I
Islam In America
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?
xml=/arts/2007/08/30/borob126.xml
William Dalrymple reviews The Mughal Emperors And The Islamic Dynasties
Of India, Iran And Central Asia, 1206-1925 by Francis Robinson
In 1526 Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Turkish poet prince from Ferghana in
Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked
followers; and with him he brought some of the first cannon seen in
India. With these he defeated the Delhi Sultan and established his
garden-capital at Agra.
Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, he also wrote
one of the most fascinating diaries ever produced by a great ruler. In
its pages he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition
similar to Pepys's, comparing the fruits and animals of India and
Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions
of falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of
opium and wine.
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In time, Babur's new Mughal Empire grew to be the greatest and most
populous of all Muslim polities, with around 100 million subjects - five
times the number ruled by their nearest rivals, the Ottomans. Indeed the
Mughals were partly responsible for shifting the centre of gravity of
the Islamic world eastwards, so that today more Muslims live to the east
of Afghanistan than to its west.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore
are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation.
This was hardly an understatement: by the age of Milton, Lahore had
grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its two million
inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the
Fort, the Great Mughal ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and
Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan.
The Mughals were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in
China. For their contemporaries in distant Europe they became potent
symbols of power and wealth - connotations with which the word Mughal
(or Mogul) is still loaded.
Yet if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most powerful and
majestic, they also defined Islam at its most tolerant, pluralistic and
eclectic. Their empire was effectively built in coalition with India's
Hindu majority and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.
This was particularly true of the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who issued
an edict of universal religious tolerance, forbade forcible conversion
to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives.
At the same time that Jesuits - and those who sheltered them - were
being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, when most of Catholic
Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and while in Rome Giordano
Bruno was being burnt for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori, in India Akbar
was summoning Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and
Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujerat and
Jesuits from Goa, as well as groups of Indian atheists, to come to his
palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring
that 'no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and
anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him'.
All this is important to remember at a time when simplistic and
inaccurate notions of Islamic history and theology have wide currency,
both inside and outside the Islamic world. For Orientalists such as
Samuel Huntingdon and his master, Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman and the
Mughal empires are potent symbols of Islam at its most threatening and
aggressive.
Lewis's books consistently depict two fixed and opposed forces at work:
on one hand the West, which he envisages as a vulnerable citadel of
pluralistic and open minded Judeo-Christian civilisation; and on the
other hand, quite distinct, a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on
aggressive conquest and conversion.
Yet such simplistic binaries quickly fall apart on any sort of fair-
minded examination. Both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569-1627), for
example, were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary,
something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their
Muslim faith: over the main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar's
capital is an inscription which still bears the legend: 'Jesus, Son of
Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but
build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity;
but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is
unseen.'
Francis Robinson is one of the country's great authorities on Islamic
and South Asian history and his new book is an excellent introduction to
this often surprising world. It is no whitewash - the Emperor Timur, for
example, is depicted in appropriately blood-thirsty colours pushing his
Luristani and Armenian prisoners en masse over cliffs, and riding heavy
cavalry right over the choir of Koran-holding singing children sent out
of the town of Sivas to beg for his mercy.
Yet The Mughal Emperors remains a vital corrective to the influential
but partial and wrong-headed readings of the flag bearers of
intellectual Islamophobia such as Naipaul, Lewis and Huntingdon, all of
whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the
greatest and most varied civilisations in world history.
In an age when a working knowledge of the world of Islam is no longer a
refinement but a necessity, Robinson's book is an excellent introduction
to the history and culture of not only the Mughal Empire, but also the
other Muslim dynasties that shared their Persianate Central Asian
civilisation.
