Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History 1474417124, 9781474417129

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Islamisation

Comparative Perspectives from History

Edited by A. C. S. Peacock

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation A. C. S. Peacock, 2017 © the chapters their several authors, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1712 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1713 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1714 3 (epub)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Islamisation A. C. S. Peacock Part I Conversion and Islamisation: Theoretical Approaches 2. Global Patterns of Ruler Conversion to Islam and the Logic of Empirical Religiosity Alan Strathern 3. Conversion out of Personal Principle: ʿAli b. Rabban al-Tabari (d. c. 860) and ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman (d. c. 1430), Two Converts from Christianity to Islam David Thomas 4. The Conversion Curve Revisited Richard W. Bulliet Part II The Early Islamic and Medieval Middle East 5. What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-Century Arabia? Harry Munt 6. Zoroastrian Fire Temples and the Islamisation of Sacred Space in Early Islamic Iran Andrew D. Magnusson 7. ‘There Is No God But God’: Islamisation and Religious Code-Switching, Eighth to Tenth Centuries Anna Chrysostomides 8. Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia A. C. S. Peacock

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9. Islamisation in the Southern Levant after the End of Frankish Rule: Some General Considerations and a Short Case Study Reuven Amitai Part III The Muslim West 10. Conversion of the Berbers to Islam/Islamisation of the Berbers Michael Brett 11. The Islamisation of al-Andalus: Recent Studies and Debates Maribel Fierro Part IV Sub-Saharan Africa 12. The Oromo and the Historical Process of Islamisation in Ethiopia Marco Demichelis 13. The Archaeology of Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa Timothy Insoll Part V The Balkans 14. The Islamisation of Ottoman Bosnia: Myths and Matters Sanja Kadrić 15. From Shahāda to ‘Aqīda: Conversion to Islam, Catechisation and Sunnitisation in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Rumeli Tijana Krstić Part VI Central Asia 16. Islamisation on the Iranian Periphery: Nasir-i Khusraw and Ismailism in Badakhshan Daniel Beben 17. Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufis in the Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia Devin DeWeese 18. The Role of the Domestic Sphere in the Islamisation of the Mongols Bruno De Nicola Part VII South Asia 19. Reconsidering ‘Conversion to Islam’ in Indian History Richard M. Eaton 20. Civilising the Savage: Myth, History and Persianisation in the Early Delhi Courts of South Asia Blain Auer Part VIII Southeast Asia and the Far East 21. China and the Rise of Islam on Java Alexander Wain 22. The Story of Yusuf and Indonesia’s Islamisation: A Work of Literature Plus Edwin P. Wieringa

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contents 23. Persian Kings, Arab Conquerors and Malay Islam: Comparative Perspectives on the Place of Muslim Epics in the Islamisation of the Chams Philipp Bruckmayr 24. Islamisation and Sinicisation: Inversions, Reversions and Alternate Versions of Islam in China James D. Frankel Index

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FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 1.1 4.1 8.1 9.1

The expansion of the Dār al-Islām to c. 1700 Graph of changes in the names in the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862 Anatolia in the early thirteenth century Administrative structure of south-west Bilad al-Sham in the fourteenth century 9.2 Tentative settlement map for the region of Gaza 10.1 Arab expansion into North Africa and Spain 12.1 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa 13.1 The subdivisions of the continent of Africa 13.2 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa 13.3 Muslim tombstone, Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea 13.4 The Old City of Harar from the south-east 13.5 The mosque excavated at Harlaa 13.6 Examples of imported ceramics from Harlaa 13.7 The Western Sahel 13.8 Part of a house excavated in Gao Ancien 13.9 Funerary inscription from Gorongobo dated to 1210 13.10 The shrine of Amir Nur, Harar 14.1 The Ottoman Balkans 16.1 Central Asia 19.1 Distribution of Muslims in South Asia, 1931 20.1 Jamshid’s throne carried by Div, from Firdawsi’s Shahnama 20.2 Rustam slays the white Div, folio from a Shahnama 20.3 Bahram Gur fights the horned wolf, from the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama 20.4 Rustam kills the Turanian hero Alkus, Shahnama 20.5 Rakhsh saves Rustam from a lioness, folio from a Shahnama 20.6 Zahhak enthroned, from Firdawsi’s Shahnama 20.7 Zahhak pinned to Mountain Damavand, from Firdawsi’s Shahnama

2 73 135 163 170 191 226 245 248 249 250 252 253 255 258 259 261 278 318 381 405 406 407 408 409 410 411

figures and tables 21.1 21.2 22.1 24.1

Map of Southeast Asia Map of Java Decorated opening folios of manuscript Schoem. II 19 Sinicisation and Islamisation in China

vii 420 421 452 508

Tables 4.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 13.1 19.1

Changes in the names of males of the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862 Breakdown of Mamluk-era inscriptions in Gaza by type Types of construction, reconstruction and waqf projects in Mamluk Gaza Chronological spread of Mamluk construction inscriptions in Gaza Inscriptions from the countryside around Gaza (late Ayyubid and Mamluk periods) Settlements in the Gaza area from textual evidence Stages or phases in African Islamic conversion Changes in the names of males of the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862

72 166 167 167 168 169 246 387

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Chapters in this volume are based on contributions given at a conference of the same title held at St Andrews on 20–1 March 2015. The conference formed part of ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’ research project funded by the European Research Council (grant number 284076). The European Research Council also contributed to the costs of producing this volume, and I wish to express my gratitude for their support. I would also like to thank Dr Paul Churchill for his assistance both in organising the conference and in editing the volume. I am also grateful to the numerous specialist referees who reviewed the chapters in this volume and offered valuable comment. A. C. S. Peacock St Andrews, July 2016

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Reuven Amitai is Eliyahu Elath Professor for Muslim History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and studies and teaches the history of the premodern Islamic world and adjacent regions. From 2014 to 2016 he was a senior fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg at the University of Bonn, a DFG-funded project devoted to ‘History and Society during the Mamluk Era 1250–1517’, during which time the chapter in this volume was mostly researched and written. His latest publications include Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol Ilkhanate (1260–1335) (2013) and Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors (co-edited with Michal Biran, 2015). Blain Auer is a professor for the study of Islam in South Asia at the University of Lausanne in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He received his PhD from Harvard University in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He specialises in Islam in the context of premodern South Asia. In particular, he studies the representations of Islamic authority exhibited through the use of the Quran, hadith, exegesis and history-writing produced during the Delhi Sultanate. A second area of research focuses on the history of Indo-Persian culture. His book titled Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate was published in 2012. Daniel Beben is an assistant professor of history at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan and is a specialist in the history of Islamic Central Asia and in the Shiʿi and Sufi traditions of the Persianate world. He received his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington with a dissertation titled ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nāṣir-i Khusraw: Memory and Textualization in Early Modern Persian Ismāʿīlism’. He was previously a visiting fellow at the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University and at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. Michael Brett took his first degree in history at Cambridge in 1955. He lectured in history at the University College of Cape Coast, Ghana, 1962–5, before taking his PhD at SOAS in 1970 with his thesis on ‘Fitnat al-Qayrawan: A Study of Traditional Arabic Historiography’, and joining the Africa Section of the History Department, ix

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retiring in 2000 as Emeritus Reader in the History of North Africa. His publications include The Moors: Islam in the West (1980); (with Elizabeth Fentress) The Berbers (1996); Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib (1999); The Rise of the Fatimids (2001); and Approaching African History (2013). He has also made contributions to The Cambridge History of Africa, The New Cambridge Medieval History and The New Cambridge History of Islam. Philipp Bruckmayr is a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna. He has served as fellow and lecturer at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna), the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies of Passau University and the Institute of Ethnic Studies of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. In 2015 he was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association of Middle Eastern Studies (DAVO). He has done research on Islam in Southeast Asia, Arab and Islamic communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and post-classical linkages between Islamic theology and Sufism. His most recent publications include ‘Cambodian Muslims, Transnational NGOs, and International Justice’, in Peace Review (2015), and ‘Arabic and Bilingual Newspapers and Magazines in Latin America and the Caribbean’, in Geoffrey Roper (ed.), Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages of the Middle East (2014). Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University, where he also directed the Middle East Institute of the School of International and Public Affairs for twelve years. He is a specialist on Iran, the social history of the Islamic Middle East, the twentieth-century resurgence of Islam, the history of domestic animals and the history of land transport. His major books include The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions (2016), Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (2009), Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human–Animal Relationships (2005), The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004), Islam: The View from the Edge (1994), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979), The Camel and the Wheel (1975), and The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (1972). Anna Chrysostomides is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology and Religion. Her research covers the social dynamics of conversion between Christianity and Islam from the eighth to the tenth century ce, specifically people who vacillated between Christianity and Islam and social situations which would have engendered people identifying with both religions, such as interreligious marriage, the children of those unions, Christian mawālī of Muslims, and Christian slaves of Muslims – and their children. More general research interests include the Study of Abrahamic Religions as an academic lens, Muslim–Christian relations, diyārāt literature, women in the Umayyad and Abbasid empires, childhood in the Umayyad and Abbasid empires, and homosexuality in Islam. Marco Demichelis is a research fellow in Islamic studies and the history of the Middle East in the Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Milan. He is preparing a monograph for Gorgias Press, titled Al-Fanā an-Nār fī al-Kalām wa al-Falsafa: A Study on the Doctrine of the Annihilation of Hell in Early Islamic

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Thought, and an edited text with Dr Paolo Maggiolini, titled The Struggle to Define a Nation: Rethinking Religious Nationalism in the Contemporary Islamic World. After a PhD in the history of Islamic thought at the University of Genoa (2007–10), Dr Demichelis published A History of Arabs (2013, 2nd edn 2015), a pedagogical text for undergraduates, and, following the release of his PhD thesis, by Harmattan (2011) on the theological and political thought of the Muʿtazilite school between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Marco Demichelis’ academic articles have been published in Oriente Moderno, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Annali di Scienze Religiose, Arab Studies Quarterly, Parole de l’Orient and Archiv Orientalni. Bruno De Nicola is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His work focuses on medieval Islamic history with particular reference to the Mongol Empire. Since 2013 he has participated in the ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia’ research project (ERC grant number 284076), conducting research on the applicability of Digital Humanities to the study of Islamic manuscripts. He has published several research articles in different journals and recently co-authored (with Andrew Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz) Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (2015) and (with Charles Melville) The Mongols’ Middle East: Continuity and Transformation in Ilkhanid Iran (2016). He is author of a monograph based on his PhD dissertation, Women in Mongol Iran: The Khātuns, 1206–1335 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Devin DeWeese is a professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His research on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia focuses chiefly on problems of Islamisation, the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (1994) and (with Ashirbek Muminov) of Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, vol. 1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (2013). His most recent article is ‘It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (’til the Jadids Brought the Light): Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (2016), pp. 37–92. Richard M. Eaton, after graduating from the College of Wooster in 1962, lived in Tabriz for two years as a member of the first group of American Peace Corps volunteers to Iran. While there, he made an overland trip through India and Pakistan and became fascinated by the historical connections between South Asia and the Iranian plateau, between Islam and Indian religions, and between Persianate and Indic civilisations from roughly 1000 to 1800. His published monographs include Sufis of Bijapur: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (1978); The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (1993); Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (2005); and Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (2014). These four historical monographs respectively employ as analytical tools Weberian social thought, Annales School methodology, biography and architecture. He is currently Professor of History at the University of Arizona.

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Maribel Fierro is a research professor at the Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean (Centre of Human and Social Sciences, CSIC – Spain). She has worked and published on the political, religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, on Islamic law, on the construction of orthodoxy in premodern societies, and on violence and its representation in medieval Arabic sources. Among her recent publications: The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries (2012). She is the editor of volume 2 (The Western Islamic World: Eleventh–Eighteenth Centuries) of the The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010); Orthodoxy and Heresy in Islam: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (4 vols, 2013); with J. Tolan of The Legal Status of Dimmis in the Islamic West (2013); and with C. Adang, H. Ansari and S. Schmidtke of Accusations of Unbelief in Islam (2015). James D. Frankel holds degrees in East Asian Studies and Religion from Columbia University. His expertise is in the history of Islam in China, a field that draws upon and informs his scholarly interests in the comparative history of ideas and religious and cultural synthesis. Dr Frankel’s first book, Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Ritual Law in Neo-Confucian Chinese (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), examines Chinese Islamic scholarship and literature of the early Qing (1644–1911) period. Dr Frankel teaches on Islam, Sufism, comparative religion, fundamentalism and mysticism. He is currently on the faculty in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also directs the Centre for the Study of Islamic Culture. Timothy Insoll is Al-Qasimi Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. His research is focused on Islamic and later African archaeology with particular interests in the material culture of Islamisation, theoretical and methodological approaches to the archaeology of rituals and religions, the archaeology of medicine and healing, and the archaeology of shrines and sacrifice in Sub-Saharan Africa. The latter two were the focus of recent Wellcome Trust funded research completed in northern Ghana. Besides Ghana, he has undertaken fieldwork in Mali, Bahrain, Uganda, Eritrea, and western India, and his current field research on the archaeology of Islamisation in eastern Ethiopia is funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant. He has co-curated exhibitions in the British Museum and Manchester Museum and is an honorary curator of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. He is the author of ten monographs and editor of seven other books, and three special journal issues, and his most recent book is Material Explorations in African Archaeology (2015). Sanja Kadrić is a doctoral candidate in Islamic history at the Department of History, Ohio State University. Her work focuses on the history of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, specifically Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her current research centres on the institution of the devşirme and its past and current resonance in the Balkans and beyond. Tijana Krstić is an associate professor in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University in Budapest. She is a historian of the early modern

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Ottoman Empire interested in social, cultural and religious history, especially in circulation of texts, artefacts, people and religio-political concepts across imperial, cultural and confessional boundaries. Her first book, Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change and Communal Politics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2011), explored how various Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors narrated the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in the empire’s formative period, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Subsequently, in several articles she turned towards the early modern Mediterranean to study the experiences of Morisco refugees to the Ottoman Empire. Currently, she is the primary investigator on the project titled ‘The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–17th Centuries’ (OTTOCONFESSION), funded by the European Research Council. Andrew D. Magnusson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Oklahoma. He earned a PhD in Islamic history at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2014. Dr Magnusson’s research interests include the impact of non-Muslim communities on the construction of Muslim identity in the premodern Middle East. His dissertation, ‘Muslim–Zoroastrian Relations and Religious Violence in Early Islamic Discourse, 600–1100 c.e.’, examined the ways that medieval Muslim historians imagined the accommodation of Zoroastrians after the Islamic conquest of Iran. He is also the author of the chapter on ‘Ethnic and Religious Minorities’ in the Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture (2015). Harry Munt is a lecturer in medieval history at the University of York. His research focuses on the history of the Islamic world, in particular the history of the Arabian Peninsula, Islamic holy cities and pilgrimage, and Arabic history-writing in the early Islamic centuries. He is the author of The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (2014). A. C. S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic history at the University of St Andrews. Principal publications include Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy (2007), Early Seljuq History (2010) and The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). He is principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’ (grant number 284076). Alan Strathern is an associate professor of history at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, and previously held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge. He has published a monograph, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Sri Lanka (2007), an edited volume (with Zoltán Biedermann), Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History (forthcoming), and many articles and chapters with thematic concerns including sacred kingship, ethnic identity, origin myths, early European imperialism, global early modernity and religious typology. For the past ten years he has been working on a global comparative analysis of ruler conversions to Christianity, with major case studies including Central Africa, Japan, Oceania and Thailand, 1450–1850.

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David Thomas is Professor of Christian–Muslim Relations in the Department of Religion and Theology, University of Birmingham. He specialises in the history of religious thought in Islam and in encounters between Christians and Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. With degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Lancaster, he has experience of the Islamic world and of involvement in interreligious relations within the United Kingdom. He is chief editor of the journal Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations and Islam editor of The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter). In addition, he is director of an international research project to produce a comprehensive history of Christian–Muslim relations based on written records. This history, Christian–Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, has now reached the seventeenth century, with eight print volumes so far published. Together with Rifaat Ebied, he has also recently published The Polemical Works of ‘Ali al-Tabari. Alexander Wain obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015. A specialist in the history of Islam in Southeast Asia, his DPhil research focused on the possible role of Chinese Muslims in the conversion of the Nusantara (Maritime Southeast Asia) between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Currently, he is Research Fellow at the International Institute for Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) Malaysia. His recent publications include ‘The Two Kronik Tionghua of Semarang and Cirebon: A Note on Provenance and Reliability’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Edwin P. Wieringa is Professor of Indonesian Philology with Special Reference to Islamic Cultures at the University of Cologne. His main research interests include Javanese and Malay (manuscript) literature, traditional Indonesian historiography and Islam in insular Southeast Asia. His most recent publications include a bilingual exhibition catalogue of Indonesian manuscripts at the State Library in Berlin (co-edited with Thoralf Hanstein), SchriftSprache; Aksara dan Bahasa. Ausstellungskatalog; Katalog Pameran (2015).

1 INTRODUCTION: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON ISLAMISATION A. C. S. Peacock

T

he Arab conquests of the Middle East and much of North Africa and Central Asia in the seventh century mark the beginning of a process of religious and cultural change which ultimately resulted in the present Muslim-majority populations of almost all of these regions (see Figure 1.1). Yet the countries with the greatest Muslim populations today exist outside the Middle East in South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia constitutes the largest Muslim-populated state in the world. Islam spread far into Africa and Europe too, and significant Muslim populations also arose in parts of the world which remained mostly non-Muslim, such as China and Ethiopia. This spread of Islam is often referred to as ‘Islamisation’, a term widespread in scholarship and in recent times in more popular media. However, this single term covers a myriad of different phenomena. Naturally, the processes at work in different parts of the world, in different periods, will vary significantly according to local circumstances. How Islam came to Southeast Asia, for instance, is the topic of much debate, but it is clear that there was no invasion by a Muslim conqueror, unlike the situation in the Middle East or India. In some times and places, it was the conversion of elites that spurred the conversion of their subjects; in other circumstances, the opposite dynamic can be observed. Perhaps of greater significance is the lack of agreement among scholars as to what the term ‘Islamisation’ actually refers to, even though relatively few works actually devote much space to an extensive analysis or justification of their usage of the term. Therefore, any attempt to introduce the subject of Islamisation must first grapple with the term’s profusion of different usages. This is our starting point here, before reviewing some of those scholarly approaches themselves, and then surveying the essays in this volume. In much scholarship, Islamisation is taken to be synonymous with conversion to Islam. In the sole previous volume to attempt to take a broad comparative perspective, Conversion to Islam edited by Nehemia Levtzion (1979), five out of thirteen essays use the term Islamisation in the titles, including the introductory essay ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’.1 For Levtzion, then, Islamisation equalled conversion and there is no attempt in his introduction to problematise the relationship between 1

Figure 1.1 The expansion of Dār al-Islām to c. 1700 (adapted from Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]).

introduction

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them. The (unspoken) assumption in this and much other scholarship seems to be that conversion is what happens to individuals, whereas Islamisation refers to society more generally – not so much mass conversion as the cumulative result of conversion which may take place over the longue durée. For some scholars, however, Islamisation offers a useful alternative to the term conversion, which may be seen as referring to a sudden and dramatic process and comes laden with some baggage from its use in Christianity, as discussed below.2 In another strand of scholarship, Islamisation refers to a much broader process. In one recent definition, for example, Islamisation ‘describes the political assimilation in Late Antiquity of much of the Middle East to Islamic rule and the centurieslong process of conversion to Islam, adoption of the Arabic language, and choosing Muslim personal names rather than Arab, Persian or biblical names’.3 This definition suggests that conversion to Islam is just one aspect of a phenomenon which includes political change as well as Arabisation and acculturation. Another scholar, writing of a fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Ottoman context, defines Islamisation as ‘the process by which the religious tradition of Islam became a major factor within the Ottoman polity’.4 Here the emphasis is less on conversion to Islam, but on the establishment of Islamic norms within a broader political, social and cultural context. In this sense, Islamisation may refer not to any kind of conversion process at all, but rather to the extension of the use of Islamic institutions such as sharia law and even urban development among existing entirely Muslim populations.5 Other scholars use the term Islamisation to describe the imprint of Islamic culture on a region attested by the construction of mosques and other characteristically Muslim buildings, such as madrasas, and the adoption, translation or adaptation of Arabic religious texts such as the Quran, its exegetical tradition and the hadith. Paradoxically, as Leor Halevi points out, some of these markers of Islamisation may themselves contravene a strict traditionalist interpretation of Islam: Halevi suggests that the presence of tombstones inscribed with Quranic verses is a useful indicator for dating the spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, yet the use of such graves was condemned by early Muslim scholars who saw them as representing an unislamic innovation.6 Such an approach also raises the question of what Islam is, and what can justifiably be described as Islamic or unislamic, a topic of recent debate which cannot be broached here. Conversely, Islamisation may also refer to the process of giving something non-Islamic an Islamic veneer, or adopting it into an Islamic framework. Therefore, the way in which pre-Islamic Iranian ideas of kingship were adapted to an Islamic context, and were thus able to continue legitimising rule throughout the Islamic period, has been referred to as a ‘process of Islamisation’.7 Islamisation, as noted above, is often closely associated with other processes of cultural and linguistic change such as Arabisation and, in later periods of Islamic history, the rise of other vernacular languages and associated ethnic identities, for instance Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Malay. In Egypt, for example, Arabic entirely replaced the local language, Coptic, with the spoken use of the latter dying out probably by the fourteenth century, and in North Africa Arabic seems to have fairly rapidly replaced Latin as the principal written, if not spoken, language. Yet Arabisation was far from inevitable: in Iran, Islamisation was accompanied not by the disappearance of the Persian language, but rather by its rebirth in a new form written in the Arabic script and often with a significant Arabic element of vocabulary. Elsewhere, in Central Asia and Anatolia, Persian acted as the lingua franca during the early spread of Islam, only to be replaced subsequently by varieties of Turkish and a concomitant process of Turkicisation.

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In some areas (like Spain), Arabisation seems to have preceded conversion, while in Iran the Arab settlers ended up being Persianised, and in perhaps the majority of the Islamic world Arabic was never adopted beyond religious and scholarly circles (as was the case in India and Southeast Asia). These complex relationships between Arabisation, vernacularisation, conversion, demographic change and the spread of an Islamic culture more broadly may all be said to be components of Islamisation as well as, in a sense, distinct processes. The preceding discussion has far from exhausted all possible interpretations of the term Islamisation, but enough has been said to illustrate the central point that a single definition is elusive, and this volume makes no attempt to provide it. It might be tempting to argue that the term is too broad and elastic to be of scholarly utility and should be discarded for a more precise and nuanced term as appropriate to individual cases. Yet, despite its difficulties, Islamisation still seems serviceable, for want of an alternative term, to refer to the broad processes by which societies were transformed from being non-Muslim to Muslim and in which all the above dynamics played their part. It is precisely by a comparative study of these processes in different parts of the Muslim world that we can come to appreciate the similarities as well as the differences and reach a more nuanced understanding of the various multiple dynamics of the spread of Islam, broadly understood as both a cultural and a religious phenomenon. The essays in this volume are thus deliberately wide-ranging not just in their geographical and chronological scope, stretching across Asia, Africa and parts of Southern Europe down to c. 1800, but in their varied interpretations of the term Islamisation. However, before examining them it is worth surveying briefly some of the main trends in scholarly interpretations of Islamisation and conversion.

Conversion and Islamisation in Scholarship Conversion to Islam remains the starting point for most scholarship on Islamisation. At this juncture a caveat is in order. Recent scholarship has questioned whether ‘conversion’ is the appropriate term to be used for any religion other than Christianity, and certainly much scholarship on conversion has been rooted in the Christian experience.8 If it is difficult to find a better term to describe the passage from one religion to another, it must be admitted that ‘conversion’ covers an incredibly wide variety of experiences, ranging from the complete transformation of a convert’s life through wholehearted abjuration of his former faith accompanied by the adoption of a whole new set of social practices – of dress, of food, even of language – to what some scholarship has described as ‘adhesion’ or ‘syncretism’, where existing practices, both religious and social, are not wholly renounced but rather are supplemented by new ones.9 The latter type of conversion is sometimes dismissed in scholarship as less ‘sincere’ and perhaps rooted in practical considerations; yet to emphasise the interior intellectual aspects of the conversion process is to fall into the trap of bringing into play assumptions rooted in the Christian experience. As Devin DeWeese has pointed out, Inherent in the Islamic outlook is the conviction that the formal and external manifestations of Muslim religious obligations, as ordained by God and exemplified by the Prophet, may themselves transmit the divine grace which alone can ‘turn’ the soul toward God and lead to a ‘change of heart’ . . . from an Islamic perspective there is no such thing as the purely formal or external adoption of Islam.10

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All conversion, then, is authentic, no matter how apparently superficial or formulaic. Thus the term ‘conversion’ is still usable in the context of Islam (despite the lack of an exact lexical equivalent in classical Arabic) as long as one accepts that it does not necessarily imply a total and sudden revocation of previous practices and even beliefs. Much older literature assumes that Islam’s spread can be explained through its successful proselytisation. This assumption underlies the first major study of the topic, and to date the only monographic survey of it, Sir Thomas Arnold’s The Preaching of Islam (1896), which defines Islam as a ‘missionary religion’.11 Yet – at the risk of generalisation – there is relatively little evidence for widespread campaigns of proselytisation. Initially, Islam seems to have seen itself not as a universal religion, but as a specifically Arab one. Converts from the vast territories encompassed by the first Islamic empire, the Umayyads (661–750), were discouraged. Indeed, the initial aftermath of the Arab conquest resulted in what has been described as an ‘Indian summer’ for Christian communities in the region,12 while Muslim domination has been claimed to have ‘saved Judaism’ by providing a new atmosphere of security for Jews as well as incorporating most of them into a single cultural area united by the use of Arabic.13 The Abbasid dynasty (750–1253), in whose coming to power Persian ‘new Muslims’ had played a critical part, was much more welcoming to converts, but few Muslim states can be shown to have sponsored proselytisation or conversion until early modern times.14 Surviving sermons (khuṭbas) by preachers from the medieval Islamic world, even in societies clearly undergoing processes of conversion and Islamisation, do not indicate that the propagation of the faith was a major concern of preachers.15 Although it is often stated that Sufi preaching played an important role in converting non-Muslims, especially in frontier regions of the Islamic world, concrete examples are hard to come by before the Mongol period (thirteenth century).16 The closest word to express proselytisation in classical Arabic is daʿwa (lit. ‘call’), but it more often seems to refer to summoning other Muslims to correct forms of belief than converting non-Muslims. The early Abbasids called themselves al-daʿwa al-ʿabbāsiyya, but this referred to the dynasty’s aim to sweep away the impiety of their Umayyad predecessors, not to any desire to promote conversion to Islam. In Egypt under the Fatimid dynasty (969–1171), daʿwa came to refer to a state-supported organisation that sought to propagate the Ismaili faith of the rulers internationally; but it did so by seeking to convert the Sunni elites of distant lands such as Iran, Central Asia and Yemen, and not by proselytising among the Fatimids’ own substantial Christian population.17 Theologically, becoming a Muslim is a very simple process, simply requiring the convert to declare the shahāda (the belief that ‘there is no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet’) three times in the presence of qualified witnesses. However, on occasion the process clearly became much more formalised. In medieval al-Andalus, there were set notary forms for converts, in which both they and the official witnesses had to certify that the conversion was done of free will.18 Older scholarship also emphasised the role of force in propagating Islam. However, the evidence for systematic forced conversions is slight and unconvincing, which is not to say they never happened at all.19 The meaning of the Quranic verse lā ikrāha fī’l-dīn (Q. 2: 256), which some have translated as ‘no compulsion in religion’ and interpreted as an injunction to religious tolerance, was nonetheless hotly contested among medieval Muslim exegetes, and was in any event originally probably addressed to Muhammad’s pagan opponents in Mecca: a plea for tolerance of the new Muslim community, not by it.20

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In discussions of ‘forced’ conversions and older scholarship, the concept of jihad often features.21 It is true that many Muslim exegetes emphasised the ‘greater jihad’ – the internal struggle against the self – yet at the same time jihad understood as warfare against non-Muslims was clearly also a legal obligation, according to normative texts, although there was some difference of opinion over whether it was to be purely defensive or offensive. Yet if, in the ideal, the aim of jihad was to extend Islamic rule over the entire Dār al-Ḥarb (the ‘Abode of War’, or non-Muslim world) and to incorporate it into the Dār al-Islām (the Islamic world) – that is, to bring it under God’s law – it does not follow that the aim was conversion of either whole populations or individuals, for nonMuslims had a recognised status within Islam as dhimmīs (or ahl al-dhimma), ‘protected peoples’.22 As a legal obligation sanctioned by the Quran, jihad was widely cited by rulers as a justification for their wars – including sometimes against other Muslims. In Abbasid times, regular expeditions were launched into Byzantine Anatolia, but these were essentially raiding expeditions justified as jihad that sought neither to hold territory nor to convert the Christian population of the areas attacked. Even where such campaigns secured more lasting gains, conversion was not the aim (or the result) as is suggested by the continued existence of large, often majority, Christian populations in the Balkans, territories acquired by the Ottomans through campaigns which were justified as jihad, or similarly the overwhelmingly non-Muslim population of India. Indeed, the irrelevance of jihad per se to the process of conversion is reflected in its absence from most modern scholarship as a factor.23 A principal concern of scholarship on conversion (and Islamisation) has been to establish the date by which the Middle East had acquired a Muslim majority, although this seems to feature slightly less as an interest of scholarship for other parts of the Muslim world (for instance, it is largely absent from studies of Central Asia). The answers have varied greatly according to the methodology employed. The classic study by Richard Bulliet, based on onomastic data from medieval biographical dictionaries which gave rise to his famous ‘S-curve’ graph illustrating conversion, suggests that ‘the primary conversion process . . . was essentially complete’ in Egypt, Syria and Iraq by the beginning of the eleventh century, while in Iran his data suggests conversion peaked much earlier, in the ninth century.24 Bulliet argues: ‘There is every reason to believe that a genealogy beginning with a non-Arabic name followed by a string of Arabic names indicates the generations of conversion to Islam.’25 Bulliet’s methodology has been extremely influential, but obviously can be applied only to areas where significant onomastic data of this nature survives – so, for instance, for Southeast Asia, which lacks a tradition of biographical dictionaries or other ready large-scale onomastic data, it is hard to apply. Further, what the data of the dictionaries shows is the date at which conversion peaked, rather than the proportion of converts, for it offers no means of quantifying the people whose ancestors never did convert; nor can it offer an insight into other processes that caused demographic change such as migration and intermarriage (only male names and patronymics are given).26 It is clear, for instance, that in seventh- to eighth-century eastern Iran conversion was simply one dynamic, alongside the settlement of Arab soldiers and their intermarriage with the local inhabitants, which resulted in the increase in the Muslim portion of the population.27 Such reservations aside, Bulliet’s methodology offered for the first time some way of attempting to quantify the conversion process. Quantification remains a challenge that it is hard to address given the problematic nature of the evidence, although, as

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Philip Wood suggests, architectural and archaeological evidence for church construction (or the lack of it) offers one way of assessing the vitality of Christian communities and thus the rate of Islamisation.28 More recently, some scholars have sought to address the problem of conversion and Islamisation through more eclectic literary and documentary sources. In a study based on the information given by medieval geographies on non-Muslim communities, shrines and mosque construction in medieval Syria, Thomas Carlson concludes that Bulliet’s date for the completion of the primary conversion process there is too early, and his curve too steep. Yet Carlson refrains from offering a precise date. His use of Ottoman archival materials indicates that there must have been a significant change over the fifteenth to sixteenth century; this may, however, reflect the highly problematic nature of the Ottoman archival materials, a topic he does not address.29 Nevertheless, he does rightly point out that a purely statistical approach to a given region fails to address the significant variation within that region. In Syria, for instance, it seems clear the countryside was more Christian, and for longer, than urban areas, while the north of Syria had a larger Christian population than the south. Syria, of course, is complicated by the Crusader presence from the late eleventh century to the thirteenth, which evidently strengthened some Christian communities and even led to Muslims converting to Christianity (although certainly not en masse). The situation in Egypt, which was continuously under Muslim rule, seems quite different. Recent research by Maged Mikhail, drawing on Coptic and Greek as well as Arabic sources, has suggested that large-scale conversion to Islam was under way by the mideighth century, continuing into the ninth.30 With accompanying Arabisation, assisted by the settlement of Arab tribes as agriculturalists and the abandonment of Coptic by Christian elites, it has been suggested that ‘a dramatic transformation occurred during the third Islamic century’ (that is, the ninth century ad) in the demography of Egypt.31 Again, Mikhail refrains from speculating about statistics, but he argues persuasively that by the ninth century there had arisen an integrated society based on Islamic governance, Islamic law and the Arabic language, which were used by all irrespective of religious affiliation. If not converted, Egypt was certainly Islamised by this date, as the external differences between Muslim and Christian had been eroded. This process of Islamisation, indeed the very willingness of the Islamic state to employ Christians in its bureaucracy, probably itself encouraged the process of conversion to Islam. As Christians adopted Arabic, and as the markers of the distinctions between them and Muslims disappeared – in Egypt the sumptuary differences had gone by the ninth century – so too did it become easier for Christians to embrace the religion of state.32 Conversion might also have brought with it financial advantages. Although the thesis that through their obligation to pay the jizya or ‘poll tax’, dhimmīs had a heavier tax burden than Muslims has been questioned, in both Iraq and Egypt we seem to see peasants fleeing from their lands as the traditional bonds of mutual obligations shared with their landlords disintegrated in the aftermath of the conquest. Taking refuge in the cities – which were certainly much more Muslim than the countryside – many might have converted, while at the same time the rural demographic balance was disrupted.33 This process continued into early modern times (and doubtless beyond). Evidence from seventeenth-century Ottoman Palestine points to Christian peasants embracing Islam to avoid the choice between paying the jizya or migrating.34 Other factors such as discrimination against non-Muslims encouraged conversion too; however, as Wood notes,35 the survival

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of Christianity in the Middle East at all is striking compared with the sudden disappearance of Buddhism in Sind after the Arab conquest, or indeed of Christianity (or at least evidence of it) in most of the Maghrib.36 Broadly speaking, then, recent scholarship on conversion in the Middle East has tended to favour the anecdotal, impressionistic evidence of literary and historical works over statistics. However, perhaps the most influential work in the field to draw on literary sources comes from outside the traditional geographical and chronological focus of most scholarship on Islamisation. Devin DeWeese’s monumental Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (1994) treats the conversion of the Khan Özbek (1282–1341) of the Golden Horde – the Mongol successor state that ruled Central Asia and the south Russian steppe – through the offices of a Sufi saint. DeWeese’s focus, however, is not on what actually happened, but rather how it was represented in Turkish-language narratives composed from the sixteenth century onwards (which may, however, draw on older materials). DeWeese’s key insight is that ‘conversion narratives themselves are central elements in the process of Islamization, as the community articulates its Islamicness and either stresses its break with the past or finds common ground with pre-Islamic traditions and values’.37 As DeWeese argues, such narratives also offer our only means of understanding what conversion meant to Muslims.38 Conversion narratives in their various forms thus offer fruitful potential for understanding the process of Islamisation, but their study remains in its infancy. Nonetheless, a recent comparative study of Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Spanish conversion narratives from Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions, focused on the medieval western Mediterranean, confirms DeWeese’s insights, arguing further that these narratives constitute a form of religious polemic or apologetic.39 The work of Tijana Krstić, focusing on the Ottoman Empire, argues that conversion narratives start to emerge there in the sixteenth century as an expression of the empire’s ‘confessionalisation’ during this period and suggests they can thus shed light not just on religious history but also on politics.40 So far, this survey has concentrated on the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. To offer an exhaustive survey of scholarship on Islamisation across the Muslim world is a challenge this chapter cannot hope to confront, and is anyway covered by many of the relevant contributions in this volume. Nonetheless, it is worth pausing to consider one striking aspect of much of the scholarship on Islamisation: the general lack of comparative perspective. Studies based on individual regions tend to reflect concerns specific to those regions and there is rarely much effort made to draw on scholarship dealing with comparable phenomena in the rest of the Islamic world, nor is that scholarship usually integrated into that dealing with the central Islamic lands. For instance, in scholarship on Islamisation and conversion in Africa, the studies of R. H. Horton, which actually focused on Christianity, have played an important part. Horton distinguished between a microcosmic worldview, focused on the local spirit world, which tended to be characteristic of subsistence communities with limited horizons. Yet, according to Horton, traditional African religions are ‘two-tiered’ and also have a macrocosmic aspect, with belief in a supreme being. As traditional subsistence communities disintegrate and their peoples become increasingly aware of and open to the wider world (for instance through trade), the macrocosmic perspective starts to replace the microcosmic one, facilitating conversion to Islam and Christianity, although the adoption of these new religions is often selective, with significant aspects of the microcosmic worldview and its associ-

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ated spirit world left in place.41 A similar argument (drawing on Max Weber) underlies aspects of Anthony Reid’s study of Islamisation and Christianisation in Southeast Asia, which associates the appeal of these new religions with the changed circumstances of what Reid perceives to be the commercial revolution of the early modern period.42 Yet despite certain affinities in the spread of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa and maritime Southeast Asia – in terms of period, competition with colonially sponsored Christianity, the role of commerce, and the microcosmic worldview that permeated indigenous societies in both regions – research has continued on both largely in isolation. A prime concern of scholarship on Islamisation in Southeast Asia remains the question of who first brought Islam to the region (Arabs, Indians or Chinese),43 as well as the relationship between Sufism and pre-Islamic religious traditions of the local courts.44 While scholarship on conversion and Islamisation in Southeast Asia draws overwhelmingly on textual, literary sources, in Africa archaeology and ethnography plays a much larger role in research.45 In other parts of the Muslim world, even the Middle East, archaeology is still in its infancy as a tool for understanding Islamisation, with the notable exception of al-Andalus.46 This is not to say there is a complete absence of cross-fertilisation by scholarship on different regions of the Muslim world. In his study of the archaeology of Islam in Africa, Timothy Insoll rejects Horton’s model of religious change and instead draws on the theories developed by Richard Eaton for Bengal.47 Eaton, who himself was influenced by studies of West Africa, argues that Islamisation (he avoids the term conversion) occurred gradually over three phases: ‘inclusion’, ‘identification’ and ‘displacement’. By ‘inclusion’, Eaton refers to ‘the process by which Islamic superhuman agencies became accepted in local Bengali cosmologies alongside local divinities’; ‘identification’ refers to the process by which these Islamic ‘superhuman agencies’ (for example, God or saints) started to merge with Bengali ones; at the same time Bengali poets ‘attempted to adapt the whole range of Perso-Islamic civilisation to the Bengali cultural universe’. In other words, the second stage represents a sort of indigenisation of Islamic civilisation. In the third phase, ‘displacement’, which in Bengal largely occurred as the result of the efforts of the Islamic reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indigenous beliefs and practices are stripped away and religiosity becomes more closely aligned with the monotheistic ideal.48 Eaton’s model has much potential as an interpretative device beyond India, and indeed Africa – for instance, it has clear affinities with the development of the Chinese corpus of Muslim scriptures, the Han Kitab, that also drew heavily on Confucianism; similarly in China, reformist movements of the nineteenth century sought to bring Chinese Islam more in line with Middle Eastern practice of the period.49

The Current Volume The sort of dialogue between research on Africa and Bengal that we see in the case of Insoll and Eaton is alas all too uncommon. This book intends to contribute to overcoming the gap between scholarship on different areas of the Muslim world (and indeed beyond) by offering the first comparative volume on the spread of Islam to appear (to the editor’s knowledge) since Levtzion’s valuable, but now in parts dated, Conversion to Islam. No single definition of Islamisation has been enforced, but rather it is hoped that the wide variety of ways in which Islamisation can be understood is

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reflected in the various essays collected here. The volume aims to cover the broad sweep of the Muslim world from the Atlantic to China and from the Balkans to Southeast Asia, although there is certainly no attempt to cover every single region that accepted Islam, which would require a multivolume work. We also include some examples of the regions which never came under Muslim rule but which nevertheless have substantial Muslim populations, such as China and Ethiopia, to emphasise that the historical process of Islamisation was not restricted to the Dār al-Islām. As the purpose of the volume is comparative, rather than represent each region with a single essay, several broad geographical regions have two or more contributions to allow an appreciation of the variety of different approaches and materials that can be employed. Contributions were solicited with a view to covering the widest possible range of methodologies and source materials, from Arabic chronicles to epigraphy, endowment deeds, archaeological evidence and a host of literary sources in a variety of languages – Arabic, Persian, varieties of Turkish, Malay, Javanese and Chinese, to name but some. The essays focus on aspects of the period from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to c. 1800. This is not to say that the process of Islamisation suddenly ceased after 1800 – quite the opposite. However, it seems to become a fundamentally different problem, owing to the rise of the Muslim reform movements and the impact of European colonialism and missionary activity. Improved communications also offered new ways in which Muslims from the furthest reaches of the Islamic world could participate in the hajj and umra, rituals hitherto reserved to a few. The introduction of printing to the Muslim world, which effectively took place only in the nineteenth century, allowed Muslim proselytisers to compete with Christian missionaries.50 To do justice to the complexities of the ongoing process of Islamisation in this period, let alone in modern times, would require a separate volume. This book is divided into eight parts. The first of these addresses theoretical perspectives on conversion and Islamisation. In the opening essay, Alan Strathern takes a sweeping comparative perspective, ranging from Southeast Asia to Africa, to examine the important topic of ruler conversion: how could a ruler who was legitimised through adherence to a given religion preserve his legitimacy when he changed it? Strathern’s broad survey allows him to suggest that many elements of conversion narratives that have hitherto been identified as topoi in fact form part of the very logic of conversion. In contrast, David Thomas’s contribution (Chapter 3) comprises a case study of two firsthand medieval accounts of conversion from Christianity to Islam and reminds us that, at least on the level of individuals, it is important not to dismiss the role of genuine conviction in conversion. Thomas’s study also provides a useful overview of these two rare autobiographical accounts of conversion to Islam, a genre which was rather unusual in the medieval Islamic world (although, as Krstić points out, it became increasingly common in the early modern period). In the final essay in this section (Chapter 4), Richard Bulliet takes us back to methodological questions, re-examining the debate caused by his famous ‘conversion curve’, discussed above, and providing further evidence for the validity of onomastics as a tool to interpret social change. The subsequent seven parts concentrate on regional case studies, the first of which (Part II) focuses on the Middle East from the seventh to the fourteenth century. It is becoming increasingly appreciated that, while the process of Islamisation in the Middle East was a long one, it also had very significant variation within the region. Therefore, our studies range broadly across the region from Arabia to Iran and from Anatolia to Syria

