beyond their respective borders.

As the most precocious of the three empires, it is hardly a surprise that the Ottomans were at the vanguard in embracing this new technology. There is firm evidence that the Ottomans' famed Janissary corps began making regular use of matchlocks by the early fifteenth century, thereby boasting pride of place as the first firearm-wielding standing infantry unit of any early modern state—Muslim or otherwise. This went hand-in-hand with the Ottomans' systematic adoption of siege artillery in the decades that followed, allowing them not only to breach the walls of Constantinople in 1453, but of dozens of other fortresses throughout the Balkans and Anatolia thereto­fore considered “impregnable.” By the turn of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had also added field artillery to their arsenal, using it to devastating effect in their victory over the Safavids at Caldiran (1514) and their subsequent conquest of Mamluk Egypt (1517).

Once introduced by these campaigns to the Ottomans' eastern neighbors, it is astonishing how quickly these weapons, and even the basic tactics with which they were deployed, spread to the farthest corners of the Islamic world. During the mid-fifteenth century, for example, the Hungarian field commander John Hunyadi had famously foiled the Ottomans' cavalry charges by deploying field guns behind a circle of fortified wagons (a tactic Hunyadi had himself adopted from teams of Austrian gunners). A half century later, at the Battle of Caldiran, the Ottomans themselves successfully adopted this same formation to rout the Safavid cavalry. But a mere decade after Caldiran, at the Battle of Panipat in 1526, Babur used exactly the same tactic in his decisive victory over Ibrahim Lodi, thereby consolidating Mughal rule in north India.

By this time, gunpowder weapons had become widespread enough—and desirable enough—to serve as the engine for an entirely new kind of

The Islamic empires of the early modern world internationalized “gunpowder diplomacy.” After their defeat at Qaldiran, for instance, the Safavids began to rapidly acquire their own arsenal, initially relying on renegades from the Ottoman army and later seeking help from Portugal and Venice. Their success prompted their rivals to the north, the Uzbeks or Shaybanids of Central Asia, to respond in kind, by seeking their own source of firearms through a direct alliance with Istanbul. And this, in turn, prompted a further escalation on the Safavid side, as Iran expanded its relations with foreign powers in a relentless search for more reliable and affordable sources of weapons and expertise. By the reign of Shah Abbas, these had grown to include Spain, England, Russia and even the Papacy.

Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, a similar dynamic took shape, as petty rulers throughout the region, in response to the novel threat posed by the seaborne firepower of the Portuguese, forged ties with ever-more distant powers to guarantee a continuous supply of guns and those skilled in their use. Thus, in the horn of Africa, the Emir of Zeyla became a tributary of the Ottoman sultan as early as the 1530s, thereby securing a unit of Ottoman musketeers for his ongoing war with the Negus of Ethiopia. At the opposite extreme of the Indian Ocean, the Sultan of Aceh followed the same strategy, using teams of Ottoman gunners in an attack on Portuguese Melaka in 1567. Even more dramatically, in the 1570s, an embassy appeared in Istanbul from the Kanem-Borno Sultanate on Lake Chad, leading to the introduction of gunpowder weapons in Africa's central Sahel by the following decade—an area where no gun-toting Europeans would dare to tread until the nineteenth century.

In each of these cases, gunpowder acted as the catalyst for an entirely new web of international relationships that simply had no precedent in earlier periods of history. Never before had a ruler in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa been in regular contact with Istanbul, just as no ruler of Iran had ever before sought direct military assistance from England or Spain. Against this background, gunpowder weapons must be accorded an importance as agents of global integration that far outweighed their usefulness on the battlefield. To return to the example with which we began this chapter, guns not only handed victory to the Moroccans at the Battle of Tondibi in 1591, but helped to create the world that brought them to Tondibi to begin with.