Presented as a sort of illustrated biographical dictionary to the
rulers, and arranged chronologically by dynasty, it gives a clear and
readable panorama of a sphere that needs to be far better understood if
we are ever to understand the Muslim world that impinges with ever
greater frequency on our daily lives.
xml=/arts/2007/08/30/borob126.xml
William Dalrymple reviews The Mughal Emperors And The Islamic Dynasties
Of India, Iran And Central Asia, 1206-1925 by Francis Robinson
In 1526 Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Turkish poet prince from Ferghana in
Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked
followers; and with him he brought some of the first cannon seen in
India. With these he defeated the Delhi Sultan and established his
garden-capital at Agra.
Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, he also wrote
one of the most fascinating diaries ever produced by a great ruler. In
its pages he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition
similar to Pepys's, comparing the fruits and animals of India and
Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions
of falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of
opium and wine.
advertisement
In time, Babur's new Mughal Empire grew to be the greatest and most
populous of all Muslim polities, with around 100 million subjects - five
times the number ruled by their nearest rivals, the Ottomans. Indeed the
Mughals were partly responsible for shifting the centre of gravity of
the Islamic world eastwards, so that today more Muslims live to the east
of Afghanistan than to its west.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore
are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation.
This was hardly an understatement: by the age of Milton, Lahore had
grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its two million
inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the
Fort, the Great Mughal ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and
Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan.
The Mughals were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in
China. For their contemporaries in distant Europe they became potent
symbols of power and wealth - connotations with which the word Mughal
(or Mogul) is still loaded.
Yet if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most powerful and
majestic, they also defined Islam at its most tolerant, pluralistic and
eclectic. Their empire was effectively built in coalition with India's
Hindu majority and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.
This was particularly true of the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who issued
an edict of universal religious tolerance, forbade forcible conversion
to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives.
At the same time that Jesuits - and those who sheltered them - were
being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, when most of Catholic
Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and while in Rome Giordano
Bruno was being burnt for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori, in India Akbar
was summoning Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and
Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujerat and
Jesuits from Goa, as well as groups of Indian atheists, to come to his
palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring
that 'no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and
anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him'.
All this is important to remember at a time when simplistic and
inaccurate notions of Islamic history and theology have wide currency,
both inside and outside the Islamic world. For Orientalists such as
Samuel Huntingdon and his master, Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman and the
Mughal empires are potent symbols of Islam at its most threatening and
aggressive.
Lewis's books consistently depict two fixed and opposed forces at work:
on one hand the West, which he envisages as a vulnerable citadel of
pluralistic and open minded Judeo-Christian civilisation; and on the
other hand, quite distinct, a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on
aggressive conquest and conversion.
Yet such simplistic binaries quickly fall apart on any sort of fair-
minded examination. Both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569-1627), for
example, were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary,
something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their
Muslim faith: over the main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar's
capital is an inscription which still bears the legend: 'Jesus, Son of
Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but
build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity;
but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is
unseen.'
Francis Robinson is one of the country's great authorities on Islamic
and South Asian history and his new book is an excellent introduction to
this often surprising world. It is no whitewash - the Emperor Timur, for
example, is depicted in appropriately blood-thirsty colours pushing his
Luristani and Armenian prisoners en masse over cliffs, and riding heavy
cavalry right over the choir of Koran-holding singing children sent out
of the town of Sivas to beg for his mercy.
Yet The Mughal Emperors remains a vital corrective to the influential
but partial and wrong-headed readings of the flag bearers of
intellectual Islamophobia such as Naipaul, Lewis and Huntingdon, all of
whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the
greatest and most varied civilisations in world history.
In an age when a working knowledge of the world of Islam is no longer a
refinement but a necessity, Robinson's book is an excellent introduction
to the history and culture of not only the Mughal Empire, but also the
other Muslim dynasties that shared their Persianate Central Asian
civilisation.
Presented as a sort of illustrated biographical dictionary to the
rulers, and arranged chronologically by dynasty, it gives a clear and
readable panorama of a sphere that needs to be far better understood if
we are ever to understand the Muslim world that impinges with ever
greater frequency on our daily lives.