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to attempt to give snapshots of the process at work in the region at different points in the medieval period. In Chapter 5, Harry Munt addresses the neglected topic of the Islamisation of Arabia, which is usually given short shrift under the assumption that almost all of the peninsula had wholeheartedly embraced Islam after the Ridda Wars that followed the Prophet Muhammad’s death. Munt provides important evidence for the continuing vitality of non-Muslim communities and emphasises that the Islamisation of Arabia was a considerably slower and more negotiated process than is often credited. In Chapter 6, Andrew Magnusson takes us to Umayyad and early Abbasid Iran to examine the stories of the destruction of Zoroastrian fire temples by the invading Arabs. Magnusson argues that the numerous narratives of fire temple destruction found in the Muslim sources probably represent not the reality, but rather how Muslims wished Islamisation to be remembered, symbolising the destruction of the old faith and its replacement with the new. Anna Chrysostomides (Chapter 7) focuses on non-elite groups in her study of religious code-switching in early Islamic society: how individuals could shift back and forth between religious identities, reflecting a growing acculturation to Islam that may not, however, be identical to conversion. Andrew Peacock’s essay (Chapter 8) turns to thirteenth-century Anatolia, a territory incorporated into the Dār al-Islām much later than the rest of the Middle East after the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. His chapter examines the role of Muslim institutions and networks in promoting Islamisation and ultimately conversion, while also underlining the significance of Persian émigrés and a Muslim middle class in promoting Islam, in contrast to previous scholarship which has attributed more agency to the state. In the concluding essay in this section (Chapter 9), Reuven Amitai examines southern Palestine, and in particular Gaza, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and points to the period of Mamluk domination as one of decisive change, in terms of both probable demographic balance and the transformation of towns and countryside through buildings, shrines and mosques. Part III deals with the Muslim west: the Maghrib and al-Andalus. Michael Brett’s essay (Chapter 10) focuses on the question of the conversion and Islamisation of North Africa’s indigenous population, the Berbers. Brett shows how the religion brought by the conquering Arab tribesmen played a crucial part in the formation of a distinctive Berber identity ‘predicated on the supposed purity of their Islam’ (p. 190). Indeed, this phenomenon of Islamic piety acting as a means to differentiate oneself not just from unbelievers but also from other putatively less devout parts of the umma can be observed in other parts of the Islamic world: in Sumatra, for instance, the traditional reputation of Aceh as a standard-bearer for Islam in Southeast Asia and as the ‘Veranda of Mecca’ has been harnessed to justify Acehnese separatism. The chapter by Maribel Fierro (Chapter 11) examines the phenomena of Islamisation, conversion and Arabisation in al-Andalus, with particular attention paid to modern scholarly debates. As Fierro shows, the question of Muslim domination in Spain remains politically charged to this day. At the same time, Fierro underlines the vast quantity of scholarship which has been devoted to these phenomena in Spain, which has been studied intensively not just by Arabists but also by archaeologists, giving one of the richest pictures of the processes of Islamisation available – one which, however, is to a degree sui generis owing to the eventual process of re-Christianisation. Part IV turns to Sub-Saharan Africa. In Chapter 12, Marco Demichelis offers an overview of the complex relations between Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa from the seventh century onwards, and points to the crucial role of the Oromo

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people in the spread of Islam in the Ethiopian Highlands. Demichelis also examines the distinctive features which allowed Ethiopia, unlike neighbouring kingdoms such as Nubia, to retain its Christian identity. In Chapter 13, Timothy Insoll draws on archaeological evidence to compare the process of Islamisation in two distinct regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn and the Western Sahel. Insoll shows how the pattern of Islamisation varied considerably between the two regions, with more evidence for phased conversion in the Sahel, where warfare seems to have been of less importance than in the Horn. Yet Insoll also shows that, despite the considerable differences between the two regions, the material culture for the spread of Islam bears remarkable similarities. Archaeological research is moving increasingly towards examining themes such as identities and social processes, and it is to be hoped that in the future this will play a greater role in studies of Islamisation. Next, in Part V, we turn to the Balkans with two essays examining different aspects of Islamisation under Ottoman rule. Sanja Kadrić (Chapter 14) focuses on the problematic case of the Islamisation of Bosnia, which seems to have been much more fully Islamised than in other parts of the Balkans. Kadrić examines hitherto ignored Ottoman sources and underlines the importance of the devşirme, the levy of youths recruited by the Ottoman state into its service, as a force not just for the conversion of individuals but for a wider process of acculturation and Islamisation, as these recruits retained links with their original communities and families. Tijana Krstić (Chapter 15) examines converts during the sixteenth century, a period when Islam was spreading to a broader social base while at the same time the Islamic character of the region was being deepened by state efforts. Krstić draws attention to the importance of catechetical literature in Ottoman Turkish as a source for understanding the religious atmosphere in a period when concern to assert orthodoxy and orthopraxy was growing. Part VI comprises three essays examining aspects of Islamisation in Central Asia. In Chapter 16, Daniel Beben assesses the distinction between conversion and Islamisation in his study of the famous Persian poet and Ismaili missionary of the eleventh century, Nasir-i Khusraw. Beben argues that in a peripheral area such as Badakhshan (in modern Tajikistan) the distinction between Ismaili and Muslim orthodoxy became less important; in local tradition, Nasir-i Khusraw was remembered not as an Ismaili proselytiser, but as a local holy man, of the sort to whom traditions across the Muslim world attribute a crucial role in bringing Islam to a given region. Thus, Beben’s essay also serves as a case study of the impact of one such holy man, suggesting that his communal memory offers a new way of interpreting how Islamisation was understood by the communities subjected to efforts at conversion. Therefore, even if Nasir-i Khusraw’s own missionary efforts were aimed primarily at converting Sunnis to his particular brand of Islam, his folk memory has a broader significance within debates on Islamisation. Similarly, in Chapter 17 Devin DeWeese looks at another well-known (but historically poorly attested) figure, Ahmad Yasavi, the twelfth-century saint to whom tradition attributes a crucial role in the Islamisation of Turkish-speaking Central Asia. While DeWeese dismisses the traditional accounts as ahistorical, he does find in the later memory of Ahmad Yasavi evidence for how the process of Islamisation was understood. Bruno De Nicola (Chapter 18) then discusses an often neglected aspect of conversion and Islamisation, the role of the domestic sphere, suggesting the religion of the Mongol royal women influenced the faith of their sons. While evidence for the domestic sphere is more limited than the dramatic tales of sudden conversion wrought by Sufi shaykhs that chronicles present to us, there is enough to suggest that this may have been an

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important aspect in the conversion of some Mongols during the height of their empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, the Mongols represent an interesting example of conquerors being converted to the religion of the conquered. In Part VII, two contributions examine conversion, Islamisation and Persianisation on the Indian subcontinent, home to a third of the world’s Muslim population. Richard Eaton (Chapter 19) reminds us how problematic the word ‘conversion’ can be to denote long-drawn-out processes of change. He adopts Bulliet’s onomastic methodology to suggest that Islamisation could have lasted some 500 years. Eaton also suggests that traditional explanations of the spread of Islam in South Asia, which stress its relationship to Muslim political power, are inadequate and argues instead that it must be understood against the background of broader social and environmental change. Moreover, as Blain Auer demonstrates in Chapter 20, India’s Central Asian Muslim conquerors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were themselves undergoing a process of acculturation to Islamic civilisation, which was expressed through the adoption and promotion of Persian culture. This Persian culture, which drew on an explicitly pre-Islamic repertoire of legends, thus became a vehicle for Turkish conquerors to express a ‘civilised’ Perso-Islamic identity. The final section (Part VIII) examines Islamisation in Southeast Asia and China, and the contributions emphasise the complex links between Islamic and local traditions that all contribute to the often complementary processes of indigenisation and Islamisation. As Alexander Wain demonstrates in Chapter 21, although scholarship has traditionally seen the import of Islam to insular Southeast Asia as the work of Arab or Indian merchants, there is good reason to believe that in fact the Chinese Muslims who settled in Java played a crucial role in its Islamisation. This offers an important corrective to views which see Islam as emanating purely out of an Arabian or Middle Eastern context. In Chapter 22, Edwin Wieringa discusses another means by which Islam was promoted and transmitted in Southeast Asia, the Quranically based tale of Yusuf (the biblical Joseph), which circulated in both Javanese and Malay versions. The tale, with its story of the victory of Joseph and his pure faith, has of course been popular in numerous other languages elsewhere in the Muslim world, but Wieringa demonstrates how in Malay and Javanese traditions the tale served thaumaturgical, even practical, purposes. It is this intersection of popular and theologically grounded belief that gave the tale such potency for the transmission of Islam. Meanwhile, Philipp Bruckmayr’s contribution (Chapter 23) turns to the process of Islamisation on mainland Southeast Asia, examining the Chams, a Muslim people of Vietnam and Cambodia whose belief systems incorporate aspects of Islam, Hinduism and pre-Islamic Persian legend. Both the contributions of Wieringa and Bruckmayr suggest the importance of literary sources such as poetry and epics for understanding the processes of Islamisation, of which they are both a product and a witness, while highlighting the significance of ‘Jawisation’ in processes of Islamisation in Southeast Asia. Finally, in Chapter 24, James Frankel examines Islamisation in China, surveying the long history of China’s Muslim communities and evaluating the complex relationship between Islamisation and Sinicisation, and the distinctive Chinese Muslim tradition cloaked in Confucian language, the Han Kitab. Frankel also reminds us of the great diversity of Muslim communities in China and their historical experiences, meaning that even on the fringes of the Dār al-Islām, generalisations about the processes of Islamisation can be fraught with difficulties. Clearly, much more could have been said; contributions dealing with other regions of the Muslim world and other periods could have been solicited. However, even if this

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volume were three times its already substantial size, it would still be able to offer only snapshots of Islamisation, which, as we have suggested, is a term that covers a whole series of complex, diverse and related yet distinct processes. However, it is hoped that this volume offers some insights into these processes and that the comparative perspective presented here will be of interest to historians not just of Islam but also of other religious and social transformations.

Notes 1. Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), esp. his chapter ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’, pp. 1–23. 2. For example, Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 269, 309–10, and also the contribution by Richard Eaton to the present volume (Chapter 19). 3. Marc David Baer, ‘History and Religious Conversion’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 27. 4. Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 27. 5. For example, Camilo Gomez-Rivas, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 6. Leor Halevi, ‘The Paradox of Islamization: Tombstone Inscriptions, Qur’ānic Recitations, and the Problem of Religious Change’, History of Religions 44, no. 2 (2004), pp. 120–52. For a discussion of the terms of Islam, Islamic and unislamic, see the important study of Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 7. D. G. Tor, ‘The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals in the Persianate Fürstenspiegel’, Iran 49 (2011), pp. 115–22. 8. See Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, ‘Introduction’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 9–11; also Arietta Papaconstantinou, ‘Introduction’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou et al. (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. xix–xxiii. 9. See Rambo and Farhadian, ‘Introduction’, p. 9; also Richard W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion to Islam’, in David Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 527–8. For a critique of syncretism, see Krstić, Contested Conversions, pp. 16–18, 51–3; see also the comments in Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, pp. 268–9. 10. Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 26 (original emphasis). See also Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 177–80. 11. T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1896). 12. See discussion and references in Philip Wood, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000: Conquest, Competition and Conversion’, in A. C. S. Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 27. 13. David Wasserstein, ‘Islamisation and the Conversion of the Jews’, in Mercedes GarcíaArenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen / Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 55–6.

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14. For seventeenth-century Ottoman state-sponsored proselytisation, see Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as the discussion in Krstić, Contested Conversions. 15. Linda G. Jones, ‘Islām al-Kāfir fī Ḥāl al-Khuṭba: Concerning the Conversion of Infidels to Islam during the Muslim Friday Sermon in Mamluk Egypt’, Annuario de Estudios Medievales 42, no. 1 (2012), pp. 53–75, esp. pp. 55–7. 16. See, for example, this challenge to the traditional viewpoint for Central Asia: Jürgen Paul, ‘Islamizing Sufis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 297–317. See also the essay by Devin DeWeese in this volume (Chapter 17). 17. On daʿwa see in general M. Canard, ‘Daʿwa’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005); see also DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion, pp. 22–3, and see Chapter 16 by Daniel Beben in this volume. 18. Jones, ‘Islām al-Kāfir’, pp. 62–3; an interesting parallel is with the nineteenth-century Ottoman post-Tanzimat rules: Krstić, Contested Conversions, pp. 165–6. 19. For some examples from medieval Egypt, see Maged S. A. Mikhail, From Christian Egypt to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014), pp. 66–7. For a discussion of older scholarship dealing with forced conversion in India, see Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, pp. 113–16. 20. See the discussion in Yohannan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); also Jacob Lassner, Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. pp. 175–93. 21. For a useful survey, see Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Forced conversion features much more in the popular imagination than the scholarly literature, but for examples see Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Toward a Comparative Study’, pp. 10–11, 22, and ‘Patterns of Islamization in West Africa’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 208–9. 22. Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, pp. 92–3. 23. A recent exception which does emphasise the role of jihad is D. G. Tor, ‘The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Period and the Reshaping of the Muslim World’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009), pp. 279–99. 24. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 131. 25. Ibid., p. 116. 26. It is true the biographical dictionaries do give some indication of migration, as they often give the place of origin of given families. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that, for the most part, they give information about only one certain segment of society, the ulama. We know that many migrants were tribesmen or soldiers and for these the biographical dictionaries give little to no information. 27. For a useful summary of the post-conquest situation in Iran, see Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 1; on identity formation, see Sarah Bowen Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28. Wood, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000’, p. 49. 29. Thomas A. Carlson, ‘Contours of Conversion: The Geography of Islamization in Syria, 600–1500’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 135, no. 4 (2015), p. 811. 30. Mikhail, From Christian Egypt to Islamic Egypt, pp. 76–7. 31. Ibid., p. 172.

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32. Cf. Wood, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000’, pp. 36–8. 33. Ibid., pp. 39–42, for a convenient survey of the literature. The classic study of the jizya is Daniel C. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 34. Felicita Tramonta, ‘The Poll Tax and the Decline of the Christian Presence in the Palestinian Countryside in the 17th Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013), pp. 631–52. 35. Wood, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000’, pp. 49–50. 36. Christian communities may have survived in the Maghrib till as late as the eleventh century, but the evidence for them is tiny compared with the wealth of literary and material sources for the material Levant. See Dominique Valerian, ‘La permanence du Christianisme au Maghreb: L’apport problématique des sources latines’, in Dominique Valerian (ed.), Islamisation et arabisation de l’Occident musulman médiéval (VII–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 131–49. It might be, of course, that the absence of evidence from Sind, a much less studied region, disguises a process of similar decline rather than sudden disappearance. 37. DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion, p. 10. 38. DeWeese’s work has continued with an edition, translation and commentary of an important series of Turkish narratives dating from the fourteenth century onwards dealing with the role of the descendants of Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya in Islamising Central Asia, narratives which may have emerged as early as the twelfth century. Devin DeWeese and Ashirbek Muminov, Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions. vol. 1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (Almaty and Bloomington, IN: Daik Press, 2013). I am very grateful to Devin DeWeese for a copy of this important work. 39. Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative. 40. Krstić, Contested Conversions. The notion of ‘confessionalisation’ is imported from the study of Reformation Europe, where it refers to the process by which Protestantism and Catholicism became entrenched, with state support, among their respective populations, consolidating distinctive confessional identities. Krstić sees the same process as applying in the Ottoman Empire, responding both to the consolidation of these identities in Europe and to the formation of a Shiite confessional identity in Iran in the same period. 41. For a summary of these arguments and also their rebuttal by H. J. Fisher, see Robin Horton, ‘On the Rationality of Conversion, Part I’, Africa 45, no. 3 (1975), pp. 219–35. 42. Anthony Reid, ‘Islamization and Christianization in Southeast Asia: The Critical Phase, 1550–1650’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade Power and Belief (New York: Cornell University, 2003), pp. 151–79. 43. See Alexander Wain’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 21). 44. M. C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2006). 45. See, for example, the survey by Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 46. On al-Andalus, see Chapter 11 by Maribel Fierro in this volume. For an example of archaeological work on Islamisation from the Middle East, see Bethany Walker, ‘The Islamization of Central Jordan in the 7th–9th Centuries: Lessons Learned from Hisban’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013), pp. 143–76. 47. See Insoll’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 13) and Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam, pp. 29–32, 179. 48. On these processes, see Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, pp. 268–303. 49. See the discussion in James Frankel’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 24). 50. For an impression of some of these dynamics, see Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (London: C. Hurst, 2014).

introduction

17

Bibliography Ahmed, Shahab, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Arnold, T. W., The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1896). Baer, Marc David, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Baer, Marc David, ‘History and Religious Conversion’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 25–47. Bonner, Michael, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Conversion to Islam’, in David Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 527–38. Canard, M., ‘Daʿwa’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). Carlson, Thomas A., ‘Contours of Conversion: The Geography of Islamization in Syria, 600–1500’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 135, no. 4 (2015), pp. 791–816. Crone, Patricia, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Dennett, Daniel C., Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). DeWeese, Devin, and Ashirbek Muminov, Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, vol. 1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (Almaty and Bloomington, IN: Daik Press, 2013). Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Friedmann, Yohannan, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Gomez-Rivas, Camilo, Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Green, Nile, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Green, Nile, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (London: C. Hurst, 2014). Halevi, Leor, ‘The Paradox of Islamization: Tombstone Inscriptions, Qur’ānic Recitations, and the Problem of Religious Change’, History of Religions 44, no. 2 (2004), pp. 120–52. Horton, Robin, ‘On the Rationality of Conversion, Part I’, Africa 45, no. 3 (1975), pp. 219–35. Insoll, Timothy, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jones, Linda G., ‘Islām al-Kāfir fī Ḥāl al-Khuṭba: Concerning the Conversion of Infidels to Islam during the Muslim Friday Sermon in Mamluk Egypt’, Annuario de Estudios Medievales 42, no. 1 (2012), pp. 53–75. Krstić, Tijana, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Lapidus, Ira, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lassner, Jacob, Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Levtzion, Nehemia (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979). Levtzion, Nehemia, ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 1–23. Levtzion, Nehemia, ‘Patterns of Islamization in West Africa’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 207–16. Mikhail, Maged S. A., From Christian Egypt to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014). Papaconstantinou, Arietta, ‘Introduction’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou, Neil McLynn and Daniel L. Schwartz (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. xv–xxxvii. Paul, Jürgen, ‘Islamizing Sufis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 297–317. Reid, Anthony, ‘Islamization and Christianization in Southeast Asia: The Critical Phase, 1550–1650’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade Power and Belief (New York: Cornell University, 2003), pp. 151–79. Rambo, Lewis R., and Charles E. Farhadian, ‘Introduction’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1–22. Ricklefs, M. C., Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2006). Savant, Sarah Bowen, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Szpiech, Ryan, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Tor, D. G., ‘The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Period and the Reshaping of the Muslim World’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009), pp. 279–99. Tor, D. G., ‘The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals in the Persianate Fürstenspiegel’, Iran 49 (2011), pp. 115–22. Tramonta, Felicita, ‘The Poll Tax and the Decline of the Christian Presence in the Palestinian Countryside in the 17th Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013), pp. 631–52. Valerian, Dominique, ‘La permanence du Christianisme au Maghreb: L’apport problématique des sources latines’, in Dominique Valerian (ed.), Islamisation et arabisation de l’Occident musulman médiéval (VII–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 131–49. Walker, Bethany, ‘The Islamization of Central Jordan in the 7th–9th Centuries: Lessons Learned from Hisban’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013), pp. 143–76. Wasserstein, David, ‘Islamisation and the Conversion of the Jews’, in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen / Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 49–60. Wood, Philip, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600-1000: Conquest, Competition and Conversion’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 23–50.

Part I

Conversion and Islamisation: Theoretical Approaches

2 GLOBAL PATTERNS OF RULER CONVERSION TO ISLAM AND THE LOGIC OF EMPIRICAL RELIGIOSITY* Alan Strathern

T

he first great expansion of Islam owed little to the conversion of rulers but instead followed, albeit slowly, in the footsteps of strikingly rapid military conquest. Yet, in the second millennium, Islam expanded further and faster by means of ruler conversions than its proselytising rivals, Christianity and Buddhism. The principal regions where this held true were Sub-Saharan Africa and maritime Southeast Asia, though Central Asia also saw numerous conversions of the Mongol and Turkic elites that poured into the region.1 This was the period, then, in which Islam broke out of its Mediterranean and West Asian base to penetrate new territories to the south and the far east of the old world. To be sure, top-down conversion, by which the new religion cascaded down the social spectrum from its royal pinnacle, was by no means an automatic or straightforward process.2 Moreover, our sources, for the sake of neatness and dynastic aggrandisement, may well underplay the extent of conversion among certain groups of subjects before the ruler himself weighed in – indeed, we shall return to emphasise this point. Yet it is clear that the decisions of rulers to adopt the new faith played a very important role in this second wave of Islamic expansion. The suggestions made in this chapter arise from a large project of comparative history, which aims to identify and explain global patterns of ruler conversions to monotheism. The main case studies, drawing on the extensive use of primary sources, all concern conversions to Christianity.3 The purpose here is to explore how far the resulting observations may also help to explain ruler conversions to Islam and how far they may need to be modified in the process. It pays most attention to just one factor: the functioning of ‘empirical religiosity’ (described below) in the business of both conversion and later mythicised retellings of conversion. One of the many advantages of this comparative procedure – even though assessing so many diverse areas of scholarship from a distance clearly carries certain risks – is that it can assist us in arriving at a broad

* I am very grateful to Edwin Wieringa, Andrew Peacock, Azfar Moin, Richard M. Eaton and Reuven Amitai for their help in responding to queries, providing translations or reading a draft of this chapter.

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perspective on questions of source criticism. Knowing when and where to attribute narrative elements to literary tropes and missionary conceits on the one hand, or to the dynamics of conversion itself on the other, is a major methodological problem for all of us at work in this area. This essay can only make some observations and pose some questions that regional experts and scholars of Islam must then take forward. The overall project starts with a problem: in the pre-modern world, political authorities rarely resisted the opportunity to ground their legitimacy in religious terms. To be a king, or even a chief, was to hold an office that was endowed with real sacred responsibility or charged with real sacred power. How, then, did rulers ever manage to convert to a different religion before their subjects had accepted it?4 Or, to phrase this in a Durkheimian register, given that society musters itself into being through its relations with the sacred, by what process may a ruler tear up the existing social fabric and replace it at will? This will be more puzzling the more the ‘conversion’ in question involves an abjuration of the old religious order. The first section of this chapter presents an overview of a model of ruler conversion based on a consideration of many Christian examples. It outlines three stages or modes of engagement with the new faith: (1) the lure of secular attraction; (2) the empirical demonstration of immanent power; (3) the opportunity for building or reshaping states and disciplining society. There is an attempt to see how well the first stage might work with the Islamic material, while the third is largely not pursued here. Instead the rest of the chapter is concerned with the second mode. Here the analysis depends on a theoretical language of comparative religion, which must first be briefly explained before going on to present a range of examples of dramatic divine intervention in Southeast Asian, African and Central Asian ruler conversion narratives. The following section then considers how we might deal with the problems of source criticism and reliability raised by these narratives in the light of comparison with the Christian examples, and goes on to consider the significance of iconoclasm as a manifestation of this logic of empirical religiosity. The final section presents some thoughts as to whether these reflections may help us explain global patterns of ruler conversion to Islam and the role of sacred kingship in the expansion more generally.

Three Modes of Engagement with the New Faith Secular Attraction For ruler conversion dilemmas to arise, the new religion must usually arrive wreathed in the tantalising possibilities of material advantage: trading opportunities, military alliance and diplomatic capital. To the extent that an apparent willingness to convert is deployed as a way of obtaining these boons, we might say that ‘theological diplomacy’ is at work. In a few cases, this logic may even carry the bulk of the explanatory burden: for some daimyo or ‘warlords’ in Kyushu in Japan in the latter sixteenth century, trade with the Portuguese ships carrying Chinese silks seems to have led straight into the heart of their religious policy.5 This clearly lends itself very readily to the Islamic material; indeed, it is the most basic paradigm within which most scholars situate the adoption of Islam by rulers in maritime Southeast Asia, or Nusantara as it was known.6 Normally, the region is viewed as an extension of the Indian Ocean, and therefore host to the peregrinations of Arabs, Persians, Gujaratis, South Indians and others, but some recent work emphasises the role played by Chinese Muslims of Persian descent.7 Whatever the origins of the Muslim

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trading groups that arrived in search of spices, the assumption is that rulers quickly saw how much could be gained from creating a hospitable environment for them.8 That this principle should be so firmly established in Southeast Asian historiography is a reflection of how pure the relationship was between political ascension and the ability to capture trade among the port city states of this region in its ‘early modern’ heyday. Control over an agricultural hinterland or strategic territorial locations mattered relatively little.9 Pierre-Yves Manguin has noted how Malay representations of political space confirm ‘the intimate relationship between political power, trade relations, and religion in Southeast Asia’ and has shown this at work in origin myths such as the Hikayat Hang Tuah and Sejarah Melayu.10 Naturally, conversion to Islam then also became an element in diplomatic exchanges too. Thus, according to the Hikayat Banjar, the Raja of Banjarmasin (in Borneo) converted in order to win the military support of the ruler of Demak in Java.11 Across the vast zone of Sub-Saharan Africa, political economy functioned rather differently and much more diversely. Yet here, too, the movements of commerce have formed the principal context for historians considering the implantation of Islamic elements in chieftaincies and kingdoms beyond the long southern border of the Sahara, particularly in the western regions. It is true that there have been warnings against economic determinism here, given that expanding trade horizons by no means automatically entailed conversion to Islam.12 Yet it is obvious that, as Anne Haour put it, ‘Islam appears almost inextricably linked with trade, as much local as long-distance trade and as much in commodities as in luxuries.’13 Islam was carried not just by North African caravan traders traversing the Sahara, but also Sudanic merchant diaspora groups such as the Juula, and later the Hausa. It is sometimes suggested that Islam was perceived as creating a basis for the trust on which long-distance trade thrives, providing a common group identity and (to varying degrees) legal system and norms, or at the very least a lingua franca.14 The Sufi ṭarīqas (orders) are noted in particular for their network-creating power. 15 Again, the idea here is that rulers perceived that the Saharan trade would help them steal a march on their rivals and that the patronage of Islam would help them attract merchants.16 In the seventeenth-century chronicle, the Taʾrikh al-Sudan, the author ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Saʿdi describes the ruler of Jenne summoning the scholars of the city and announcing his conversion with three requests, and the first of these was that foreigners would be drawn to the city.17 Trade entailed income from customs dues, or less regular gifts, and access to prestige goods, guns and horses.18 The ability to induce the arrival of new artefacts has often carried a prestige quite apart from their pragmatic utility or economic value; they represent a materialisation of one’s social reach. In all of these areas theological diplomacy was also liable to turn on the shifting imperatives of military alliance, and this seems most true for Central Asia.19 The conversion of the Mongol ruler of Iran, Ghazan Khan, in 1295 has been attributed to the desire to either obtain the support of the amir Nawruz or appeal to the large numbers of Mongols in Iran who had already converted.20 All such calculations are testimony to the extent to which the political field could be shaped by religious affiliation. And in this infiltration of diplomatic networks and dynamics, we see a simple but important mechanism by which the world religions circumnavigated the globe. There is another way of looking at the relationship between trade, state-building and the world religions, which is more to do with structural affinities than conscious calculations. Is there a connection between transformation in modes of living – through trade, travel, new wealth, urbanisation, literacy, office-holding and so on – and the

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willingness of elites and masses to enter more fully into the world religions?21 Wherever one places the causal weight in this triad of political, religious and economic transformations, it is difficult to deny that intriguing relationships exist among them. Thus Richard Eaton refers to the way that, as it expanded from chiefdom into large empire, Mali’s state religion was more thoroughly Islamised to speak to the Muslim merchants who could potentially reach across the whole expanse, but, as it shrank and lost its mercantile status, Mali’s rulers turned back to the old cults.22 Moreover, in other African cases, rulers added Islam (‘adhesion’ in Humphrey Fisher’s terms) to their existing ritual repertoire merely in order to speak to one element of their subjects, while the old cults were retained for much of the land-working population.23

Demonstration of Immanent Power In the Christian cases, such secular considerations typically created only a beachhead for the new religion, however, attracting attention and possibly patronage at court. They were usually not sufficient in themselves to induce a significant transformation in the state cult. The latter was often accompanied by an empirical demonstration of efficacious spiritual force through which the power of the new cult could be witnessed directly. This is the second mode of engagement and it was most powerfully achieved in moments of life-and-death drama: healing crises and battle victories. It is worth pausing over the irony here. It means that when transcendentalist religions advance into virgin soil they often need to make an initial breakthrough with rulers by demonstrating a superiority in terms of the worldly outcomes that the old religions claimed to address. We might twist one of Richard Bulliet’s axioms here, that ‘the convert’s expectations of his new religion will parallel his expectations of his old religion’, by understanding those expectations less in social terms than in a conception of what ultimately the purpose of religious activity is held to be.24

Building States, Disciplining Society The third stage or mode of engagement is most closely associated with the enduring conversion of ruling dynasties. Here the ruler tries to entrench the new religion in wider society as a vehicle for the consolidation of political power. If the second stage resonates with ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘intellectualist’ models of religion or with aspects of the Weberian corpus, this makes sense within a more Durkheimian vision of what religion does (or from a rather different angle, a Marxian one). Given that the ruler must engage in an attempt to rewrite the rules of legitimacy, this often betokens a visionary and ambitious cast of mind – as exhibited by Dom Afonso of Kongo in the early 1500s, for example. The neophyte ruler perceives the new religion as offering a means of gathering the reins of spiritual power into his hands, or providing a readymade institutional framework by which his reach can be extended, or borrowing the glamour of a long-burnished monarchical tradition from elsewhere. In some cases, the fact that the world religions were carriers of literacy may have exerted an appeal. We shall not dwell for long on this stage here, but we can note in passing the possible implication that we may see a particularly strong impulse to convert among states in the earlier, more plastic, stage of state formation. Like Christianity and Buddhism elsewhere, Islam provided an alternative to kinship as the organising mechanism of

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political life (or of subsuming it within a much broader form of imagined kinship and creating new bases for lineal authority). In some cases, Sufis may have been the stimulus here, arriving as charismatic figures into a field of competing kin groups and factions and offering a route to unity through their relatively disinterested position as outsiders.25 But it was also because of the state-building resources embedded in the Islamic and Islamicate tradition.

A Theoretical Language of Religion This chapter focuses on the second mode of engagement (the demonstration of immanent power), and for this we must pause to consider the theoretical language adopted here. To explain it properly would take far too much space; suffice it to say that it is informed by the scholarship of the Axial Age of the middle centuries of the first millennium bc.26 What this discloses is the contingent and relatively late arrival of a predisposition that we might otherwise consider to be a core element of religion per se: this can be referred to as ‘transcendentalism’, and it became a fundamental aspect of monotheistic and Indic religions at least in their more textualised and official manifestations. Transcendentalism is oriented around salvation towards an ineffable future state of being as revealed in a relatively closed canon of texts. This in turn brings many institutional implications in its train, not least the emergence of a literati potentially independent of the state. This clerisy retains a powerful claim to moral authority through its relationship with soteriological ends and the texts that elucidate them. If transcendentalism does not always produce bounded religious identities, it certainly entails a conscious commitment to particular all-important truth claims which are held to be superior to rival ones.27 This category pushes together otherwise very diverse traditions, but it can be distinguished from an even broader, indeed universal, form of religiosity, namely immanentism. In the immanentist worldview, the purpose of ritual activity is to draw on forces in the aid of life here and now, forces that are accessible in local and concrete manifestations. Where this characterises the religious system in its entirety, we find that it is rarely textualised or doctrinalised; it seldom involves a strong differentiation of the ‘religious’ sphere from other forms of life, let alone the construction of firm group identities based on that sphere; it does not give rise to proselytising institutions; and it is concerned with communal well-being rather than universal ethics or individual conscience. However, it is analytically vital to recognise that even when a transcendentalist tradition manages to acquire a certain institutional and cultural dominance, or become ‘established’ in society as I shall put it, immanentist impulses always remain and demand to be serviced in myriad ways. Jesus and Muhammad may cast down the idols, but within some generations we will find saints and relics, grace and baraka, miracles and blessings galore . . . This form of accommodation is perhaps most obvious when the transcendentalist system is on the march, incorporating new groups either by expanding outwards or downwards to reach the masses.28 Note that immanentist forms need not be attributed to the stubborn persistence of pre-existing religious forms, nor to class-bound predispositions of the lower orders; rather, they arise from deep structures and needs of the evolved human mind. These two different forms of religious activity entail different ways of conceiving the sacrality of kingship. In their early incarnations, the transcendentalist traditions could display an ambivalence towards kingship as a deeply mundane and morally

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ambiguous social necessity, but they soon found ways of providing it with necessary radiance by association with the soteriological project. Thus were Buddhist, Christian and Muslim kings rendered ‘righteous’. But, in the immanentist vision, kings tend to have a more ‘divine’ aspect (they are ‘cosmic’ in Francis Oakley’s phrase, or ‘cosmotheistic’ in Jan Assman’s): they were considered to possess some sort of divine quality in themselves and acted as ritual pivots between this world and the heavens, allowing the fructifying powers of the latter to pass into the former.29 Once again, many forms of royal cult combined both visions, but to varying degrees, and this too is analytically significant.

Empirical Religiosity or the Demonstration of Efficacy30 The god of the Quran does not refrain from worldly intervention: he is a god of battles just as recognisable as Jehovah and no less jealous of his people, as when he aids the young Muslim community against the pagans of Mecca in 624.31 We might be further encouraged to hunt for alleged ‘empirical’ proofs of divine power in the Islamic material by broad tendencies in the scholarship on Islamisation, which usually underlines the extent to which Islam accommodated to existing cultural patterns in the first generations of acceptance and how often that accommodation involved the servicing of worldly desires.32 Such features may reflect how simple the fundamental act of entry was: the profession of faith in the company of witnesses, and circumcision.33 The effectiveness of acculturation has often been attributed to the particular genius of the Sufi orders, though this is now much contested and complicated.34 While Sufis played a role in the post-Mongol expansion of Islam, there is particular controversy over the extent and nature of their earlier role in proselytisation.35 But how exactly does the theme of magical efficacy emerge from the source material we have for ruler conversions to Islam? What follows is a provisional survey rather than a comprehensive trawl and perhaps regional experts will be able to adduce further examples. In the Malay chronicles, which provide most of our conversion narratives for maritime Southeast Asia, Islamic victory in contests of thaumaturgic potency is a consistent theme.36 According to the early seventeenth-century Sejarah Melayu, the conversion of Patani on the Malay Peninsula turns on a clear Constantinian wager.37 We are told that a Siamese prince called Chau Sri Bangsa attacks Kota Mahligai and says, ‘“If I defeat Raja Sulaiman I will embrace Islam.” And by the will of God Kota Mahligai fell.’38 As the Hikayat Patani tells it, however, the key conversion of the raja occurs after a shaykh from Pasai thrice demonstrates his power to heal a terrible skin disease.39 The Salasilah Kutai, written in the 1620s or 1630s, perhaps 50–60 years after the events, has a story of the conversion of the ruler of Kutai on Borneo, Raja Makota, by a wālī (saint), Tuan di Parangan, who had arrived on a swordfish.40 The ruling king said that he would only convert if he could be defeated in a magical contest.41 The raja made himself invisible, but was found, and he created a big fire through meditation, but it was dowsed by a heavy rain brought on by the preacher’s prayer. After the king and his court had been converted, the saint then said a prayer for the well-being of the realm and the permanence of the dynasty. This episode is particularly interesting for the way in which it is the king himself who stands as the representation of the old

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power, a clear indication of immanentist sacred kingship, here no doubt conveyed through the Indic tradition. But Muslim prayers overrule meditation. The Javanese chronicle Babad Tanah Jawi (probably composed in the late seventeenth century) is rather blunt on the connection between Islam and immanent power: ‘At that time, many Javanese wished to be taught the religion of the Prophet and to learn supernatural powers and invincibility.’42 In Merle Ricklefs’ analysis of the turning of Sultan Agung of Mataram (r. 1613–46) towards the consummation of the ‘mystic synthesis’ between older Javanese traditions and Islamic ones, the disconfirmation of the old divine order by his failure to defeat the Dutch in 1630 plays an important role.43 Shifting to the Maldives, an Arabic chronicle tells us that the king and people remained unconvinced until Shaykh Muhammad Shams al-Din ‘roused them by displaying miraculous powers’.44 For some of the African cases we are reliant on chronicles set down at an even more distant date from their events, though clearly drawing on extensive oral tradition. According to the mid-eighteenth-century Kitab Ghonja, the critical moment in the conversion of the ruling dynasty of Gonja in northern Ghana occurred in the sixteenth century when an imam came to the aid of the king in battle by planting his staff in the ground before the enemy and turning them back ‘by the decree of Allah’.45 The account of the conversion of the Hausa in the Kano Chronicle is intriguing for the way in which Islam is first credited with helping King Yaji (r. 1349–85) win a victory over his enemies, and then discredited when his successor Kanajeji (r. 1390–1410) reverts to paganism after failing in battle.46 Elsewhere in West Africa, waiting for the rains could become just as much an occasion of existential crisis as battle. Abu ʿUbayd ʿAbdallah al-Bakri’s narrative, written in 1068, of the ‘conversion’ of the King of Malal turns on the moment when the ruler appealed to a Muslim cleric after many drought-afflicted years. His conversion was rewarded: ‘The dawn had just started to break when God caused abundant rain to descend upon them. So the king ordered the idols to be broken and the sorcerers expelled from his country.’47 Magical objects such as talismans may be seen as concretisations of superior potency, and one occurs in an account of the conversion of Ghazan Khan.48 The most common theme in the Central Asian material, however, is that of Sufis engaged in a public contest of magical strength such as a trial by fire, picking up on a range of pre-monotheistic Inner Asian and Abrahamic symbolism.49 Devin DeWeese mentions a story, contained in a seventeenth-century Naqshbandi hagiography, of a Sufi curing a sick Qïrghïz chief through a prayer after idol worship had failed to do the job, amongst other examples of the theme of religious contest. From DeWeese’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 17), we learn that the tales surrounding the Sufi Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, who is associated with the Islamisation of the Turks, include feats of weatherworking and mountain disappearance amongst other miracles.50

What Does Such Material Mean? Problems of Interpretation The problem, of course, is that much of the source material carrying such stories is late, emerging in texts more than a generation, and sometimes centuries, afterwards and in the shape of a court chronicle or textualised oral tradition. This does not afford us an immediate sense of confidence as to its relevance to the actual events surrounding conversion. So our methodological dilemma concerns the extent to which the content of such stories derives from: (1) rather conscious literary invention in

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accordance with the text’s function or genre precedent; (2) a process of oral and communal mythogenesis; or (3) the logic of the conversion process itself. Much scholarship has been inclined towards (1); some Islamic scholarship has helpfully elaborated the importance of (2), while I shall suggest that the comparative study of Christian cases at least underlines the possibility of (3) for certain kinds of narrative. One of the most systematic and thoughtful analyses of a whole corpus of this material argues strongly for the importance of communal myth-making. As DeWeese has shown, the vision of the arrival of a wonder-working Sufi prepared to marry into local families became a central mechanism whereby ethnic groups could imagine and authenticate their identity.51 Indeed it is worth further consideration that these stories share many features with Marshall Sahlins’ paradigm of the stranger-king, a surprisingly ubiquitous template for origin myths worldwide.52 What we refer to as ‘conversion’ was not simply imagined as the occasion for individual rebirth, but the actual point of societal origin.53 That our ruler conversion stories served the needs of communal mythicisation over the longer term does not undermine the possibility that they also reflect the actual logic of the transition to Islam over the short to medium term.54 Furthermore, it remains to be explained why a show of supramundane power should so regularly be deployed as the basis for that project. Here, I think it may be worthwhile to turn to the Christian cases for a sense of the possible. For those cases where we have reasonable contemporary evidence, the conclusion is that we do not find equivalents to the more theatrical stories of magical contest, but we do find dramatic demonstrations of efficacy through healing and war. In some of the classic stories of this genre – and in most of the Islamic ones cited above – the demonstration is presented as decisive for the rulers’ interior cogitations and motivations, as in the Roman Emperor Constantine’s famous vision before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. The earliest sources for the Battle of Milvian Bridge do not mention the vision; instead it was first mentioned within two years by Lacantius.55 Constantine had by this time embarked on the process of installing Christianity as an element of state cult. It is certainly possible that Constantine had indeed embarked on a private experiment of committing himself to the Christian god before battle to see if he was rewarded with divine favour: that is suggested by the fact that within weeks of the battle he had the church of St John Lateran under construction at Rome, and pagan symbols began to be dropped from his coins.56 Still, that is uncertain; what is very likely is that the story of the vision was considered to be a very effective way of convincing others in the year or two after the events. Alternatively, we could take the case of Vladimir of Rus. According to Jonathan Shepard: [It was] only when Vladimir’s run of victories came to an end with his failure to subjugate the Volga Bulgars in the mid-980s, and the pantheon of gods was seen publicly to be failing to deliver, that Vladimir began his quest for a better guarantor of victory, sometimes termed his ‘Investigation of the Faiths’, into Christianity, Judaism and Islam.57 With Vladimir, as with a number of Polynesian rulers, it was probably the perceived failure of a voracious god of war, hungry for human sacrifice, that mattered.58 Shepard

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here is drawing on the Russian Primary Chronicle, which took its present form more than a hundred years after the events in question and which may be considered ripe for both literary deconstruction and mythical interpretation.59 But the chronicle’s evocation of Vladimir’s exploration of the religious marketplace receives some quite surprising support in the independent testimony of Marwazi, who refers to Vladimir’s despatching of four envoys to obtain instruction in Islam.60 The Russian Primary Chronicle also relates another story about Vladimir’s conversion connecting it to victory in battle at Cherson and a sudden attack of blindness cured by baptism. As we move forward and our evidence becomes richer and firmer, we find that the superior efficacy of the new cult may be revealed at several junctures in the process of elite conversion, and it is more often most apparent after a ruler has signalled his attachment to the new religion but before his authority is securely established. A common pattern is that the first steps towards conversion on the part of a contender stimulate his enemies to frame their opposition to him as antagonism to the new faith. When the opposing faction is crushed in battle, it may be read as a deadly blow to the old order. To take an example from a period closer to many of the Muslim cases, we know that Dom Afonso of Kongo won a decisive battle in 1509 against a much larger faction that was opposed to Christianity. He claimed that he had called upon St James in the Portuguese manner and received celestial support in reply. This emerges from letters written three and five years after the events, and all our sources agree on the main points.61 Once it had done its job in quelling anti-Christian political opposition the story became the founding myth of the Catholic dynasty in Kongo and was apparently the basis for communal ritual elaboration in classic Durkheimian fashion a hundred years later.62 Now let us alight on an example from a more modern era: on 7 April 1855, the ‘one great pitched encounter in the whole history of Fijian warfare’ was fought between the tentatively Christianising chiefly contender Cakobau and his Christian Tongan allies against his enemies based in the town of Kaba.63 Cakobau’s victory was decisive. After the town fell, one of the defeated chiefs observed that ‘the lotu [Church] is true or Kaba would not have been taken’.64 Just as in the reports about Vladimir, Cakobau had long resisted conversion and was only brought round after a series of defeats, in which the war god Cagawalu had been propitiated to no avail. A distressing medical problem for which he visited a missionary also played its part.65 Then the drum was sounded to call for baptism and those priests still prophesying divine displeasure were summoned to sit in a circle around him and be whipped. Once the new god had duly awarded victory, Cakobau’s authority and Christianity were thenceforth secure. Our first reaction to these elements in the sources might well be to see them as a mere effect of Christian textual genres in the manner of method (1) above. This will be a particularly tempting option for the earlier cases. The image of a decisive revelation of divine power in battle could be seen to have originated in Old Testament themes of a war god avenging his people, and surfacing more particularly among the stories about the Roman emperor Constantine’s world-changing conversion. This influenced how the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis (r. c. 466–511) was written up and thence passed into the bloodstream of Christian literati. But the more we find such moments appearing in such a diverse range of cases and sources, in nineteenth-century