Islamic empires and the global economy

Because of its many military applications, and the consequent attention paid to it by the machinery of government, gunpowder provides an unusually

clear illustration of the ways in which Islamic empires engaged with, and were in turn influenced by, the emerging global economy of the early modern period. But gunpowder was by no means the only new product to take the lands of Islam by storm during these centuries, and the widespread adoption of many of its less combustible counterparts was to have equally profound economic and social consequences—both for the Muslim world itself, and for the larger global history of early modernity.

Maize, for example, unknown outside of the Americas before the sixteenth century, was in the Old World first cultivated as a large-scale commercial crop in Egypt, such that it became known in most European languages as “Turkish Grain.” Tobacco, another New World commodity, grew equally deep roots in the Islamic world from an early date, to the extent that, five centuries later, a leading brand of American cigarettes continues to sport a “Turkish” dromedary as its inimitable trademark. Opium, despite a much older history of cultivation in India and the Middle East, reached equally unprecedented levels of popularity in the early modern period, where it could be smoked in the same new-fangled contraptions—and in the same disreputable establishments—that catered to users of tobacco. And coffee, originally brewed by medieval Sufis of the southern Red Sea to enhance their mystical rites, was similarly transformed into a product of mass consumption in the sixteenth century, spreading from Cairo and Istanbul to the far corners of the Ottoman Empire (and from there to Iran and points farther east) in a matter of just a few decades. By contrast, coffee did not make the jump to Paris and London (and points farther west) until well over a century later.

As elsewhere in the early modern world, the introduction of so many novel sources of nourishment, pleasure and profit shook the foundations of the established order in all of the Islamic empires. In the countryside, the cultivation of new crops dramatically changed the rhythms of agricultural life. In the marketplace, the demand for new products overturned the traditional hierarchies of merchant elites. And in cities, the growing appetite for stimulants, narcotics and exotic foods led to the proliferation of coffee­houses and other venues for their public consumption.

Inevitably, these novel habits and the new modes of sociability they engendered led to sweeping re-evaluations of the standards of propriety, legality and ethical conduct inherited from the pre-modern past. Physicians, legal scholars and religious authorities were drawn into heated and surpris­ingly public debates on these issues, remarkable both for their diversity and for their pervasiveness across the Muslim world. Rulers, too, were by no means aloof from these concerns, anxious as they were about the

The Islamic empires of the early modern world implications of such rapid changes for their own grip on power. Sometimes, in fact, they took extravagant measures to root them out at the source: for a brief period in the mid-seventeenth century, the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV even went so far as to declare coffee drinking a capital offense.

But just as often, rulers found themselves attracted rather than repulsed by the dynamism of early modern commerce, and pioneered new strategies of state entrepreneurship that were typically of the age both in their reach and in their rationale. In the Indian Ocean, largely in response to the aggressive Portuguese ventures “in search of Christians and spices,” the Ottomans developed a rival commercial and military presence to protect Muslim pilgrimage routes and, in the process, secure a steady supply of spices for state-owned pepper galleys. Members of the Mughal dynasty, once they had secured their own outlets onto the Indian Ocean, invested even more directly in maritime trading ventures from their bustling port-city of Surat. And in Morocco, in reaction to the burgeoning international market for sugar, the ruling Sa‘adian dynasty declared a state monopoly over sugar exports, and aggressively expanded its cultivation throughout the sixteenth century. By the eve of the Battle of Tondibi, no less than 600,000 pounds of sugar were exported annually from Morocco to England alone—much of it exchanged directly for English artillery.

Ironically, however, the very openness that characterized the economies of the early modern Muslim world could also present systemic obstacles when it came to experimentation in at least some matters of commercial policy. In contrast to Europe (and, to a certain extent, Ming China or TokugawaJapan), where political and economic space had long been defined more parochially, the cosmopolitan commercial traditions of the lands of Islam—often directly reflected in the language of the shari‘a—made it difficult for Muslim sovereigns to legally discriminate in favor of “their” merchants and “their” markets. Instead, since a basic measure of a ruler's efficacy was precisely his ability to ensure the free and unobstructed flow of trade across borders, a whole array of policies that became standard practice in the emerging mercantilist economies of Europe, ranging from protective tariffs and “staple rights” to the imposition of medical quarantines, tended to be viewed very differently in the Islamic empires: as gross violations of the compact between ruler and subject, rather than as normal expressions of sovereign or national prerogative.

