The Handy Islam Answer Book. John Renard
of south Asia, from Afghanistan across at least the northern two-thirds of India. Babur’s grandson Akbar (r. 1556–1605) was the patron of major cultural and religious developments effected through a vast network of international relations. Akbar’s son Jahangir and grandson Shah Jahan continued to rule in splendor. They constructed some of the world’s finest architectural creations, including the Taj Mahal, in which Shah Jahan and his wife are buried. Akbar’s great grandson Aurangzeb (1658–1707) reverted to a religiously intolerant rule and presided over the beginning of the end of Mughal glory.
How did the early Muslim conquerors of South Asia deal with the subject peoples? Did they insist on conversion to Islam?
When the first of the several waves of Muslim conquest arrived in 711 (about the same time Muslims crossed over to Gibraltar and began the conquest of Spain), General Muhammad ibn Qasim’s forces allowed the populace to retain its ancient faith traditions. As Muslims entered predominantly Hindu lands, the military commander explicitly declared that their temples would enjoy the status of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Zoroastrian fire temples already under Muslim law—that is, protected. Some three centuries later, Mahmud, Muslim ruler of Ghazna in present-day Afghanistan, conquered the region of Punjab. Even in the mid-eleventh century, Muslims remained a minority in the regions under Islamic administrations. Not until the early thirteenth century— that is, a full five hundred years after the initial Muslim conquests in the region—did the Muslim population in Northern India arrive at majority status, and this occurred primarily through natural growth rather than through forced conversion.
The Taj Mahal is a seventeenth-century tomb constructed in Agra, India, by Mughal Muslim ruler Shah Jahan as a burial place for his favorite wife.
How would one describe the “Turkic” sphere? And why not just call it Turkish?
As with all of our “spheres,” the Turkic overlaps and intersects in fascinating ways with others, especially with the Persianate and Arabicate. In the former case, the contiguity of Central Asia, Turkic ancestral homeland, fostered a natural mingling of culture and ethnicities across Persia’s northeastern boundaries; and toward their northwestern borders, Persians encountered Turkic peoples already present in the Caucasus (Khazars and Bulgars). Turkic elements entered the Arabicate sphere as early as the ninth century, originally as prisoners captured in military expeditions into Central Asia and brought back to the Central Middle East as “slave soldiers” who went on to establish themselves as independent dynasties (most notably the Mamluks). Sufi spirituality gradually replaced the traditions of Shamanism, Buddhism, and Manicheanism the Turkic peoples brought with them. As the Turkic peoples moved into Anatolia, they encountered Arabic culture in Iraq and adapted elements of Byzantine culture.
How extensive is the Turkic sphere today?
Today the Turkic sphere includes not only most of the Central Asian republics formerly under Soviet control as well as Anatolia, but parts of the Balkans to the west, and of western China to the east (especially in the province of Xinjiang). In addition, Turkic influence extended importantly into South Asia, since major Muslim rulers of late medieval India traced their legitimacy to descent from another major Central Asian source, the Mongols. The dominant law school is the Hanafi, and the Mevlevis, Naqshbandis, and Halvetis are among the most important Sufi orders. The term “Turkic” is used here because of the rich diversity of tribal and linguistic components, because the linguistic and cultural influence of the “Turks” is not limited to the use of the Turkish tongue, and because the sphere extends well beyond what is now called Turkey.
If Central Asia is the ancestral homeland of the Turkic peoples, how did Turks come to the Middle East?
A complex development started in the ninth century when Muslim Arab armies invading Central Asia began a policy of transporting young prisoners of Turkic origin back to Baghdad and other major cities to serve as palace guards. Caliphs could easily make enemies even among family and friends and found it necessary to employ troops more capable of disinterested service. Thus was born a class of people within Islamic societies, the Turkish slave soldier. From time to time the Turkish guard would rise up and take temporary control of the reins in Baghdad. On several occasions promising members of the guard would work their way up through the ranks and even be appointed to high office in a provincial post. Some took the next logical step, declaring themselves independent rulers when the caliph back in Baghdad had too much on his mind to attend to the provinces.
How did the nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh come about?
After about the mid-eighteenth century, European colonialism began to make inroads into lands formerly under Islamic regimes. Not until the mid-twentieth century did major colonial powers begin to withdraw, ceding political control back to indigenous populations. One dramatic example of that relatively recent change is the independence of India from Britain and the partition of India that created the Muslim state of Pakistan (1948), itself divided in 1971 into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Pakistan and Bangladesh are almost entirely Muslim, while the Muslim population of India constitutes the world’s largest Islamic minority. Collectively, the Indian subcontinent is home to over one quarter of the world’s Muslims.
How did the present-day state of Turkey become Turkish?
In the mid-eleventh century, a confederation of Central Asian Turkic tribes newly converted to Sunni Islam began to migrate westward, occupying the city of Baghdad in 1055. There they established the sultanate as a temporal institution parallel to the caliphate, which they had reduced largely to a position of spiritual leadership. Moving northward through Syria and into eastern Anatolia, the Saljuqid rulers launched campaigns northward against the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia. In 1071, the Turkic expeditionary force encountered a Byzantine army at Manzikert and won a decisive victory, after which a Byzantine call for help went out to Rome, resulting in the first Crusade in 1096. Under Sultan Alp Arslan (r. 1063–1072), the Turks continued their westward conquest and established their regional capital in Konya.
By the mid-twelfth century the Saljuqid tribe established its dominance under Sultan Kilij Arslan II (r. 1153–1192). Known as the Saljuqids of Rum (i.e., “eastern Rome”), they controlled central Anatolia until 1243 from Konya, amid continuing struggles for power with another Turkic group called the Danishmendids and the Byzantines. Konya became a Sufi center with a heavily Persian cultural substrate. Sufi orders facilitated the conversion of Greek and Armenian peoples to Islam.
Two important Sufi leaders were Haji Bektash, who synthesized Sunni and Shia beliefs, and Muslim and Christian practices; and Jalal ad-Din Rumi, known as a foundational figure of the so-called “Whirling Dervishes.” Mongol forces migrating through the Middle East from Central Asia invaded the area in 1242–1243. Finally, in 1280, the Saljuqid dynasty was decisively overcome by the increasingly dominant Osmali Turkic tribe, which consolidated its power through a confederation of tribes that became the basis of the Ottoman Empire.
How did the Ottomans get started as an eastern Mediterranean power?
The early Ottoman “state” arose from one of the warrior states and was led by Ertugrul (d. c. 1280) and his son Osman (aka Othman; the namesake of the Ottoman Empire). Osman’s confederation was the beginning of what would become the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman sultans generally conceived of themselves as supreme rulers of all Muslims, even if they did not claim the title of caliph. Expanding out of Anatolia in 1345, they crossed to Gallipoli (on the Dardanelles strait) and from there conquered Northern Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. In 1389 they defeated a Serbian force at the Battle of Kosovo, largely securing their hold on the Balkans. (It was in June 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of this battle, that Slobodan Milosevic declared his campaign for a “Greater Serbia” that would redress Ottoman oppression by defeating the Bosnian Muslims, regarded by Serbian nationalists as descendants of the Ottoman invaders.) In 1402, Mongol ruler Timur invaded Anatolia and temporarily slowed the Ottoman advance by making the Turks his vassals. After a brief hiatus, the Ottoman