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diary entries and indigenous accounts, the more unsatisfying it becomes to see it as mere topos. The alternative is to see it as an intriguing logic operating at the frontiers of religious expansion. Given that it is the social interpretation of events which matters for the construal of legitimacy, the distinction between what actually happened and how it is reported is a rather fine one: particularly in societies with limited literacy, it is of course what people say about any given battle or healing episode or drama at court that matters. The stories that gather force will be those that make the most sense in terms of the prevailing assumptions about what ritual relations are for and how they work.66 Here we see that the new cult demonstrates its superiority by speaking to the kinds of desiderata assumed by the old religion, whether this be weather-working, healing or battle magic. In this way, it is shown to be a more secure route to communal prosperity and the authority of the old order is shaken. We might put it that if mythicisation gets to work, it may do so very quickly indeed and serve the needs of both popular cognition and elite legitimation. Now much of the Islamic material that we have to hand – for example, the Malay chronicles – is often more akin to the medieval Christian cases than later ones in terms of their proximity to events and so on. Moreover, if the logic of empirical contest may apply to the actual events, to how those events were reported soon afterwards, and to how they were imagined in later mythicised accounts, then naturally its mere appearance in a source would not allow us to discriminate between these options; we have to find our clues elsewhere. When it first appears in our sources is obviously relevant, although here we must be cautious given how patchy the record is and how often the earlier sources come from outsiders. As we indicated above, it is clearly important whether the demonstration event itself is plausible and whether we have good evidence that it actually occurred.67 Battles, healing acts, rainstorms: these are all natural events that can plausibly go either way, but yet are readily and frequently attributed to supramundane causation.68 We can also look for features of the narrative that do not seem to obey the more obvious demands of legitimation. For example, in actuality – but much less often, one assumes, in charter myth – empirical demonstration is a sword that cuts both ways. Fortune may favour the other side too: the battle may be lost, the healing act may fail, and this will represent a serious risk for the fledging faith. Indeed, it may result in apostasy. We saw exactly this happen in the Kano Chronicle.69 The chronicle thus presents us with a plausible register of empirical pivot points: it is difficult to see what later pious or legitimising purpose might be served by the regression of Kanajeji, an unruly crinkle in the story of Kano’s embracing of Islam. We see a similar process at work in the sources for the conversion of the fourteenth-century Mongol ruler Ilkhan Öljeitü (r. 1304–16) to Twelver Shiism, who seems to have tried on many forms of transcendentalism for size in his youth. They say that after an intra-Muslim dispute at court a storm raged and lightning killed some of his company. This threw him into months of doubt about the Islamic faith that he had held to for more than ten years, spurred by exhortations from some of his amirs to return to Mongol custom. As long as representatives of the old order remain, they will be at hand to suggest that worldly misfortunes have followed its abandonment. It is in fact the persistence of a profoundly immanentist mentality that makes the first few generations of conversion so febrile. So common is the motif of early steps to

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conversion being followed by vigorous objection and revolt, followed in turn by eventual victory, that it may be tempting – in the absence of robust contemporary evidence – to simply attribute this pattern to literary convention or mythical imagination. DeWeese finds it a recurrent motif in a range of narratives, including the Qïrghïz epic cycle of Manas, as in its account of the conversion of one the heroes, Almambet.70 The son of a khan, Almambet is rejected by his parents after conversion and so has to do battle with his infidel kinsmen. Cut off from his family’s protective spirits, he ‘instead invokes the aid of the Muslim hero Koshoy, whose success he ascribes to his ancestor spirits (arbak) and angels (berishta)’.71 He is, of course, victorious. Yet, if this is a ‘fictional’ story, it is worth pausing on the fact that where we have good contemporary evidence of actual elite conversions to Christianity we also find that they tend to stimulate a backlash and that the resulting battle is imagined as mirrored by heavenly combat above. Many of the magical contest stories in the Southeast Asian and Central Asian corpus, on the other hand, pivot on events that are blatantly miraculous. The story in the Salasilah Kutai may contain an echo of a spectacular act of weather-working, but is likely spun out of legendary thread almost entirely. In principle, trials by fire, a frequent occurrence in the Central Asian material, straddle the borderline of the possible and the miraculous, as they continue to be a familiar element of ritual theatrics in many parts of the world today. A Mamluk source on the conversion of Tegüder before he became Ilkhan is not breaking the bounds of reason in relating it to the experience of being carried through fire by a Sufi.72 But many of the more particular forms they take in the conversion are incredible as they stand.73 DeWeese is surely right to point to mythemes circulating across Eurasia and certainly over Christian–Muslim boundaries in this regard.74 This is not to reduce interpretation to the procedure of sifting the possible wheat from the impossible chaff, a procedure that has long been criticised.75 It goes without saying that possible does not mean plausible. But nor does the impossible quite mean myth. As historians of religion, we are liable to come across rather contemporary sources – even eyewitness ones – reporting miraculous acts, and how we explain these is something that historiography has barely begun to address or even taken seriously as a scholarly question, perhaps because it would involve straying too far into psychology or anthropology. It is even possible that conjuring tricks played a role. To return to Tegüder’s conversion, Reuven Amitai refers to other Mamluk sources that point to the influence of the Sufi ʿAbd al-Rahman, but through the disreputable means of performing tricks. Thirty-one such deceptions are described.76 This is intriguing, too, for the way that they are explicitly deprecated by rather transcendentally minded (and perhaps politically motivated) sources.77 It might seem crass to refer to the role of mere conjuring tricks as carrying any weight in the solemn business of conversion were it not for the unavoidable fact that they have appeared in the repertoire of some charismatic religious leaders in our own time.78 Nevertheless, in essence the ‘set-piece magical contest story turning on an impossible act’ is almost certainly going to be the product of later mythologisation. Naturally, each account will need to be addressed in its own terms and in the light of close source criticism to make any further headway here. But, from one perspective at least, it is not terribly important whether mythologisation took place in the immediate, shorter or longer term, for all are testimony to how much an empiricist or immanentist mentality was the mechanism by which radical religious rupture was accommodated. On

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a societal level, ‘conversion’ may be a long, long process after all. Moreover, setting the Islamic material alongside the Christian shifts us away from what might be the standard source-criticism reflex of interpreting these stories as mere literary or courtly confection, arriving out of the imagination (or lack of it) of a few clerics and scholars recycling familiar topoi. It is perhaps other themes, which speak of direct links to the Prophet Muhammad and the Holy Land by dreams, visions, travel or lineage (rather prevalent in the Southeast Asian material), or of virtuoso performance in debates (in some Central Asian material), that speak clearly of a transcendentalist element in religiosity thanks to Islamisation.79

Iconoclasm: Destruction or Assimilation? A priori one might expect that the less radical the conversion undertaken by kings – in other words, the more that the old rites are maintained – then the more palatable the whole process would become to wider society. The legitimacy paradox may simply be smoothed away by the passage of time; the apparel of sacred kingship replaced one piece at a time rather than brutally stripped off. It is not usually in the interests of later chroniclers and clerics to dwell on such untidy evolutionary processes.80 However, a consideration of the Christian material indicates that it is far from the case that successful ruler conversions must be drawn out in this way; instead they may be accompanied by dramatic repudiations of the old system – in actuality and not simply in the stereotypical imaginings of monastics and scholars.81 In Hawaii, to take just one example, there is ample evidence for the alacrity with which the high chiefess Kahaumanu took to public ‘bonfires of the idols’ in the early 1820s as she toured the islands in the run-up to conversion – a run-up much extended by the grudgingly strict standards of the Calvinist American preacher. Indeed these vivid theatrics seem to have served her political purpose.82 To understand what might be going on here we can again consider the logic of empirical demonstration. Everywhere the world’s religions have advanced, they have done so through two strategies: first, the destruction of competing ritual systems as false or evil; second, the hegemonic incorporation of them. DeWeese means something similar by oppositional and assimilative forms of displacement.83 Hegemonic incorporation involves an attempt to acknowledge the power of the old deities and rites but reinterpret their significance in line with an overarching ideology assuming the hegemony of new transcendent claims. It is most clearly seen in the expansion of Buddhism: pre-existing systems of immanentist power (such as Shinto in Japan or the spirit cults in Southeast Asia) were retained as not intrinsically threatening to Buddhist soteriology, but were subsumed and subordinated in the process.84 Incorporation may involve syncretism, but is not synonymous with it.85 It is true, on a broad level of abstraction, that the Abrahamic religions have deployed the destructive or oppositional mode of expansion far more than, say, the Indic traditions have, but both Islam and Christianity have found more subtle ways of deploying incorporation too. The point we shall develop here is that, while iconoclastic violence looks like a transcendentalist exercise in the destructive mode pure and simple, it may actually resonate with an immanentist logic that contains traces of hegemonic incorporation. A familiar image here is the tendency for pre-existing sacred sites to be dismantled but their materials redeployed in the creation of a mosque or church at the same

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site. This logic may be found at work in mythic or narrative accounts of conversion, as emphasised in DeWeese’s work, but again in a global perspective it is no less characteristic of conversion as it was actually played out.86 In Kongo, for example, we know that King Afonso cut down a sacred grove containing the graves of his ancestors but built a church on the same spot dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Vitória (‘Our Lady of Victory’, a reference to the miraculous battle of 1509).87 Indeed, Islam locates its sacred centre in the same object that functioned as the cultic focus of preMuslim Mecca: the black cube of the Kaʿba.88 In such ways, the habitus of royal sacrality is preserved while its ostensible referents are transformed. More subtly, while proselytisers tend to represent iconoclastic acts as evidence of an immediate grasp of transcendentalist values – a demonstration of pious commitment, a purging of abominations in the eyes of God – to those converting they may make sense in fundamentally immanentist terms. For iconoclasm is the most dramatic demonstration of superior efficacy possible. By defying the local gods and rites with uncanny confidence, the proselytisers effect a shocking demonstration of their weakness. The old cults are thereby rendered neither unforgivably evil nor downright false in their claims, but are simply outclassed. Certainly, some Islamic chronicles exhibit a striking lack of appetite for categorically disproving or demonising the supramundane abilities of the gods and kings of their pre-Islamic forebears; instead, the sense is that they have been superseded. In the Kano Chronicle of the Hausa people of northern Nigeria, the dynastic ancestor Barbushe is represented as skilled in pagan rites in unabashed terms: ‘By his wonders and sorceries and the power he gained over his brethren he became chief and lord over them. He was all-powerful at the sacrificial rites.’89 He is lightly Islamised – that is, subject to hegemonic incorporation – by being made to prophesy that their sacred tree will be burnt down and mosque built. Here, he anticipates the later convert Yaji’s destruction of the sacred site.90 It is worth pausing to note that the Kano Chronicle is steeped in an immanentist mentality in which political power is seen as deriving from ritual power. Rulers and their gods are almost interchangeable: weak rulers/gods will be defeated by stronger ones.91 (Indeed, this understanding of temple destruction – in which scriptural exhortation or moral purity is less at issue than an attempt to undermine the ritual basis for a rival’s power – arguably persisted far into Muslim history, influencing the contentious destructive acts of Turkic and Persian warrior elites in South Asia, for example, as Azfar Moin has pointed out.)92 It is likely that Muslim elites were usually less inclined to iconoclasm than their Christian counterparts: early on Muslim imperial elites adjusted to the political incorporation of very large numbers of unconverted groups in ways that few Christian kings could countenance.93 It must also be the case that in some parts of the world such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, Islam was capable of stretching to much more striking forms of coexistence or syncretism with other elements of the ruling cult than we find in the history of Christian expansion. The ṭarīqa may have been, as Nile Green has suggested, more flexible in the face of local forms than the centralised mentality of the Catholic Church could admit.94 Such accommodative tendencies no doubt explain why some of the Islamic evidence for ruler iconoclasm as disconfirmation pertains to instances where it was used to effect a second stage of conversion – or reform – to break the hold of the preexisting royal cult that had been maintained after the ‘adhesion’ of Islam.95 Tim Insoll

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has referred us to an incident in the thirteenth century in which the King of Kanem, Dunamma son of Dabale, destroyed a sacred object, the Mune, that had been credited with potent battle magic.96 He did this simply by unwrapping this stone, which had been a major vehicle of royal mystique. If we are inclined to treat this simply as a story – given that it is set down some three centuries or so after the events – then we must at least consider that it does not fit any idealised picture of Islamic ascension: it seems to have aroused a violent reaction and pushed the dynasty out of Kanem. And, to revert once more to the comparative method, it was a tactic that was a central feature of chiefly conversions in nineteenth-century Oceania. In 1831, for example, the recently converted King George Tupou of Tonga marched into a temple in Makave and tore off the wrappings of an effigy until out rolled a small spotted shell. Thus were the old powers diminished as the layers of taboo surrounding their physical vehicle fell away.97

Transcendentalism: Some Questions and Observations about Global Patterns In the cases discussed so far it has been assumed that an immanentist religiosity has characterised the reception of Islam. This usually entails a flexible attitude towards ritual efficacy so that new means of accessing divine power can be experimented with relatively easily. Richard Eaton has cited Melford Spiro on the ‘ruthless pragmatism’ characterising this approach to weighing up the merits of various ritual activities. If this helps describe the propensity to religious absorption among would-be peasants in Bengal, it could in fact be expanded to a generalisation relevant for all forms of immanentism – which is, after all, the default religiosity of mankind.98 Hence, for example, the ritual promiscuity of Mongol elites before their conversion to Islam.99 Since immanentism is a feature of all religious systems to some extent, we may not feel the need to make any regional discriminations as to where and when it will shape the reception of a new religion. However, is it possible that this logic had a more decisive impact in areas which had not seen the official establishment of a transcendentalist layer? Some years ago, I suggested that where a transcendentalist system has achieved a hegemonic status in society at large – that is, where successive rulers have worked within the third mode of engagement and clerisies (Church, ulama/Sufis, Sangha) have become entrenched in society beyond the court – then the less decisive such logic tended to be.100 This may help to explain one pattern we have already noticed here: while in the first few generations after conversion the road may twist this way and that as ruling figures apostatise or pagan rivals manoeuvre into succession, yet usually it returns finally towards the new cult. For all the salutary warnings not to be seduced by the teleological hindsight and eschatological mentality of our sources, it is difficult to avoid the simple observation that the conversion process to a world religion ultimately tends to head one way after a generation or two of tumult. Once transcendentalism has sunk its claws in, it is not easily shrugged off by subsequent ruler conversions.101 It may not be a typical analytical manoeuvre today to appeal to categorisations of religion in this way, so it might be worth cleansing our mental palette with some questions. How many cases spring to mind of independent rulers who have switched between Christianity and Islam?102 (Naturally, there will be many cases of non-rulers converting, which are explored in this volume, but the question here concerns rulers.)103 And, if such cases appear exceptionally thin on the ground, why should that be so?

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Indeed, why has this question so rarely been asked?104 Is it because we instinctively feel that the possibility is absurd? What about conversions to monotheism by rulers of societies where forms of textualised Hinduism and Buddhism have been established?105 One would expect these to be less intransigent than the Abrahamic creeds – as, indeed, historically they were – given that it was only the latter which pushed boundary construction centre stage and insisted on exclusive rights over ritual behaviour. But the theoretical framework mentioned briefly above highlighted certain features that the Indic religions had in common with the monotheistic, and it is worth considering if these also gave rise to certain forms of resilience to ruler conversion. When monotheistic proselytisers met a Buddhist society, for example, they were forced to compete on grounds other than the empirical. They had to appeal to questions of soteriology and epistemology and to contend with recognised textual authorities and institutions of literati gathered like them into organised bodies that wielded moral authority.106 It remains to be seen whether such factors can be shown to have clearly shaped which parts of the world saw ruler conversions to Islam and which did not. There were, of course, many other factors involved in determining each outcome, even beyond the questions of secular advantages and societal reimagining that were raised earlier. We would need, for example, to consider how established and popularised the transcendentalist element was in each region, and ultimately only much more detailed case studies – as undertaken in my book project looking at Christian expansion107 – can take this forward. But a few preliminary comments follow. Sub-Saharan Africa is unproblematic in that here Islam made its way into regions with no other ‘Axial’ competitors. But the success of Islam in regions where Indic traditions had been at work might, on the face of it, indicate that the principle of ‘transcendentalist intransigence’ is barely visible. Parts of maritime Southeast Asia had absorbed waves of Hindu and Buddhist influence before the arrival of Islam; I have sought to account for the subsequent ruler conversions to Islam here in another publication.108 As for Central Asia, there are examples of Mongol elites switching between different transcendentalist traditions and developing an ecumenical approach to religion more generally. This indeed raises larger issues: it is roughly the Eurasian plains of the broader Silk Road region that have seen the most intense traffic of ancient civilisational patterns and diffusions of multifarious forms of Axial insight, whether as Manicheanism, Nestorianism, Judaism, different forms of Buddhism, and so on. Most importantly, we see three overlapping waves, each of which shows strong association between the diffusion of trade and diplomatic networks, transcendentalism and state-building: a Pali/Buddhist ecumene; a Sanskrit/Hindu one; and a Persian–Arabic/Muslim one. These dynamics, unrolling over two millennia, may have had little to do with ruler conversion, but rather more deep-lying shifts in the political landscape, in turn shaped by a more fundamental geopolitical structure. They lie in what Victor Lieberman has characterised as Eurasia’s vast ‘exposed zone’.109 Life here, then, meant dealing with evanescent imperial systems and recurrent incursions as well as competing transcendentalisms.110 The greater emphasis on intellectual debate in the Central Asian sources on ruler conversion may then also reflect the cosmopolitan inheritance of long-textualised transcendentalist traditions with their roots in the philosophical revolutions of the Axial Age.111 It may then simply be an accident of geography that Mahayana Buddhist traditions seem in

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general to have been less resistant than the Theravada variant, but this too is a recognisable pattern.112 However that may be, to return to ruler conversions per se, many of the Southeast Asian cases become easier to understand once we see that the ruler was responding to a significant shift in the make-up of his most important subjects – in other words, that a crucial faction had already become Muslim – and there are signs that this was the case in many Central Asian cases too.113 If in the trade-oriented Southeast Asian city state, these were liable to be mercantile groups; in the Mongol and Turkic empires, they were more likely to be military elites. This point is crucial given how we set up the paradox initially; such cases are in one sense not top-down but are responses to shifts in the power base already underway.114 They were ways of resolving legitimacy dilemmas, not merely provocations of them. Mongol elites were not committed to Buddhism for long, though they seem to have been generous in their commitment, and ruled over diverse and shifting populations.115 It may be that, where rulers must appeal to several transcendentalist elites, conversions are particularly likely to stimulate reactions and less likely to hold.116 It is surely also no coincidence that it should be this part of the world, in which so many different forms of both transcendentalism and immanentism were present, that gave rise to what we might call the ‘transcendence of transcendence’ – that is, ways of rising above and containing the world religions – which shaped Mongol and Mughal conceptions of universal empire, and in a different way even those of the Qing.117 In a deep irony, this could be achieved by an immanentist insistence on the supramundane qualities of the person of the king.118 We can finish by reflecting a little on South Asia, which has hardly figured in this chapter thus far. The hypothesis of the relative intransigence of transcendentalism has a number of points in common with arguments that Richard Eaton has been making for a long time regarding the distribution of Islam across South Asia – although he is interested in societal rather than ruler conversions and places a somewhat different emphasis on the key mechanisms.119 Eaton also sees the superficiality of explanation by diffusion here: we are not going to get very far in explaining such transformations by tracing the movements of the proselytisers themselves. His central observation is that it was the more heavily Brahmanised and Buddhist parts of South Asia that proved largely impervious to Islam, while these together with Islamised regions subsequently proved impervious to Christianity.120 Islam spread most rapidly not in areas under Muslim political rule but, as one moved further east into the Bengal delta, where Brahmanic influence fell away and rice cultivation was only just beginning.121 The resistance in the Hindu south is all the more striking given the recent historiographical concern with detailing how attractive ‘Islamicate’ or Persian culture was for all polities in the region, including ‘Hindu’ ones such as Vijayanagar. Clearly, the Delhi Sultanate and then Mughal Empire had established the prestige of the Muslim world as a source of civilisational glamour. The essays by both Richard Eaton (Chapter 19) and Blain Auer (Chapter 20) in this volume explore the ways in which Persian became a language of high culture decoupled from its Islamic setting to provide an attractive model for non-Muslim courts to adopt. But why did it need to be decoupled? The very willingness of Hindu rajas to employ Muslim elites and absorb a raft of cultural patterns from styles of clothing and architecture to chronicle-writing and court procedure raises the question of why they did not also convert to Islam.122 (In this sense, Hindu

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India may be comparable to Christian Georgia over the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, which saw a striking importation of ‘Islamicate’ courtly culture while retaining its Christian identity.123) If this seems an odd question, one might remember that where glamorous imperial centres induce peripheral rulers to certain forms of imitation, this had often included ritual mimesis too. To build a state on the periphery of Late Rome or Byzantium and import its culture was often to import Christianity too; to seek to imitate China was to introduce Confucianism.124 There must have been some such conversions, but so far I have encountered very few beyond some Rajput families – whose inclusion would rather stretch the term ‘ruler’ anyway – and the Bengali sultan Jalal al-Din Muhammad (r. 1415–32), which, as Eaton points out, was actually a case of a potential successor converting in order to be king.125 Part of the explanation may simply be that Muslim rulers rarely sought to encourage ruler conversion in South Asia – for the Mughals in particular rather saw themselves as holding together and rising above multiple traditions. In that sense, the Mughal imperium was comparable to the British East India Company in seeking to maintain the balance of the religious status quo for the sake of stability. But this cannot be the whole story; that would be to place too much emphasis on the agency of proselytisers when we have seen that there is often a peripheral motor of cultural absorption at work. Moreover, it in turn raises the question of why proselytisation was seen as a risky and implausible project rather than an integrative and stabilising one. Another question: if we emphasise the fundamental role played by trade in fertilising ruler conversions to Islam, why did Islam not capture the political high ground in coastal South India and Sri Lanka? These lay right in the centre of the Muslimdominated Indian Ocean, dangling valuable spices before its merchants and exposed to all its currents both physical and metaphysical.126 The pattern along the Malabar Coast and Jaffna was instead for Hindu rajas to retain ultimate sovereignty while the function of trade and naval protection was held somewhat at arm’s length, being dominated by semi-independent groups such as the Mappilas.127 In southern Sri Lanka, Buddhist courts prevailed and again engaged in contractual relations with the Mappilas or other merchant communities. It is possible that the arrival of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century forestalled the possibility of later Islamisation, but in truth there are no signs of any such momentum beforehand. Again it may be that part of the explanation is the way that the ‘transcendentalist’ element in the prevailing religious systems had entwined itself around political authority.

Sacred Kingship and Accommodation as Conversion Variables If this chapter has alluded to certain vulnerabilities of pure immanentism, let us finish by noting how recurrently appealing rulers have found kingship systems that combine transcendentalist and immanentist qualities. This would naturally describe all forms of Indic monarchical imagery, but it would also apply to certain manifestations of Islamic kingship. This may seem odd given Islam’s origin as an austere transcendentalism and the notably stern admonishments of royal pretensions one may find in its intellectual traditions.128 But Azfar Moin’s work on Safavid and Mughal kingship, for example, shows how significant elaborations of royal sacred power became in post-Mongol Central and South Asia, partly drawing on millenarian discourses, hermetic theories,

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sun worship and ideas of the Perfect Man.129 Is it then possible that Islam enjoyed a competitive advantage over Christianity in appealing to potential covert rulers in the early modern period because it had greater scope for their divinisation? Anthony Reid has suggested that the Sufi-borne Islam conducted to Southeast Asia was much better than Iberian Catholicism at accommodating rulers’ supernatural pretensions in the manner of the existing Indic religions.130 Thomas Gibson has made a similar suggestion for the kings of South Sulawesi in particular, who were only persuaded to convert ‘when a version of Islam became available that placed the ruler himself at the apex of religious hierarchy’, thereby easily transforming the existing Indo-Austronesian cult into the ‘Islamic model of the king as the Perfect Man’.131 We may recall at this juncture those Malay chronicles such as the Salasilah Kutai in which the raja is a potent thaumaturgic figure who then submits to the greater power of the Prophet Muhammad or a saint. European kingship was not without its own sort of sacred glamour, largely conveyed in the righteous mode, but after the Eusebian moment Western Christianity rarely allowed suggestions of personal divinity to accumulate and always placed the ruler in dialogue with the institutional might of the Church, which strove to retain ultimate power of religious authority.132 In the late sixteenth century, however, Akbar sought ways of making himself the ultimate arbiter of religious matters.133 This may represent an unusual peak in the immanentisation of Muslim kingship, setting the scene for reformist objections in later centuries, but it is still striking when set against the limits placed on Christian royal aggrandisement. One could appeal to many intellectual and theological developments to help explain this, of course, including the influence of the monistic and gnostic Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240).134 It must also owe something to the way in which the Muslim world found itself heir to the great ancient civilisational traditions of West Asia, which had developed particularly resonant traditions of divine kingship long before the world religions arrived – and were conveyed particularly through the Persian tradition.135 Thus was unlocked a combined transcendentalist–immanentist model of kingship that compelled emulation and smoothed the path to adoption. Indeed, geography may be relevant to Islam’s greater tendency over the second millennium to accommodate various expressions of immanentist religiosity more generally. Lying in Lieberman’s ‘exposed zone’, Islam had space to expand outwards into territory not yet claimed by the world religions, and at the same time it was exposed to wave after wave of conquering elites from Inner Asia. Therefore, the Muslim world had to undertake the great labour of domesticating and Islamising both peripheral subjects and incoming elites.136 This was a task that demanded constant and innovative accommodation of immanentist needs and understandings: theology stretched to follow where societal and political needs led. Christendom, by contrast, was hemmed in by Islam itself: it became a more insular, enclosed world, and perhaps its frontier turned inwards as it set about constructing what R. I. Moore has called the ‘persecuting society’.137 While an array of immanentist practice was sanctioned through various theological elaborations, the power of the Church from the eleventh century in particular allowed it to take a firm control of its expression and limits. In the Islamic world, only once the work of absorption was complete in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could transcendentalism seek to eat away at the accommodations that labour had necessitated.138

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Conclusion The inner landscape of conversion is notoriously resistant to scholarly discernment. But when it comes to the conversion of rulers, more visible political considerations and public representations matter above all. Hence this essay began by alluding to the way that trading and military advantages magnetised the operation of theological diplomacy. However, it must also be recognised how deeply the field of politics was itself shaped by religion in the pre-modern world. And so we began with this paradox: if political authority usually tries to clothe itself in the apparel of religious legitimacy, how could rulers convert without appearing worryingly naked to their subjects? We have explored one possible answer: that empirical ‘proofs’ of superior supramundane power rendered the new clothes radiant and attractive in their newness rather than garish and unconvincing in their unfamiliarity. In this sense, the cultural logic of ruler conversion events may be closer to the narrative and mythic logic of their subsequent retellings than we might otherwise assume. Indeed, situating Islamic and Christian ruler conversion dynamics alongside each other affords us some release from understanding some of the more intriguing elements of our sources simply in terms of specific literary and theological conventions. For example, the same immanentist logic – a concern with empirically observable outcomes – turns out to be fundamental to the meaning of iconoclasm. When we come across dramatic accounts of temple destruction accompanying ruler conversions to Islam, therefore, comparison with well-attested cases in Christian history indicates that our options are not either scepticism on the one hand, in favour of the dominant scholarly emphasis on de facto toleration and accommodation, or falling in line with the predictable concerns of pious chroniclers on the other. For iconoclasm may also have been meaningful in terms of pre-existing religious understandings, as ritual forms were disavowed to reveal their impotence. Just like advertising divine assistance in battles over foes appealing to a pagan war god, this was a strategy that proselytisers and neophyte kings pursued to establish their authority during the liminal and hazardous period in which the ruling cult was substituted. Whether or not those regions where ‘transcendentalist’ religions had twined themselves around kingship and had long held sway among the population at large were less likely to yield ruler conversions to Islam is a very complex question that awaits further consideration, though it would find some congruence with Richard Eaton’s observations about patterns of conversion in South Asia. That task would involve appreciating that many ruler conversions in regions where various transcendentalisms already wielded influence were not actually ‘top-down’ in any simple sense at all, but rather reflected a change in the configuration of politically relevant subjects, those in whose eyes legitimacy mattered most.

Notes 1. In Central Asia, which was already Islamised, it was thus more a case of Islamic absorption rather than expansion. 2. See Felicitas Becker, ‘Commoners in the Process of Islamization: Reassessing Their Role in the Light of Evidence from Southeastern Tanzania’, Journal of Global History 3 (2008), pp. 227–49.

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3. Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Sacred Kingship and Religious Change in Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), will take as its main case studies: missionary attempts to convert African rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a particular focus on Kongo 1480–1530; Japan, which saw the conversion of a number of daimyo or ‘feudal lords’ (also ‘warlords’) in the late sixteenth century; Persian and French attempts to convert Narai of Siam in the 1680s; and the conversions of ruling chiefs in Oceania, 1800–50, with a particular focus on Hawaii. 4. A key issue here, however, is the extent to which legitimacy was even sought among different groups of subjects. In some contexts, discourses of legitimacy may be deployed chiefly among the broader conquest elite rather than subject populations, and this will be relevant to our analysis below. For a sense, however, of the ideological tensions between (Bengali noble) local administrators and the (Indo-Turkish) conquest elite, see Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 51. 5. C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), ch. 3. 6. E.g. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 7. See Alexander Wain’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 21) and the secondary sources cited there too. 8. For some robust criticism of the role of merchants in proselytisation, however, see Richard W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion to Islam’, in Anthony Reid and David Morgan (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 535. 9. See Alan Strathern, ‘Immanence and Tolerance: Ruler Conversions to Islam and Christianity in Archipelagic Southeast Asia’, in Tara Alberts and David R. M. Irving (eds), Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia: History and Society in the Early Modern World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 23–58. 10. Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities in Insular Southeast Asia’, Moussons 5 (2002), pp. 73–99. 11. J. J. Ras (ed.), Hikajat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), pp. 429–31; and Anthony Reid, ‘The Islamization of Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Bangkok: Silkworm, 1999), p. 29. 12. Tim Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 398–9; Lamin Sanneh, Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), p. 12; Humphrey J. Fisher,,‘Many Deep Baptisms: Reflections on Religious, Chiefly Muslim, Conversion in Black Africa’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57, no. 1 (1994), pp. 76–7. 13. Anne Haour, Rulers, Warriors, Traders and Clerics: The Central Sahel and the North Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 109. 14. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, ‘Introduction: Patterns of Islamization and Varieties of Religious Experience among Muslims of Africa’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 3. 15. Nile Green, ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, in Jerry Bentley et al. (eds.), The Cambridge World History, vol. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE. Part 2: Patterns of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 368. 16. Levtzion and Pouwels, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 17. Sanneh, Piety and Power, pp. 13–14. 18. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 56–60.

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19. Devin DeWeese, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, in Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 132 on the conversion of Tughluq Tumir Khan shoring up political alignments. 20. Charles Melville, ‘Padishah-i Islam: The Conversion of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan’, in Charles Melville (ed.), History and Literature in Iran, Pembroke Persian Papers 1 (British Academic Press, 1990), p. 161; Reuven Amitai, Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol Ilkhanate (1260–1335) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 70. Michal Biran, ‘The Chaghadaids and Islam: The Conversion of Tarmasharin Khan (1331–34)’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 4 (2002), p. 746 suggests that the Chaghadaid Tarmashirin Khan may have converted with the need to establish good relations with the Delhi Sultan. 21. This may be associated with Robin Horton’s famous arguments in ‘African Conversion’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41, no. 2 (1971), pp. 85–108, and subsequently. 22. Richard M. Eaton, ‘Islamic History as Global History’, in Michael Adas (ed.), Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 29–30, and ‘Islamization in Late Medieval Bengal: The Relevance of Max Weber’, in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Weber and Islam (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 163–81. 23. Humphrey J. Fisher, ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 1 (1973), p. 33. 24. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 35. 25. Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 131. 26. A seminal volume is Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), but there have been more recent works in the last few years. A first formulation of this approach was given in Alan Strathern, ‘Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007), pp. 358–83. 27. In general, the monotheistic variants have been much more insistent on exclusivist group identity formation than the Indic. 28. Broadly Weberian conceptions of popular religion have been much criticised in the past generation, and may still need critique in some historiographies. Yet from a global perspective a properly conceived version of the paradigm of popular religion is not after all easy to dismiss: see Stephen Sharot, A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosi, Priests and Popular Religions (New York: New York University, 2001), which analyses a mass of scholarship on all world religions. 29. Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Jan Assman, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 30. I take the phrase ‘empirical religiosity’ from Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371–1386 ad (London: Fontana, 1998), p. 6, who in turn refers vaguely to ‘sociologists of religion’. 31. David Thomas, ‘Miracles in Islam’, in Graham H. Twelftree (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Miracles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 199–215. 32. Just one example: J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Divergent Modes of Religiosity in West Africa’, in H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds), Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004), p. 19, on ritual uses of the Quran.

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33. Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 23; Green, ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, p. 370. 34. See Devin DeWeese, ‘Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufis in the Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia’, in this volume (Chapter 17). 35. DeWeese, Islamization, p. 83, notes the that the earliest Mongol royal conversion, of Berke in 1257, probably did involve a Sufi, but in general emphasises that their role has been overplayed, as does Reuven Amitai, ‘The Conversion of Tegüder Ilkhan to Islam’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 20 (2001), p. 41, and Reuven AmitaiPreiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Ilkhanate’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999), pp. 27–46; Biran, ‘Chaghadaids and Islam’, pp. 746–7. For other perspectives from other regions, see Eaton, ‘Islamic History as Global History,’ p. 22; Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 191; Green, Sufism, ch. 3. 36. See Edwin Wieringa’s essay in this volume (Chapter 22). 37. The earliest manuscript we have is the Raffles Malay 18, copied in c. 1813, but the text announces that it was composed in 1612 utilising local traditions. Alexander D. R. Wain, ‘Chinese Muslims and the Conversion of the Nusantara to Islam’, doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2015, pp. 190–5, argues for an early fifteenth-century date for the source for the latter half of the text, but the conversion moment sits within the former half. 38. C. C. Brown (ed. and trans.), Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 145; and Russell Jones, ‘Ten Conversion Myths from Indonesia’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Maier, 1979), p. 141. The Islamic name does not mean the raja was a Muslim. Further, Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, p. 153 says that ‘some chronicles simply asserted that the spiritual potency of the saint was so obvious that no battle was needed, as when the radiance of Raden Rahmat was enough to convert the ruler of Jipang in east Java’, referring to Ras, Hikajat Bandjar, pp. 419–21. However, I cannot see that in the English translation. The chief of Djipang seems to have submitted to Radja Bungsu before meeting him, though he is clearly converted by the ‘glow’ or ‘radiance’ (no doubt immanent power) of the latter, reportedly greater than that of the Raja of Majapahit. 39. Jones, ‘Ten Conversion Myths’, p. 142; Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, p. 157. 40. Edwin Wieringa, ‘Structure and Function of the Salasilah Kutai, a Malay Dynastic Myth from East Kalimantan’, Saeculum 49 (1998), pp. 316–26. Wieringa, in note 15, observes that conversion after a magical contest is a common feature of Indonesian lives of the saints. Also Jones, ‘Ten Conversion Myths’, p. 148. 41. I am very grateful to Edwin Wieringa (private correspondence, 20 July 2015) for providing a summary of this part of the chronicle for me, following the account in the Dutch translation in Constantinus Alting Mees, De Kroniek van Koetai, doctoral thesis, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden (Santpoort: Uitgeverij, 1935), pp. 53–4, 100–1. 42. Merle C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 5. 43. Merle C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (White Plains, NY: EastBridge, 2006), pp. 32–50. This is discussed in a little more detail in Strathern, ‘Immanence and Tolerance’. 44. According to the summary of the eighteenth century Taʾrikh by Hasan Taj al-Din in H. C. P. Bell, The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy (Malé, Maldives, 1985 [Colombo, 1940]), p. 19, and see A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-Century Indian Ocean: Sharia, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast

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45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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Asia and the Maldives’, in Joshua Gedacht and R. M. Feener (eds), Coercion, Cosmopolitanism and Islamic Connections in Asia (forthcoming). Ivor Wilks ‘The Juula and the Expansion of Islam into the Forest’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 99. H. R. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs: Being Mainly Translations of a Number of Arabic Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan (Lagos: The Government Printer, 1928), vol. 3, pp. 104–8, and comments/summary in Haour, Rulers, Warriors, pp. 112–14, 126–7. Also see Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 82–3. See also David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 56. Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan’, pp. 64–5. The conversion of the rulers in this way probably happened earlier in the century, though we are told the people remained polytheists. In al-Jazari, often seen as the best account we have for the conversion of Ghazan Khan: ‘I had a talisman (jaikal) with me, in which (were written) some of the prayers of the shaikh (i.e. al-Din), and his words and epitomes. He (Ghazan) saw it and asked about it. Nauruz explained what it was, giving some information about my father, and told him some of his miracles (karamat) and traditions (akhbar). I took out the talisman and presented it to him.’ Melville, ‘Padishah-i Islam’, p. 163. DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 232–67, Amitai, ‘The Conversion of Tegüder Ilkhan’, pp. 18, 19. According to texts discussed in Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Conversion Versions: Sultan Öljeytü’s Conversion to Shi’ism (709/1309) in Muslim Narrative Sources’, Mongolian Studies 22 (1999), pp. 35–67, Öljeytü’s amirs advised him to pass through a fire to purify himself according to Mongol custom. See also DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 174–5, also notes a healing competition in accounts of the conversion of the Bulghars to Islam. DeWeese, Islamization; also Green ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, p. 373. Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Stranger-King: or, Elementary Forms of the Political Life’, in Ian Caldwell and David Henley (eds), Stranger-Kings in Indonesia and Beyond, a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World 105 (2008), pp. 177–99; Jeyamalar KathirathambyWells, ‘“Strangers” and “Stranger-Kings”: The Stranger-King in Eighteenth Century Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40 (2009), pp. 567–91; and application to Sri Lanka in Alan Strathern, ‘The Vijaya Origin Myth of Sri Lanka and the Strangeness of Kingship’, Past and Present 203 (2009), pp. 3–28. Also see Anne Haour, Outsiders and Strangers: An Archaeology of Liminality in West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Yet note that Sahlins sees the stranger-king logic as animating both origin myths and the actual functioning and ritualisation of political authority in many cases. DeWeese, Islamization, p. 12, explains that his concern ‘is not “what happened” but “what people say happened”’. H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 178–90. Raymond Van Dam, Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Jonathan Shepard, ‘Rus’, in Nora Berend (ed.), Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 381–2. Clearly, theological diplomacy was also strongly at work since the move entailed a significant alliance with Byzantium, taking the emperor’s sister as his bride. I am grateful to Jonathan Shepard for alerting me to Vladimir and discussing his case.

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58. Jonathan Shepard, ‘The Coming of Christianity To Rus: Authorized and Unauthorized Versions’, in Calvin B. Kendall et al. (eds), Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia and the Americas (Minneapolis, MN: Center for Early Modern History, 2009), pp. 208–9. 59. As in DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 169–70. 60. V. Minorsky, Sharaf al-Zaman Tahir Marvazi on China, the Turks and India (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1942), p. 36. They had previously converted to Christianity but this ‘blunted their swords’. See Jonathan Shepard, ‘Some Remarks on the Sources for the Conversion of the Rus’, in S. W. Swierkosz-Lenart (ed.), Le origini e lo sviluppo della cristianità Slavo-Bizantina (Rome: Nella Sede dell’Istituto Palazzo Borromini, 1992), pp. 59–95. Note Shepard is also willing here (e.g. p. 80) to explore literary/mythic models. There are naturally some differences in the details between Marwazi and the Primary Chronicle. Shepard, ‘The Coming of Christianity to Rus’, pp. 213–14, also points to the fact that the chronicle’s claims of the destruction of pagan sites have received some archaeological corroboration. Vladimir’s actions are more broadly reminiscent here of many accounts of steppe leaders’ theological enquiries – for which Reuven Amitai, ‘Hülegü and His Wise Men: Topos or Reality?’, in Judith Pfeiffer (ed.), Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 15–34, is surely right to point to a ‘dialectical relationship between topos and reality’. 61. See the various chronicle extracts and letters in António Brásio (ed.) Monumenta missionária africana: Africa occidental (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–9), vol. 1, pp. 144–5, 268, 301. 62. Cecile Fromont, ‘Dance, Image, Myth, and Conversion in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1500–1800’, African Arts 44, no. 4 (2011), pp. 54–65. 63. David Routledge, Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1985). 64. Andrew Thornley, Exodus of the I Taukei: The Wesleyan Church in Fiji: 1848–74 (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2002), p. 80. 65. Joseph Waterhouse, The King and the People of Fiji: Containing a Life of Thakombau; with Notices of the Fijians, Their Manners, Customs, and Superstitions, previous to the Great Religious Reformation in 1854 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1866), p. 107. 66. This is close to what DeWeese, Islamization, p. 168, says about displacement, ‘when the bearer of the new religion proves more adept, or more powerful, than an upholder of the indigenous tradition in controlling the very signs of sacred power proper to that indigenous tradition’. However, I would suggest that entirely new signs and rites may also be at issue as long as they are seen as means to the traditional this-worldly ends. It is the ‘raw demonstration of sacred power’ (ibid., p. 176) that is crucial. 67. So it will not be controversial to propose that the eighteenth-century Arab chronicle by Hasan Taj al-Din (Bell, Maldive Islands, p. 19) purporting to describe the conversion of the Maldives in the twelfth century by means of miracles, such as raising a jinn whose head almost reached the sky, might be attributed to subsequent mythologisation. 68. To take just one Southeast Asian example involving Christianity, in the 1550s, Fr J. De Beira reported that in a conflict with the Sultan of Jailolo he prayed for God’s support and a nearby volcano destroyed the enemy trenches at night: ‘In the morning the apostate town of Tolo was captured. These events promoted a kind of mass conversion.’ See Jan S. Aritonang and Karel A. Steenbrink (eds), A History of Christianity in Indonesia (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 55. 69. ‘The men of Zaria defeated him and he went back to Kano in a rage. “What shall I do to conquer these men?” “Re-establish the god of your father and grandfather,” said the ruler of Tchibiri. “Whatever you wish for in this world, do as our forefathers did of old.” The

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70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

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ruler of Tchibiri taught him the song of Barbushe. The next year Kanajeji set out to war with Zaria and prevailed.’ Haour, Rulers, Warriors, p. 127. DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 59–65, in particular note p. 62 n. 45, and also compare p. 111 with p. 314. But DeWeese, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, p. 123 describes an actual rather than merely narrative ‘abortive’ stage represented by Teguder. DeWeese (p. 124) notes that Ghazan Khan announced his conversion after his victory over his rival Baydu, but describes later reports making his battlefield conversion as essential to his victory as fanciful. DeWeese, Islamization, p. 63. Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans’, p. 18. Note also that the Islamising warrior hero of the Saltuk-name also miraculously escapes burning: Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Islamisation through the Lens of the Saltuk-name’, in A. C. S. Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 357–8. This would include the stories analysed by DeWeese, Islamization, of the trial undergone by Baba Tükles in his conversion of Özbek Khan (r. 1313–41) of the Golden Horde. Baba Tükles was baked inside an oven pit while wearing armour, but escaped unscathed. One example would be Fr João de Vila do Conde’s attempt in the early 1540s to convert Bhuvanekabahu VII of Kotte (r. 1521–51) in Sri Lanka. Francesco Gonzaga’s chronicle of the Franciscan order later asserted that after a frustrating debate he had challenged his religious opponents to hold a trial by fire or by crocodile-infested river before the king (Francesco Gonzaga, De Origine Seraphicae Religionis Franciscanae eiusque progressibus, vol. 2: De Principii (Venice: n.p., 1603), p. 1406. This in turn was based on notes compiled by Gaspar de Lisboa, who was the Custodian in India (1584–91). A forty-year time lag would be enough for mythical processes or literary massage to get to work, to be sure. Indeed, a similar time lag attends the first claim that St Francis of Assisi suggested a trial by fire in his encounter with the Sultan of Egypt, which may have provided a hagiographic template here. On the other end, the bathetic end to Fr João’s request – he is told it will not be necessary – may signal an element of truth, and Gonzaga’s narrative elsewhere tallies well with contemporary documents. The various representations of this debate are discussed further in Alan Strathern, ‘Representing Eastern Religion: Queirós and Gonzaga on the first Christian–Buddhist Debate in Sri Lanka, 1543’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 43 (1998, published 2000), pp. 39–70. Indeed it has long been derided in anthropology – for good reason, given that anthropologists are concerned with the holistic structure of narrative as a reflection of and constitution for contemporary society. Yet as historians it is not unreasonable to ask whether the mythic imagination has assimilated and preserved older understandings of events. Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans’, pp. 27–46. See also See Amitai, Holy War, p. 67 on a Mongol leader who had ‘become a Muslim and served Shakyks, followed the Sufi rituals and ascetic lifestyle, performing the miraculous things (karamat) that faqirs (i.e. indigent Sufis) do’. Rivalry between different holy men must also have stimulated sceptical attacks. See DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 249–50 on a fifteenth-century text recounting how a Khamal Khunjandi exposed a local saint as a charlatan: he had been using a medicament in order to walk unharmed through fire. Trickery again. There is also clearly an Islamic intellectual tradition of ‘disreputable magic’ to consider here too, which is beyond my expertise to consider. But see Thierry Zarcone, ‘Between Legend and History: About the “Conversion” to Islam of Two Prominent Lamaists in the Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, in Anna Akasoy et al. (eds), Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 281–92 on stories about a magical contest between a Muslim protagonist and the Dalai Lama, in which the latter’s prowess is acknowledged through categorization as istidrāj (divine deception).