Tellingly, the instance where we see the most systematic departure from this principle of open borders is found in the one Islamic empire that, at least for a time, defined itself as juridically and confessionally distinct from its

Muslim neighbors: the Shiite state of Safavid Iran. Here, particularly during the reign of Shah Abbas I (r. 1587 to 1629), the Safavids adopted policies surprisingly reminiscent of European mercantilism, including a ban on the export of precious metals, the imposition of targeted tariffs to protect local products, a comprehensive reorganization of the silk trade as a state monopoly and, when politically expedient, a strict embargo on exports to the Ottoman Empire. By no means coincidentally, this aggressive European-style assertion of economic sovereignty was also accompanied by tumultuous social policies equally characteristic of early modern Europe, including the dispossession of religious minorities, forced conversions, heresy trials and other measures designed to enhance state power through the creation of a confessionally homogenous population.

Historians continue to debate the impact of these policies on Iran's long­term economic development—a debate complicated by the fact that they were comprehensively instituted for only a very short time. What is clear, however, is that Shah Abbas's economic strategy was in many ways sui generis, and probably only possible because of his regime's unique self­consciousness as a Shiite state surrounded and besieged by Sunni rivals. By contrast, the same period saw the Ottoman Empire's relations with Western Europe defined by the so-called “capitulations,” a series of agreements designed to ensure peaceful intercourse and the steady inflow of products by granting friendly Western nations the right to trade at a lower rate of taxation than was paid even by the Sultan's own subjects.

How to explain such laissez-faire confidence in the virtue of open borders, maintained long after the resulting cost to the economies of the lands of Islam were apparent for all to see? For historians of the twentieth century, their assumptions shaped by an age of nation-states and protected national economies, such insouciance seemed inexplicably naive, and pointed inevit­ably to the conclusion that the Islamic empires, locked into the outmoded economic mindset of an earlier “agrarian” age, were incapable of adapting to the realities of a new world dominated by commerce.

But today, as the age of national economies itself passes into history, it is difficult not to have more sympathy for early modern Islam's cosmopolitan quandary. For we too, much like the Islamic empires at the end of the early modern period, live in an age in which the world's most developed econ­omies—married to their own “orthodox” beliefs about the virtue of open borders and unobstructed commerce—watch with bemusement as their wealth and productive capacity flow relentlessly elsewhere. As the twenty- first century continues to unfold, it therefore seems likely that both the

The Islamic empires of the early modern world

successes, and the failures, of the Ottomans, Mughals and Safavids may look a good deal more modern to historians of future generations than they did to those of even the recent past.

FURTHER READING

Abisaab, Rula Jurdi, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).

Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Mughal State: 1526-1750 (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Asher, Catherine B. and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Babaie, Sussan, Kathryn Babayan, Ina Baghdiantz McCage and Massumeh Farhad, Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).

Babayan, Kathryn, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 2003).

Casale, Giancarlo, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Dale, Stephen, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Das Gupta, Ashin, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Eaton, Richard, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Floor, Willem and Edmund Herzig (eds.), Iran and the World in the Safavid Age (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012).

Goffman, Daniel, The Ottomans and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Gommans, J. J. L., Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire (London: Routledge, 2002).

Hanna, Nelly, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times ofIsma'il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse University Press, 1997).

Hattox, Ralph, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1985).

Inalcik, Halil and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Koch, Ebba, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Matar, Nabil, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Matthee, Rudolph, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silkfor Silver, 1600-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Moin, Azfar, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

Murphey, Rhoads, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

Newman, Andrew, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008).

Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988-95).

Richards, John, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Risso, Patricia, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

Smith, Richard, Ahmad al-Mansur: Islamic Visionary (London: Longman, 2005).

Streusand, Douglas, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010).

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Tezcan, Baki, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2010).