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78. Sai Baba’s (1926–2011) charisma was assisted by his ability to conjure sacred ash and expensive watches from thin air, amongst other miracles: Smriti Srinivas, In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 18, 57. 79. For the importance of lineage, consider the role of dreams of the Apostle in Brown, Sejarah Melayu, pp. 32, 43, and the theme emerges very strongly in Peacock, ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism’. Indeed the latter is testimony to a much more transcendentalist form of Islamic appeal insofar as it was based on explicit ethics, textual authority, identity formation and a closed canon of revelation. 80. See Andrew Magnusson (Chapter 6) in this volume on the alleged desecration of Zoroastrian fire temples for an example of scholarship that seeks to look beyond claims of iconoclastic destruction. 81. For a new emphasis within anthropology on conversion as rupture, see Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 82. We might compare this with feasts marking conversion in Southeast Asia in which all domestic pigs were slaughtered (Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, p. 141). My thanks to Andrew Peacock for this point. Pigs approached sacred status in some societies of the region, so their consumption may have been a correspondingly radical step. 83. See the excellent discussion in DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 290–9. 84. Particularly clear in the literature on Buddhist expansion in Japan, as in Fabio Rambelli and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm (London: Routledge, 2003). 85. ‘Syncretism’ can be understood in many ways (see J. D. Y. Peel, ‘Syncretism and Religious Change’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 10, no. 2 [January 1968], pp. 121– 41), but a certain suspicion of it seems to have become ubiquitous among scholars and was certainly in evidence at the St Andrews conference on which the current volume is based. It is assumed to imply an essentialist categorisation of religions into either ‘syncretic’ or ‘pure’ traditions. However, it need imply no such thing; rather, it exists to make visible a process. All religions are of course the result of syncretic processes, but not all religious activity everywhere is equally involved in rapid and profound processes of commingling. See the sensible comments of Charles Stewart, ‘Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture’, Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1 (2011), pp. 48–55 and David N. Gellner, ‘For Syncretism: The Position of Buddhism in Nepal and Japan Compared’, Social Anthropology 5 (1997), pp. 277–91. 86. DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 290–319. 87. Brásio, Monumenta missionária africana, vol. 1, pp. 479–80. Compare DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 292–5, which considers a late account of the Armenian Bishop Israyel’s mission to a group of Huns north of the Caucasus around 682 centred on a magical contest involving a healing test between the bishop and local sorcerers. The sacred tree was cut down, but made into a cross, which became a site of pilgrimage and prayers. 88. My thanks to Andrew Peacock for pointing this out to me. 89. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs, p. 97; Haour, Rulers, Warriors, pp. 126–7. Compare Ras, Hikajat Bandjar, pp. 303–11, in which the two rulers, the Raja of Majapahit and Lambu Mangkurat, compete with each other in terms of magical power. 90. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs, p. 98. Here again we see the pattern of a first move to Islam (building a mosque under a sacred tree), a counteraction (the defiling of the mosque) and a superior response (Allah hears the prayers and strikes the pagan chief blind; Yaji is victorious over all pagan people). 91. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs, pp. 101–4.

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92. See Ahmed Azfar Moin, ‘Sovereign Violence: Temple Destruction in India and Shrine Desecration in Iran and Central Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 467–96. 93. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, p. 142: Islamic conversion stories show ‘surprisingly little evidence of iconoclasm’. 94. Green, ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, p. 369. 95. We can find a mythic example in the Hikayat Yusuf (The Story of Joseph): King Jiyang tells Yusuf he will convert if he makes his idol bow for him. The idol bows and then shatters. I am again very grateful to Edwin Wieringa, who has sent me extracts from Bernard Arps’ doctoral thesis, which was published as Tembang in Two Traditions: Performance and Interpretation of Javanese Literature (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992). 96. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam, p. 274; Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam in Africa, p. 80, and see p. 75 for an second iconoclastic moment in the conversion of Jenne. 97. Sione Latukefu, Church and State in Tonga: The Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries and Political Development (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974), p. 102. See Mat Tomlinson, ‘Efficacy, Truth, and Silence: Language Ideologies in Fijian Christian Conversions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009), p. 72, for a Fijian case. 98. Eaton, Rise of Islam, p. 274 also quotes Igor Kopytoff on the Suku of Belgian Congo: ‘There is a persuasive assumption in Suku culture that somewhere, somehow, other methods exist for dealing with the culturally given causes of misfortune – methods already known to others or as yet undiscovered. This instrumental orientation makes the system very much akin to a technology which is ever receptive to innovation and trials of new means for the same ends.’ 99. Peter Jackson, ‘Mongol Khans and Religious Allegiance: The Problems Confronting a Minister-Historian in Ilkhanid Iran’, Iran 47 (2009), p. 115, refers to ‘the customary readiness of Mongol princes of the imperial era to court supernatural powers, and those whose expertise furnished access to such powers, in whatever location and with whichever of the great religious traditions they were associated’. See also Amitai, ‘Hülegü and His Wise Men’, p. 31 on the connection between omnivorous ritualism and practical magic. 100. Strathern, ‘Transcendentalist Intransigence’. 101. Central Asia may provide the most counterexamples, partly because of the relative evanescence of polities and partly because of several competing transcendentalisms – see below. 102. In A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Identity, Culture and Religion on Medieval Islam’s Caucasian Frontier’, Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 13 (2011), pp. 79, 83, we see two princes of Erzurum, a weak vassal state of Georgia, who convert in order to gain marriage with queens of Georgia – but they are converting in order to obtain office, as in the case of the Bengali sultan Jalal al-Din Muhammad (r. 1415–32) discussed below. Meanwhile, the case of Sultan Hasan IX of the Maldives is rather telling: fleeing to Portuguese India from the Maldives, he accepts conversion and the Portuguese attempt to place him as a puppet king, but he is overthrown. See Peacock, ‘Sufi Cosmoplitanism’, and Chandra R. de Silva, Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of Discoveries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 197–216, which includes a passage from the early eighteenth-century Taʾrikh Islam Diba Mahal. 103. See the contributions by David Thomas (Chapter 3) and Tjiana Krstić (Chapter 15) in this volume, and also A. C. S. Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 104. I have never heard the question asked. 105. I pass over the difficult question of how to characterise the multifarious traditions now grouped under ‘Hinduism’. ‘Textualised’ might equally be rendered ‘transcendentalised’ Hinduism, whether emphasised by Brahmans or non-Brahmanic devotional traditions.

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106. However, note that in accordance with the ubiquity of immanentism, empirical religiosity is also a visible part of the debates and conflicts (and even ruler conversions) between transcendentalisms too. 107. See note 3 above. 108. See Strathern, ‘Immanence and Tolerance’. I cannot summarise all the reasons for this here, but they include a consideration of how deep the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism was beyond courtly life. I suggested that, broadly speaking, along the spectrum of most to least Indianised (or perhaps Brahmanised) regions of the island world, we have the same spectrum of most to least resistant to ruler conversion. 109. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 110. For a sense of religious pluralism in this milieu, see Devin DeWeese, ‘ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Simnānī’s Religious Encounters at the Mongol Court near Tabriz’, in Judith Pfeiffer (ed.), Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 35–76. 111. Of course, our sources have strong motives for emphasising the intellectual origins of conversion, as in the Jami al-Tawarikh’s account of the conversion of Ghazan Khan, which is concerned to prove that it was ‘true, sincere and free of any taint of hypocrisy’. See Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s ‘Jamiʿu’t-tawarikh’, A Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998–9), p. 620. Some readers may have expected intellectual persuasion to take the place of empirical demonstration in stage two of the schema. It was not there simply because it has been a relatively minor issue in the cases of successful ruler conversion to Christianity that I have seen. If we are inclined to accept it as a reflection of actual conversion logic, rather than later Islamised concerns, then this would be one way the schema would need to be adapted for transfer to Muslim material. 112. Also in many places Mahayana did not become quite as hegemonic and definitive of state power as Theravada Buddhism did in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. The issues around using the term ‘Theravada’ in the pre-modern period are discussed in Peter Skilling et al. (eds), How Theravāda is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012). 113. Andrew Peacock (private correspondence, 19 September 2015) has drawn my attention here to the account of the Maliknama transmitted by Bar Hebraeus (Chronography, trans. E. A. W. Budge [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932], p. 195), which has Seljuq say, when he migrates into Iran, ‘If we do not enter the Faith of the people in the country in which we desire [to live] and make a pact with them (or confirm to their custom) no man will cleave to us and we shall be a small and solitary people.’ 114. See Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections on a Double Rapprochement: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 373–4, 388, on extensive conversions among amirs in the thirteenth century before the first Huleguid convert, Ahmad Tegüder (r. 1282–4), and also Biran, ‘Chaghadaids and Islam’, pp. 748, 751; Melville, ‘Padshah-i Islam’, pp. 171–2; Amitai, Holy War, pp. 63, 70, and DeWeese, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, pp. 121, 131. 115. Roxann Prazniak, ‘Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 3 (2014), pp. 650–80. 116. See, for example, Rashid al-Din on Buddhist resurgence under Arghun Khan in Prazniak, ‘Ilkhanid Buddhism’, p. 666. 117. Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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118. As we see in Ahmed Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press 2012), and the suggestion in Alan Strathern, ‘Drawing the Veil of Sovereignty: Early Modern Islamic Empires and Understanding Sacred Kingship’, History and Theory 53 (2014), pp. 89–90. Could Ilkhanid Buddhism have shaped the Islam of the region in the manner that Indic influences more famously did in Indonesia and Malaysia? On Ghazan’s syncretism: Reuven Amitai-Preiss, ‘Ghazan, Islam, and Mongol Tradition: A View from the Mamluk Sultanate’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 59, no. 1 (1996), pp. 1–10. 119. Eaton, Rise of Islam. His central explanation (pp. 291–7) for the resilience of Buddhist and Brahmanic tradition rests on the importance of literacy as authority structure and as relatively immutable form of revelation. See also his ‘Reconsidering “Conversion to Islam” in Indian History’ (Chapter 19) in the present volume. 120. Richard M. Eaton, ‘Comparative History as World History: Religious Conversion in Modern India’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2, ( 1997), pp. 243–71. 121. Eaton, ‘Islamization in Late Medieval Bengal’, pp. 173–4 refers in Weberian terms to Bengali religion in the more eastern parts of the delta as less ‘rationalised’. 122. On how long it took for Hindu rajas to accommodate themselves to Muslim rule, see J. F. Richards, ‘Introduction’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 10. 123. Peacock, ‘Identity, Culture and Religion’, pp. 73–9. 124. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), claims a sort of religious neutrality for the Sanskrit ‘cosmopolis’, but this was so only insofar as it acted as a vehicle for the dissemination of various religions rather than one. 125. Rather than the conversion of a king in situ, as (Eaton, private correspondence, 3 September 2015) points out. From Eaton, Rise of Islam, pp. 50–63 we see that he was the son of a Hindu (Raja Ganesh) who had succeeded, controversially, to a kingdom established by Turks and which looked westwards to a Muslim ecumene. Moreover, as we saw with Central Asian and Southeast Asian cases above, the conversion was stimulated by the need to retain support of the Turkish old guard. My thanks also to Eaton for pointing me to the case of the chief of Bodhan in Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), but this was a conversion under sheer military duress. Christianity and Islam were patronised by some poligars of Southern Tamilnadu in the less Brahmanised dry zone, but this makes sense in terms of the profoundly immanentist religious landscape described by Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 395–6, in which all was rivalry for control of immanent power. 126. On the Indian Ocean as an Arabic cosmopolis, see Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 127. On the Mappilas, see Sebastian R. Prange, ‘A Trade of No Dishonor: Piracy, Commerce, and Community in the Western Indian Ocean, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century’, The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011), pp. 1269–93. 128. Of course the question is a very complicated one. See, for example, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 73 on the king as God’s shadow on earth. 129. Moin, The Millennial Sovereign. Eaton, in this volume (Chapter 19), refers to the elaboration of secular principles of monarchical legitimacy, which were surely also important, but existed alongside far-reaching and eclectic experimentation with religious forms.

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130. But see Peacock, ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism’, for critical comments with regard to Banten, Aceh and the Maldives. Indeed, the way in which, in a seventeenth-century setting, a more anti-accommodationist, sharia-oriented form of Sufism could acquire popular assent and royal favour as Peacock describes indicates (a) the need to understand the logic of rupture and (b) the extent to which such monarchs were now engaging in the third form of engagement with the new faith – as a tool to reshape society and state in a fundamental manner. 131. Thomas Gibson, Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 39–42. 132. Oakley, Kingship. 133. Green ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, p. 377 sees a parallel with the ambitions of the Acehnese sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–36) in this specific sense. 134. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship; Ahmed Azfar Moin, ‘Why Mughal Kings Venerated the Sun: Messianic Peace and Cosmotheism in Islam’, unpublished manuscript. 135. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, and Eaton, ‘Islamic History as Global History’, particularly p. 13. 136. See André Wink, Akbar (London: Oneworld, 2008), on the Mughal Empire as a machine of domestication. Also Moin, ‘Why Mughal Kings’, p. 17: under the Mongols, ‘vast territories of Muslim Asia had to endure a new “pagan” order that brought with it strong cosmotheistic tendencies’. 137. R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). This thought was first mentioned in Strathern, ‘Drawing the Veil of Sovereignty’. 138. This is perhaps what we see in the seventeenth-century turn towards more ‘reformist’ or ‘transcendentalist’ currents in various parts of the Islamic world. See Peacock, ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism’, for some preliminary comments on this.

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Bayly, Susan, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Becker, Felicitas, ‘Commoners in the Process of Islamization: Reassessing their Role in the Light of Evidence from Southeastern Tanzania’, Journal of Global History 3 (2008), pp. 227–49. Bell, H. C. P., The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy (Malé, Maldives: n.p., 1985 [Colombo, 1940]). Biran, Michal, ‘The Chaghadaids and Islam: The Conversion of Tarmasharin Khan (1331–34)’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 4 (2002), pp. 742–52. Boxer, C. R., The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Brásio, António (ed.), Monumenta missionária africana: Africa occidental, 6 vols (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–9). Brown, C. C. (ed. and trans.), Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970). Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Conversion to Islam’, in Anthony Reid and David Morgan (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 529–38. Crossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). DeWeese, Devin, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, in Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 120–34. DeWeese, Devin, ‘ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Simnānī’s Religious Encounters at the Mongol Court near Tabriz’, in Judith Pfeiffer (ed.), Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz (Leiden: Brill, 2013) pp. 35–76. Drake, H. A., Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Eaton, Richard M., ‘Islamic History as Global History’, in Michael Adas (ed.), Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 1–36. Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Eaton, Richard M. ‘Comparative History as World History: Religious Conversion in Modern India’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 ( 1997), pp. 243–71. Eaton, Richard M., ‘Islamization in Late Medieval Bengal: The Relevance of Max Weber’, in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Weber and Islam (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 163–81. Eaton, Richard M., and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). Fisher, Humphrey J., ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 1 (1973), pp. 27–40. Fisher, Humphrey J., ‘Many Deep Baptisms: Reflections on Religious, Chiefly Muslim, Conversion in Black Africa’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57, no. 1 (1994), pp. 68–81.

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Fletcher, Richard, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD (London: Fontana, 1998). Fromont, Cecile, ‘Dance, Image, Myth, and Conversion in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1500–1800’, African Arts 44, no. 4 (2011), pp. 54–65. Gellner, David N., ‘For Syncretism: The Position of Buddhism in Nepal and Japan Compared’, Social Anthropology 5 (1997), pp. 277–91. Gibson, Thomas, Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia: From the 16th to the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Gonzaga, Francesco, De Origine Seraphicae Religionis Franciscanae eiusque progressibus, vol. 2: De Principii (Venice: n.p., 1603). Green, Nile, Sufism: A Global History (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). Green, Nile, ‘Islam in the Early Modern World’, in Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (eds), The Cambridge World History, vol. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE. Part 2: Patterns of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 358–86. Hastings, Adrian, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Haour, Anne, Rulers, Warriors, Traders and Clerics: The Central Sahel and the North Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Haour, Anne, Outsiders and Strangers: An Archaeology of Liminality in West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Horton, Robin, ‘African Conversion’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41, no. 2 (1971), pp. 85–108. Insoll, Tim, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jackson, Peter, ‘Mongol Khans and Religious Allegiance: The Problems Confronting a MinisterHistorian in Ilkhanid Iran’, Iran 47 (2009), pp. 109–22. Jones, Russell, ‘Ten Conversion Myths from Indonesia’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 129–58. Karamustafa, Ahmet T., ‘Islamisation through the Lens of the Saltuk-name’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 349–64. Kathirathamby-Wells, Jeyamalar, ‘“Strangers” and “Stranger-Kings”: The Stranger-King in Eighteenth Century Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40 (2009), pp. 567–91. Lapidus, Ira M., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Latukefu, Sione, Church and State in Tonga: The Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries and Political Development (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974). Lieberman, Victor, Strange Parallels, vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Levtzion, Nehemia, and Randall L. Pouwels, ‘Introduction: Patterns of Islamization and Varieties of Religious Experience among Muslims of Africa’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 1–20. Levtzion, Nehemia, and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). Levtzion, Nehemia, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 63–112. Manguin, Pierre-Yves, ‘The Amorphous Nature of Coastal Polities in Insular Southeast Asia’, Moussons 5 (2002), pp. 73–99.

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Mees, Constantinus Alting, De Kroniek van Koetai, doctoral thesis, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden (Santpoort: Uitgeverij, 1935). Melville, Charles, ‘Padshah-i Islam: The Conversion of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan’, in Charles Melville (ed.), History and Literature in Iran, Pembroke Persian Papers 1 (British Academic Press, 1990), pp. 159–77. Minorsky, V., Sharaf al-Zaman Tahir Marvazi on China, the Turks and India (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1942). Moin, Ahmed Azfar, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Moin, Ahmed Azfar, ‘Sovereign Violence: Temple Destruction in India and Shrine Desecration in Iran and Central Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 467–96. Moin, Ahmed Azfar, ‘Why Mughal Kings Venerated the Sun: Messianic Peace and Cosmotheism in Islam’, unpublished manuscript. Moore, R. I., The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Oakley, Francis, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Palmer, H. R., Sudanese Memoirs: Being Mainly Translations of a Number of Arabic Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan (Lagos: The Government Printer, 1928). Peacock, A. C. S., ‘Identity, Culture and Religion on Medieval Islam’s Caucasian Frontier’, Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 13 (2011), pp. 69–90. Peacock, A. C. S., ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-Century Indian Ocean: Sharia, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives’, in Joshua Gedacht and R. M. Feener (eds), Coercion, Cosmopolitanism and Islamic Connections in Asia (forthcoming). Peacock, A. C. S., Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Syncretism and Religious Change’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 10, no. 2 (January 1968), pp. 121–41. Peel, J. D. Y., ‘Divergent Modes of Religiosity in West Africa’, in H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds), Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004), pp. 11–30. Pfeiffer, Judith, ‘Conversion Versions: Sultan Öljeytü’s Conversion to Shi’ism (709/1309) in Muslim Narrative Sources’, Mongolian Studies 22 (1999), pp. 35–67. Pfeiffer, Judith, ‘Reflections on a Double Rapprochement: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill 2006), pp. 369–89. Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Prange, Sebastian R., ‘A Trade of No Dishonor: Piracy, Commerce, and Community in the Western Indian Ocean, Twelfth to Sixteenth Century’, The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011), pp. 1269–93. Prazniak, Roxann, ‘Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no.3 (2014), pp. 650–80. Rambelli, Fabio, and Mark Teeuwen (eds), Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm (London: Routledge, 2003). Ras, J. J. (ed.), Hikajat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968). Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s ‘Jamiʿu’t-tawarikh’, A Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998–9). Ricci, Ronit, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Richards, J. F., ‘Introduction’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Reid, Anthony, ‘The Islamization of Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Bangkok: Silkworm, 1999), pp. 15–38. Ricklefs, Merle C., Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Ricklefs, Merle C., Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (White Plains, NY: EastBridge, 2006). Robbins, Joel, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Robinson, David, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Routledge, David, Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1985). Sahlins, Marshall, ‘The Stranger-King: or, Elementary Forms of the Political Life’, in Ian Caldwell and David Henley (eds), Stranger-Kings in Indonesia and Beyond, a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World 105 (2008), pp. 177–99. Sanneh, Lamin, Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Sharot, Stephen, A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosi, Priests and Popular Religions (New York: New York University, 2001). Shepard, Jonathan, ‘Some Remarks on the Sources for the Conversion of the Rus’, in S. W. Swierkosz-Lenart (ed.), Le origini e lo sviluppo della cristianità Slavo-Bizantina (Rome: Nella Sede dell’Istituto Palazzo Borromini, 1992), pp. 59–95. Shepard, Jonathan, ‘The Coming of Christianity to Rus: Authorized and Unauthorized Versions’, in Calvin B. Kendall, Oliver Nicholson, William D. Phillips Jr and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Conversion to Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age: Considering the Process in Europe, Asia and the Americas (Minneaspolis, MN: Center for Early Modern History, 2009), pp. 185–222. Shepard, Jonathan, ‘Rus’, in Nora Berend (ed.), Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 369–415. de Silva, Chandra R. Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of Discoveries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Skilling, Peter, Jason A. Carbine, Claudio Cicuzza and Santi Pakdeekham (eds), How Theravāda is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012). Srinivas, Smriti, In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Stewart, Charles, ‘Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture’, Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1 (2011), pp. 48–55. Strathern, Alan, ‘Representing Eastern Religion: Queirós and Gonzaga on the First Christian– Buddhist Debate in Sri Lanka, 1543’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 43 (1998, published 2000), pp. 39–70. Strathern, Alan, ‘Transcendentalist Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007), pp. 358–83. Strathern, Alan, ‘The Vijaya Origin Myth of Sri Lanka and the Strangeness of Kingship’, Past and Present 203 (2009), pp. 3–28.

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Strathern, Alan, ‘Immanence and Tolerance: Ruler Conversions to Islam and Christianity in Archipelagic Southeast Asia’, in Tara Alberts and David R. M. Irving (eds), Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia: History and Society in the Early Modern World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 23–58. Strathern, Alan, ‘Drawing the Veil of Sovereignty: Early Modern Islamic Empires and Understanding Sacred Kingship’, History and Theory 53 (2014), pp. 79–93. Strathern, Alan, Unearthly Powers: Sacred Kingship and Religious Change in Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Thomas, David, ‘Miracles in Islam’, in Graham H. Twelftree (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Miracles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 199–215. Thornley, Andrew, Exodus of the I Taukei: The Wesleyan Church in Fiji: 1848–74 (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2002). Tomlinson, Mat, ‘Efficacy, Truth, and Silence: Language Ideologies in Fijian Christian Conversions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009), pp. 64–90. Van Dam, Raymond, Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Wain, Alexander D. R., ‘Chinese Muslims and the Conversion of the Nusantara to Islam’, doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. Waterhouse, Joseph, The King and the People of Fiji: Containing a Life of Thakombau; with Notices of the Fijians, Their Manners, Customs, and Superstitions, previous to the Great Religious Reformation in 1854 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1866). Wessing, Robert, ‘A Change in the Forest: Myth and History in West Java’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24 (1993), pp. 1–13. Wieringa, Edwin, ‘Structure and Function of the Salasilah Kuati, a Malay Dynastic Myth from East Kalimantan’, Saeculum 49 (1998), pp. 316–26. Wilks, Ivor, ‘The Juula and the Expansion of Islam into the Forest’, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp. 93–116. Wink, André, Akbar (London: Oneworld, 2008). Zarcone, Thierry, ‘Between Legend and History: About the “Conversion” to Islam of Two Prominent Lamaists in the Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, in Anna Akasoy, Charles S. F. Burnett and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (eds), Islam and Tibet: Interactions Along the Musk Routes (Farnham: Ashgate 2010), pp. 281–92.

3 CONVERSION OUT OF PERSONAL PRINCIPLE: ʿALI B. RABBAN AL-TABARI (d. c. 860) AND ʿABDALLAH AL-TARJUMAN (d. c. 1430), TWO CONVERTS FROM CHRISTIANITY TO ISLAM David Thomas

A

mong the glittering intellects of ninth-century Baghdad, few surpassed the Nestorian Christian Hunayn b. Ishaq. He was known for his scientific accomplishments, among them for his scholarship on the structure and function of the eye, and also for his medical skills, though he gained his reputation above all else for his translations of works from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. In these he achieved an accuracy and clarity that singled him out from other translators and made him into a celebrity whom people with money and position sought out for their commissions. Thanks to these skills and accomplishments, Hunayn moved in elite circles. These included the imperial court, where a succession of caliphs were glad to pay for his services. Here he must have been intimate with the courtiers who were closest to the ruler, and it is with one of these that he entered into a frank and unrestrained correspondence about the virtues of Islam. The details can no longer fully be known,1 but it appears that ʿAli b. Yahya b. al-Munajjim, from a family of advisers that had been close to the caliph since the start of the Abbasid dynasty, wrote to Hunayn after hearing him remark that anyone who knew the truth but did not follow it was blameworthy. Ibn al-Munajjim argued that the truth must certainly be with Islam because, in order to have issued his challenge to contemporaries to try to produce a scripture like the Quran, Muhammad must have possessed divinely inspired knowledge about its inimitability. In reply to this, Hunayn wrote a rather haughty dismissal of Ibn al-Munajjim’s arguments, which showed that not only was he unpersuaded by the courtier’s attempts to get him to convert, but also he was not at all frightened to reject the points made about the Prophet Muhammad himself. Maybe his indispensability afforded him immunity; maybe the atmosphere at court was such that non-Muslims felt they could express their views openly without fear of reprisals. At the beginning of his reply, Hunayn makes a point of some interest with regard to Christian attitudes towards conversion. Although it is made briefly and unspecifically, it shows that conversion was a common occurrence at this time, and that Christians such as Hunayn had no doubt at all that people who went over to Islam 56

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were committing a monumental error because they were giving up what was right and godly for what was false and godless. Hunayn’s point is that the reasons for accepting what is true are different from those for accepting what is false. The reasons for accepting the false are six: 1. by the force of his words one person can coerce another to accept involuntarily; 2. a person in great difficulty and distress will accept something he thinks will give him ease and comfort; 3. a person prefers glory over ignominy, honour over humbleness and power over weakness, and will move from one religion to another for these; 4. one person is deceitful towards another and treats the other unfairly; 5. a person may be among extremely ignorant people and he finds what is false an aid against their ignorance and lack of manners; 6. there may be a family tie between two people and one of them follows the religion of the other in order to preserve this. The very different reasons for accepting what is true are four: 1. 2. 3. 4.

a person witnesses miracles and will believe because of them; a person may perceive something as a proof of a truth that is still hidden from him; a conclusive proof will appear that leads to acceptance; the end of the matter agrees with its beginning, leaving no space for continuing doubt.2

It can hardly be missed in these two sets of reasons that a person accepts what is true because of conviction arising from miracles or rational certainty and what is freely accepted, while a person accepts what is false because of coercion or selfish ambition. Quite understandably, Hunayn has no time for people who think there are convincing reasons to convert from Christianity to Islam. As he puts it a little later, just as the ancient religions that flourished before Christianity vanished with the disappearance of their supports (al-umūr allatī kāna qiwāmuhā bi-hā),3 so will those that have come after it, which have the same underlying supports. For him, Islam is founded on identical errors to the cults of the ancient world. It can only be a matter of conjecture, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that when he was making these sardonic remarks Hunayn had in mind a fellow Nestorian who worked for the caliph and must have appeared among the same royal audiences as he did, and even in the same circles of discussion. This was Abu al-Hasan ʿAli b. Rabban Sahl al-Tabari, a well-known medical expert who at the advanced age of about seventy converted from his ancestral Christianity to the Islam of those among whom he had mingled for a good decade. This step must have caused scandal among the Nestorians of Baghdad, and Hunayn may have dismissed him more as being selfinterested and wanting to please his Muslim master and colleagues. However, there is reason to suppose that ʿAli al-Tabari was as convinced as anyone could be that the step he took was sound and right. Discussions about conversion in the early centuries of Islam frequently point to the kind of motives that Hunayn lists, detailing social and economic pressures, and sometimes political and raw physical pressures, as the main reasons behind Christians and others becoming Muslims. While there is little evidence to support the old and worn

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view that Islam was spread by the sword, it is undeniable that pressures of this kind must have been keenly felt and in many cases had their intended effect. What cannot be known at this distance from the events is how deeply the individuals concerned sensed the change – or indeed whether, for many of them, there was much of a perceptible change other than now making observances of a slightly different kind in a new building on a different day of the week, but to the same god. Historical records rarely allow insights into such fascinating questions. While conversion is usually seen as the result of pressure exerted on client believers or incentives laid before them, the individuals concerned are less often seen as active agents in this process, who sought a new way of believing (or simply of identifying who they were) out of attraction to what they knew about it and dissatisfaction with their former ways. Yet it stands to reason that there must have been some such individuals, and in some cases there is sufficient information to allow some inferences about their reasons for actively leaving the one faith and entering the other. ʿAli al-Tabari in the ninth century is one, and the Franciscan friar Anselmo Turmeda around the year 1400 is another. There must have been more, for whom there was a definite point of conversion with clear reasons for taking such a giant step. For an intellectual with an interest in academic medicine, ʿAli al-Tabari led a life of some excitement and glamour. He is first heard of in the service of the Abbasid governor of Tabaristan, Mazyar b. Qarin. This governor was from the old ruling family of the province and in 838–9 he rose in revolt, presumably to reassert his independence of Baghdad. In order to concentrate his resources, he sent ʿAli al-Tabari as his deputy to exact ransom from a town the sons of whose leaders he was holding captive, and then in 840, when his cause was lost, he released ʿAli from his service. These details suggest that as a trusted retainer ʿAli must have had the maturity that suited him to the governor’s service, and must at least have been approaching middle age. Soon after this, ʿAli must have been in the Abbasid capital Samarra because he was taken into the service of Caliph al-Muʿtasim, who died in 842. He worked chiefly as a secretary, though he evidently studied, and presumably practised, medicine because he wrote a succession of medical tracts at this time. He remained in the service of the caliphs al-Wathiq (r. 842–7) and al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–61), and he must have come particularly to their notice because al-Mutawakkil made him a nadīm, one of his close companions at table. At the beginning of al-Mutawakkil’s reign, he completed the work for which he became best known, the Firdaws al-Hikma (The Paradise of Medicine), a comprehensive medical treatise that remained one of the major works on the topic for centuries. The great historian and Quran commentator, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad al-Tabari, who was one of ʿAli’s students, kept a copy at his side. Sometime in the reign of al-Mutawakkil, ʿAli converted to Islam (some sources say under al-Muʿtasim, though this is unlikely), and soon after he wrote a recantation of his former faith known as the Radd ʿala’l-Nasara (Refutation of the Christians), and a few years later a defence of the prophethood of Muhammad based on biographical sources and references that ʿAli identified in the Bible, the Kitab al-Din wa’l-Dawla (The Book of Religion and Empire; hereafter Din wa’l-Dawla). These two works provide the main sources upon which ʿAli’s reasons for converting can be reconstructed. Incidentally, among ʿAli’s later biographers this major step of faith is not always remembered as the most significant fact about him. He is recalled as a medical expert and as a secretary to rulers, and he is imputed Jewish ancestry because of evident

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confusion over his father’s title rabban, which resembles the Jewish title ‘rabbi’ but is in fact a Syriac term which means ‘our master’. His conversion to Islam is mainly remembered by later Christians who took the same step as he did and who made use of his anti-Christian works in order to support their own justifications for doing so. In the Firdaws al-Hikma, ʿAli explains that his father was given this title rabban by the Christian community in Merv in recognition of his surpassing expertise in medicine.4 It must be assumed that he was also more than expert in Christian theology. In fact, ʿAli must have come from a family of theologians because in the Din wa’l-Dawla he himself recalls his uncle, whom he describes as an expert renowned throughout Iraq and Khurasan, expressing definite views about the Quran and remarking that no one became a Muslim on the basis of the evidence of miracles, because there were none.5 This recalls Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s first reason for people converting from one faith to another, and appears to reflect a widespread Christian attitude that Muhammad and his teachings could not be authentic because they were not supported by miracles in the same way as Christianity. All these details suggest a home background that was thoroughly intellectual and Christian, and confident in its reasons for finding Islam unconvincing. But there are reasons to suppose that ʿAli himself was not as sure about the claims of Christianity as this picture may lead one to think. The Radd ʿala’l-Nasara (hereafter Radd), which ʿAli probably wrote in the early 850s soon after he converted to Islam, was in its original form a substantial series of demonstrations that Christianity was shot through with inconsistencies and irrationalities (it survives in a single manuscript which contains possibly only half of what ʿAli wrote). At the beginning, ʿAli divulges the important detail that he had been a Christian until the age of seventy, which even if it is not to be taken literally shows that he must have converted somewhere near this age, a point to be taken into consideration later. The work reflects the deep factual knowledge that ʿAli possessed about the faith he had just left. He is able to adduce verses from the Gospels and other books of the Bible at will, and to compare these with the Nicene Creed and Christian doctrines to show discrepancies between the two. He starts with seven arguments that he calls ‘the Silencers’ because he believes they will prove unanswerable by any Christian. The second provides a good example of his approach. This argument concerns whether what Christ had said about himself was true or false. Christians will naturally have to say that Jesus spoke the truth entirely, though this allows ʿAli to go on to say that, on the basis of Christ’s own words about being human and being ignorant of some things, Christians must affirm that he was a creature and subordinate to God and that God is one and unique. But this is contrary to the Creed, which states that Christ is true God from true God.6 The dilemma that ʿAli presents here is briefly put but nevertheless embarrassing for Christians: if Christ is to be believed, he declared that God was above him and that he was human, though the Creed attributes divinity to him and equality with God. Thus, either the Gospel or the doctrinal formulations of the Church must be wrong. ʿAli clinches his argument by quoting some verses from the Gospels in which Jesus clearly identifies himself as human and inferior to God. This kind of argument is repeated with variations throughout the Radd, and it shows how thoroughly inconsistent ʿAli regarded Christianity as being. For him it was intellectually threadbare. In addition to this, however, another element in his attitude to Christianity comes through. This seems to be not so much a realisation of its insufficiency, which he may

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have arrived at since his conversion or in the years immediately before it, as an awareness of its raggedness that must have stretched back through the years when he still called himself a Christian. The latter lost parts of the Radd can be restored in outline from brief quotations preserved by the thirteenth-century Coptic scholar al-Safi b. al-ʿAssal in the response he made to the work. At one point he quotes ʿAli arguing that, according to the Hebrew Bible, the priest who gave King David the bread of the offering at the time he and his men had no food was named Abimelech (1 Samuel 21: 1–6), though in his reference to this incident Jesus names him Abiathar (Mark 2: 26). Thus, in the original story of David seeking out food for his fighting men it is the father Abimelech who gives him consecrated bread, while in Jesus’ mention of it in the Gospel it is the son, Abiathar, who does this. It is a glaring inconsistency, and all the more flagrant for involving Jesus himself. It would have been known in Christian circles for centuries, certainly throughout ʿAli’s life, and maybe it would have been part of a familiar list of such howlers. But whereas the majority of Christians recognised it and were not deeply affected, in ʿAli’s estimation it was evidently one of those elements that alienated him from his family’s faith. The condition of the text of the Radd prevents any confirmation of this supposition. However, it is supported by another argument in which ʿAli brings together the incident from the Gospels in which John the Baptist’s disciples come to Jesus to ask him who he is (Matthew 11: 3) and the incident of the baptism of Jesus in which John hears the heavenly voice declaring that Jesus is Son of God (Matthew 3: 16–17). The problem raised by these two passages together is that, if John had known from the start of Jesus’ ministry that he was the Son of God, it seems contradictory for him at a later stage to send disciples to ask who he was. As part of the discussion of this inconsistency, ʿAli refers to an attempted reconciliation of the two passages by a Nestorian exegete to whom he gives the title al-Mufassiq, Syriac for ‘the Interpreter’. This individual was most probably the fifthcentury Church Father Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), whose commentaries on the Bible were particularly prized in the Church of the East and whose teachings would have been well known in ʿAli’s home throughout his life. This means that the apparent inconsistency regarding John the Baptist’s knowledge about Jesus must have been familiar to ʿAli since his childhood. It points to the possibility that at least some or many of the problems he discusses in the Radd had been known to him for many years. They had not arisen as glaring obstacles to belief only in the few years leading up to his conversion, or those leading away from it. Rather, they had been difficulties that would have caused him to feel growing unease about his Christianity for a long time, not insubstantial contributory reasons to make him abandon it. His conversion, it would seem, was not sudden or unprepared for. ʿAli’s other anti-Christian work yields further details about what was going on when he converted. Again, these do not consist of direct statements and they have to be interpreted with care. The Din wa’l-Dawla probably dates from about five years after the Radd (ʿAli alludes to the Radd twice in the course of his arguments in the Din wa’l-Dawla) and it is a very different kind of work. In fact, it is one of the earliest known ‘proofs of prophethood’ (dalāʾil al-nubuwwa) works, intended to defend the prophetic status of Muhammad by various kinds of proofs including his personal virtues, his knowledge of the past and future, his miracles and, most impressively, evidence from the Christian scriptures. These latter proofs are the result of ʿAli’s ingenious interpretations of words and meanings from the Old Testament and the Gospels;

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some later Muslim theologians found them so useful that they continued to be passed on for many centuries. Like the Radd, ʿAli wrote the Din wa’l-Dawla during the reign of Caliph alMutawakkil, probably in about 855 or thereabouts. But, unlike the Radd, in this work he mentions the caliph a number of times, intimating that it was he who had encouraged him to write it and, even more, that it was he who had brought ʿAli to Islam ‘by his attracting and alarming, his esteeming and appreciating all people together’.7 The words are not direct, though they are sufficiently suggestive of the active part played by al-Mutawakkil in causing ʿAli to become a Muslim. It is worth remembering that ʿAli and he would have been well known to each other and close enough for the caliph to admit the courtier to his close circle of friends, though it is unclear whether this was before ʿAli converted or after. So there would have been ample opportunity for al-Mutawakkil to argue with him and find ways of persuading him. Throughout the Din wa’l-Dawla ʿAli shows that he has become completely Islamised, to the extent that his approach to the Bible is utterly dissociated from that of his former fellow Christian believers, and in places external to the text itself. Thus, for example, he reads verses from Psalm 50 in such a way as to distort their natural meaning. Verse 2, which is usually translated as ‘God shines out from Zion, perfect in beauty’ (Revised English Bible), he translates as ‘From Zion God caused to appear a crown greatly praised’, and he sees in the phrase ‘greatly praised’ (maḥmūd in Arabic) a reference to Muhammad by virtue of the trilateral root ḥ-m-d, which lies at the basis of both Arabic words. Irrespective of the most obvious meaning, the appearance of this word is enough to allow him to argue that it is a prediction of Muhammad. Maybe the most obvious example of this singular approach to the Bible that is completely severed from past associations comes in ʿAli’s interpretation of Isaiah 40: In the desert a voice cried and said, ‘Make clear the way for the Lord and make straight the path in the desert for our God; every valley shall be filled with water and they shall overflow; the mountains and hills shall be made low; the rises will become flat, and the rough ground made low and smooth, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. (Isaiah 40: 3–5) This prophecy would be known to anyone who studied the Gospels, where in Matthew, Mark and Luke it is associated with John the Baptist. He is identified as ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord”’, proclaiming the coming of Jesus. ʿAli, however, in denial of this interprets the passage as a prediction of the victory of the Muslim armies over the Sasanian Persians in the seventh century: Do you know, may God guide you, a community which God has summoned from the desert and arid spaces, for whom he has made level what is rough, made fertile the wild tract, made pasture from barren land, filled the valleys for their thirsty ones, to which he has humbled tyrants and kings, whom he compares with rises and hills, other than this community, before whom the Tigris became like a smoothed out pathway? For when they reached it, they all said, ‘He who has protected us on dry land will protect us on the sea.’ Then they plunged through it, with Chosroes and his satraps and armies beyond it, though they regarded him as nothing and did not fall back before him, when they were naked and barefoot, with only the reins from their camels to protect their heads.8

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It is difficult to think that he could not have been aware of the association made in the Gospels between this passage and John the Baptist. So, his indifference to it, and his construction of an entirely new association, provides a graphic example of how fully he had turned his mind away from his former faith and was thinking entirely along the lines of his new faith. There can be little doubt that by the time he wrote the Din wa’l-Dawla ʿAli was intellectually a Muslim and, from the evidence of this and the Radd, that he was also a Muslim by conviction. Close to the caliph as he was, and therefore needing to show how he had changed, his whole demeanour seems to have become reconciled with Islam and its portrayal of the coming of Muhammad and the Quran, and that this is foreshadowed in the revelations that were sent beforehand. He shows no hint of any tension between his former belief in the finality of Christ and his new acceptance of the finality of Islam, but simply accepts Christ as the prophet the Quran says he was, and as a forerunner of Muhammad. Thus he has no compunction in following the old Muslim interpretations of Jesus’ promise in the Gospel of John to send the Paraclete as a promise that Muhammad will come, and he adds his own interpretation to this: that the numerical value of the letters of ‘Paraclete’ is equivalent to ‘Muhammad, son of ʿAbdallah, prophet, guide’.9 Similarly, he regards Christian interpretation of the Bible as flawed, and in the Radd he actually complains that Christians take the handful of verses in the Gospels and Letters of Paul that give ambiguous hints about Jesus’ divinity and use them to interpret the 20,000 verses that speak of Jesus’ humanity, instead of doing the opposite. In general, he is quite clear that both Christ and his first disciples, and also Christian scripture, conform to the teaching of Islam in pointing to the oneness of God, the humanity of the prophet Jesus and the coming of the last prophet, Muhammad. The conviction that ʿAli shows in the Din wa’l-Dawla, and that is already suggested in the Radd, cannot be reconciled with any of the six reasons for conversion to Islam that Hunayn b. Ishaq lists in his response to Ibn al-Munajjim written at about this time. Hunayn’s second reason, that a person accepts something to give him comfort from his distress; his fourth reason, that one person deceives another into believing; his fifth reason, that a person finds what is false as an aid against ignorant people; and his sixth reason, that he accepts a religion because of family ties – all these can be ruled out immediately. It is also unlikely that Hunayn’s third reason, the allure of glory, honour and power, applies because ʿAli was approaching the age of seventy when he converted, was already celebrated as the author of significant medical texts and must have already enjoyed a comfortable income from his work in the palace and his membership of the caliph’s intimate circle. This leaves Hunayn’s first reason, that one person coerces another to convert by the force of his words. ʿAli is quite open about the part Caliph al-Mutawakkil played in his composition of the Din wa’l-Dawla, and, as has been mentioned, at one point he goes further and expresses his thanks for what the caliph has ‘firmly brought me to, and has drawn me and others of the protected people to by his attracting and alarming, his esteeming and appreciating all people together’. This suggests that the caliph has been setting arguments before him and that these have taken the form of some sort of warning about the implications of following the wrong sort of faith. It is even likely that al-Mutawakkil, who was known for his intolerance towards divergences in religion away from the strict Sunni orthodoxy that he favoured, had made the point to ʿAli that he could not continue as one of the caliph’s intimates if he persisted in his faith of Christianity.

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There may be something in this, and it would contribute to the conclusion that in ʿAli’s case conversion was not entirely sincere, but in part a response to pressure from outside. However, weighed against this is the evidence of ʿAli’s anti-Christian works themselves, showing the complete absence of any traces of Christian beliefs and a mental framework so thoroughly Islamic that it can only have sprung from deep inner conviction. There are signs that ʿAli had found the contradictions in the Gospels and inconsistencies between Christian scripture and doctrine to be a problem for some time, maybe even before he entered the service of the caliphs. It is not unreasonable to think of his doubts and misgivings gradually gathering in strength in the atmosphere of the Abbasid court, where the emphasis on the radical oneness of God and the distinction between God and all other beings would be maintained in strict form, and finally issuing in an act of formal conversion, possibly with the caliph’s active assistance. In the case of ʿAli al-Tabari we may have someone who was deeply convinced of his new faith, having come to see at an advanced age the reasonableness and coherence of what he now embraced. The question that remains, of course, and one that no manner of probing of texts will satisfactorily answer, is how convinced he had been of the Christian faith into which he was born. He talks at one point in the Din wa’lDawla of how he used to agree with his uncle’s views about the weakness of Islam, and this may provide a hint that he was very much under this theologian’s influence as a young man, with the implication that as he grew more mature and came to think for himself he began to see things rather differently. It may be, then, that he had found more problems with Christianity than he had reasons for believing in it, and later saw in Islam some of the solutions. But this must be no more than a conjecture that cannot be substantiated on the basis of the evidence in the works that ʿAli has left. There are, then, strong reasons to think that ʿAli b. Rabban al-Tabari converted to Islam for reasons that were in major part conviction. The same may well have been the case with the much later convert, the Franciscan friar Anselmo Turmeda,10 though his reasons are just as difficult to work out as ʿAli’s. Unlike ʿAli al-Tabari, Turmeda actually describes and explains his conversion in the main work for which he is known, the Tuhfat al-Adib fī’l-Radd ʿala Ahl al-Salib (The Cultured Man’s Gift, in Refutation of the People of the Cross; hereafter Tuhfa),11 which is part autobiography, part history and part polemic. He says how his life had been one of study: at his home in Majorca he studied the Gospel, Greek and logic; then, at the age of fourteen, he went to the University of Lérida and later to Bologna, where in 1379, after ten years of study, he became a Franciscan friar. But then, after attending a disputation on the identity of the Paraclete, he decided to convert to Islam. He returned to Majorca and from there he travelled to Sicily and Tunis. He made a formal act of conversion before the ruler and he adopted the name ʿAbdallah. He married and had children, and he worked in the customs office as a translator (hence the name ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman). He died in Tunis sometime between 1424 and 1430.12 This is a stark and uncompromising outline, suggesting a man who acts decisively on his convictions and does not count the cost when he discerns the right action to take. ʿAbdallah intimates as much at the beginning of the Tuhfa when he says: ‘God blessed me with guidance to the “path that is straight” and entry into the religion of God that is authentic, whose religion has abrogated all religions’ (dīn Allāh al-qawīm al-nāsikh dīnuhu kull al-adyān). To give up his own religion and his membership of the Franciscan order, and to migrate for good to a new country and work in a job that by no means brought recognition or honour shows how convinced he was about the

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truth he perceived. However, his story as he tells it includes elements that raise some doubts about what actually happened and give occasion to wonder about what really caused Anselmo to become ʿAbdallah. ʿAbdallah recalls with some affection the priest with whom he studied in Bologna, saying how he drew close to him and was placed by him in a position of trust. The decisive event that led to his conversion was a discussion, at which this priest was not present, on the meaning of Jesus’ words ‘After me will come a prophet whose name is the Paraclete’. This is clearly a reference to Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John during his long discourse at supper with his disciples on the night of his arrest, in which he refers to the Paraclete four times (14: 16, 14: 26, 15: 26, 16: 7), saying how, when he has departed, he will send the Paraclete. The problem is that Jesus does not identify this being as a prophet, and it is extremely difficult to imagine a group of Christian scholars in a university such as Bologna debating the question of any prophetic figure coming after Jesus. If this awkwardness raises doubts about the reliability of the account, what ʿAbdallah says about the events that ensued intensifies them. The scholars in the debate each express an opinion about the identity of this figure in Jesus’ prediction, and when they fail to reach agreement they take the matter to the priest with whom Anselmo was studying. The priest tells them they are all wrong and replies with the words, ‘No one knows him except God and those who are deeply rooted in knowledge.’ Then, when Anselmo asks him to tell him the meaning of the name Paraclete, he says that this title is one of the names of Muhammad, and adds that if the Christians had remained true to the original religion of Jesus they would have been following the religion of God. When Anslemo declares that he will convert to Islam, the priest says that he himself would have done the same if only he were able. This whole account is circumstantially suspect and much too dramatically changed to sound plausible, including a priest who is venerated for his Christian learning and pious way of life hiding as a secret unitarian. In addition, his words to the assembled scholars neatly echo the Quran, though they have been removed from their context. In Sura 3, the original reference is to the interpretation of the Quran: ‘No one knows its interpretation except God and those who are deeply rooted in knowledge’ (Q. 3:7). Ironically, the precise meaning of this verse is one of the most contested in the whole Quran, with some scholars saying that the grammatical pause should come after ‘in knowledge’, so that the meaning of the verse is that God and the learned know the interpretation of the Quran, while other scholars say that the pause should come after ‘except God’, so that the meaning is that only God knows the interpretation, with the following sentence stating that men who are deeply rooted in knowledge will say, ‘Our Lord, let not our hearts deviate.’ ʿAbdallah does not say whether he has particularly chosen the verse because of its contested structure and meaning, though it obviously fits his purpose as an indication that the truly knowledgeable, as opposed to those with a little learning, grasp the truth about the proper identity of the Paraclete. There is also the further element of doubt in the topic of the Bologna scholars’ debate about the identity of the prophet (nabī) who will come after Jesus. Like the words of the priest, these are also from the Quran, originally part of Jesus’ speech to the people of Israel in which he refers to himself as ‘giving tidings of a messenger to come after me whose name will be Ahmad’. Again, this is contested because Muslims

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see the name Ahmad as identical to Muhammad (again both deriving from the root ḥ-m-d) and take the verse as justification for finding references to Muhammad in the Bible (ʿAli al-Tabari did exactly this), and either find them in the title Paraclete and elsewhere, or conclude that the Bible has been corrupted. Why should ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman choose two such charged verses? He does not say, expecting his Arabic-speaking readers to accept that Christian priests in an Italian university knew the Quran and debated it. The obvious reason he should choose them is, of course, that they would be well known in polemical circles and so a reader would recognise them. But whatever function they served, they clearly show that this account of conversion has been constructed for dramatic effect. This raises the question of the veracity of the whole sequence of events and the reason for ʿAbdallah’s conversion in the first place. It could be argued that someone who had become a Muslim and wanted to tell his story would give it dramatic texture by including a debate about a verse from the Gospel whose meaning lay open but no one could identify it, and involving a deeply scholarly priest who was a secret Muslim; and also, it could be argued, that he would debase the name of Christianity by making the protagonist a member of an order that was deeply respected for its Christ-like simplicity and holiness, converting because the truth lay elsewhere. Such considerations point to a story that is largely made up, not unlikely for polemical effect, with little in it that can be taken as reliable. But there certainly was a Fray Anselmo Turmeda, and he does appear to have ended his days as a Muslim in Tunis. So why did he convert? At this point it may be worth observing that, on the basis of ʿAbdallah’s account as he gives it, Hunayn b. Ishaq would explain his conversion under either the fifth or sixth of his reasons. According to the fifth – that ‘a person may be among extremely ignorant people and he finds what is false an aid against their ignorance and lack of manners’ – ʿAbdallah could have converted out of frustration at the shallowness and inconclusiveness of the debate among his confrères in Bologna; and, according to the sixth – that ‘there may be a family tie between two people and one of them follows the religion of the other in order to preserve this’ – ʿAbdallah could have taken his final decision after he heard what the old priest, a father figure to him, had wistfully said about Islam. There may be some substance in both, though neither seems substantial enough to cause such an upheaval in the scholarly friar’s life. ʿAbdallah himself suggests an immediate reason for his conversion, provided by Christians who had heard about it. This was that he desired to marry (p. 219). He did indeed marry in Tunis and have children, though since he is prepared to quote this reason against himself it is unlikely to have been any more than his opponents’ sour retaliation against his action that he himself did not take seriously. A more likely hint is given elsewhere in the Tuhfa, where ʿAbdallah refers to a trick played by priests, which was to add salt and vinegar to the water they put in their fonts and other church vessels in order to fool people into thinking the water never changed or went off (p. 317). This suggests disillusionment with his former fellow Christians, but, even though he may have realised that the priesthood was not all it was purported to be, this again does not seem a strong enough reason to cause such a drastic upheaval in the life of a man who professed as a Franciscan and knew enough about the problems of theology to have seen that the fabric of Christianity was not all even.

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It is maybe no longer possible to know why ʿAbdallah converted. The story he himself tells about it reflects more than anything else the Muslim belief that beneath all the different professions of faith lies the truth that is embodied in Islam. Thus, the issue that is debated by the scholars in Bologna in reality concerns the belief that all revelations point to Muhammad and the ultimate revelation, and the wise old priest represents the truly knowledgeable figure (functioning not unlike the monk Bahira in legends about the young Muhammad) who discerns the truth beneath artificial manifestations. It is possible that ʿAbdallah’s portrayal of the priest points to his own inner journey, even though he says little about the priest’s true reasons for concealing his beliefs. Maybe he himself was dissatisfied with the arguments presented by theologians and their attempts to shore up the central doctrines of the Church, and in his own mind he wanted to get away from pretence about faith to the deeper core of belief in a God who fulfilled the requirements of divinity in his transcendence, omnipotence and omniscience; the God of Francis was too anthropomorphised. It is impossible to do more than offer guesses such as this, though clearly ʿAbdallah found the traditional Muslim arguments against Christianity to be more than congenial, and he repeats many that are known from earlier polemicists in the third part of the Tuhfa. Incidentally, among these are arguments taken from ʿAli al-Tabari’s Radd ʿala’l-Nasara, which ʿAbdallah had clearly studied at close hand. In these he found particularly strong the sequence of comparisons in which the miracles performed by Jesus and similar miracles performed by other prophetic figures are shown to be no different in quality, and thus remove ground for saying that Jesus was unique and divine.13 He was also impressed by the inconsistencies between the Gospels over the crucifixion of Jesus, in which one says that both thieves who were crucified with him mocked him, while another says that one thief rebuked the other for this.14 These seem to suggest that, like ʿAli al-Tabari, ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman found no basis in scripture for saying that Jesus was divine. The fact is that this Franciscan, who had studied Christianity for years and appeared to have a secure existence in a university community, gave up everything and made his way to an unknown land. There he settled for the rest of his life and assisted his new masters against Christian Europe by making translations for them. In order to do this he learnt Arabic and achieved expertise in it. So, whatever his precise reasons for converting, it seems beyond doubt that his conversion was sincere. He had truly come to see that Christian teachings about the nature of God and his relationship with the world did not hold together, and he thanked God for graciously guiding him to the straight path and the religion that is true and replaces all others. Comparing ʿAbdallah’s conversion with ʿAli al-Tabari’s, it seems more sudden and less easy to explain (more Pauline than Augustinian, one might say). There are reasonably clear signs in ʿAli’s work that he had been on a mental and spiritual journey for some years, maybe from the time he entered the caliphal service in about 840, ten years before he formally professed his new faith, or even before. But ʿAbdallah gives no hint that he had been on such a journey. His account of his education, and especially of his years with the priest in Bologna, shows it to have apparently been untrammelled by religious doubt, while his profession as a Franciscan is an indication of what would

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appear to have been a deep inner conviction. But if his recollection of the debate that caused the decisive change in him contains any grain of truth – even on the most charitable terms it must be accepted as a reconstruction composed years after the event and intended for a Muslim readership – it was the possibility of another being who was to come after Christ that affected him. Why should this be? Of course, there is no way of knowing for sure, though the fact that he entertained the possibility means that he did not happily accept the idea of the finality of Christ and maybe the divinity of a being who was also fully human. This suggests that he was already moving away from doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity, and was maybe attracted by the God of the Averroists, as Robert Brunschvig argues.15 But this goes beyond the evidence that ʿAbdallah himself gives in the Tuhfa. The fact remains that he was shaken enough by something that happened in Bologna to abandon his whole way of life, leave the places that had been familiar for years, and move to a new country and culture. ʿAbdallah’s was a different journey from ʿAli’s. The earlier Christian appears to have been travelling inwardly for many years before taking the final outward step of converting, while the later of the two seems to have changed suddenly without prior awareness or warning and to have travelled hundreds of miles to a new life. But they share the conviction that the faith they had left was mistaken and the truth lay elsewhere. This point deserves underlining: both Christians were convinced that the teachings of the Church as they understood them lacked the distinguishing qualities of God’s final word to his creation. Whatever the faith they found – to go by the warm affirmations of Islam ʿAli makes in both his works and the unqualified veneration for Muhammad he witnesses in the Din wa’l-Dawla, he was mentally and spiritually at home in Islam, while ʿAbdallah may have undergone a conversion that lacked conviction,16 more the abandonment of a position that raised too many doubts than the adoption of a position that offered satisfaction – this, it seems, was more coherent in its structure and more easily explained and defended according to intellectual norms. There is a story about the caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, the only Umayyad ruler who continued to be respected after the dynasty was overthrown. When he heard that the governors of his provinces were preventing Christians from converting to Islam, he issued a decree forbidding this. The story behind this story is revealing. On the one hand, the governors prevented conversions because they did not want to lose the revenue that accrued from their client people, while on the other, the caliph forbade the governors from doing this, regardless of the state finances, out of simple piety. And the Christians, it appeared, were wanting to convert in order to avoid the imposition of the taxes they were compelled to pay. Here is a glaring example of conversion from Christianity to Islam for crude reasons of self-interest. No doubt, countless other Christians, as well as Jews and others, took the same step because of financial inducements, social pressures and physical threats, all conforming to one or more of Hunayn b. Ishaq’s reasons for accepting a false religion. But this cannot be the whole story. The examples of ʿAli al-Tabari in the ninth century and ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman in the fifteenth show that some Christians took the step of conversion because they sincerely felt they could do no other if they were to come nearer to finding peace within themselves.

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Notes 1. See B. Roggema and J. P. Monferrer-Sala, ‘Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’, in D. Thomas and B. Roggema (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 762–7 (on Ibn al-Munajjim) and pp. 768–79 (on Hunayn b. Ishaq). 2. S. K. Samir and P. Nwyia, Une correspondence islamo-chrétienne entre Ibn al-Munağğim, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq et Qusṭa ibn Lūqā, Patriologia Orientalis 40 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), pp. 690–3. 3. Ibid., p. 694. 4. ʿAli al-Tabari, Firdaws al-Hikma, ed. M. Z. Siddiqui (Berlin: Sonne, 1928), p. 1. 5. ʿAli al-Tabari, Kitab al-Din wa’l-Dawla, in R. Ebied and D. Thomas (eds and trans.), The Polemical Works of ʿAli al-Ṭabarī (L0eiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 434–7. 6. ʿAli al-Tabari, Radd ʿala‘l-Nasara, in R. Ebied and D. Thomas (eds and trans.), The Polemical Works of ʿAli al-Ṭabarī (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 72–3. 7. Al-Tabari, Radd ʿala‘l-Nasara, pp. 472–3. 8. Al-Tabari, Radd ʿala‘l-Nasara, pp. 362–3. ʿAli’s chronology here raises some difficulties. He imagines an invasion across the Tigris by poorly armed Muslim believers during Muhammad’s lifetime, and before 628 when Chosroes II died. But no such crossing is known until the late 630s at the earliest. 9. Ibid., pp. 426–7. 10. See J. P. Monferrer-Sala, ‘Fray Anselmo Turmeda’, in D. Thomas and A. Mallet (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 5 (1350–1500) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 326–9. 11. M. de Epalza (ed. and trans.), La Tuḥfa, autobiografía polémica islámica contra al Cristianismo de ʿAbdallāh al-Taryumān (fray Anselmo Turmeda) (Rome: Accad. Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971). 12. Ibid., pp. 202–43 (see also Epalza’s summary biography, pp. 11–25). 13. De Epalza, La Tuḥfa, pp. 339–47. 14. Ibid., pp. 412–15. This reference indicates that ʿAbdallah had access to a more complete text of the Radd than is now available. 15. R. Brunschvig, La Barbérie orientale sous les Ḥafṣides (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1941), pp. 469–70. 16. Ibid.

Bibliography Brunschvig, R., La Barbérie orientale sous les Ḥafṣides (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1941). Ebied, R., and D. Thomas (eds and trans.), The Polemical Works of ʿAli al-Tabari (Leiden: Brill, 2015). de Epalza, M. (ed. and trans.), La Tuḥfa, autobiografía polémica islámica contra al Cristianismo de ʿAbdallāh al-Taryumān (fray Anselmo Turmeda) (Rome: Accad. Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971). Monferrer-Sala, J. P., ‘Fray Anselmo Turmeda’, in D. Thomas and A. Mallet (eds), Christian– Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 5 (1350–1500) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 326–9. Roggema, B., and J. P. Monferrer-Sala, ‘Hunayn ibn Ishāq’, in D. Thomas and B. Roggema (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 768–79. Samir, S. K., and P. Nwyia, Une correspondence islamo-chrétienne entre Ibn al-Munağğim, Ḥunayn ibn Iṣhāq et Qusṭa ibn Lūqā, Patriologia Orientalis 40 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981). al-Tabari, ʿAli, Firdaws al-Hikma, ed. M. Z. Siddiqui (Berlin: Sonne, 1928).

4 THE CONVERSION CURVE REVISITED Richard W. Bulliet

I

n 1970, I published ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’ in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.1 Originally a part of my doctoral thesis, the article sought to derive fluctuations over time in traffic flows along the major caravan routes passing through Nishapur, a major city in north-eastern Iran, from the place names borne by the religious elite of that city during the first Islamic centuries. A second part of my submission was gently rejected by the editor. It dealt with a bell-shaped curve that traced the rise and fall in popularity of the personal names Muhammad, Ahmad, ʿAli, al-Hasan and al-Husain during the same period. Four years later, when I was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, I was still puzzling over the bell-shaped curve of overtly religious Islamic naming. It occurred to me that it might in some way be related to the conversion of the Iranian population to Islam, but I had no idea how to proceed. I explored this conjecture in a seminar talk, taking the rising part of the bell curve as an indication of the growth of the Muslim population and then reversing the curve to turn the bell shape into an elongated ‘S’ shape. After the talk, a geographer friend, Michael Bonine, mentioned that this was an interesting application of a logistic curve. As I had never heard of this statistical tool, I asked him where I might find out more about it and I quickly discovered that it was an integrated form of the bell curve that had frequently been used in the twentieth century to model the spread of new ideas and inventions. The ideas and inventions started off slowly, gained momentum in the middle portion of the curve, and then spread more and more slowly as the population of possible adopters became saturated. After thinking long and hard about whether religious conversion could be likened to the diffusion of innovations in modern times, I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support a more detailed exploration of the possible relationship between name frequencies and conversion to Islam. By good fortune, my application was selected. Yet the naming data that so intrigued me could hardly, in and of itself, show religious conversion because they were all the names of Muslims drawn from the much larger pool of personal names of Muslim religious notables contained in medieval Arabic 69

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biographical compilations. How could I talk about the movement of non-Muslims into the Muslim community if the only data I had came from the Muslim community? Halfway through my Guggenheim year, I was still baffled by this problem. Using the genealogical data included in most of the entries in the compilations relating to Nishapur, I tried counting the frequency of my chosen group of five names – indeed of all sorts of names – among the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the scholars listed. But everything I tried was held up by the fact that all of the names were the names of Muslims. My desk overflowed with dozens of useless graphs. Then late one night, following a suggestion from a friend, I turned to the subset of genealogical sequences that began with a name in Persian instead of Arabic. I assigned a date to each Persian name by counting generations backwards from the lifetime of the descendant whose genealogy began with that name. My hypothesis was that, inasmuch as Persian names appeared only rarely in any position other than at the beginning of a genealogical lineage, the change in language in the genealogy marked the point of conversion of that particular lineage. Lo and behold, the result was a perfect logistic curve. But this curve was entirely unconnected to the popularity of the five names I had started with. Seldom, in fact, did one of the five appear as the earliest Arabic name in a genealogy. Though puzzled by this, I felt I had made progress because it seemed so improbable that the Persian names in the genealogies would fit perfectly into the regular pattern I had predicted on the premise, based on an entirely different naming sample, that such a pattern would reflect conversion to Islam. What else could explain it? That was the genesis of my book Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History, published in 1979.2 When I sent the manuscript to Harvard University Press, which had published my two earlier books, The Patricians of Nishapur and The Camel and the Wheel, they duly sent it out for review. The review that came back – I do not know who wrote it – aggressively criticised my findings and raised sufficient knowledgeable questions about various details to warrant a negative conclusion: ‘I know that I would not want to publish a manuscript in this condition.’ Going through the review in detail, I found it to contain thirty-four specific arguments against what I had written. My response to the Press thus consisted of thirty-four rebuttals. For example, the reviewer complained: ‘The language in his first chapter is much too apologetic for someone with reliable evidence. If the evidence justifies the conclusions drawn from it no apology is needed. If not, no excuses will help.’ To this I replied: The language may well be too apologetic in chapter 1. On the other hand, I feel a speculative work should be labeled as such and not passed off as proven theory. For someone who believes my theories to be entirely wrong to ask me to assert more confidently that they are right sounds like an invitation to cut my own throat more deeply. Overall, the review was saturated with disdain. ‘It hardly seems advisable,’ the reviewer wrote, ‘to impose a model taken from marketing on religious conversion as though it were only a socio-economic phenomenon without at least consulting the psychological and sociological literature on conversion.’ I had gone to pains in the manuscript to explain that I had no way of determining the depth, motivation or genuineness of the move from a non-Muslim to a Muslim social identity that I read into the logistic

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curve. But nothing can placate a sensibility that holds religious belief to be beyond the reach of quantification. The Press moved on to other reviewers, who read the manuscript with more open minds. But the vituperative tone of the first reviewer’s report proved a harbinger of responses to come. Since the three-century timetable of conversion indicated by the conversion curve fit remarkably well with the early political and institutional history of Islam, the chronology I proposed was widely adopted. However, in many quarters the methodology is still either questioned, ignored or treated with scepticism. The most common complaint is that, by using biographical compilations dedicated exclusively to religious scholars, my conclusions can apply to only elite urbanites. I wondered as I read such comments which of my critics among the specialised scholars of Islamic history had themselves followed academic careers that were somehow foreshadowed by the names borne by their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The learned elite of a city like Nishapur, whose population numbered less than 10,000 at the time of the Arab conquest and had grown to well over 100,000 by the time their scholars’ names were set down in biographical dictionaries, could not possibly have all been descended from the educated urban elite of the conquest era. At a lower level of conviction, I observed that a secondary curve, the one I had started with tracing the popularity of Muhammad, Ahmad, ʿAli, al-Hasan and alHusain, seemed to correlate with a particular point in the Iranian conversion curve derived from Persian-named ancestors. That correlation allowed me to suggest slightly different chronologies for the non-Persian-speaking parts of the caliphate. The only province that offered a parallel array of name changes in scholarly genealogies was Spain, but the data there were fewer and less certain, and the curve, though of the same general shape, was not as smooth as the one for Iran. Disagreements about my technique and my conclusions have continued, particularly with regard to Spain, where a misinterpretation led some commenters to confuse the degree of growth of the Muslim population with a zero-sum reduction in nonMuslim population, not realising that there was always a residuum of incalculable size of people who never converted.3 In other words, the pace of Muslim conversion over the first three centuries following the conquest of Spain in 711 could have reached 90 per cent, but with Islam still being a minority religion in the lands ruled by Muslim princes because of a large residual population that never converted. But, if that is what happened, the question would have arisen as to why Spain had so few converts compared with every other part of the caliphal domain. Three and a half decades have passed and challenges to my theory persist. In 2013, one young computer-savvy scholar wrote: ‘The very fact that this study is still criticized after more than three decades from its publication shows that a solid model cannot be discarded through a critique of where it fails, if otherwise it still remains plausible and coherent.’4 Was my approach plausible and coherent? Enough so to be described in detail in non-Islamicist works like Lewis R. Rambo’s Understanding Religious Conversion5 and Ralph W. Hood, Jr et al.’s Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach.6 Yet its basic premise, that a quantitative analysis of large numbers of personal names can reveal changes in social attitudes, led me to continue to search for corroboration. Ideally, corroboration would take the form of detailed registers of new Muslim converts, but these do not exist for the medieval period. Alternatively, corroboration

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might take the form of abundant testimonies and anecdotes dealing with individual or group conversions. Such testimonies and anecdotes do exist, but they are too few and far between, not to mention too infected by hagiographical distortion, to constitute a convincing body of evidence.7 The third alternative, which I followed in my book and in numerous subsequent writings, was to show correlations with political and social developments.8 But these might, in fact, have been only tangentially related to conversion . . . or not related at all. A fourth type of corroboration would consist of finding parallel historical situations in which the same dynamic of name change accompanies a broad change in ideology. My first effort along these lines dealt with the onomastic impact of the Tanzimat

Table 4.1 Changes in the names of males of the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862. (This table has been smoothed from Eaton’s by using three-generation running totals.)

Generation End Year

Total Names Recorded

% of Muslim Names as a % of Three-Period Muslim Total Number Number of Punjabi of Muslim Names per Composite Average Period Secular Names Names

1

1217

1

1

0

0

0

2

1250

3

3

0

0

0

3

1283

13

13

0

0

0

4

1316

11

11

0

0

0

5

1349

9

9

0

0

0

6

1382

15

15

0

0

6

7

1415

39

35

4

10

14

8

1448

27

20

7

26

15

9

1481

51

45

6

12

20

10

1514

51

38

13

25

21

11

1547

54

41

13

24

27

12

1580

60

42

18

30

31

13

1613

51

31

20

39

39

14

1646

34

15

19

56

47

15

1679

12

5

7

58

65

16

1712

22

4

18

82

74

17

1750

12

3

9

75

76

18

1782

8

3

5

63

80

19

1815

10

0

10

100

88

20

1862

8

0

8

100

Source: Maulawi Nur Muhammad, Tarikh-i Jhang Siyal (Meerut, 1862), pp. 15–28.

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on Ottoman Anatolia and yielded an article, ‘First Names and Political Change in Modern Turkey’,9 that indicated a steady decline, from the 1830s to 1910, in preferences for explicitly Muslim given names among the parliamentarians of the first Ottoman parliament of 1876 and their fathers, and then among the successive parliamentarians of the Turkish Republic and their fathers. The narrowness and political bias of the name sample, questions as to how widely the Tanzimat reforms were felt, and the determination of an Islamic context solely on the basis of diagnostic names like Mehmet, Ahmet and Ali made this article more suggestive than dispositive with respect to the method I was exploring. In his contribution to this volume, ‘Reconsidering “Conversion to Islam” in Indian History’ (Chapter 19), Richard Eaton provides a similar pattern of steady name change among a clan of Punjabi Jats who traced their conversion to Islam to the saintly Sufi Baba Farid. This one, however, extends over five centuries and sees Muslim names increasing at the expense of Punjabi secular names, rather than the Turkish example of secular names replacing Muslim ones. The graph in Figure 4.1 plots data in the second, sixth and seventh columns of Table 4.1. It shows the percentage of Muslim names recorded in the Siyal clan at intervals of roughly a generation apart (dashed line) as well as a three-period aggregated average plotted at (approximately) the temporal midpoint (dark line) to illustrate the general trend more clearly. What we see is a rough logistic curve with the first ten generations reaching no more as a three-period average than approximately one in five having Muslim names, the proportion in the next six generations accelerating considerably as they go from approximately one in five to around three in every four having a Muslim name, and the final generations moving more gradually towards the complete

Figure 4.1 Graph of changes in the names of males of the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862.

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displacement of secular Punjabi names with Muslim ones. The last two single entries for generations 19 and 20 show all names recorded to be Muslim. In looking for historical parallels that were non-Muslim, I encountered the work of the Israeli sociologist Sasha Weitman.10 Using the complete onomastic registers for personal names in Israel and the preceding Yishuv period in Palestine going back to the First Aliya in 1882, Weitman discovered an accelerating drop in male first names classifiable as ‘Classic Judeo-Hebrew’ between 1920 and 1975. These names, including Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Jacob and Simon, fell from 45 per cent to 10 per cent, while names defined by Weitman as ‘Hebrew neonyms’, including Shai, Ilan, Ofer, Eyal, Ronen, Yaniv, Amir, Lior and Yaron, increased from 15 per cent to 55 per cent over the same period. Weitman’s eight other name categories held relatively steady, suggesting that the Zionist aspiration to establish a Jewish homeland, and then state, in Palestine prompted an ever larger number of parents to give their sons Hebrew names that had seldom before been used and to turn their backs on names associated with life in the diaspora. While the ideological motivation for these naming trends seems clear, however, the series of migrations (aliyot) to Palestine was not equivalent to a sudden event like the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. The one historical situation I found that met the criteria of being non-Muslim, ostensibly triggered by sudden ideological change, socially homogeneous and susceptible to quantitative study was the colony, and after the American Revolution the state, of Massachusetts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The given names of graduates of Harvard College, the pre-eminent educational institution in Massachusetts from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, provide a data base that is consistent with the scholarly, male and economically well-off character of the sources that I used for my study of Nishapur. Where conversion to Islam in Iran began with the conquering Arabs establishing their faith as the ruling ideology in the seventh century, the American Revolution and achievement of national independence had a parallel impact on the psychology of the American citizenry. And where Iranians who converted to Islam switched from Persian to Arabic names, that segment of the Massachusetts population that aspired to send their sons to Harvard, where half of them would become Protestant ministers, increasingly turned away from conferring on those sons names drawn from the Old Testament. The ideological change in this parallel case, in other words, was not religious conversion, but rather its opposite, suitability for life in the constitutionally secular American republic established in the aftermath of the American Revolution. From the time of its founding in 1628, the Massachusetts Bay Colony adhered to the doctrines and practices of the Puritans and put a strong emphasis on religious probity in determining who could participate in public affairs. This religious inclination showed up in a distinct preference for male given names drawn from the Old Testament, names like Samuel, Benjamin, Daniel and Ezekiel. While individuals with Old Testament names accounted for only 16 per cent of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, for example, fully 28 per cent of the 646 discrete individuals mentioned in The Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newtowne) Massachusetts, 1630–170311 bore such names. If John and William – for several centuries the first, second or third most popular Massachusetts male names – are excluded, the predominance of Old Testament naming in Massachusetts is even more striking. Harvard graduates who were born between 1625 and 1730 – I subtract twenty-one from the graduation date to approximate a student’s birth year – consistently include 42 to 43 per cent bearing names from the Old Testament.

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For some thirty years after 1730, this percentage edges up to 44–5 per cent. Since this was a period of evangelical fervour in Massachusetts known as the ‘Great Awakening’, the uptick in biblical naming seems appropriate to the times. For comparison with contemporary naming practices back in England, a sample of 700 British students at Trinity College, Cambridge – the other Cambridge – born in the eighteenth century includes only 5 per cent bearing Old Testament names. Thus Massachusetts parents were markedly more inclined to bestow Old Testament names on their sons than were parents in either the other British Colonies in North America or England at the same time. A change in this engrained practice can first be detected among boys born in 1769, or a bit later if my assumption of graduation at age twenty-one is an overestimate. I propose that this reflects resentment against England’s taxation policies that began to be strongly felt by Massachusetts merchants at that time and that eventually culminated in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. From that time onwards, the growth in popularity of what I will term ‘secular names’, meaning names not drawn from either testament of the Bible, follows a clear logistic curve that reaches, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a plateau of 92–3 per cent that remains constant down through the World War I period. As for the names the Massachusetts parents chose instead of Jacob, Joseph, Ezekiel, Samuel, Benjamin and Daniel, throughout the nineteenth century the most popular aside from John and William were Charles, George, Henry, Edward and Francis. Ironically, four out of these five were the names of English kings, but they were also names that were borne by 20 per cent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Another 20 per cent of the signers were named either John or William. Just as there is no way to ascertain with complete confidence a correspondence between conversion to Islam and a change from Persian to Arabic naming in medieval Iran, there is no assurance that the logistic curve showing a change from Old Testament to secular naming in post-Revolution Massachusetts corresponds to a change in ideology from religious to ‘secular national’. But it is difficult to account for these curves in any other fashion. As the dyspeptic reviewer of my original manuscript wrote to the publisher in 1978, ‘The peaks in naming patterns . . . must mean something whether or not they mean what [Bulliet] says they do.’ To cast doubt on the plausibility of my theory as applied to Iran, the reviewer deployed a range of detailed objections, but none of them would apply to Massachusetts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the likelihood that an abrupt and warlike change in a society’s political order in seventh-century Iran would mark the onset of a wave of change in personal naming that has a close parallel in pre- and post-revolutionary Massachusetts is so low that there is little choice but to attribute both waves to the psychological impact of a change in the dominant political ideology. I do not know whether this form of corroboration will convince critics who wish to discount the methodology I used to propose a chronology for the history of conversion to Islam in Iran (some of them at the same time accepting the dates I proposed and even their apparent correspondence with political and social developments). And I myself can see that the theory of ideological change propagating in a pattern associated with innovation diffusion in the twentieth century would not fit all movements of mass religious conversion. But with respect to the two cases of Iran and Massachusetts, as the reviewer said, ‘the peaks in naming patterns . . . must mean something’. Feeling reassured by the Massachusetts comparison that a methodology based on quantitative onomastics has merit, there is one final aspect of the initial reviewer’s diatribe that should be addressed, namely the charge that I ignored the psychological and

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sociological literature on conversion. This, I maintain, is common practice in quantitative analyses, whether historical or contemporary. When sociologists conduct public opinion polls, they typically ask respondents to identify themselves with respect to categories selected by the pollster: age, gender, level of education, political party, place of residence, ideological sympathies and so on. However, they do not ask them to authenticate their answers or comment on the depth, sincerity or complexity of their beliefs. Self-identification works for polling because variations in these factors are considered to average out when a substantial population is being surveyed. When two people identify themselves as conservatives or liberals, or as Zoroastrians or Muslims, the precise meaning they ascribe to those identifiers is left unexplored. With respect to the name sets that I have studied, the question of exactly what sort of Muslim or Massachusetts Puritan is hiding behind his name should not arise, even if it were ascertainable. How people implicitly identify themselves in conferring names on their offspring doubtless differs a great deal from one individual to another. But when the names connote an orientation towards a religious onomasticon, Arabic names borne by Iranians on the one hand and Old Testament names borne by Massachusetts citizens on the other, the degree or quality of the parental attachment to that set of religious names is irrelevant with respect to broad currents of change over time. In conclusion, therefore, I do not see any persuasive reason to question the analytical method I adopted some four decades ago, nor, with respect to Iran, to revise the chronology that it yielded. That being said, there is one area in which my analysis can be usefully expanded on the basis of work I have done more recently. The concept underlying the application of logistic curves to innovation diffusion presumes a geometric expansion in the number of potential adopters as they encounter convincing information about the adoption from people they trust and wish to emulate. In practice, this ideal pattern cannot be assumed to work in an even pattern unaffected by social and spatial particularities. In my book, I suggested several concomitant factors that would cause certain groups of potential adopters to identify as Muslim at certain points in time. Soldiers taken prisoner during the Arab conquests, for example, may have been convinced to convert as a way of escaping slavery. Spatially, the growth of cities with substantial Muslim populations may have attracted converts who wanted to move out of their non-Muslim home environment. Now I am exploring the possibility that certain economic projects initiated by Muslim entrepreneurs may have made at least nominal conversion to Islam a condition of participation. I first encountered this idea in the work of Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, where he associates the growth of Islam with projects by Muslim entrepreneurs to convert jungle to rice paddy agriculture.12 In his chapter included in this volume (see Chapter 19) he expands this thought to consider the growth of the Muslim population in the agricultural lands developed around major north Indian Sufi shrines. Another scholar, Marie Philiponeau, describes similar links between the spread of cotton production and Muslim identity in the African Sahel in her book Le Coton et l’Islam.13 In my own work Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran, I describe a vast extension of cotton farming in new villages surrounding the central Iranian plateau, and through the use of place names I identify the entrepreneurs who developed those lands as Arab Muslims or Iranian converts to Islam.14 Explicit evidence that the workers attracted to live in the new villages and cultivate their lands had to convert to

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Islam is lacking, but the pattern of religious homogeneity in village life that is found through much of the premodern Middle East suggests that this is likely to have been the case. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a Muslim landlord seeking workers to live in his newly established village of, say, 300 people being comfortable with half or two thirds of them retaining allegiance to Zoroastrianism or Christianity. The same might be hypothesised for certain lands along the Euphrates River that were developed as agricultural areas under the early Abbasid caliphate.15 Though the growth of Islam through conversion doubtless differed from region to region and time to time, these several examples at least raise the question as to whether economic entrepreneurship and development may have been a recurring factor in the spread of the faith.

Notes 1. Richard W. Bulliet, ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13, no. 2 (1970), pp. 195–211. 2. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 3. For a discussion, see Alwyn Harrisson, ‘Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited’, Al-Masāq 24, no. 1 (2012), pp. 35–51. 4. Maxim Romanov, ‘Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History’, in Elias I. Muhanna (ed.), The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 117–50. 5. Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 6. Ralph W. Hood, Jr et al., Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, 4th edn (New York: Guilford Press, 2009). 7. My publications exploring other approaches to medieval conversion to Islam based on biographical dictionaries include ‘Conversion Stories in Early Islam’, in Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 9 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 123–33, and ‘Conversion-based Patronage and Onomastic Evidence’, in Monique Bernards and John Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 246–62. 8. Works of mine that attempt to correlate stages of the conversion curve with political and social developments include Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); ‘Pottery Styles and Social Status in Medieval Khurasan’, in A. Bernard Knapp (ed.), Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 131–4; Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); ‘Economy and Society in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Idea of Iran, vol. 4: The Rise of Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 44–60; and ‘Abu Muslim and Charlemagne’, in Brannon Wheeler and Abdarrahman Al-Salimi (eds), Community, State, History and Changes: Festschrift for Prof. Ridwan Al-Sayyid on His Sixtieth Birthday (Beirut: Arab Network for Research and Publishing, 2011), pp. 19–28. 9. Richard W. Bulliet, ‘First Names and Political Change in Modern Turkey’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978), pp. 489–95.

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10. Sasha Weitman, ‘Some Methodological Issues in Quantitative Onomastics’, Names: A Journal of Onomastics 29, no. 3 (September 1981), pp. 181–96. 11. The Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newtowne) Massachusetts, 1630–1703 (Cambridge, MA: University Press, John Wilson and Son, 1901). 12. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 13. Marie Philiponeau, Le coton et l’islam: Fil d’une histoire africaine (Algiers: CasbahÉditions, 2009). 14. Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels. 15. See the numerous works of archaeologist Sophie Berthier, including Sophie Berthier et al., ‘Le peuplement rural de la moyenne vallée de l’Euphrate à l’époque islamique (VIIème s.–début XXème s.)’, in Contribution française à l’archéologie syrienne 1969–1989: Catalogue de l’exposition (Damascus: IFAPO, 1989), pp. 227–31; and Sophie Berthier, ‘Recherche en cours sur les aménagements hydro-agricoles dans la vallée de l’Euphrate à l’époque islamique’, in Techniques et pratiques hydro-agricoles traditionnelles en domaine irrigué: Approche pluridisciplinaire des modes de culture avant la motorization en Syrie (Actes du Colloque de L’IFAPO, Damas, 1987), Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique 136 (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 229–37.

Bibliography Anon., The Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newtowne) Massachusetts, 1630–1703 (Cambridge, MA: University Press, John Wilson and Son, 1901). Berthier, Sophie, ‘Recherche en cours sur les aménagements hydro-agricoles dans la vallée de l’Euphrate à l’époque islamique’, in Techniques et pratiques hydro-agricoles traditionnelles en domaine irrigué: Approche pluridisciplinaire des modes de culture avant la motorization en Syrie (Actes du Colloque de L’IFAPO, Damas, 1987), Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique 136 (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 229–37. Berthier, Sophie, Olivier D’Hont and Bernard Geyer, ‘Le peuplement rural de la moyenne vallée de l’Euphrate à l’époque islamique (VIIème s.–début XXème s.)’, in Contribution française à l’archéologie syrienne 1969-1989: Catalogue de l’exposition (Damascus: IFAPO, 1989), pp. 227–31. Bulliet, Richard W., ‘A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13, no. 2 (1970), pp. 195–211. Bulliet, Richard W., ‘First Names and Political Change in Modern Turkey’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978), pp. 489–95. Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Conversion Stories in Early Islam’, in Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 9 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 123–33. Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Pottery Styles and Social Status in Medieval Khurasan’, in A. Bernard Knapp (ed.), Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 131–4. Bulliet, Richard W., Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Conversion-based Patronage and Onomastic Evidence’, in Monique Bernards and John Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 246–62.

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Bulliet, Richard W., Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Economy and Society in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Idea of Iran, vol. 4: The Rise of Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 44–60. Bulliet, Richard W., ‘Abu Muslim and Charlemagne’, in Brannon Wheeler and Abdarrahman Al-Salimi (eds), Community, State, History and Changes: Festschrift for Prof. Ridwan Al-Sayyid on His Sixtieth Birthday (Beirut: Arab Network for Research and Publishing, 2011), pp. 19–28. Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Harrisson, Alwyn, ‘Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited’, Al-Masāq 24, no. 1 (2012), pp. 35–51. Hood, Ralph W., Jr, Peter C. Hill and Bernard Spilka, Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, 4th edn (New York: Guilford Press, 2009). Philiponeau, Marie, Le coton et l’islam: Fil d’une histoire africaine (Algiers: Casbah-Éditions, 2009). Rambo, Lewis R., Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Romanov, Maxim, ‘Toward Abstract Models for Islamic History’, in Elias I. Muhanna (ed.), The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 117–50. Weitman, Sasha, ‘Some Methodological Issues in Quantitative Onomastics’, Names: A Journal of Onomastics 29, no. 3 (September 1981), pp. 181–96.

Part II

The Early Islamic and Medieval Middle East

5 WHAT DID CONVERSION TO ISLAM MEAN IN SEVENTH-CENTURY ARABIA? Harry Munt

I

n a late seventh- or very early eighth-century Coptic homily anachronistically attributed to the church father Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), it is lamented that, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the early 640s, ‘many Christians, Barbarians, Greeks, Syrians and from all tribes will go and join them in their faith’.1 This prophecy comes across as somewhat hysterical to many modern observers – at least within its seventh- or eighth-century context – since it is now the generally accepted consensus of historians that the processes through which the inhabitants of the conquered territories of the Middle East converted to Islam were extremely gradual and persisted for centuries. Monumental changes to the political, social and religious life of many communities in this region came in the decades and centuries after the conquests – developments to which many non-Muslims fully contributed – but Muslim-majority populations are not thought to have emerged widely until the ninth or tenth centuries at the very earliest.2 However, one group in particular is often offered as an exception to this model of very gradual conversion to Islam: the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula itself. The majority of the inhabitants of Arabia are frequently assumed to have converted to Islam during the twelve years or so between Muhammad’s hijra (migration) to Medina in 622 and the death of the first caliph Abu Bakr in 634. Uriel Simonsohn broadly reflects a scholarly consensus when he notes that the whole process of conversion to Islam in the Middle East began with ‘the mass Islamization of Arabian tribes in the seventh century’.3 This is certainly a picture offered by a large number of extant sources, although it is hard to argue with Aziz Al-Azmeh, who has raised the slight problem that ‘it is difficult to discern what adherence to Muhammad’s new religion implied at the time’.4 This chapter will suggest some ways that we might gain a (slightly) better appreciation of what conversion to Islam did actually mean in seventh-century Arabia. There are three principal obstacles to the study of the Arabian tribes’ conversion to Islam. First, the sources for processes of Islamisation in Arabia are generally quite problematic.5 Most extant literary sources written by Muslims assume that the Arabian tribes’ conversion was more or less completed during the mid-seventh century, but these works were not written until the ninth century at the earliest. They present quite schematic 83

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overviews of the tribes’ acceptance of Islam and rely upon generous use of literary topoi;6 they are far more interested in using conversion narratives to demonstrate the tribes’ role in the realisation of God’s plan for mankind than in understanding the messy reality of how conversion actually works. Thus, as Anders Winroth has written of the analogous situation of stories of the conversion of Scandinavians to Christianity in later narratives, ‘the conversions tend to be quick and immediately complete’.7 The second obstacle is that modern scholarship in general has been happier thinking about processes of conversion in the early Islamic centuries as they played out in mostly non-tribal urban settings; Richard Bulliet, for example, in his pioneering study explicitly noted his reluctance to integrate sociological and anthropological models of tribal conversions into his analysis.8 This contrasts notably with research into later periods of premodern Islamic history, where studies of the Islamisation of tribal and nomadic groups has been taken more seriously.9 Third, there is the problem that whatever beliefs and practices the earliest Muslims in seventhcentury Arabia may have considered important, there is no good reason to assume that they were identical to those understood by the authors of extant sources from the ninth century and later, who lived and worked throughout the lands between al-Andalus and Central Asia.10 In spite of the problems, however, there is no good reason why a range of modern sociological and anthropological research into the many aspects of religious conversion among urban, agrarian and nomadic societies should not be brought to bear, even if (as in this chapter) fairly indirectly, on the question of the Islamisation of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. More fundamentally, there are some contemporary sources for seventh-century Arabia which do have material bearing on the processes of conversion to Islam in that period. In this chapter, we will look briefly at four sets of sources in particular – Syriac Christian observers, the Quran, the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’ and seventh-century Arabic graffiti – to see what light they can shed on two particular issues: the supposed rapidity of Arabia’s Islamisation and how we might best understand what the processes of Islamisation actually involved in seventh-century Arabia.

Conversion as an Event Before we deal with this contemporary evidence, it seems a good idea to start with a brief overview of the picture of Arabia’s Islamisation that we get from the ninth-century Arabic sources. Historical and legal sources from this period do generally describe a very rapid Islamisation of Arabia in the mid-seventh century, achieved through the mass conversion to Islam of most Arabian tribes, on the one hand, and the apparent expulsion of some recalcitrant Christian and Jewish groups on the other.11 After the completion of the so-called ‘Wars of Apostasy’, or Ridda Wars (Ar. ḥurūb al-ridda), by 634, the vast majority of Arabia’s population is generally assumed to have been Muslim.12 For several reasons, of course, we have to be wary of such a picture. One of these – our sources’ interest in using narratives of Islamisation as part of the construction of a salvation history for the early Muslim community – has already been mentioned. A second reason is that it would seem that a number of tribal elites had a good reason to push their ancestors’ conversion to Islam back to the time of Muhammad, since

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this allowed for the establishment of prophetic precedence and sanction for decisions that became controversial later on. To give just one example, it allowed the people of Jurash (between Mecca and Najran) to claim that their protected grazing ground (Ar. ḥimā) had been granted to them by Muhammad himself, at a time when there was a common aphorism that ran, ‘There can be no ḥimās except [those] belonging to God and His Prophet.’13 Third, a number of sources do actually admit to the persistence of significant non-Muslim communities in Arabia long after the mid-seventh century. The mid-tenth-century traveller al-Muqaddasi, for example, famously observed that in his day the relatively large settlement of Qurh in the northern Hijaz – about 170 miles north-west of Medina – was ‘dominated by Jews’.14 This occasional and significant acceptance of lasting Christian and Jewish communities aside, there is still an almost unanimous assumption of the eradication of all forms of Arabian polytheism during the middle of the seventh century.15 Many of us today might consider this ninth-century picture of such rapid Islamisation to be a sociologically and anthropologically questionable model of religious conversion. There is something of a track record in modern scholarship of accepting the occurrence of mass conversion events, particularly amongst nomadic populations, but recent scholarship on the Islamisation of groups such as the Seljuq Turks and the Mongols is rapidly nuancing such understandings.16 Even so, there may be some evidence pointing towards a slightly earlier Arabian parallel for such a rapid process of conversion. Our knowledge of pre-Islamic South Arabian history has improved immeasurably over recent decades and Christian Robin has demonstrated in a number of studies how around the year 380 there was a remarkable and essentially all-pervasive transformation in the religious content of the epigraphic record of South Arabia from polytheistic invocations to monotheistic ones, a transformation which accompanied the acceptance of Judaism by members of the ruling Himyarite elite. As Robin himself puts it: ‘Ce rejet du polythéisme est radical et définitif. Dans tout le Yémen, aucune inscription postérieure à 380 n’est explicitement polythéiste.’17 We can hardly assume that these epigraphic texts represent the beliefs of the entire population of the region, nor that they give us an accurate indication of the full extent of the processes of South Arabia’s monotheisation,18 but the way in which contemporary evidence for late antique Arabia can offer such a startling picture of rapid conversion to a biblical monotheistic religion is noteworthy. Might there be a way of situating the depiction of rapid conversion to Islam among Arabia’s tribes in the mid-seventh century within a more nuanced understanding of the broader processes of conversion? Such a swift Islamisation of Arabia is perhaps a more sociologically plausible model if we understand conversion in this instance as being intimately linked with the territorial expansion of the nascent Muslim community’s political authority. This is certainly how many modern historians have understood the process of Arabia’s Islamisation.19 It is also perhaps significant that the monotheisation of South Arabia in the late fourth century followed a century or so after the initial expansion of the authority of a new ruling elite there, in this case the Himyarites. What we could call the political aspect of conversion does dominate a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic accounts of the Islamisation of Arabia’s tribal elites. Oman can offer a representative example here.20 This is an account of the conversion

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to Islam of Oman’s ruling brothers, Jayfar and ʿAbd, offered by one of our earliest chroniclers of the Islamisation of Arabia, Ibn Saʿd (d. 845):21 The Messenger of God sent ʿAmr b. al-ʿAs in Dhu’l-Qaʿda of the year 8 [= February–March 630] to Jayfar and ʿAbd – the two sons of al-Julanda; they were both Azdis and Jayfar was the ‘king’ – to summon them to Islam. He sent with him a sealed letter to the pair of them. According to ʿAmr: When I arrived in Oman I first went to ʿAbd, the more sagacious and easy-going of the two. I said, ‘I am a messenger of the Messenger of God to you and your brother.’ He replied, ‘My brother has precedence over me in both age and authority. I will get you an audience with him so he can read your letter.’ I stayed around for a few days before he summoned me. I came before him and handed the letter to him still sealed. He broke the seal and read it through to the end. Then he handed it to his brother, who read it likewise, although I thought that his brother was weaker than him. He said, ‘Leave me today and come back in the morning.’ When morning came, I returned and he said, ‘I have been pondering to what it is you are summoning me. Surely I would be the weakest of the Arabs were I to hand authority over to a man nowhere nearby?’ ‘I will leave tomorrow,’ I replied. When he was convinced that I was leaving, he rose for the day and sent for me. I came before him and he and his brother accepted Islam together and agreed to pay the ṣadaqa to the Prophet. They gave me free rein in determining the ṣadaqa and arbitrating between them22 and gave me every assistance against those who opposed me. I took the ṣadaqa from the wealthy among them and redistributed it to the poor among them. I continued to oversee their affairs until I heard that the Messenger of God had passed away.23 Slightly later in the same work, Ibn Saʿd offers another version of the story of Oman’s conversion to Islam: They say that the people of Oman converted to Islam, so the Messenger of God sent al-ʿAlaʾ b. al-Hadhrami to them to instruct them in the laws of Islam and to ascertain the ṣadaqa on their properties. A delegation from them set out for the Messenger of God, led by Asad b. Yabrah al-Tahi. They met the Messenger of God and asked him to send back with them someone to oversee their affairs. Makhraba al-ʿAbdi, whose name was Mudrik b. Khut, said, ‘Send me to them, since they act graciously towards me. They took me prisoner at the Battle of Janub, but treated me well.’ So he sent him with them back to Oman. After them, Salima b. ʿIyadh al-Azdi came, leading some of his people, and asked the Messenger of God about how he worshipped and to what he was summoning [people]. The Messenger of God informed him and so he said, ‘Beseech God to unite our words and hospitality.’ He made the invocation for them and Salima together with those with him converted to Islam.24 There are clearly important differences between the two accounts, which we could take as an indication that Ibn Saʿd was attempting to make an Islamisation event out of earlier accounts that emphasised process more heavily; we might, however, with perhaps better reason, see the conflicting accounts as Ibn Saʿd’s attempt to juggle the existence of varying narratives on Arabia’s conversion to Islam that a matrix of

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ninth-century concerns had given rise to. What we can simply note here is that both accounts, albeit the first a little more clearly than the second, foreground the political connotations of conversion. Jayfar’s original objection to conversion was a fear that the political subjugation it implied would make him look weak; the principal ways through which the Omanis demonstrated their conversion was to agree to the remittance of tribute – called ṣadaqa in both accounts – to Medina as well as to accept the governance and mediation of an official appointed from Medina by Muhammad. We should also note the suggestion in the first account that the followers of ʿAbd and Jayfar all converted with them as well as the more explicit assumption in the second that the inhabitants of Oman converted together. The paradigm of political conversion established by Ibn Saʿd and others of his era generally continued into later Arabic accounts as well. We can stick with the case of Oman for the time being and simply note that the Prophet’s letter to ʿAbd and Jayfar alluded to in earlier accounts such as Ibn Saʿd’s is provided with a full text in later accounts, at least from the fourteenth century onwards. The summons to Islam in this letter gives significant place to a political threat: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. From Muhammad, the Messenger of God, to Jayfar and ʿAbd, the sons of al-Julanda: Greetings to those who follow guidance. To begin, I call you both to Islam. Convert to Islam! I am the Messenger of God to all people, ‘that he might warn those who are alive and that the word may be proved true against the unbelievers’.25 If the pair of you acknowledge Islam, I will confirm you in your rule, but if you refuse to acknowledge Islam then your rule will come to an end and my cavalry will set up camp in your lands and my prophethood will have authority over your rulership. Written by Ubayy b. Kaʿb and sealed.26 Aziz Al-Azmeh has recently analysed a number of ninth- and tenth-century accounts of Muhammad’s diplomatic engagements with the tribes of Arabia as he attempted to bring them under Medina’s political sway. In particular, he notes that in these accounts Muhammad offers protection for lives and property, expecting in return ‘political allegiance and the payment of a variety of levies on livestock and produce, sometimes specified in great detail, and of course for adopting Paleo-Muslim cultic observances, as they developed, and the repudiation of pagan worship’.27 As can be seen in the texts about Oman’s conversion offered above, the last two expectations – adoption of new cultic rites and the rejection of polytheism – do not always come across explicitly. Even if we can assume that they may have been taken as given, it is interesting that their significance is not prioritised; pride of place goes to political allegiance and the payment of tribute. A small detour to medieval Iceland may actually give us some hesitation in always assuming the priority of the adoption of new cultic observances in episodes of conversion. Ari Thorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, written around 1125, includes a fascinating discussion of the Icelandic elites’ decision to convert as a group to Christianity at an assembly of the Althing in either 999 or 1000. It was apparently proclaimed that everyone should convert to Christianity and all those unbaptised should become so, but also that ‘the old laws should stand as regards the exposure of children and the eating of horse-flesh. People had the right to sacrifice in secret, if they wished, but it would be punishable by the lesser outlawry if witnesses were produced.’28 Now,

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of course, seventh-century Arabia was not Iceland, but there is some evidence that alerts us to the potential that there too political ‘conversion’ need not have meant the renunciation, even in theory, of older cultic arrangements. In some accounts of Muhammad’s dealings with Arabia’s tribes, he is actually presented as giving ground on the question of the repudiation of former cultic practices. For example, in some ninth-century and later versions of the text of a letter sent by Muhammad to the leaders of Thaqif in al-Taʾif, the continuing existence of their ḥaram, loosely ‘sanctuary’, at Wajj is guaranteed.29 Aziz Al-Azmeh, who argued for the significance of cultic alterations in Muhammad’s agreements with the tribes of Arabia, has also suggested that these agreements were at the time seen as only a pledge made to a specific person, and thus the military campaigns that followed many of the tribes attempting to break away from political allegiance to Medina after the Prophet’s death were only ‘later spiritualised’ as the ‘Wars of Apostasy’.30 With this evidence for the political impetus to and ramifications of conversion to Islam, we might consider comparing the Islamisation of Arabia in the seventh century with the Christianisation of the Arab tribes along the borders of the Roman Empire in the fourth to sixth centuries. Recent research seems to be cementing agreement that among the myriad reasons why a large number of Arabs converted to Christianity in late antiquity, political manoeuvring played an important role in convincing many tribal elites to adopt Christianity first of all, and then particular church allegiances more specifically.31 Just as our Arabic sources for the Islamisation of Arabia tend to focus on the political significance of conversion, with the decision of tribal elites to convert generally signifying changes in political allegiance and resulting in the conversion of most of their followers, so too did fourth-, fifth- and sixth-century observers of the Christianisation of the Syrian Arab tribes. Cyril of Scythopolis’ (d. c. 558) account of the conversion of the ‘Saracen’ Aspebetos, later Peter, and his followers to Christianity at the hands of Euthymius (d. 473) serves as a widely cited example of this; in Cyril’s text, the conversion of Aspebetos and his followers is even introduced with the words, ‘Now, Aspébetus, though a pagan and a Persian subject, became an ally of the Romans in the following way.’32 Slightly earlier, Sozomen’s (d. c. 449) account of the conversion of the ‘Saracen’ Zokomos and his followers in c. 364 also makes many of the same points.33 We have here then a possible model of what we can call political conversion that may explain a part of what was going on in seventh-century Arabia. There are plenty of grounds for caution. For one thing, there is something of a gulf between the suggestion that Arabian tribes converted to Christianity to gain access to the patronage networks of an empire whose hegemony over much of the Near East had been established for centuries, with the suggestion that others converted to Islam to ingratiate themselves with a distant prophet whose community had little by way of hegemony at this point at all. For another, while the model of political conversion may help to make sense of narratives that assume rapid Islamisation in the Arabian Peninsula, it does not really offer any help for understanding other, more gradual, aspects of the process(es) of Islamisation that no doubt continued long after the triumph of Medinan political authority during the Ridda Wars, but in which our later Arabic sources are far less interested.34 Finally, the objection can be raised that it is a model that, so far in this discussion at least, has been based exclusively on non-contemporary

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sources. As we turn now to the available contemporary evidence for conversion to Islam in seventh-century Arabia, we actually get more of a window onto conversion as a dynamic process that meant different things to different people, rather than as a somewhat static political event.

Conversion as a Process We can start the discussion of contemporary sources on Arabia’s Islamisation with an external observer, who actually also brings us back to Oman. Sometime between 649 and his death in 659, the Catholicos of the Church of the East in Iraq, Ishoʿyahb III, wrote a number of letters to a variety of addressees.35 In one of these (Letter 14), Ishoʿyahb famously berated his disobedient subordinate Simeon, the metropolitan bishop of Rev-Ardashir in Fars, for failing to halt the conversion of rhetorically vast numbers of Omani Christians (here called by the Syriac term Mazūnāyē) to Islam. The Catholicos’s understanding of the process of conversion, as it is on display here, is a rather crude expression of what some anthropologists call the ‘utilitarian’ approach, understanding conversion as conveying material advantages:36 Where are your sons, anchorite father? Where are your holy places, feeble priest? Where is that great nation of the Mazūnāyē,37 they who without seeing sword nor fire nor tortures, solely out of desire for half of their possessions, were seized with frenzy and consumed all of a sudden by the abyss of apostasy and have perished forever?38 And then slightly later in the same letter: How is it indeed that your Mazūnāyē on their account abandoned their faith? This, as even these Mazūnāyē say, is not because the Ṭayyāyē39 forced them to abandon their faith, but solely because they ordered them to surrender half of their possessions to keep their faith. They thus abandoned the faith which is for eternity and kept the half of the possessions which is for a trifling amount of time.40 We might of course question Ishoʿyahb’s motives in declaiming so bitterly the apostasy of Omani Christians.41 The impression he offers that mass conversions to Islam had taken place among eastern Arabian Christians for no good reason does not, for one thing, fit with the evidence for flourishing seventh-century literary activity among Christians from the region, nor with the evidence for continuing church structures there in the acts of the synod of George I, held in 676 (more on this soon), nor with the archaeological evidence for the construction of new monasteries and churches in the region during the seventh and early eighth centuries.42 As one recent study has put it: ‘These are clearly not the activities of a moribund Christian community.’43 Instead, it seems as though the Catholicos in Iraq was rhetorically using a panicky tone about the apostasy of Omanis, the scale of which is no doubt enhanced, to score points against a long-standing opponent.44 Nevertheless, Ishoʿyahb’s letter offers one contemporary understanding of what conversion to Islam could mean in seventh-century Arabia: the preservation of property.

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Before we turn to the contemporary evidence from western and central Arabia, it is worth noting briefly that the nineteen extant canons agreed at the synod convened in May 676 in eastern Arabia by Ishoʿyahb III’s successor, George I (in office c. 661–81), offer some insight into the protracted developments in a range of practices that accompanied the process of Islamisation there.45 Alongside the Catholicos George, this synod was attended by the metropolitan bishop of eastern Arabia (Syr. Bēt Qaṭrāyē) and five other eastern Arabian bishops, including Stephen, bishop of the Omanis (Syr. Mazūnāyē).46 The canons of this synod display considerable concern with protecting the authority of the formal ecclesiastical structures and officials in eastern Arabia, which was coming under threat on a range of fronts, some of which involved the region’s new Muslim population, almost invariably referred to in the text as ‘pagans’ (Syr. ḥanpē). Canon 6 warns Christians not to settle disputes before non-Christian officials and canon 14 orders Christian women not to marry ‘pagan’ men; canon 18 criticises the practice of burying Christian dead as the ‘pagans’ do. Canon 19 gives us a possible reference to a Muslim poll tax on Christians (Syr. ksep rīshā), which may have been what Ishoʿyahb III had in mind when he bemoaned the apostasy of the Omani Christians for monetary reasons. Interestingly, canon 18 may actually give evidence of the persistence of pre-Islamic burial customs in eastern Arabia even after that region’s process of Islamisation was already long underway, since the ‘pagan’ burial rites criticised in canon 18 do not correspond particularly closely with known Muslim ones. More important, however, is the light that these debates shine on the gradual process of Islamisation in seventh-century Arabia.47 There were relatively few clear-cut points at which someone officially stopped acting like a Christian and started acting like a Muslim; instead practices changed gradually as communal boundaries became more fluid. It was not just with Muslims that the priests thought boundaries were becoming too fluid: canon 17 finds fault with Christians who drank in Jewish taverns after mass, even though there was no lack of local Christian drinking holes. We might finally note that, even if the eastern Arabian Christian clergy were worried about the breakdown of rigid boundaries between their flock and their Muslim neighbours, they themselves were actually adopting some ‘Islamic’ practices: the date of the synod is given according to the Islamic hijri era, to ‘Īyār [May] of the year 57 of the rule of the Ṭayyāyē’.48 The evidence for western and central Arabia is of a rather different sort to that already covered for eastern Arabia. Rather than texts written by Christians in Syriac that owed a considerable amount to the observations of clergymen who mostly lived and worked outside of the Arabian Peninsula, the texts to which we now turn were composed in Arabic and by people who identified in some way with the new faith promulgated by Muhammad. The best known of these is, of course, the Quran.49 This text unfortunately does not outline precisely and concisely what was expected immediately of converts to the new faith, but there are plenty of indications. Belief in the unique oneness of God and in the imminence and reality of His judgement at the end of days come across frequently as key messages.50 There are also a number of diatribes against those whom the Quran frequently labels as ‘hypocrites’ (Ar. munāfiqūn), people who profess to follow the Messenger’s leadership and guidance, but who in reality shy away whenever they get the opportunity. These hypocrites feature prominently throughout a number of Quranic suras, but

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the single lengthiest polemic can be found in Q. 9: 38–129. To give just a sample of this passage, Q. 9: 44–5 runs: 44. Those who believe in God and the Last Day do not ask your permission to strive with their persons and their possessions. God is well aware of those who protect themselves. 45. The only ones to ask permission are those who do not believe in God and the Last Day, and whose hearts feel doubt – they waver in their doubt. Certain beliefs, then, are important, but it is in the manifestation of sharing in those beliefs by striving for God that believers are measured. It was in light of evidence such as this that Chase Robinson concluded that, for the nascent Muslim community, ‘Warfare against non-Muslims (polytheist and monotheist alike) – holy war (jihad), conducted ‘in the path of God’ – was the proving ground of belief and piety.’51 This striving in the path of God consisted of emigration alongside fighting, as can be seen in Q. 8: 72: Those who have believed and have migrated and striven with their possessions and their persons in God’s way, and those who have given them shelter and helped them – those are the friends of one another. Those who have believed but have not migrated – you have no duty of friendship towards them until they migrate. This emphasis on the significance of emigration (Ar. hijra) for new Muslims persisted throughout the decades after Muhammad’s death and bears interesting parallels with Late Antique narratives of the Christianisation of Arab tribes, which ‘often revolved around rhetorical biblical scenes of renewal, rebirth, and the rejection of a nomadic lifestyle’.52 Evidence such as this does help us to understand how the political implications of conversion could sit quite comfortably beside other convictions in seventhcentury Arabia: belief in God and the Last Day meant, in practice, fighting in God’s path to expand the territorial authority of His Messenger.53 Another document produced by the nascent Muslim community in western Arabia adds further support to this understanding of the significance of Islamisation in the midseventh century. The so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’ is only preserved in two ninthcentury texts, but its authenticity is generally accepted by many scholars today.54 Most of the clauses in this treaty are aimed at organising the community ruled by Muhammad in Medina – which consisted of Jews as well as groups of believers (Ar. muʾminūn) and Muslims, a category distinct from ‘believers’ in the text – so that violence within that community is restricted as much as possible and military campaigns against its enemies are as effective as possible. One clause in the text aims to further this aim by the establishment of a ḥaram, a particular practice of sanctifying space found in pre-Islamic Arabia and adopted by Muhammad and his followers.55 The significance of sacred spaces, in no small part through the opportunities they provide for enacting a range of necessary social functions, in converting Arab tribes to Christianity in the fourth to sixth century has been highlighted recently and the text of the ‘Constitution of Medina’ suggests that practices of sacred space had a similarly important social role to play in the Islamisation of western Arabia.56 This reminds us of the social role that conversion to Islam could play in seventh-century Arabia, as well as its political one.

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The final group of contemporary sources worth considering here is the surviving corpus of Arabic graffiti from seventh-century western and central Arabia. This is still a rapidly expanding body of evidence, so any conclusions drawn from it for the time being must remain tentative, but initial understandings are certainly worth considering. We have very little knowledge about most of the people who inscribed these texts on rock faces along Arabia’s trade and pilgrimage routes – although those responsible for a small number have been identified57 – but their thoughts offer a vital source of information from a context quite different to the literary texts we otherwise mostly use to investigate seventh-century Arabian society. There is an ever-expanding range of studies of these texts and publications of new ones, but only a very small sample can be considered here. The potential of these texts has been nicely demonstrated in a recent article by Frédéric Imbert, in which he charts a number of developments in the formulae of invocations offered.58 He suggests that the texts progress from the simple provision of a name and date to the introduction of religious formulae generally based around God’s role as an almost tangible protector (for example, as a given individual’s thiqa, ‘guarantor’, or walī, ‘protector’), and to texts simply asking for God’s forgiveness for the inscriber, mostly by using one of what go on to become two standard formulae: Allāhumma ighfir li-fulān, ‘O God, forgive so-and-so!’, and ghafara Allāh li-fulān, ‘May God forgive so-andso’. Professions of faith similar to the ‘classical’ Islamic shahāda are rather rare for quite a long time, although by the late seventh century some individuals had started to inscribe verses from the Quran onto rocks.59 We also get references to Islamic cultic practices by the end of the first century ah, with, for example, at least two texts – one from Najd dated to ah 82 (701–2) and one from the north-west Hijaz dated to Dhu’l-qaʿda ah 91 (August–September 710) – which seek God’s acceptance of their inscribers’ pilgrimages to Mecca (Ar. ḥijja).60 In some respects, these texts remain quite similar to extant pre-Islamic graffiti from the Hijaz. For example, a number of so-called ‘transitional’ Nabataean-Arabic texts of the third to fifth century call for their inscribers to be remembered, the author of at least one of which has been identified as Jewish.61 There may be a significant difference between the perhaps vainglorious pre-Islamic seeking of remembrance and the more humble seventh-century begging for forgiveness, but the latter was still a way inscribers could seek to immortalise their name on rock: ‘Ainsi, écrire “ô Dieu, pardonne à untel” procéderait d’une stratégie, d’un enrobage religieux dont la finalité ne serait encore que de parler de soi et de pérenniser son nom, éventuellement celui de ses proches réunis dans la prière adressée à la divinité.’62 Nonetheless, in these seventh-century Arabic texts’ gradual adaptation of existing regional practices of epigraphic invocation, we can see something of the gradual process through which western and central Arabia’s Islamisation proceeded, a process which continued long after the acceptance by the areas’ tribes of the political and perhaps religious authority of Muhammad’s community in Medina. That they corroborate neither Ishoʿyahb’s utilitarian understanding of conversion nor the Quran’s emphasis on striving in God’s path as the principal public indication of adherence to its message offers a valuable reminder that processes and competing discourses of conversion are always complicated and multifaceted, no less so in the case of the Islamisation of Arabia.

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Models of Conversion and Seventh-Century Arabia Much of the above plays the necessary role of reminding us that the conversion of Arabia’s inhabitants to Islam was presumably no less complex a process than the Islamisation of any other area of the world into which Islam later spread. We have to reject many aspects of the appealing simplicity of later narratives of conversion events throughout Arabia in the mid-seventh century and think much more about gradual and varied processes. As Elizabeth Fowden has recently put it in a discussion of the Christianisation of pre-Islamic Arab tribes, ‘What we need to leave space for in our reconstructions is the interplay of the clearly-drawn converter we find in the historical and hagiographical texts and the much less clear-cut process on the ground.’63 Apart from pointing out the complexity of the process, however, are there any firmer conclusions we can draw about how Islamisation proceeded in seventh-century Arabia and what conversion to Islam at the time may have meant? To an unfortunate extent, the answer might be no. Chase Robinson has reminded historians of the first Islamic century that ‘as long as our evidence remains so weak, the models we choose to apply will exert disproportionate power on our explanations’.64 Perhaps the most obvious source of models to help investigate Arabia’s Islamisation would come from studies of the conversion to monotheistic religions of other (semi-)nomadic and tribal groups, for example the conversion to Islam of the Seljuqs or the Christianisation of Arab groups in the fourth to the sixth century. As we saw earlier, however, there is a significant problem here, in that these potential comparisons offer models of tribal groups’ conversion to the religion of a hegemonic imperial neighbour, which does not fit with many current understandings of the political significance of the Medinan Muslim community in seventh-century Arabia. We might start, however, to move towards answers if we consider the following argument drawn from a study of the spread of Pentecostalism in Africa: Conversion does not necessarily imply a rejection of other identities, but involves their assimilation within a complex of discourses and practices governing all aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political life which enable them to be mediated through and subsumed within a collective system of representations.65 And if, as Thomas Bauer has put it, ‘Alle Kulturen müssen mit kultureller Ambiguität leben’, then conversion to Islam in seventh-century Arabia seems to have meant finding ways of negotiating and, to an extent, reconciling those ambiguities.66 A great many modern studies of the early Islamic Middle East outside of Arabia have emphasised the cultural interchange between the many different communities of the region and have demonstrated a number of ways in which the negotiation of confessional and communal identities, beliefs and practices owed much to dialogue, be it polemical or otherwise, between the adherents of different faiths and sects as many of their members converted between one and another. In so many instances of conversion, be it of Arab tribes to Christianity or Near Eastern Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to Islam, we now know that the process did not entail the wholesale rejection of the complex range of pre-conversion identities. We should not assume that conversion to Islam in seventh-century Arabia was anything other than a similar process.

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Notes 1. Cited by Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997), p. 283. 2. The classic study, although much critiqued, remains Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). At least two studies on Egypt in particular have suggested that perhaps the most crucial phase in the conversion of that territory’s population to Islam did not come until the Mamluk period; see John Iskander, ‘Islamization in Medieval Egypt: The Copto-Arabic “Apocalypse of Samuel” as a Source for the Social and Religious History of Medieval Copts’, Medieval Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998), esp. p. 219 n. 1; and Tamer El-Leithy, ‘Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293–1524 a.d.’, doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 2005. 3. Uriel Simonsohn, ‘Conversion to Islam: A Case Study for the Use of Legal Sources’, History Compass 11, no. 8 (2013), p. 650. 4. Aziz Al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 388. 5. The term ‘Islamisation’ can, of course, be used to refer to a number of related if distinct phenomena, but in this chapter it will be employed rather simply as shorthand for conversion of people to Islam. 6. On many ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources’ reliance upon schemata and topoi more broadly, see Albrecht Noth and Lawrence I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source Critical Study, trans. Michael Bonner, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994). 7. Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 121. 8. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam, pp. 37, 114. 9. See, for example, Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); A. C. S. Peacock, Early Seljūq History: A New Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 99–127; Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapprochement”: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 369–89. 10. A recent study to argue this point quite forcefully is Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 11. On several issues surrounding this latter phenomenon, see now Harry Munt, ‘“No Two Religions”: Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Ḥijaz’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 2 (2015), pp. 249–69. 12. For two overviews of some aspects of this common narrative of Arabia’s Islamisation, see W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 78–150; Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muḥammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 46–50. For some more critical analysis, see Ella Landau-Tasseron, ‘From Tribal Society to Centralized Polity: An Interpretation of Events and Anecdotes of the Formative Period of Islam’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 24 (2000), pp. 180–216. 13. For a discussion of ḥimas, with references for the Jurash episode, see Harry Munt, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 28–31; for the aphorism, see for example Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafiʿi, Kitab al-Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzi ʿAbd al-Muttalib (al-Mansura: Dar al-Wafaʾ, 2001), vol. 5, pp. 80, 87.

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14. Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Maʿrifat al-Aqalim, ed. Michael Jan de Goeje, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1906), pp. 83–4; for a discussion of this and other examples, see Munt, ‘No Two Religions’, pp. 259–64. 15. How historically reliable depictions of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism in Muslim sources actually are is widely debated in modern scholarship; compare, for example, Gerald R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam. The point to take away here, however, is that Muslim authors of the ninth century and later widely agreed that the paganism they describe had not survived beyond the mid-seventh century. 16. See the references above, n. 9. 17. In English: ‘This rejection of polytheism is radical and final. Throughout Yemen, no inscription after 380 is explicitly polytheist.’ The quotation is from Christian J. Robin, ‘L’Antiquité’, in Ali Ibrahim al-Ghabbân et al. (eds), Routes d’Arabie: Archéologie et histoire du Royaume d’Arabie Saoudite (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2010), p. 88, but for a more detailed discussion, see his ‘Ḥimyar et Israël’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’année: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (2004), pp. 831–908. 18. Aziz Al-Azmeh (Emergence of Islam, pp. 255–6) has recently raised some objections to accepting the historical accuracy of the impression of such a sweeping and complete conversion event in South Arabia. 19. See, for example, M. A. Shaban, ‘Conversion to Islam’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 25–6 on ‘enforced adherence’ to Islam; and, in a different way, Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009; repr. Penguin, 2010), p. 283, where the political expansion of Medina’s polity is discussed without much reference to religious change. 20. For two more thorough overviews of the Arabic sources’ material on the Omanis’ conversion to Islam, see Isam Al-Rawas, Oman in Early Islamic History (Reading: Ithaca, 2000), pp. 35–57; John C. Wilkinson, Ibâḍism: Origins and Early Development in Oman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 67–90. 21. On this aspect of Ibn Saʿd’s work, see Giovanna Calasso, ‘Récits de conversion, zèle dévotionnel et instruction religieuse dans les biographies des “gens de Baṣra” du Kitab al-Ṭabaqat d’Ibn Saʿd’, in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen/Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 19–47. 22. The Arabic word for ‘them’ has now moved from the dual to the plural and so presumably now refers as well to those under the authority of Jayfar and ʿAbd. 23. Muhammad ibn Saʿd, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, ed. ʿAli Muhammad ʿUmar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 2001), vol. 1, p. 226. 24. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 303. 25. Q. 36: 70. All translations of the Quran in this chapter are taken from The Qurʾan, trans. Alan Jones (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007). 26. Muhammad Hamidullah, Majmuʿat al-Wathaʾiq al-Siyasiyya li’l-ʿAhd al-Nabawi wa’lKhilafa al-Rashida, 4th edn (Beirut: Dar al-Nafaʾis, 1983), pp. 161–3 (no. 76), text at p. 162. 27. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, pp. 388–98 (quotation from p. 390). 28. Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders, the Story of the Conversion, trans. Siân Grønlie, (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2006), p. 9; discussion in Winroth, Conversion of Scandinavia, pp. 135, 151–2; and Jenny Jochens, ‘Late and Peaceful: Iceland’s Conversion through Arbitration in 1000’, Speculum 74, no. 3 (1999), pp. 621–55, esp. at pp. 647–54. 29. See, with further references, Munt, Holy City of Medina, pp. 24–5, 32–3.

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30. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, p. 392. 31. See especially the overviews in Greg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 34–71; and recently Greg Fisher et al., ‘Arabs and Christianity’, in Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 276–372. 32. Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), pp. 14–17 (= Vita Euthymii 10; quotation from p. 14). For a recent discussion with further bibliography, see Fisher et al., ‘Arabs and Christianity’, pp. 302–11. 33. Fisher et al., ‘Arabs and Christianity’, pp. 289–90. 34. For two studies of comparative examples in which more gradual processes of conversion to Christianity accompanied, but were not restricted to, shifting political allegiances, see Christopher Haas, ‘Mountain Constantines: The Christianization of Aksum and Iberia’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1, no. 1 (2008), pp. 101–26; Winroth, Conversion of Scandinavia, esp. pp. 103–4. 35. For background and further bibliography, see Hoyland, Seeing Islam, pp. 174–82; Herman G. B. Teule, ‘Ishoʿyahb III of Adiabene’, in David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 133–6; Ovidiu Ioan, Muslime und Araber bei Īšōʿjahb III. (649–659) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009). 36. See, for example, the discussion in Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 84–6. Ishoʿyahb’s letter is a crude expression of this view, but Robbins does note (at p. 85) that one of the problems of the utilitarian approach to understanding conversion is that it often becomes ‘something of a caricature of itself’. 37. The text here actually reads Marūnāyē, perhaps ‘people of Merv’, and although the emendation to Mazūnāyē, ‘Omanis’, is widely accepted in modern scholarship, some doubt about this persists; see esp. the discussion in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, p. 181, n. 28. I favour the amended reading Mazūnāyē for two reasons. First, and this is the more tenuous reason, Ishoʿyahb wrote this letter between 649 and 659, and, although we are told that a tentative Arab garrison was stationed in Merv in c. 651, it was not until about twenty years later that a serious garrison was installed there; see Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (Harlow: Longman, 1986), pp. 72, 86. Second, and more convincingly, what we know of the diocesan structure of the Church of the East in the seventh century suggests that as metropolitan of Rev-Ardashir, Simeon could have been held accountable for eastern Arabia, but not for Merv, which had been raised to metropolitan status itself by 524; see Jean-Maurice Fiey, ‘Diocèses syriens orientaux du Golfe Persique’, in Mémorial Mgr Gabriel Khouri-Sarkis (1898–1968) (Leuven: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1968), pp. 177–219 (esp. 215–17 for Mazūn, ‘Oman’); and David Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East (London: East and West, 2011), pp. 76–9, 118–21. 38. Ishoʿyahb III, Liber epistularum, ed. and trans. Rubens Duval (Leipzig: Harrassowitz; Paris: E Typographeo Reipublicae, 1905), pp. 248 (Syr.)/pp. 179–80 (Lat.). 39. Ṭayyāyē is a common word in Syriac texts used to describe those peoples often known in English as ‘Arabs’; after the advent of Islam, it also came to refer to Muslims. 40. Ishoʿyahb, Liber epistularum, p. 251/p. 182. 41. See, for example, the discussion in Ioan, Muslime und Araber, pp. 100–3. 42. Mario Kozah et al. (eds), The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014); Herman G. B. Teule, ‘Ghiwarghis I’, in David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 151–3; Robert A. Carter, ‘Christianity in the Gulf

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43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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during the First Centuries of Islam’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 19, no. 1 (2008), pp. 71–108. Carter, ‘Christianity in the Gulf’, p. 105. See also the ever so slightly different take in Michael Philip Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 169. For an overview, see Hoyland, Seeing Islam, pp. 192–4. For the text of the record from the synod, including the nineteen canons agreed there, see Synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens, ed. and trans. J.-B. Chabot (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902), pp. 215–26 (Syr.)/pp. 480–90 (Fr.). In this aspect, this text is very similar to a number of other Syriac texts from regions to the north of the Arabian Peninsula, which have been put to good use in studies of communal boundaries and Muslim–Christian interactions in Syria and Iraq; see, for example, the brief discussion of Jacob of Edessa’s (d. 708) writings in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, pp. 160–7. Synodicon orientale, p. 216/p. 482. For more detailed thoughts on the Quran’s usefulness as a source for seventh-century Arabian history, with further bibliography, see Harry Munt, ‘The Arabian Context of the Qurʾan: History and the Text’, M. A. S. Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Qurʾanic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See, for example, Patricia Crone, ‘The Quranic Mushrikūn and the Resurrection’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75, no. 3 (2012), pp. 445–72; and 76, no. 1 (2013), pp. 1–20. Chase F. Robinson, ‘Prophecy and Holy Men in Early Islam’, in P. A. Hayward and James Howard-Johnston (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 249; see also Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, pp. 82–6. The quotation is from Fisher et al., ‘Arabs and Christianity’, p. 277; for further discussion of these narrative topoi in Late Antique texts, see Konstantin Klein, ‘Marauders, Daredevils, and Noble Savages: Perceptions of Arab Nomads in Late Antique Hagiography’, Der Islam 92, no. 1 (2015), pp. 13–41. For more on the significance of emigration to early Muslims, see Patricia Crone, ‘The First-Century Concept of Hiğra’, Arabica 41, no. 3 (1994), pp. 352–87. Richard Bulliet also cautioned that ‘the notion of religious conversion as a moral or spiritual act that could be taken independently of other social or political action may not have been widespread in seventh-century Arabia’; see his ‘Conversion Stories in Early Islam’, in Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), p. 124. The fundamental study is Michael Lecker, The ‘Constitution of Medina’: Muḥammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004). For a more detailed discussion of the practice in pre-Islamic Arabia and of Muhammad’s adoption of it in Medina, see Munt, Holy City of Medina, pp. 16–64. Ibid., esp. pp. 57–64; Elizabeth K. Fowden, ‘Des églises pour les Arabes, pour les nomades?’, in Françoise Briquel Chatonnet (ed.), Les églises en monde syriaques (Paris: Geuthner, 2013), pp. 391–420. For some discussion of the significance of Mecca’s sacred space and pilgrimage rites to the nascent community, see al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, pp. 328–38. See, as a recent example, Frédéric Imbert, ‘Califes, princes et compagnons dans les graffiti du début de l’islam’, Romano-Arabica 15 (2015), pp. 59–78. Frédéric Imbert, ‘L’islam des pierres: L’expression de la foi dans les graffiti arabes des premiers siècles’, in Antoine Borrut (ed.), Écriture de l’histoire et processus de canonisation dans les premiers siècles de l’islam: Hommage à Alfred-Louis de Prémare

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59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

islamisation (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2011), pp. 57–78. For another similar discussion, albeit one that ranges well beyond seventh-century texts, see Robert G. Hoyland, ‘The Content and Context of Early Arabic Inscriptions’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 21 (1997), pp. 77–102. Frédéric Imbert, ‘Le Coran dans les graffiti des deux premiers siècles de l’hégire’, Arabica 47, no. 3 (2000), pp. 381–90. Fahd bin Saleh al-Hawas et al., ‘Taqrir Awwali ʿan Aʿmal al-Tanqibat al-Athariyya biMadinat Fayd al-Taʾrikhiyya bi-Mintaqat Haʾil (al-Mawsim al-Awwal 1427h.–2006m.)’, Al-Atlal 20 (2010), p. 35; Ali Ibrahim al-Ghabbân, Les deux routes syrienne et égyptienne de pèlerinage au nord-ouest de l’Arabie Saoudite (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2011), vol. 2, pp. 499–501 (no. 1). For examples, see the texts discussed in Robert G. Hoyland, ‘The Jews of the Hijaz in the Qurʾān and in Their Inscriptions’, in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), New Perspectives on the Qurʾān: The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context 2 (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 91–116 (that mentioned here is no. 4, at pp. 94–5); and Laïla Nehmé, ‘A Glimpse of the Development of the Nabataean Script into Arabic Based on Old and New Epigraphic Material’, in Michael C. A. Macdonald (ed.), The Development of Arabic as a Written Language (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), pp. 47–88. Imbert, ‘L’islam des pierres’, p. 71. In English: ‘After all, to write “O God, forgive so-andso!” is part of a strategy, a religious veneer the purpose of which is still only to talk about oneself and immortalise one’s name and possibly those of one’s relatives, brought together in a prayer addressed to the deity.’ Elizabeth K. Fowden, ‘Rural Converters among the Arabs’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou, Neil McLynn and Daniel L. Schwartz (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 178. Chase F. Robinson, ‘Reconstructing Early Islam: Truth and Consequences’, in Heribert Berg (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 131. Ruth Marshall-Fratani, ‘Mediating the Global and Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism’, in André Corton and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America (London: Hurst, 2001), p. 86, cited by Henri Gooren, ‘Anthropology of Religious Conversion’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 91. Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011), p. 17. In English: ‘All cultures have to live with cultural ambiguity.’ Also see discussion in Fowden, ‘Rural Converters’, pp. 193–4.

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Calasso, Giovanna, ‘Récits de conversion, zèle dévotionnel et instruction religieuse dans les biographies des “gens de Baṣra” du Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt d’Ibn Saʿd’, in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen / Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 19–47. Carter, Robert A., ‘Christianity in the Gulf during the First Centuries of Islam’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 19, no. 1 (2008), pp. 71–108. Crone, Patricia, ‘The First-Century Concept of Hiğra’, Arabica 41, no. 3 (1994), pp. 352–87. Crone, Patricia, ‘The Quranic Mushrikūn and the Resurrection’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75, no. 3 (2012), pp. 445–72; and 76, no. 1 (2013), pp. 1–20. Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. Richard M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991). DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Donner, Fred M., Muhammad and the Believers at the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). El-Leithy, Tamer, ‘Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293–1524 a.d.’, doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 2005. Fiey, Jean-Maurice, ‘Diocèses syriens orientaux du Golfe Persique’, in Mémorial Mgr Gabriel Khouri-Sarkis (1898–1968) (Leuven: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1968), pp. 177–219. Fisher, Greg, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Fisher, Greg, Philip Wood, George Bevan, Geoffrey Greatrex, Basema Hamarneh, Peter Schadler and Walter Ward, ‘Arabs and Christianity’, in Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 276–372. Fowden, Elizabeth K., ‘Des églises pour les Arabes, pour les nomades?’, in Françoise Briquel Chatonnet (ed.), Les églises en monde syriaques (Paris: Geuthner, 2013), pp. 391–420. Fowden, Elizabeth K., ‘Rural Converters among the Arabs’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou, Neil McLynn and Daniel Schwartz (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 175–96. al-Ghabbân, Ali Ibrahim, Les deux routes syrienne et égyptienne de pèlerinage au nord-ouest de l’Arabie Saoudite (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2011). Gooren, Henri, ‘Anthropology of Religious Conversion’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 84–116. Haas, Christopher, ‘Mountain Constantines: The Christianization of Aksum and Iberia’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1, no. 1 (2008), pp. 101–26. Hamidullah, Muhammad, Majmuʿat al-Wathaʾiq al-Siyasiyya li’l-ʿAhd al-Nabawi wa’l- Khilafa al-Rashida, 4th edn (Beirut: Dar al-Nafaʾis, 1983). al-Hawas, Fahd bin Saleh, al-Syed Anis Hasham, Jahaz Birjis Abdullah al-Shamri, Aʿjab Mohammad al-Utaibi, Maher Khalifah al-Musa, Saad Abdulrahman al-Rawaisan and Abdullah Abdulmohsin al-Khalil, ‘Taqrir Awwali ʿan Aʿmal al-Tanqibat al-Athariyya biMadinat Fayd al-Tarikhiyya bi-Mintaqat Haʾil (al-Mawsim al-Awwal 1427h.–2006m.)’, Al-Atlal 20 (2010), pp. 31–53. Hawting, Gerald R., The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hoyland, Robert G., ‘The Content and Context of Early Arabic Inscriptions’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 21 (1997), pp. 77–102. Hoyland, Robert G., Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997).

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Hoyland, Robert G., ‘The Jews of the Hijaz in the Qurʾān and in Their Inscriptions’, in Gabriel Said Reynolds (ed.), New Perspectives on the Qurʾān: The Qurʾān in its Historical Context 2 (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 91–116. Ibn Saʿd, Muhammad, Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir, ed. ʿAli Muhammad ʿUmar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 2001). Imbert, Frédéric, ‘Le Coran dans les graffiti des deux premiers siècles de l’hégire’, Arabica 47, no. 3 (2000), pp. 381–90. Imbert, Frédéric, ‘L’islam des pierres: L’expression de la foi dans les graffiti arabes des premiers siècles’, in Antoine Borrut (ed.), Écriture de l’histoire et processus de canonisation dans les premiers siècles de l’islam: Hommage à Alfred-Louis de Prémare (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2011), pp. 57–78. Imbert, Frédéric, ‘Califes, princes et compagnons dans les graffiti du début de l’islam’, RomanoArabica 15 (2015), pp. 59–78. Ioan, Ovidiu, Muslime und Araber bei Īšōʿjahb III. (649–659) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009). Ishoʿyahb III. Liber epistularum, ed. and trans. Rubens Duval (Leipzig: Harrassowitz; Paris: E. Typographeo Reipublicae, 1905). Iskander, John, ‘Islamization in Medieval Egypt: The Copto-Arabic “Apocalypse of Samuel” as a Source for the Social and Religious History of Medieval Copts’, Medieval Encounters 4, no. 3 (1998), pp. 219–27. Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders, the Story of the Conversion, trans. Siân Grønlie (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2006). Jochens, Jenny, ‘Late and Peaceful: Iceland’s Conversion through Arbitration in 1000’, Speculum 74, no. 3 (1999), pp. 621–55. Kennedy, Hugh, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (Harlow: Longman, 1986). Klein, Konstantin, ‘Marauders, Daredevils, and Noble Savages: Perceptions of Arab Nomads in Late Antique Hagiography’, Der Islam 92, no. 1 (2015), pp. 13–41. Kozah, Mario, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaheen al-Murikhi and Haya al-Thani (eds), The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014). Landau-Tasseron, Ella, ‘From Tribal Society to Centralized Polity: An Interpretation of Events and Anecdotes of the Formative Period of Islam’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 24 (2000), pp. 180–216. Lecker, Michael, The ‘Constitution of Medina’: Muḥammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004). Madelung, Wilferd, The Succession to Muḥammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Munt, Harry, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Munt, Harry, ‘“No Two Religions”: Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Ḥijāz’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 2 (2015), pp. 249–69. Munt, Harry, ‘The Arabian Context of the Qurʾan: History and the Text’, in M. A. S. Haleem and Mustafa Shah (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Qurʾanic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). al-Muqaddasi [al-Maqdisi], Muhammad b. Ahmad, Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Maʿrifat al-Aqalim, ed. Michael Jan de Goeje, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1906). Nehmé, Laïla, ‘A Glimpse of the Development of the Nabataean Script into Arabic Based on Old and New Epigraphic Material’, in Michael C. A. Macdonald (ed.), The Development of Arabic as a Written Language (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), pp. 47–88. Noth, Albrecht, and Lawrence I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source Critical Study, trans. Michael Bonner, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994). Peacock, A. C. S., Early Seljūq History: A New Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2010).

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Penn, Michael Philip, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Pfeiffer, Judith, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapprochement”: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 369–89. The Qurʾān, trans. Alan Jones (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007). Al-Rawas, Isam, Oman in Early Islamic History (Reading: Ithaca, 2000). Robbins, Joel, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Robin, Christian Julien, ‘L’Antiquité’, in Ali Ibrahim al-Ghabbân, Béatrice André-Salvini, Françoise Demange, Carine Juvin and Marianne Cotty (eds), Routes d’Arabie: Archéologie et histoire du Royaume d’Arabie Saoudite (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2010), pp. 81–99. Robin, Christian Julien, ‘Ḥimyar et Israël’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’année: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (2004), pp. 831–908. Robinson, Chase F., ‘Prophecy and Holy Men in Early Islam’, in P. A. Hayward and James Howard-Johnston (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 241–62. Robinson, Chase F., ‘Reconstructing Early Islam: Truth and Consequences’, in Herbert Berg (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 101–34. Shaban, M. A., ‘Conversion to Islam’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 24–9. al-Shafiʿi, Muhammad b. Idris, Kitab al-Umm, ed. Rifʿat Fawzi ʿAbd al-Muttalib (Al-Mansura: Dar al-Wafaʾ, 2001). Simonsohn, Uriel, ‘Conversion to Islam: A Case Study for the Use of Legal Sources’, History Compass 11, no. 8 (2013), pp. 647–62. Synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens, ed. and trans. J.-B. Chabot (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902). Teule, Herman G. B., ‘Ghiwarghis I’, in David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (eds), Christian– Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 151–3. Teule, Herman G. B., ‘Ishoʿyahb III of Adiabene,’ in David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (eds), Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 133–6. Watt, W. Montgomery, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). Wickham, Chris, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009; repr. Penguin, 2010). Wilkinson, John C., Ibâḍism: Origins and Early Development in Oman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Wilmshurst, David, The Martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East (London: East and West, 2011). Winroth, Anders, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

6 ZOROASTRIAN FIRE TEMPLES AND THE ISLAMISATION OF SACRED SPACE IN EARLY ISLAMIC IRAN Andrew D. Magnusson

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ocal histories of Iranian cities from the early Islamic era are replete with accounts of fire temple desecration. Are such accounts reliable indicators of Islamisation? In other words, does the alleged violation or appropriation of sacred space indicate the spread of Islam? Or is it indicative of a deeper antagonism between Muslims and Zoroastrians that may have encouraged conversion? Much of the secondary literature presumes so. Scholars often treat these violent tales as a barometer for Muslim–Zoroastrian relations, and for Islamisation more generally.1 Yet if tales of fire temple desecration, intertwined as they often are with tales of mosque construction, seem ideally suited to explain the process of Islamisation in post-conquest Iran, it is because they were designed to do so. Medieval Muslims wrote them to explain the triumph of Islam over Zoroastrianism. For that reason, scholars should question their reliability as indicators of conversion. Tales of fire temple desecration are not disinterested historical accounts; they are triumphal narratives of religious supersession.2 As a result, the careful historian of Islamisation must bear three caveats in mind when analysing them. First, early Muslims used tales of fire temple desecration for a variety of purposes. Even if the moral of the story seems apparent, these tales should not be read presumptively nor in isolation. They must be evaluated against the information available in other sources. Second, instances of fire temple desecration are not necessarily indicative of sectarian tension between Muslims and Zoroastrians. A sound understanding of the context is necessary to properly interpret intercommunal violence. Third, these tales tend to exaggerate the numerical and political strength of early Islamic communities in Iran – or project the founding of these communities far into the past – in order to claim that Muslims were dominant (and Zoroastrians subservient) from the early days of the conquest. This is particularly true of stories purporting to describe the construction of the first mosque in a town. Since these tales can be rhetorical, it is important to read them critically. However, accounts of fire temple desecration represent the communal memory of Islamisation in Iran, so they cannot be dismissed entirely. Sarah Savant has recently emphasised the importance of memory in the construction of post-conquest Iranian 102

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history.3 Tales of fire temple desecration are one way that Muslims chose to remember the process of Islamisation. They remembered the physical supersession of Islam through the appropriation of Zoroastrian sacred space. In that regard, these tales – rhetorical or reliable – are indicators of Islamisation as Muslims remembered it.

Interpreting Fire Temple Desecration Early Muslims wrote tales of fire temple desecration for a variety of reasons. Since these tales are usually embedded in Islamic texts dedicated to other topics, it is imprudent to take them at face value or treat in isolation the information they contain. For example, scholars of Zoroastrianism regularly invoke a report about ʿUbaydallah b. Abi Bakra as evidence that Muslims routinely pillaged Zoroastrian temples. Wanton violation of sacred space supposedly spurred conversion to Islam. Upon closer inspection, however, this tale of fire temple desecration does not entirely support that interpretation. According to Ahmad b. Yahya al-Baladhuri’s Ansab al-Ashraf, Ziyad b. Abihi, the Umayyad viceroy of the East, ordered his deputy, ʿUbaydallah, to destroy Zoroastrian temples: Ziyad charged ʿUbaydallah b. Abi Bakra with extinguishing the fires and demolishing their temples, and seizing whatever offerings were gathered there that the Zoroastrians brought, as well as the wealth intended for their maintenance. He ended up with, they say, 40 million dirhams. Before the year was over, he squandered it and was indebted.4 The assumption that ʿUbaydallah destroyed many fire temples – a pervasive assumption in the secondary literature – is based on al-Baladhuri’s claim that ʿUbaydallah amassed 40 million dirhams from the campaign.5 Admittedly, 40 million dirhams is an astronomical sum. It is twenty times the amount that ʿUbaydallah extracted as tribute from the Zunbil, a ruler in Afghanistan, that same year.6 However, it is clear from the other stories in this section of the Ansab al-Ashraf that al-Baladhuri intended this report to demonstrate ʿUbaydallah’s profligacy, not the number of fire temples he destroyed. ʿUbaydallah was a notorious spendthrift. He reportedly once paid 30,000 dirhams for a drink of water.7 The report about the fire temples is an ironic commentary on ʿUbaydallah’s extravagant lifestyle and the evanescence of wealth. This supposed decadence is almost certainly a trope, even if it does reflect the fact that tribal connections permitted men of humble origin, like Ziyad and ʿUbaydallah, to profit immensely from the administration of the early caliphate.8 Perhaps that was even the point: ʿUbaydallah was perceived as nouveau riche and reckless with money, so Muslim authors fostered that image of him. Regardless, the 40 million dirhams attributed to his campaign of fire temple desecration seems to be part of a carefully crafted caricature. It alone is not indicative of the number of fire temples he destroyed. In reality, the scope of ʿUbaydallah’s campaign was quite limited. Ziyad appointed him governor of Sistan in 671–2. The Tarikh-i Sistan, a local history of that province, suggests that it was in connection with this appointment that Ziyad ordered ʿUbaydallah to destroy the fire temples.9 ʿUbaydallah did so during his march to assume the governorship of Sistan. Therefore, the scope of his campaign was limited

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to Fars and Sistan – the two provinces that he passed through on his way east – and the brief period between his appointment as governor of Sistan and his assumption of that post.10 According to ʿAmr b. Bahr al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-Hayawan, ʿUbaydallah targeted three fire temples along the way, sacking one but ultimately sparing two. The limited nature of ʿUbaydallah’s campaign is confirmed by the fact that it is so sparsely documented in other Islamic sources. Al-Jahiz reports that ʿUbaydallah went first to the city of Jur (also known as Firuzabad) in Fars province, intending to extinguish its sacred fire: While extinguishing it, [ʿUbaydallah] was told: ‘There is no fire more esteemed by the Zoroastrians than the fire at Kariyan of Darabjird. If you extinguish it, no one will resist (Ar. yamtaniʿu) you; while if you extinguish their lowly fire [at Jur], they will resist (imtanaʿū) it and prepare for war.’ So he departed for Kariyan and began with it.11 In the end, ʿUbaydallah spared the fire at Jur for fear of a popular revolt. ʿUbaydallah’s unnamed informant was correct; Zoroastrians greatly esteemed the fire temple at Kariyan, which housed one of the three imperial fires of Sasanian Zoroastrianism – the Adhar Khwarra, or ‘Fire of the Priests’. Al-Baladhuri described the region as ‘the fountain of [the Zoroastrians’] knowledge and religion’.12 Abu’lHasan b. Ali b. al-Husayn al-Masʿudi wrote in the tenth century: ‘The Zoroastrians venerate this fire beyond any other fire or temple.’13 In fact, the Muslim geographer Ahmad b. Muhammad b. al-Faqih al-Hamadhani reported that Zoroastrians regarded the Adhar Khwarra so highly that they took precautions against the possibility that Muslims might extinguish it: ‘When the Arabs ruled, the Zoroastrians feared that [this fire] would be extinguished so they split it into two parts – the part in Kariyan and the part carried to Fasa. They said that if one was extinguished, the other would remain.’14 The effort that Zoroastrians made to preserve this fire belies the claim that no one would resist its desecration. ʿUbaydallah’s reluctance to extinguish the fire at Jur might reflect the Muslim authorities’ tenuous control over the region. Jur was the second to last city in Fars to submit to Muslim rule.15 Ardeshir I, the founder of the Sasanian Empire, had built Jur as an imperial capital in the third century. Although emperors no longer resided there by the seventh century, it remained a loyal Sasanian stronghold.16 Muslim forces drove the Sasanian monarch, Yazdagird III, out of Jur just two decades before ʿUbaydallah arrived.17 Jur was also a major cultic centre. According to al-Masʿudi, its fire temple hosted an annual festival and procession.18 Therefore, ʿUbaydallah’s fear that the city’s inhabitants would have violently resisted any attempt to extinguish their fire was probably well founded. Perhaps that is the reason he abandoned the effort. In any case, ʿUbaydallah spared the fire at Jur and went to Kariyan. Its inhabitants barricaded themselves inside the citadel. According to al-Jahiz, one ill-tempered Persian who remained outside the walls used to pass by ʿUbaydallah’s camp daily. When ʿUbaydallah commented on the Persian’s foul temperament, an Arab soldier asked how much he would pay to have the man imprisoned. ʿUbaydallah offered 4,000 dirhams, but the soldier talked him up to 5,000 – perhaps another example of ʿUbaydallah’s profligacy. According to al-Jahiz, the Persian ‘did not resist (Ar. mā imtanaʿa)’ when the soldier seized him, which may fulfil the earlier prediction that no one would resist the destruction of the fire at Kariyan. The soldier threw the Persian to the ground and the people trampled him to death. Only then did the citadel surrender.

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The Muslim forces extinguished the temple’s sacred flame and massacred the Zoroastrian herbads, or ‘priests’.19 The reason for ʿUbaydallah’s assault on the temple is not stated, although it seems to have been part of an attempt by the Umayyad Viceroy of the East to eliminate a rival centre of power in what was once the heartland of Sasanian Iran. Kariyan was located near Darabjird, a rebellious region dominated by a Zoroastrian priest known in Islamic sources as ‘the Herbad’ (Ar. al-hirbadh). He and his supporters surrendered to caliphal armies more than once. The Herbad sued for peace when Muslim forces initially arrived in the region, but he rebelled shortly thereafter, and Darabjird had to be forcibly conquered in the mid-seventh century. ʿUbaydallah’s assassination of the Herbad appears to have been the culmination of that effort.20 The final stop on ʿUbaydallah’s campaign of fire temple destruction was Sistan. The Tarikh-i Sistan reports that when the Zoroastrians and local aristocracy learnt of his intention to destroy their fire temple they threatened to revolt. The Muslims of Sistan intervened, arguing that destroying the fire temple violated Islamic law (sharia). They wrote directly to the Umayyad authorities in Damascus for advice. The court’s reply bears a remarkable degree of theological egalitarianism: You should not [destroy the fire temple], since they and their places of worship are protected by treaty . . . In this case, it is not obligatory [to destroy it] since the synagogue is to the Jews and the church is to the Christians as the fire temple is to the Zoroastrians. How could we differentiate between all of the protected people and their houses of worship? . . . If our Prophet, peace be upon him, desired that . . . he would have uprooted unbelief and religions other than Islam, but he did not. He did not uproot them and even made peace with them through the jizya . . . So [ʿUbaydallah] ignored [Ziyad’s] decree.21 In the end, ʿUbaydallah also spared the fire temple at Sistan. The reference to Islamic law in this story is a bit anachronistic, but the Tarikh-i Sistan was written several centuries after ʿUbaydallah’s arrival, so such projections are not unexpected. While the Tarikh-i Sistan may not accurately depict Muslim– Zoroastrian relations in this period, it nonetheless reflects how later Muslims in the region remembered them. In other words, the author of the Tarikh-i Sistan chose to remember that the Prophet Muhammad did not distinguish between Zoroastrianism and other religions, that fire temples were the equivalent of churches and synagogues, and that ʿUbaydallah preserved the temple. ʿUbaydallah’s campaign ended in Sistan. He had targeted three fire temples in total, but only sacked one. Clearly, the extent and significance of this episode has been overstated. It is not evidence that Muslims wantonly violated Zoroastrian sacred space, nor that such desecration encouraged Islamisation. On the other hand, this story is evidence that Muslims sometimes remembered the protection of fire temples – a fact easily lost on historians preoccupied with tales of destruction.22

Contextualising Fire Temple Desecration Even credible accounts of fire temple desecration are not necessarily evidence of sectarianism. A sound understanding of the historical context is necessary to understand religious violence. For instance, Abrun the Turk’s destruction of the fire temple at Furdujan, near Qom, in 895 is frequently cited as an example of the persecution of

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Zoroastrians by Muslims.23 Ibn al-Faqih’s early tenth-century geographical work, the Kitab al-Buldan, describes this episode as follows: [The fire] in this temple remained in this village until, in the year 282 [895–6], Abrun al-Turk24 came there. He was governing Qom (Ar. kāna yatawallā Qum). He aimed his mangonels and catapults at the village until he conquered it. He destroyed the walls of the village, sacked the temple, extinguished the fire and carried the brazier to the city of Qom. The fire has been out since that day.25 This seems to be a credible account of fire temple desecration because it is attested by more than one source, it is not associated with the construction of a mosque or the establishment of an Islamic community at Furdujan and the violence originated outside the temple precinct. Previous scholars have misinterpreted this incident as the product of religious animus because they failed to properly contextualise it. Context matters, particularly when interpreting intercommunal violence. This is as true of the Shepherds’ Crusade in fourteenthcentury Europe as it is of fire temple desecration in seventh-century Iran. The Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320 was a popular movement initiated by pastoralists to defend the Kingdom of Aragon against the Muslims of Granada. The shepherds marched to Paris to invite the King of France to lead them in a crusade, but he refused to grant them an audience. In response, they pillaged royal institutions and attacked Jews. These attacks continued throughout France and into Iberia as the shepherds crossed the Pyrenees.26 Due to the religious overtones of the Shepherds’ Crusade and the devastating effect that it had on France’s Jewish population, some historians of Judaism have interpreted this incident as evidence of the growing intolerance towards Jews in fourteenth-century Europe. Others view it through the lens of atrocities committed against Jews in Nazi Germany. From that perspective, the Shepherds’ Crusade is but one step in the long march of European intolerance that culminated in the Holocaust. By contrast, David Nirenberg argues that violence against Jews during the Shepherds’ Crusade was contingent and particular to that time and place, not part of a pattern of regular persecution against Jews. Furthermore, Jews fared differently on either side of the Pyrenees. When the shepherds initially targeted Jews in France, the king condemned the violence and attempted to contain it. Nevertheless, he did not intervene when accusations that Jews had colluded with lepers in poisoning wells sparked further violence in 1321. In that case, the municipal authorities justified attacks on lepers and Jews as defence of the realm. The king did not challenge that logic and many Jews fled to Aragon for safety. The King of Aragon staunchly defended the Jews against the shepherds in 1320. The accusations against lepers during the poisoning scare of 1321 did not result in violence against Jews in Aragon.27 Nirenberg draws two conclusions about religious violence from these facts. First, religious violence must be understood in its local context because even the same violent act can have distinct meanings depending on where and when it occurs. Second, rather than viewing religious violence in hindsight as part of a progressive march towards some tragic end, each act must be understood at the time and in the place which it occurred. Although historians know the end from the beginning, they must resist the urge to impose that knowledge on the past. Applying Nirenberg’s ideas and methodology to Abrun’s destruction of the fire temple at Furdujan reveals that this incident may not have been motivated by sectarianism.

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Abrun was not the regular governor of Qom but ‘was governing’ (kāna yatawallā) it temporarily. The Tarikh-i Qum describes him as the city’s amir, which implies that he was not a political administrator but a military commander.28 Al-Tabari confirms that Abrun was ‘an officer of the central authorities’, meaning the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad. He was also the brother of Kayghalagh.29 A mid-ranking member of the caliph’s Turkish guard, Kayghalagh mediated on behalf of the Abbasid caliph alMuhtadi during a troop revolt at Samarra in 869–70.30 Apparently, the brothers were promoted for their loyalty because Kayghalagh served as governor of Rayy in 875–8 while Abrun was set ‘over’ Qazwin (Ar. ʿalayhā) in 879–80.31 Thus, when he destroyed the temple at Furdujan, Abrun was temporarily governing a region under martial law on behalf of the Abbasids. The Abbasids needed a loyal governor at Qom because al-Jibal, the province to which it belonged, was a hotbed of revolt in the late ninth century. To the north, Tabaristan and Gilan spawned successive ʿAlid rebellions. Al-Jibal was overrun numerous times as the struggle of the Tahirids, Saffarids and Samanids for control of Khurasan spilled over into neighbouring provinces. To the south, the caliph had given begrudging recognition to the Saffarids’ seizure of Fars, even as Saffarid armies pressed further west towards the very heart of the caliphate. In Jibal, the Dulafids who ruled the province hereditarily on behalf of the Abbasids, were showing signs of independence.32 This unrest appears to be the reason that the caliph sent his son in 894–5 to rule over the region directly. Abrun likely assumed command of Qom at this time, just a year before his attack on the fire temple. Previously, members of the al-Ashʿari family had governed Qom, at least until 892 when a rogue slave soldier named Wasif captured the city.33 Muhammad b. Abi al-Saj, Wasif’s master, had expelled him from Baghdad for waging war on rival troops. When summoned to return, Wasif refused, wreaking havoc across Khuzistan instead.34 It was apparently at this time that he seized Qom and ruled it for three years (892–5). The Dulafids, who ruled most of al-Jibal on behalf of the Abbasids, were too preoccupied with a succession crisis to respond. ʿUmar Dulafi finally fought Wasif in 894–5, but could not defeat him.35 Later that year, the Abbasid caliph al-Muʿtadid escorted his son, the future caliph al-Muktafi, to al-Jibal, installing him at Rayy as governor over the northern cities of the province such as Qazwin and Qom. Although al-Tabari does not make the connection, the arrival of the caliph and his son in al-Jibal must have been the reason that Wasif suddenly and inexplicably quit Qom in 894–5, despite his recent victory over ʿUmar Dulafi.36 In 895–6, the caliph launched a campaign to kill the leaders of the unreliable Dulafid clan, capture their territories, and seize their wealth. That same year, Abrun, the Abbasid general, besieged Furdujan and sacked the fire temple. Therefore, the context for that attack is not Muslim–Zoroastrian tension but the Abbasids’ attempt to reassert authority over an unruly province. Qom’s frequent tax revolts may also have played a role in Abrun’s assault on the fire temple. The city had to be subjugated by the central authorities five times in the ninth century before taxes could be collected.37 The inhabitants of Qom had complained about their tax rate from the very first survey of the land in 804–5. As a result, there were five more surveys in the ninth century and two more in the early tenth century. The residents of Qom endured a total of eight separate tax assessments in a little over a century.38 Abrun seized Qom in 895–6, just two years before the sixth assessment. The sixth assessment came after the ‘people of Qom had complained of

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the extortionate treatment of the tax collectors who had followed one another in Qom in rapid succession, each raising the demand’.39 Indeed, the fifty-seven years between the fifth and sixth assessments was the longest period in the ninth century without an adjustment of Qom’s tax burden. To make matters worse, there was a severe drought at Rayy in 894–5. The resulting famine was so bad that, according to al-Tabari, the people resorted to cannibalism.40 Since Qom is the closest major city to Rayy, it undoubtedly suffered the same famine. In sum, the local populace’s penchant for rebellion, combined with a recent famine and extortionate levels of taxation, suggests that the desecration of the fire temple at Furdujan occurred amidst a tax revolt. Abrun responded by besieging the village and razing its walls, imposing Abbasid authority – and taxes by extension – on a reluctant Zoroastrian population. A piece of circumstantial evidence supports the assertion that Abrun attacked the fire temple during a tax revolt. The Tarikh-i Qum, the earliest surviving history of the city, does not contain an independent account of Abrun’s assault. It simply quotes verbatim from Ibn al-Faqih’s Kitab al-Buldan without adding any detail. It seems odd that a local historian would know less about this incident than an itinerant geographer. However, the Tarikh-i Qum does preserve local lore about an instance of fire temple desecration at Furdujan during the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705) nearly two centuries earlier: They also say that the Muslims – in the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwan, when Hajjaj b. Yusuf was the governor and viceroy of the two Iraqs – took kharāj from the people of this village [Furdujan] and warred with them and conquered this village and broke into the fire temple. There were two golden doors. They pried them off and carried them before Hajjaj. He sent them to Mecca to hang at the entrance of the Kaʿba. Only God knows (Allāhu aʿlam).41 Several elements of this story are inconsistent. First, the context mentions Muslims taxing Zoroastrians, but they were not in a position to do so during the caliphate of ʿAbd al-Malik. When Muslims settled at Qom, the local Zoroastrian ruler allowed them to occupy villages in exchange for defending the frontier. He, not they, administered the city. Second, the Muslims supposedly sent the golden doors to al-Hajjaj, the Umayyad Viceroy of the East, after sacking the temple. But the first Muslims came to Qom after instigating a revolt against al-Hajjaj at Kufa.42 Therefore, it is unlikely that they would have honoured him with such a tribute. Finally, this tale ends with the Arabic phrase, ‘Only God knows (Allāhu aʿlam)’, which is commonly used by Muslim authors to express uncertainty about competing narratives of the same event.43 These elements of the story are more intelligible as local memories of Abrun’s desecration of the fire temple. By the ninth century, Muslims governed Qom and could tax Zoroastrians. In fact, the central authorities in Baghdad made the city its own tax district in the early ninth century.44 Furthermore, the inhabitants of Qom regularly rebelled against their tax burden during Abrun’s era, not ʿAbd al-Malik’s. In both stories, the Muslims plundered goods from the temple. However, only in the Tarikh-i Qum are these goods sent to al-Hajjaj, a detail that both demonstrates the attackers’ loyalty to the viceroy and keeps their actions above reproach. Even though these attacks ostensibly occurred centuries apart, they appear side by side in the Tarikh-i Qum, which would explain the author’s use of the phrase Allāhu aʿlam to express uncertainty about competing narratives of the same event. In short, this otherwise dubious report of fire

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temple desecration makes more sense as a local memory, albeit confused, of the attack on Furdujan in the late ninth century. Sectarianism was doubtlessly not the primary motive, even if it may have been a consequence, of Abrun’s actions. It is presumptive to say that this instance of desecration encouraged Islamisation.

Inventing Fire Temple Desecration As the previous example illustrates, Muslims invented tales of fire temple desecration to exaggerate the numerical and political strength of early Islamic communities in Iran. They also fabricated them to enhance the reputation of a town, mosque or pious ancestor. For this reason, these tales are unreliable indicators of Islamisation. Research on the history of Islam in South Asia has uncovered a triumphal Muslim narrative of temple desecration. Indo-Muslim sources are replete with accounts of Muslim rulers destroying Hindu temples to build mosques atop them. Yet most of these accounts are highly rhetorical or difficult to substantiate. Richard Eaton estimates that, of the 60,000 temples supposedly destroyed by Muslims in South Asia from 1192 to 1729, only eighty can be established with certainty. Nevertheless, contemporary Hindu nationalists use these exaggerated estimates to ‘demonstrate a persistent pattern of villainy and fanaticism on the part of premodern Indo-Muslim conquerors and rulers’.45 The fact that medieval Muslims promoted this discourse of religious supersession only enhances the caricature. Muslim historians used triumphal narratives to bolster the reputation of their rulers. Jihad was an important rallying cry in medieval South Asia against enemies both internal and external, Muslim and non-Muslim. The legitimacy of a ruler depended to a large extent on his success on the battlefield, and court historians were not above inventing victories for a patron. Such tales often mention the destruction of an enemy’s shrine. Mughal rulers even celebrated the destruction of their Muslim rivals’ mosques!46 Sometimes these claims were pure fabrication. A sixteenth-century Hindu temple in Andhra Pradesh bears the inscription of a Muslim commander in the service of the Qutb Shahs declaring that he had damaged the edifice and built a mosque there. Yet there is no surviving evidence of that attack and another inscription at the site claims that just five years later a representative of the same Qutb Shahs endowed this Hindu temple with revenue from a local village.47 Since some claims of temple desecration are rhetorical, scholars must scrutinise them to determine their reliability. They must weigh competing narratives of an event and consider the earliest date of attestation. Otherwise, they risk being duped by their own sources – or worse. In 1992, sectarian violence erupted in India over unsubstantiated claims that the Mughal emperor Babur had destroyed a Hindu temple at Ayodhya centuries earlier. Hindu nationalists, defying a court order, demolished the Babri Masjid, the mosque that Babur had supposedly built atop the ruins of a temple to the god Ram. Riots between Hindus and Muslims ensued. The tragic irony is that probably there had not been a temple on the site. That claim first surfaces in a nineteenth-century colonial gazetteer. What historians have confirmed, however, is that Ayodhya developed as a centre of Ram worship under Muslim rule and through the patronage of Muslim rulers.48 Scholars must be careful not to perpetuate unconfirmed claims of temple desecration because they can exacerbate sectarianism in the present.

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In Iran, as in India, rhetorical claims of temple desecration are often embedded in tales of mosque construction. For example, ʿAbdallah b. ʿAmir, a Companion of the Prophet, supposedly built a mosque atop a fire temple at Bam in 651–2.49 There are two stories about the origin of the mosque in the Tarikh-i Kirman, a nineteenth-century history of the province written by Ahmad ʿAli Khan Waziri. He was the descendant of a minor official in the Qajar dynasty whose family had lived in Kirman since the twelfth century. Although the Tarikh-i Kirman is an extremely late source for such information, Waziri cites the Bam-nama, a lost history of the city written in the thirteenth century by Tahir al-Din b. Shams al-Din.50 It mentions the destruction of the fire temple: The author of the Bam-nama says: ‘At the same time an old man, one of the new Muslims who was completely devoted to Mansur al-Din [a local Muslim leader], offered a piece of gold to ʿAbdallah b. ʿAmir for someone to remove the fire temple and build a mosque in its place. He fulfilled the fortunate old man’s request to construct a mosque built on four pillars. Today there is no trace of that mosque.’51 Unfortunately, the Bam-nama is no longer extant so it is difficult to properly contextualise this quote or to determine its reliability. Like most accounts of Hindu temple desecration, there is no archaeological evidence to support this story. The claim that a fire temple existed on the site seems purely rhetorical. Its rhetorical nature is confirmed by the existence of a second story of the mosque’s origins that does not mention a fire temple at all. Since Waziri does not cite a source for it, the second story is presumably narrated on his authority. [ʿAbd] Allah-i ʿAmir left Mujashiʿ b. Masʿud with 1,000 men in Gawashir and entered Bam on the way to Khurasan. Mansur al-Din had been in Nasa Narmashir inviting the people to Islam but had not made progress on account of his small entourage. He joined with ʿAbdallah-i ʿAmir and constructed a large compound further away from the Zoroastrians of that district who used to vex the Muslims and speak ill of their religion. ʿAbdallah sent for a large group of the insurgents of that troublesome faction, and many of the people of Bam and Narmashir entered into the glory of Islam and built a mosque that is called the Mosque of the Honourable Messenger. He had with him a piece of wood from the tree under which the Believers swore allegiance to the Honourable Seal [of the Prophets], peace be upon him. The sublime truth in the glorious Quran declares: ‘Truly God was pleased with the believers when they swore allegiance to you under the tree . . .’, to the end of the verse [Surat al-Fath, verse 14]. He placed it in the miḥrāb. Today, which is the year 1291 [1874–5], that mosque with the same well-known name is outside of the city of Bam.52 It is significant that in this story ʿAbdallah did not build the mosque on the site of a Zoroastrian temple. Rather, he moved the small band of Muslims further away from the Zoroastrians in order to decrease the interaction between them. This second account better reflects the struggle of a Muslim minority living on the eastern frontier of the Islamic world in the mid-seventh century.53 In this second story, the reputation of the mosque at Bam is not literally and symbolically built on the ruins of a fire temple. Rather, the mosque’s claim to fame is that it hosts a Prophetic relic. Local Iranian historians boasted of similar connections to Muhammad

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as part of a conscious effort to place their otherwise marginal cities within the mainstream of Islamic history. Muslims living on the fringes of the medieval Islamic world – that is, geographically distant from its centres of political power and religious authority – inserted themselves into the central narrative of the faith through religious relics, contact with the Companions or visions of the Prophet Muhammad. Mimi Hanaoka describes this as a discourse of ‘centering the periphery’ in Islamic history.54 The Tarikh-i Kirman locates Bam within the central narrative of Islamic history in two ways. First, it makes ʿAbdallah b. ʿAmir the builder of the Mosque of the Honourable Messenger. As a Companion of the Prophet, two-time governor of Basra and subjugator of Fars and Khurasan, ʿAbdallah had a certain cachet in early Islamic Iran. The Kitab Ahwal-i Nishapur ascribes supernatural power (Ar. baraka) to him on account of his interaction with Muhammad as a child.55 However, it is unlikely that ʿAbdallah ever visited Bam, let alone constructed its first mosque. ‘The shaykhs of Kirman’ boasted that he marched through their province on his way to conquer Nishapur. The southern route to Khurasan did pass through Kirman, but in his haste ʿAbdallah took the shorter, more dangerous, route through the deserts of eastern Iran, skirting the province.56 Therefore, it is unlikely that ʿAbdallah ‘entered Bam on the way to Khurasan’, as the Tarikh-i Kirman suggests, because that would have taken him in the wrong direction. Instead, ʿAbdallah sent his subordinate Mujashiʿ to conquer the city.57 The notion that ʿAbdallah had once passed through Bam spawned the related notion that he was buried there. In fact, ʿAbdallah died in Mecca.58 He may have never visited Bam, which makes it extremely unlikely that he built its first mosque. The Tarikh-i Kirman also places the Mosque of the Honourable Messenger in the mainstream of Islamic history through the piece of wood, a Prophetic relic, which ʿAbdallah placed in its prayer niche. In 628, the Prophet Muhammad attempted a pilgrimage to Mecca with 1,400 of his followers, but was diverted to Hudaybiyya by hostile Meccan forces. A rumour spread that the future caliph ʿUthman had been killed while negotiating on Muhammad’s behalf with the Meccans. To prevent the Muslims from fleeing in panic, the Prophet asked them to swear allegiance to him. Their pledge to adhere to whatever terms Muhammad negotiated with the Meccans at Hudaybiyya became known as the ‘Pledge of Good Pleasure’ (Ar. bayʿat al-riḍwān) because the Quran declared that it pleased God.59 It was also known as the ‘Pledge of the Tree’, whence the Prophet administered it. ʿAbdallah supposedly installed a piece of that tree in the mosque at Bam. Not only is it unlikely that he visited the city, but it is unlikely that he had such a relic. ʿAbdallah was not at Hudaybiyya; he was just two years old at the time. His father, ʿAmir, would not become a Muslim until Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630.60 Sometime later, the caliph ʿUmar is supposed to have felled the tree at Hudaybiyya because it had become a site of veneration.61 Yet the remote probability that ʿAbdallah could have acquired a piece of that tree is, in some sense, irrelevant. The intent of the ‘centering the periphery’ genre is to enhance the reputation of an otherwise marginal place. A Prophetic relic installed by ʿAbdallah, regardless of its authenticity, serves this function for the Mosque of the Honourable Messenger at Bam. The story of fire temple desecration seems to have served a similar function in an earlier era. It proclaimed the triumph of Islam over Zoroastrianism at Bam. Kirman was one of two Zoroastrian strongholds in Iran in the thirteenth century, when the

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Bam-nama was likely composed. Thus, the author of that work, Tahir al-Din, had reason to proclaim the supersession of Islam in his home town because Muslims were still in contact – and perhaps competition – with Zoroastrians. Yet it appears that the size and influence of the Zoroastrian community had decreased sufficiently by the nineteenth century that the narrative of temple desecration no longer had the same resonance for its Muslim audience.62 As it became less imperative to assert Islam’s dominance over Zoroastrianism, a second story about the origin of the mosque came into circulation. This revised story dropped the trope of sectarian violence, inserting peripheral Bam into the mainstream of Islamic history through a Prophetic relic. It was a Muslim-centred story for Bam’s increasingly Muslim population. Both tales were invented to enhance the reputation of the local mosque. Neither elucidates the process of Islamisation.

Conclusion Are tales of fire temple desecration reliable indicators of Islamisation? Clearly, they are not. Yet medieval Muslims intended them to be, which is undoubtedly the reason such tales feature prominently in Iranian local histories. These histories, composed in Arabic centuries after the events they purport to describe, often survive only in later New Persian translations that have been heavily edited. Thus, they are secondary sources – synthetic works of historical interpretation – rather than primary sources. While these histories contain some valuable information about Muslim–Zoroastrian relations, they should not be read as straightforward accounts of Islamisation. The alleged violation of a sacred site or the supposed construction of a mosque does not necessarily indicate the adoption of Islam by Zoroastrians. Abrun’s assault on the fire temple at Furdujan, near restive Qom, is an example. At the same time, these were the stories that medieval Muslims told themselves about the Islamisation of Iran. Muslims preserved or invented tales of fire temple desecration to foster a certain image of their ancestors, men like ʿUbaydallah b. Abi Bakra or ʿAbdallah b. ʿAmir. They also used these stories to demonstrate the supersession of Islam and to enhance the prestige of peripheral places by inserting them into the mainstream of Islamic history, such as at Bam. Tales of fire temple desecration from local histories represent a sort of collective memory of the triumph of Islam over Zoroastrianism. They preserve the story of Islamisation as Iranian Muslims chose to remember it.

Notes 1. Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979); Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975); Michael Morony, ‘Conquerors and Conquered: Iran’, in G. H. A. Juynboll (ed.), Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 73–88; Jamsheed K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Jenny Rose, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Aptin Khanbaghi, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

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2. Andrew D. Magnusson, ‘Muslim–Zoroastrian Relations and Religious Violence in Early Islamic Discourse, 600–1100 c.e.’, doctoral thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2014, ch. 4. 3. Sarah Bowen Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4. Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1959), p. 494. 5. Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007), pp. 184, 195; Mary Boyce, ‘Zoroastrianism in Iran after the Arab Conquest’, in Pheroza Godrej and Firoza Mistree (eds), A Zoroastrian Tapestry: Art, Religion & Culture (Usmanpura, India: Mapin, 2002), p. 230; Michael Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 257; Alfred Kremer, Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen, vol. 2 (Vienna: W. Braumuller, 1875), p. 164. 6. Tarikh-e Sistan, trans. Milton Gold (Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1976), p. 75. 7. Al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf, vol. 1, p. 498. 8. Kennedy, Great Arab Conquests, p. 195; Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, p. 257. 9. Tarikh-i Sistan, ed. Muhammad Taqi Bahar (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Zawwar, 1935), p. 92; Tarikh-e Sistan, trans. Gold, p. 74. 10. Baha al-Din Muhammad b. al-Hasan ibn Hamdun, al-Tadhkira al-Hamduniyya, vol. 2 (Beirut: Maʿhad al-Inma al-ʿArabi, 1983), p. 268. 11. ʿAmr b. Bahr al-Jahiz, al-Hayawan, ed. Abd al-Salam Muhammad Harun, vol. 4 (Cairo: Maktabat Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi wa-Awladuh, 1938), p. 480. The text reads ‘Dar Harith’ instead of ‘Darabjird’, which is clearly an error. 12. Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, ed. Salah al-Din Munajjid (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1956), vol. 2, p. 478; The Origins of the Islamic State, trans. Philip Hitti (Beirut: Khayats, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 130–1. 13. Abu’l-Hasan b. Ali b. al-Husayn al-Masʿudi, Muruj al-Dhahab wa-Maʿadin al-Jawhar, ed. Abel Pavet de Courteille et al., vol. 2 (Beirut: al-Jamiʿat al-Lubnaniyya, 1966), p. 399; Les prairies d’or, ed. Abel Pavet de Courteille, vol. 2 (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1962), p. 540. 14. Ahmad b. Muhammad ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani, Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1967), p. 246. 15. Martin Hinds, ‘The First Arab Conquests in Fars’, in Jere Bacharach et al. (eds), Studies in Early Islamic History, (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1996), p. 224. 16. Kennedy, Great Arab Conquests, p. 182. 17. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1964), vol. 5, p. 2863; Tarikh-e Sistan, trans. Gold, p. 63. 18. Al-Masʿudi, Muruj al-Dhahab wa-Maʿadin al-Jawhar, vol. 2, p. 400. 19. Al-Jahiz, al-Hayawan, vol. 4, pp. 480–1. 20. A more extensive treatment of this episode can be found in Magnusson, ‘Muslim–Zoroastrian Relations’, ch. 4. 21. Tarikh-i Sistan, p. 92. 22. Tarikh-i Harat preserves the story of a Muslim governor attempting to protect a fire temple. See ʿAbd al-Rahman Fami Hirawi, Tarikh-i Harat: Dastniwishti-yi Nawyafta (Tehran: Mirath-i Maktub, 1387), pp. 120–3. 23. Jamsheed K. Choksy, ‘Altars, Precincts, and Temples: Medieval and Modern Zoroastrian Praxis’, Iran 44 (2006): p. 330; Michael Morony, ‘Madjus’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005); Frye, Golden Age of Persia, p. 145; G. K. Nariman, Persia & Parsis (Bombay: Iran League, 1925), p. 81. 24. This name varies in the sources. It is actually Barun al-Turk in Kitab al-Buldan and Birun-i Turk in Tarikh-i Qum, but I have favoured al-Tabari’s spelling of Abrun. It is Bayram-i Turk

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

islamisation in Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 106. Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani, Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, p. 247. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), ch. 1. Ibid., ch. 2. Hasan b. Muhammad b. Hasan al-Qummi, Kitab-i Tarikh-i Qummi, ed. Jalal al-Din Tehrani, trans. Hasan b. Ali b. Hasan b. Abd al-Malik Qummi (Tehran: Majlis, 1934), pp. 67, 89. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The Return of the Caliphate to Baghdad, trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 38 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 104. Matthew Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra, A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 128. Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 163; al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, series 3, vol. 4, p. 1936. Roy Mottahedeh, ‘The Abbasid Caliphate in Iran’, in Richard Frye (ed.), Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 79. Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, p. 167. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The ʿAbbasid Recovery, trans. Philip Fields, vol. 37 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 169. Al-Tabari, Return of the Caliphate to Baghdad, p. 13. Ibid., pp. 13–4. Fischer, Iran, p. 107; Hossein Modarressi Tabatabaʾi, Qum dar Qarn-i Nuhum-i Hijri, 801–900 (Qom: Chapkhana-yi Hikmat, 1350), pp. 94–7. A. K. S. Lambton, ‘An Account of the “Tarikhi Qumm”’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 (1948), p. 592. Ibid. Al-Tabari, Return of the Caliphate to Baghdad, p. 14. Al-Qummi, Kitab-i Tarikh-i Qummi, p. 89. Ibid., pp. 245, 262; Lambton, ‘Account of the “Tarikhi Qumm”’, p. 596. A. K. S. Lambton, ‘Persian Local Histories: The Tradition behind Them and the Assumptions of Their Authors’, in Alessandro Bausani and Lucia Rostagno (eds), Yad-Nama: In memoria di Alessandro Bausani (Rome: Bardi Editore, 1991), p. 235. Mottahedeh, ‘The Abbasid Caliphate in Iran’, pp. 79–80. Richard Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States’, in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 247, 257. Barbara Metcalf, ‘Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (1995), p. 958. Cynthia Talbot, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu–Muslim Identities in PreColonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (1995), pp. 717–18. Metcalf, ‘Too Little and Too Much’, p. 963; Ali Ashgar Engineer, ‘Muslim Views of Hindus since 1950’, in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 269. Choksy, ‘Altars, Precincts, and Temples’, p. 331; Mehrdad Shokoohy, ‘Two Fire Temples Converted to Mosques in Central Iran’, Acta Iranica 11 (1985), p. 545. Percy M. Sykes, A History of Persia, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1951), p. 16; Ahmad ʿAli Waziri Kirmani, Tarikh-i Kirman, ed. Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani Parizi (Tehran: Kitabhana-yi Iran, 1961), p. 3. Waziri Kirmani, Tarikh-i Kirman, p. 31.

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52. Ibid., pp. 29–31. 53. C. E. Bosworth, Sistan under the Arabs: From the Islamic Conquest to the Rise of the Saffarids (30–250/651–864) (Rome: IsMEO, 1968), p. 24. 54. Mimi Hanaoka, ‘Perspectives from the Peripheries: Strategies for “Centering” Persian Histories from the “Peripheries”’, Journal of Persianate Studies 8, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–22. 55. Kitab-i Ahwal-i Nishapur, fol. 61b, in Richard N. Frye, The Histories of Nishapur (London: Mouton, 1965). 56. Al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, pp. 2885–6; Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir alTabari, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, trans. R. Stephen Humphreys (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 90. 57. Al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldan, vol. 1, p. 490; vol. 2, pp. 136–7; Tarikh-e Sistan, trans. Gold, p. 63. 58. Waziri Kirmani, Tarikh-i Kirman, p. 31; H. A. R. Gibb, ‘ʿAbd Allah b. Amir’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). 59. Q. 48: 14. 60. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Biographies of the Prophet’s Companions and Their Successors, trans. Ella Landau-Tasseron (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) , vol. 39, p. 76. 61. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Quran (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.vv. ‘Tree’ and ‘Hudaybiyya’. 62. For information on the Zoroastrians of Kerman and Yazd in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Monica Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Jamsheed K. Choksy, ‘Despite Shāhs and Mollās: Minority Sociopolitics in Premodern and Modern Iran’, Journal of Asian History 40, no. 2 (2006), pp. 129–84; Nile Green, ‘The Survival of Zoroastrianism in Yazd’, Iran 38 (2000), pp. 115–22; Mary Boyce, A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

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Engineer, Ali Ashgar, ‘Muslim Views of Hindus since 1950’, in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 263–9. Fami Hirawi, ʿAbd al-Rahman, Tarikh-i Harat: Dastniwishti-yi Nawyafta (Tehran: Mirath-i Maktub, 2008). Fischer, Michael M. J., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Frye, Richard N., The Histories of Nishapur (London: Mouton, 1965). Frye, Richard N., The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975). Gordon, Matthew, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra, A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Green, Nile, ‘The Survival of Zoroastrianism in Yazd’, Iran 38 (2000), pp. 115–22. Hanaoka, Mimi, ‘Perspectives from the Peripheries: Strategies for “Centering” Persian Histories from the “Peripheries”’, Journal of Persianate Studies 8, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–22. Hinds, Martin, ‘The First Arab Conquests in Fars’, in Jere Bacharach, Lawrence Conrad and Patricia Crone (eds), Studies in Early Islamic History (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1996), pp. 191–231. Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani, Ahmad ibn Muhammad, Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1967). Ibn Hamdun, Baha al-Din Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, al-Tadhkira al-Hamduniyya, vol. 2 (Beirut: Maʿhad al-Inmaʾ al-ʿArabi, 1983). al-Jahiz, ʿAmr b. Bahr, al-Hayawan, ed. Abd al-Salam Muhammad Harun, vol. 4 (Cairo: Maktabat Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi wa-Awladuh, 1938). Kennedy, Hugh, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007). Khanbaghi, Aptin, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). Kremer, Alfred, Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen, vol. 2 (Vienna: W. Braumuller, 1875). Lambton, A. K. S., ‘An Account of the “Tarikhi Qumm”’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 (1948), pp. 586–96. Lambton, A. K. S., ‘Persian Local Histories: The Tradition behind Them and the Assumptions of Their Authors’, in Alessandro Bausani and Lucia Rostagno (eds), Yad-Nama: In memoria di Alessandro Bausani (Rome: Bardi Editore, 1991), pp. 227–38. McAuliffe, Jane Dammen (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Quran (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Magnusson, Andrew D., ‘Muslim–Zoroastrian Relations and Religious Violence in Early Islamic Discourse, 600–1100 c.e.’, doctoral thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2014. Massignon, Louis, The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). al-Masʿudi, Abu’l-Hasan b. Ali b. al-Husayn, Les prairies d’or, ed. Abel Pavet de Courteille, vol. 2 (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1962). al-Masʿudi, Abu’l-Hasan b. Ali b. al-Husayn, Muruj al-Dhahab wa-Maʿadin al-Jawhar, ed. Abel Pavet de Courteille, Charles Barbier de Meynard and Charles Pellat, vol. 2 (Beirut: al-Jamiʿat al-Lubnaniyya, 1966). Metcalf, Barbara, ‘Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (1995), pp. 951–67. Modarressi Tabatabaʾi, Hossein, Qum dar Qarn-i Nuhum-i Hijri, 801–900 (Qom: Chapkhanayi Hikmat, 1350). Morony, Michael, ‘Conquerors and Conquered: Iran’, in G. H. A. Juynboll (ed.), Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 73–88.

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Morony, Michael, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Mottahedeh, Roy, ‘The Abbasid Caliphate in Iran’, in Richard Frye (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 57–89. Nariman, G. K., Persia & Parsis (Bombay: Iran League, 1925). Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). al-Qummi, Hasan b. Muhammad b. Hasan, Kitab-i Tarikh-i Qummi, ed. Jalal al-Din Tehrani, trans. Hasan b. Ali b. Hasan b. Abd al-Malik Qummi (Tehran: Majlis, 1934). Ringer, Monica, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Rose, Jenny, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). Savant, Sarah Bowen, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Shokoohy, Mehrdad, ‘Two Fire Temples Converted to Mosques in Central Iran’, Acta Iranica 11 (1985), pp. 545–72. Sykes, Percy M., A History of Persia, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1951). al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje, 15 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1964). al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, The ‘Abbasid Recovery, trans. Philip Fields, vol. 37 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, The Return of the Caliphate to Baghdad, trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 38 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985). al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, trans. R. Stephen Humphreys (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, Biographies of the Prophet’s Companions and Their Successors, trans. Ella Landau-Tasseron (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). Talbot, Cynthia, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu–Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (1995), pp. 692–722. Tarikh-e Sistan, trans. Milton Gold (Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1976). Tarikh-i Sistan, ed. Muhammad Taqi Bahar (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Zawwar, 1935). Waziri Kirmani, Ahmad ʿAli, Tarikh-i Kirman, ed. Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani Parizi (Tehran: Kitabhana-yi Iran, 1961).

7 ‘THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD’: ISLAMISATION AND RELIGIOUS CODE-SWITCHING, EIGHTH TO TENTH CENTURIES Anna Chrysostomides

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hroughout the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras, Islam was the minority religion amongst a majority of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. Yet, while it was the numerical minority, in terms of cultural capital identifying as Muslim provided social, professional and even monetary benefits. During the Abbasid period (750–934), it is likely that the majority of the population still officially identified as non-Muslim;1 however, it is during this era that textual evidence for conversion and assimilation begins to increase. At times it is difficult to distinguish exactly which type of behaviour the texts describe: conversion or assimilation. Acculturation to Islam may have occurred among non-Muslim, and in this case specifically Christian, communities before, or likely as the first step towards, large-scale conversion over the longue durée. In many instances, textual sources appear to be talking about conversion when realistically they may be referencing acculturation. Rather than calculate the demographics of conversion in a specific geographical area, I will use textual examples from the Levant, Iraq, Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to exhibit acculturation to Islam throughout the Dār al-Islām, exploring the useful ambiguity of language. I then move into the main theme of this study: religious code-switching, a behaviour associated with acculturation to Islam that is difficult to distinguish from conversion.

Ambiguous Language The relationship between terminology and religious identity in the early medieval Near East was complicated. By the eighth century, Arabic was becoming the common language for Christians in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. A monk from Palestine circa 860 specifically complains about this in the Summa Theologiae Arabica, a compendious collection of theological material, and the first of its genre extant in Arabic. Though he uses Quranic quotations throughout his Summa, and appropriates Qurʼanic terms and phrases for specifically Christian meanings, he also complains that the language of Islam is so easy to understand and so simple that it causes confusion amongst 118

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Christians who seem to be unaware that when they agree with a Muslim phrase regarding faith and belief in God they are actually saying something heretical to their own beliefs. The term ‘There is no god but God’, which is the first part of the shahāda (the Muslim testament of faith) and the utterance of which can be taken as an act of conversion according to several hadith, is particularly bothersome for the ninth-century author, who points out the theological differences between the threefold Christian concept of the divine versus the very strict monotheism of Islam: However, the language of this (Muslim) community about God is a clear language, which the common people may comprehend. By this I mean their statement, ‘There is no god but God’. But by ‘there is no god but God’ they mean a god other than the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. According to their own statement god is not a begetter nor begotten (cf. Qur’an 112.3), and the Holy Spirit is in their view only one of the created beings. Hence, their statement ‘there is no god but God’ and our statement are the same in words but different in meaning. That is because when we Christians say ‘there is no god but God’, we mean thereby the Living God, possessing a living spirit that is able to give and take life, an intellect that decrees whatever it wills, and a word in which is all being.2 Significantly, this phrase in the ninth century was symbolic to Muslims in a more practical sense; it was occasionally all that was required for a person to officially convert to Islam. The legal sources regarding conversion in the ninth century were only just beginning to add the second part to the usual shahāda: ‘. . . and Muhammad is the Messenger (rasūl) of God.’ However, often a conversion is depicted in the legal sources by the convert simply uttering the beginning of this now well-established phrase.3 It is possible that this is an abbreviation with the second clause about Muhammad being understood; however, even if that were the case, a misunderstanding during conversation could easily occur if only the first part was implied or stated outright. A contemporary text to the Summa, Muslim b. al-Hajjaj’s (d. 875) Sahih Muslim, contains hadith emphasising the importance of accepting the first part of the shahāda as legitimate conversion to Islam. He records three variants of a tradition about Usama b. Zayd (Muhammad’s freed slave whom he had adopted as his son) and this particular one is narrated on Usama’s own authority: The messenger of Allah may peace be upon him, sent us to Huraqat, a tribe of Juhaina. We attacked that tribe early in the morning and defeated them and I and a man from the Ansar caught hold of a person (of the defeated tribe). When we overcame him, he said, ‘There is no god but Allah.’ At that moment the Ansari spared him, but I attacked him with my spear and killed him. The news had already reached the Apostle (peace be upon him), so when we came back he (the Apostle) said to me, ‘Usama, did you kill him after he had made the profession, “There is no god but Allah?”’ I said, ‘Messenger of Allah, he did it only as a shelter.’ The Prophet observed, ‘Did you kill him after he had made the profession that there is no god but Allah?’ He (the Holy Prophet) went on [and] repeated this to me till I wished I had not embraced Islam before that day.4 Here we see Muhammad being clear in his disapproval to the point of being annoying. It would appear that early Muslim traditionalists, as they chose to include

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these particular hadith in their compilations, considered reciting the first part of the shahāda, ‘There is no god but God’ – a statement that was theologically acceptable to both Jews and Christians – to be a legitimate form of conversion. There is a tradition concerning a non-Muslim on a battlefield who has injured the narrator, Miqdad b. Aswad, one of the ṣaḥāba (a ‘Companion’ of the Prophet). Miqdad intends to kill him when the non-Muslim says, according to Sahih Muslim, ‘I become a Muslim for Allah’s sake.’ Whereas, according to ʿAbd al-Razzaq’s account of the tradition, the man says ‘There is no god but God’ without the second part of the shahāda affirming that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Muslim: Chapter: The prohibition of killing an unbeliever after he says, ‘There is no god but God.’ If I encountered a person amongst the infidels (on the battlefield) and he attacked me and struck me and cut off one of my hands with the sword. Then he (in order to protect himself from me) took shelter of a tree and said, ‘I become Muslim for Allah’s sake.’ Messenger of Allah, can I kill him after he had uttered this? The Messenger of Allah said, ‘Do not kill him.’ I said, ‘Messenger of Allah, he cut off my hand and uttered this after amputating it; should I then kill him?’ The Messenger of Allah said, ‘Don’t kill him, for if you kill him, verily he would be in the position where you had been before killing him and you would be in the position he had been [in] before uttering (kalima).’5 ʿAbd al-Razzaq: Chapter: Unbelievers after belief. I said, ‘Oh prophet of God! Verily I fought with a man of the mushrikīn, and he cut off my hand. I reached out to strike him. He [then] said, “There is no god but God.” Should I kill him or let him be?’ He said, ‘No, let him be.’ I said, ‘Even though he cut off my hand?’ He said, ‘Even though he did.’ I repeated it to him a second and a third [time]. So the prophet, peace be upon him, said, ‘If you kill him after he said, “There is no god but God,” you are like him before he said it, and he is like you before you killed him. He is a man of Kinda, and he is an ally of the Banu Zuhra.’6 It is interesting to note that while Muslim’s version of this hadith does not include the beginning of the shahāda in the tradition itself, but rather a hasty and unofficial statement about becoming a Muslim, it does include the phrase, ‘There is no god but God’ in the title. Perhaps, in addition to being a common way to convert, this eventually became a catch-all phrase in the legal literature signifying conversion. The interchangeability within the legal literature of the full shahāda with the first half, potentially taken as an abbreviation for the full phrase, may reflect an inability to coordinate a universal and official conversion statement or ritual. In a situation where a Muslim could potentially take a simple and vague statement as an act of conversion, especially one which is a viable statement of truth for multiple other religious traditions, there is quite a bit of room for misunderstanding common courtesy or intentional misdirection. If Muslims did commonly accept somewhat vague language during the conquest, Umayyad and Abbasid periods as testament to a person’s religious affiliation, it is no wonder that we get legal precedents from Muslim religious elites of apostates moving

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back and forth between Christianity and Islam and complaints from Christian religious elites of Christians speaking like Muslims.7 Ambiguity of religiously significant speech acts allow for ambiguity of public affiliation and identity performance, which non-Muslims could and did take advantage of. Speaking like a Muslim would give people the impression that one was Muslim, which could offer social and professional advantages. Although, in a society where non-Muslims may have been increasingly educated like Muslims and who socialised with and/or had professional relationships with Muslims, it is likely that speech acts resembling the complaints made by the author of the Summa could have simply been performed as a consequence of acculturation to Islam as often as, if not more often than, conscious deception through ambiguity. Moreover, such speech acts could easily have been common courtesy. Considering the examples from Muslim and ʿAbd al-Razzaq, the question remains: can one consider textual examples of people stating the beginning of the shahāda, at times under threat of violence or death, or simply to fit into a social group, as evidence of a conversion?

Religious Code-Switching The Islamic and Christian textual sources of the Near East present a phenomenon in which people are depicted as enacting one religious identity or another as is socially expedient. I have termed this ‘religious code-switching’ because its description in the sources is vaguely reminiscent of the linguistic concept of code-switching, which is, very simplistically put, the change in vocabulary, accent or other general linguistic traits when speaking to people of various social or linguistic backgrounds. Religious codeswitching is primarily a social act performed via either ambiguous speech or physical action. Adopting others’ manners of speech, dress and action complicates the study of conversion by making reports of conversion inconclusive as to whether or not they are even truly accounts of conversion at all, or rather misconstrued moments of acculturation to Islam. I am defining religious code-switching as any speech act, change in appearance and/ or participation in a social or religious ritual by those who identify with one religious community in the social or religious utterances, dress or rituals of another religious community. The question of motive, as always, is difficult to assess; religious codeswitching could at times be a product of acculturation to Islam, while at other times the actors seem to be portrayed as having a specific purpose or goal. Modern sociological studies, such as those of Bernard Lahire and Peter Burke, have shown that it is very possible for a person to identify with two religious communities simultaneously. There is little reason to assume that this was any different in the Abbasid period. Lahire discusses the ‘internal plurality’ of individuals: Social agents are not made all of one piece; they are fit together from separate parts, complex charts of dispositions to act and to believe which are more or less tightly constituted. This does not mean that they ‘lack coherence’, but that they lack a principle of unique coherence – of beliefs, i.e., models, norms, ideals, values, and of dispositions of act.8 Burke gives an extremely elegant example of this otherwise complicated theory by observing: ‘One may have several roles within a group (e.g., husband, father, son, and

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brother within an extended family group, or task leader and social emotional leader in the same group).’9 These modern sociological theories could play an important role in understanding conversion in the medieval Near East and potentially elsewhere. After all, people from interreligious backgrounds or, more generally, people living in a diverse society could easily acquire multiple religious identities simply from socialising with other groups. Eric Rebillard has used similar theories to suggest that early Christians in North Africa often presented one religious affiliation or another, both genuinely and for specific purposes, in the third to the fifth century. If any religion can be taken as a potential model for Islamic conversion, it is certainly the fellow Abrahamic faith, Christianity.10 The potential for a person to have multiple identities, occasionally enacting one or more of these identities in a given social situation, could explain some of the ambiguous actions described in the textual sources.

Examples from Christian Sources Theological Sources The author of the Summa Theologiae Arabica, mentioned earlier, rather precisely describes religious code-switching and suggests that these people can no longer be considered Christian, as they display Islamic tendencies in public. Obviously, monks were purists when it came to enacting religious identity. He complains of people whom he calls mudhabdhabūn or ‘waverers’: A group who were born among them (meaning Muslims), grew up among them and were educated in their culture with the result that they hide their faith and divulge to them (the Muslims) only what is acceptable and agreeable to them (i.e. to their Muslim faith) and practice terrible dissimulation.11 He is complaining about people who agree with Islamic declarations of faith concerning Jesus and the Trinity; he says, ‘They will only utter what their (Muslim) lords and masters agree with and what they won’t take offense at.’12 He then proceeds to analyse accurately and paraphrase Quranic material while making his point.

Hagiographical Sources Eastern Christian hagiography often uses martyrs’ lives for multiple reasons, among them polemic against Islam,13 being mimetic of everyday social situations in an effort to be didactic to those listening, and compositions for the purpose of worship. Below are two examples from Melkite Christian hagiography describing people participating in religious code-switching. The first vita is of Elias of Damascus, a fatherless young man apprenticed to a recently converted Muslim – this Muslim had, as a Christian, become a mawlā, or ‘client’, of a Muslim and had converted after Elias was employed. The pivotal moment in Elias’s martyrdom comes when he is asked to serve at a party for his newly converted superior for the Muslim family to which both ultimately are attached through a client relationship. Elias is asked to remove his zunnār, a belt that was a symbol of Christianity just as a hijab may be considered one of Islam today, in order to dance and socialise with the Muslims more freely. He does so, and his removal of the belt is taken as a sign of

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conversion to Islam by the Muslims, though it was not intended as such by the young man. When he wakes up before the Muslim guests the following morning and goes to church there is trouble.14 The removal of Elias’s belt symbolically made him look more Muslim and, in the social context described, it would have made him fit in better with the group – a group he already fit in quite well with as the apprentice to a mawlā. With the removal of the belt, a visible symbol of his Christian identity, he is described as clearly enacting a more Muslim identity by giving himself the physical appearance of being Muslim. It is significant that the author chooses to highlight a party the child Elias innocently attended before his death in adulthood as the moment that led him down the path to martyrdom. The second example vita is of Bakchos the Younger. Bakchos is the child of an interreligious family. His father is a Muslim, who had converted before Bakchos was born, while his mother is a Christian. He chooses to become a monk as an adult despite Islamic law calling for him to identify as Muslim and is ultimately discovered and martyred for apostasy from Islam. For our purposes, Bakchos’s mother and the man sent to search for Bakchos, once he is revealed as an apostate, are the two most interesting people in the vita. The mother plays a significant role in the plot as a social example to readers/listeners; her husband converted to Islam after they were married. The martyrdom never states outright that she converted, but does say that she attends church secretly and implies that she secretly wishes her children were Christian, even though legally once the husband converts his children must identify as Muslim.15 The emphasis on the secrecy of her Christianity and her later public return to Christianity would suggest that she is part of a household conversion and has to enact a Muslim identity in public, and even amongst her own children. But since [Bakchos’s] father was a Christian after his parents, he was also married to a most Christian wife. Satanic incitement ensnared him and drew him away, he apostatised from the holy religion of the Christians [and] went to the religion of the dirty Hagarenes. Wedded to his wife, they begat seven sons, raising and educating them in the usual custom of the abomination.16 His wife was God-fearing, she perceived the foulness of that abominable man. She secretly sat in Christian churches, [where] she asked God to separate her from foul intercourse with him, and that she and her children might join the Christian church.17 Later in the vita an abbot mentions a type of behaviour that could be considered religious code-switching. He admits that he is hesitant to baptise and tonsure Bakchos due to a fear of the ‘secret investigations of the Arabs’. When Bakchos asks to be baptised and tonsured, the author writes: The abbot of these monks feared the secret investigations of the Arabs [lit. nation hated of God]. Lest he be discovered as having baptised a Hagarene and risk death upon himself and his monks, he ordered that he [Bakchos] work and perform the monastic way of life on the move. Thus the saint travelled through the holy places and the monasteries, thoroughly learning the virtue of each and inspiring his mind, he rendered himself an abode of virtues.18 ‘Secret investigations’ implies secret investigators. One wonders exactly who these people might have been. The setting here is a monastery and a secret investigator in a monastery may simply represent someone who has participated in religious code-switching as an act of social assimilation. Assimilation of any kind was likely disapproved of by

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monastics. Although, admittedly, the statement could also have been inspired by Christians occasionally betraying their fellows to Muslims for their own benefit. The author confirms the abbot’s fears as legitimate by claiming that the Muslims have sent out a man to perform a secret investigation to find Bakchos. The narrative never makes clear whether this character is Christian or Muslim – he seems to be able to move seamlessly through both communities. The Muslims, tipped off by Bakchos’s own sister-in-law, respond by calling in a most wicked man and apostate, that is to say he was believed to be Christian, and sending him to spend time in the monasteries and the churches to deliver in any way the pious Bakchos, being called by them Dahhak, and they offered him silver sufficing to pay for murder.19 Here we begin to see how the author of this martyrdom views the more Islam-oriented Christians who choose to work for Muslims and could potentially have identified somewhat with both traditions. This man who can pass as both Christian and Muslim is compared to the brothers of Joseph who sell him to the Ishmaelites for silver, as well as to Judas Iscariot.20 The author also calls the spy an apostate, though in this particular case it is difficult to tell whether he has truly converted to Islam, as the term ‘apostate’ was frequently used to slander enemies of Christianity. Here we seem to have a person who is ‘believed to be Christian’ working for Muslims by exposing a convert from Islam to Christianity. Later, the author describes the spy doing his work: The knavish man and backbiter was in Jerusalem, he was wandering the streets and deceitfully and craftily investigating. Bakchos, the man of God, was entering to pray in the holy Anastasis; the mischievous and crooked man saw the pure one [Bakchos] was present. Like a savage beast he burst in, grasped his shoulder, and after returning to those at the back, he began to shout loudly to those Hagarenes who were present saying, ‘He is the same tribe as us,21 yet this loathsome one became a believer in Christianity and behold, he donned the monastic garment!’ Then they arrested him and led him off to the amir of the holy city.22 Whether he has truly converted to Islam or is merely a Christian hoping to earn some extra cash, this spy blends the boundaries between the two religions and the author of this text uses the diction to suggest that he is a dangerous apostate. The words directly used to describe him are ‘πονηρότατον’ (knavish or wicked); ‘ἀποστάτην’ (potentially meaning a true apostate who has converted to Islam or simply a traitor to Christianity, as previously discussed); ‘πονηρὸς’ (knave); ‘διάβολος’ (backbiter or slanderer); ‘κακεντρεχής’ (mischievous one); ‘σκολιὸς ανὴρ’ (crooked man); ‘θήρ ἀνἠµερος’ (savage beast). His search for Bakchos is described as ‘δολίως’ (being done ‘deceitfully’) and, when he does actually find Bakchos, this language of being secretive, traitorous and spy-like suddenly changes to being loud, open and honest. The spy manages to get the attention of passing Muslims, who are presumably strangers yet somehow miraculously understand that this man, while appearing Christian, is actually Muslim. The statement he yells to these people is particularly interesting. His opening sentence while exposing Bakchos is, ‘ὁµόφυλος ἡµῖν ὢν (He is the same tribe as us)’. Contextually, this clearly means that Bakchos was once Muslim; however, this is a linguistically interesting choice by the author considering ‘ὁµόφυλος’ is a word historically connoting kinship in every sense that it is used. Even when used to describe

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friendship, it implies ‘friendship based on kinship’.23 This certainly speaks to the concept that religion was a large part of self and group identification. While the character of the spy may not be historically accurate, what social behaviour or type of person does he mimetically represent? Does he represent a Christian interested in the worldly benefits of helping Muslims or does he act as an example of an active convert to Islam who used his past identity to his benefit? In either intended representation, he is participating in the social act of religious code-switching when he is believably appearing to be Christian and then believably appearing to be Muslim. The spy’s motives are presented as being material, he is paid by the Muslims, yet aside from that it is almost impossible to tell where this character falls. It is, however, clear that the author considers him to be liminal in a way that leans towards Islam. The spy is vulnerable to Muslim influence, while also being extremely dangerous to Christians via his ability to blend in, and for all intents and purposes be Christian, in order to discover information they are trying to keep hidden from Muslims for various reasons. This character provides an interesting window into how clergy and monastics may have viewed and feared both laypeople and religious elites participating in religious code-switching and general social assimilation to Islam and/or Islamic norms. The author has gone to great lengths to show two possible contexts and motives for religious code-switching. He makes clear that people in situations similar to Bakchos’s mother, who are Christian at heart but have to act Muslim for social or familial purposes, are participating in a morally acceptable form of religious code-switching, while people who are performing this activity for the purposes of personal gain are participating in a morally reprehensible form which could be threatening to those around him/her. While the author’s goal is to convince Christians in similar positions to use Bakchos’s mother as a positive example, he also preserves evidence of non-idealistic forms of religious code-switching, showing a fear of assimilation to Islam and of various behavioural possibilities which he views as potentially dangerous to the Christian community from those who may identify with both traditions.

Examples from Islamic Sources Sahih Muslim The Sahih Muslim also mentions people performing actions that could be described as religious code-switching. In some hadith collections, the use of the term ‘hypocrite’ seems to be roughly equivalent to the Christian use of ‘heretic’ to brand members of the same religion who differ on key theological points as well as criticising members of other religious traditions. However, while Muslim b. al-Hajjaj certainly uses this terminology to reflect a group of Muslims who somehow differ in belief from what he preserves as normative, he seems to associate hypocrites with ‘People of the Book’,24 to some extent, first reporting a tradition from Anas b. Malik stating: There was a person amongst us who belonged to the tribe of Bani Najjar and he recited Surat al-Baqarah and Surat al-Imran and he used to transcribe for Allah’s Messenger. He ran away as a rebel and joined the People of the Book. They gave it much importance and said: He is the person who used to transcribe for Muhammad and they were much pleased with him.25

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The hadith goes on to discuss how this person could not be buried in a Muslim grave. However, in a hadith closely following this one, he describes a hypocrite, reporting a tradition quoting the Prophet from Ibn Umar: The similitude of a hypocrite is that of a sheep which roams aimlessly between two flocks. She goes to one at one time and to the other at another time.26 He then reports a variant of the same tradition immediately after: She sometimes finds a way in one flock and then in another flock.27

Ahl al-Milal A later source, the responsa of Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855), as preserved by Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Khallal (d. 923), also complains of actions which could be interpreted as religious code-switching, or at the very least a strong interest in Islam by non-Muslims that could resemble the Late Antique ‘god fearers’ rather than outright conversion. In his responsa, he records traditions condoning Muslims teaching the Quran to the children of Christians and other non-Muslims. When asked about this topic he records two traditions, one saying that he does not like it, though not explicitly saying that it was not acceptable, and another stating that the children should convert to Islam. He agrees that these children should be taught to pray in the manner of Muslims as well, suggesting that learning the Quran should ideally be for the purpose of conversion. Questions like these imply that there may have been adults of non-Muslim faiths who wished their children to learn about the sacred text of Islam, yet not necessarily convert.28 We know that Christians seem to have had a working knowledge of the Quran by the late seventh and early eighth centuries, most obviously through the works of John of Damascus, who uses Quranic quotations in his De haeresibus. Christians certainly had a knowledge of Quranic language in the ninth century, as it is co-opted for Christian uses in theological tracts such as the previously mentioned Summa. Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Khallal also records traditions from Ahmad b. Hanbal asking, ‘If a Christian admits that Muhammad is a prophet, has he become a Muslim or is he still Christian?’ One must wonder how often this issue came up in conversation. It would have been a bit tricky because, as Thomas Sizgorich points out, if the Christian has previously agreed that there is only one god and later in the conversation admits that he/she believes that Muhammad was a prophet, then they have accidentally stated the two basic points of the shahāda as previously mentioned.29 The semantic answer Ibn Hanbal provides is that if the Christian used the word for messenger, rasūl, he had become a Muslim, but if he used the literal word for prophet, nabī, then he was still a Christian.30 Khallal also preserves Ahmad b. Hanbal’s responsa as having a section concerning Muslim attendance of Christian festivals. He includes a tradition condoning festival attendance on the condition that Muslims do not sell or purchase anything, and records one just after alluding to Q. 25:72, ‘And those who do not testify to falsehood, and when they pass near ill speech, they pass by with dignity.’31 That this question is raised suggests that Muslims were attending Christian festivals. This is evidenced in, amongst other sources, the diyārāt literature, which romanticises recreational visits to monasteries, occasionally for festivals, by caliphs and other political elites. It is significant

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that, while categorising Muslim attendance of non-Muslim festivals as a disapprovedof behaviour in the title of the section, he condones it as a neutral fact of life. He says that ‘there is no harm in it’ (lā bās). One wonders if there were contemporary debates over whether or not this behaviour was acceptable.32 Here we may have an instance of a recently converted populace continuing to embrace traditions previously held by their community or family. Khallal preserves debates surrounding the establishment of Islamic norms in response to this. Christopher Melchert has recently brought to light some examples in hadith collections and hagiographical Islamic texts of Christians praying with Muslims and even occasionally leading Muslims in prayer. Abu Nuʿaym, in his Hilyat al-Awliyaʾ, records an instance of joint Christian– Muslim prayer with Hassan b. ʿAtiyya (Damascene, d. c. 738–48) saying ‘Amen’ to a monk’s prayers for him. His companions ask him if he said ‘Amen’ to the prayers and his response is that he hoped that God would answer it for his sake rather than the monk’s.33 Al-Jassas al-Razi (d. 982) has a section in his Mukhtasar Ikhtilaf al-ʿUlamaʾ titled ‘Christians who pray with Muslims, do they become Muslim?’ He preserves a tradition from Muhammad al-Shaybani (d. 804/5) stating that if a Christian prays in a mosque or minaret then they have ‘become Muslim’, but if they are praying with Muslims outside of a mosque or minaret, then they have not. Likewise, if he strips and circumambulates ‘the House’ (i.e. the Kaʿba) he has converted, but if this behaviour is performed elsewhere, he has not.34 Al-Jassas al-Razi also includes a tradition from al-Awzaʿi (d. 773–4?) saying that a Christian travelling with Muslims who somehow ends up leading them in prayer should be punished but not expected to convert. Melchert suggests that this covers a potentially common situation among travelling Christians: the need to reinforce social ties by joining Muslims in their rituals.35 A Christian textual example of this type of behaviour used polemically as a warning against conversion can be found within the life of ʿAbd al-Masih al-Najrani alGhassani (fl. late ninth century), who travelled on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a group of Muslims. Eventually he accompanied them on raids into Byzantine territory and began to pray with them. The author emphasises the joint prayer after vividly describing how much the Muslims had corrupted the youth. The author explains: ‘He killed, he plundered, he burned, and following their example, he engaged in everything forbidden. He prayed with them, and he became even more furious and harder of heart against the Romans than they.’36 Praying with Muslims is emphasised as being part of the polemic image of the violence inherent in Islam, an overarching theme within this narrative, and is portrayed as the final step in the process of his conversion. Praying with Muslims solidifies both his conversion and the polemic of violence even after the descriptions of him fighting with the ghāzīs (raiders). As in most of the Christian neo-martyr narratives, all forms of socialisation, religious or otherwise, with Muslims is portrayed as a slippery slope towards conversion. Association with Islam is often immersed in language of violence and debauchery. However, the acknowledgement of joint prayer in this narrative, when seen in the context of the tradition from al-Awzaʿi recorded by al-Jassas al-Razi, adds legitimacy to Melchert’s suggestion that Christians joining in Muslim prayer, especially while travelling together, may have been relatively common.

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Exogamy and Divorce as a Social Environment Conducive to Religious Code-Switching The Christian neo-martyr narratives are particularly useful for highlighting the social environments where Christians and Muslims might regularly interact. The vitae, often read aloud on feast days, were as much auditory as literary and needed to immediately gain the interest of the audience. Therefore, they necessarily begin with characters in situations with which both the clergy and the average layperson could sympathise. In the Elias narrative, he interacts with a Christian who converts to Islam and then socially interacts with Muslims through a professional connection – he is an apprentice. In the Ghassani narrative, he travels with Muslims, and prays with them, eventually converting. In the vita of Bakchos the Younger, the saint is the product of an interreligious marriage. His mother and father were married as Christians, but the father converts to Islam before the birth of the children. Bakchos was born into an interreligious family where he presumably would have had relatives adhering to both Christianity and Islam, and clearly has a secretly Christian mother and converted Muslim father. This familial situation must have been quite familiar to the average layperson, otherwise the author would not have placed so much emphasis on the interreligious family at the very beginning of the narrative, the details of which are even preserved in an epitome.37 Interreligious marriage would have been a social situation involving ample opportunities for religious code-switching. Both Christian and Islamic legal texts allow for, or at least attempt to regulate, interreligious marriage. The author of the Bakchos martyrdom provides us with a narrative framework within which we can contextualise the more dry legal evidence. We know that exogamy was relatively common, as there are several canons regulating it throughout the three main Christian communities in the Near East from the seventh century onwards, prior to and contemporary with the earliest extant Islamic hadith collections.38 There are even some situations portrayed within Islamic legal texts that encourage religious code-switching by requiring a non-Muslim wife of a Muslim to observe Islamic religious rituals engrained into everyday life such as purification after intercourse and menstruation, and the ʿidda, or waiting period after divorce or the death of a husband. In ʿAbd al-Razzaq’s Musannaf, we find a hadith claiming that it is acceptable to marry a woman of the People of the Book, ‘If she preserves her chastity and she cleanses when [it is] necessary to perform a total ablution (al-janāba).’39 Religion as a category includes the participation in certain rituals and laws. The type of ritual cleansing a Christian wife of a Muslim man would have to pursue in this particular situation is not a ritual of Christianity, but rather one of Islam. The primary significance of janāba, or impurity requiring ritual cleansing, is ritual distance; it represents the state of a person who has recently had sexual intercourse, ejaculated or given birth.40 This is a perfect example of an act which could both qualify as a mundane activity and yet is full of religious significance – a Christian is ritually distanced and has to ritually cleanse in the manner of Muslims, all the while thinking of the practice as daily life if married to a Muslim. While performing ritual purification is clearly not an act of outright conversion, situations such as this would presumably have come up quite regularly and would have encouraged, at the very least, a type of religious code-switching. Another

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instance requiring religious code-switching, of a sort, is divorce. Non-Muslim women married to Muslim men in the medieval period were expected to respect the Islamic custom of taking an ʿidda, a period of time after divorce, an annulled marriage or the death of a husband where a woman abstains from sexual relations.41 The practical purpose of the ʿidda was to determine paternity of children born after a marriage had ended. However, the ʿidda was also a distinctly Islamic practice. Therefore, the legal precedents expecting a Christian woman to participate in the Islamic ritual of observing an ʿidda represents a case where religious code-switching was openly encouraged. ʿAbd al-Razzaq clearly states, ‘A woman of the People of the Book has an ʿidda, a right to divorce, and an allotment [of her dowry], in the manner of Muslims.’42 Additionally, while early Islamic legal sources do not seem to have a need to repeatedly state that a Muslim woman may not marry a non-Muslim man, they spend an inordinate amount of time discussing what happens when a woman converts to Islam before her husband. Most jurists suggest that they are officially separated until the husband converts to Islam, though some allow for the newly Muslim woman to remain with her non-Muslim husband. There seem to have been a significant amount of interreligious families containing either a mother or father who was Muslim and one who was not. ʿAbd al-Razzaq: A Hiran woman converts to Islam and her husband does not convert to Islam, then ʿUmar b. al-Khattab wrote: It is her choice whether she wants to separate from him or to continue with him.43 [There is] a Christian woman under a Christian man and she converts to Islam. He said: A Christian man cannot be above a Muslim woman, they should separate from each other.44 Ibn Abi Shayba: If a Christian wife of a Jew or Christian converts to Islam; marriage is more suitable between them; if he has an agreement.45 She is a divorced woman with a dowry.46 One wonders what the household religious dynamic would have been like in these situations. Here we see a potential for familial dynamics which could have produced either Muslim-leaning Christians or vice versa, and almost certainly people who participated in religious code-switching, choosing to act on their Christian or Muslim identity to fit a given social situation. Consideration of such familial situations adds a wide variety of potential identities to people with what we, as twenty-first-century academics, perceive as Muslim or Christian names.

Conclusion The examples above are just a handful of many textual representations of people within the first 300 years of Muslim rule who primarily identified as one religion and are recorded as having performed the identity of another, or perhaps genuinely identified with both religious communities, whether via participation in religious rituals, social acts or theologically significant conversation. Both Christian sources, such as the Summa Theologeia Arabica and the lives of Elias of Damascus, Bakchos the

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Younger and ʿAbd al-Masih al-Najrani al-Ghassani, as well as Islamic sources, such as the hadith collections of Muslim b. al-Hajjaj, ʿAbd al-Razzaq and Ibn Abi Shayba, Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s responsa as preserved by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Khallal and the hagiographical texts of Abu Nuʿaym and al-Jassas al-Razi, provide textual examples of religious code-switching as well as explaining how these behaviours fit into daily social situations. Additionally, the hadith collections and the responsa seen above from the ninth and tenth centuries appear to concentrate on marriage and divorce as important aspects of conversion, suggesting that exogamy and interreligious families could have been an important social factor in the slow conversion of successive generations. Most of the examples recorded above could be perceived as conversion or vacillation between traditions, but may more realistically be viewed through the lens of acculturation to Islam. These texts are just a handful of many that record Islamic tendencies among what we would like to view as purely non-Muslim communities; in some cases this possibly indicated conversion, but often it indicated the performance of multiple religious and social identities, or religious code-switching. Depictions such as these complicate the study of conversion, but perhaps provide a window into the most prominent means of acculturation of native religious communities to the social and religious aspects of Islam.

Notes 1. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979): for Iraq, pp. 82–3; for Egypt and Tunisia, pp. 96–7; for Syria, pp. 108–9; for Spain, p. 117. While Bulliet’s methodology here was experimental, this book remains the seminal work on conversion in the early medieval period and his timescale for conversion is relatively consistent with evidence from written sources. 2. Robert Hoyland, ‘St Andrews MS 14 and the Earliest Arabic Summa Theologiae: Its Date, Authorship and Apologetic Context’, in Wout Jac Bekkum, Jan Willem Drijvers and Alexander Cornelis Klugkist (eds), Syriac Polemics, Studies in Honor of Gerrit Jan Reinink (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), p. 166. British Library MS Or 4950, ff. 5a–b = St Andrews 14, ff. 3b–4a. 3. The shorter version of the shahāda appears repeatedly in ninth-century legal texts; here are but a few examples: Abu Bakr ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanʿani, al-Musannaf, ed. Habib alRahman Qasimi (Beirut: al-Majlis al-ʿIlmi, 1970–2), vol. 6, pp. 164–75, nos 18707, 18718 and 18719. 4. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim: Being Traditions of the Sayings and Doings of the Prophet Muhammad as Narrated by His Companions and Compiled under the Title ‘al-Jamiʿ us-sahih’, trans. Abdul Hameed Siddiqui (Beirut: Dar al-Arabia, 199?), vol. 1, p. 57, no. 177. The variants are vol. 1, p. 56, no. 176 and vol. 1, p. 57, no. 178. 5. Ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, vol. 1, p. 55, no. 173. 6. ʿAbd al-Razzaq, Musannaf, vol. 6, p. 173, no. 18719. 7. Uriel Simonsohn, ‘“Halting Between Two Opinions”: Conversion and Apostasy in Early Islam’, Medieval Encounters 19 (2013), pp. 342–70. 8. Bernard Lahire, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics 31, nos 5–6 (2003), p. 348. 9. Peter Burke, ‘Relationships between Multiple Identities’, in Peter J. Burke, Timothy J. Owens, Richard Serpe and Peggy A. Thoits (eds), Advances in Identity Theory and Research

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

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(New York: Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers, 2003), p. 201. See also Eric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 4. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities. Hoyland, ‘Earliest Arabic Summa Theologiae’, p. 166. BL Or 4950, ff. 6a–b = St Andrews 14, ff. 4b–5a. Hoyland, ‘Earliest Arabic Summa Theologiae’, p. 166. BL Or 4950, ff. 7a–b = St Andrews 14, ff. 5b–6a. David Vila, ‘Christian Martyrs in the First Abbasid Century and the Development of an Apologetic Against Islam’, doctoral thesis, Saint Louis University, 1999. Stamatina McGrath, ‘Elias of Heliopolis the Life of an Eighth-Century Syrian Saint’, in John W. Nesbitt (ed.), Byzantine Authors: Literary Activities and Preoccupations: Texts and Translations Dedicated to the Memory of Nicolas Oikonomides (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 95. Just one example comes from Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi, Kitab al-Umm, ed. Mahmud Matraji (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1993), vol. 9. p. 334, lines 18–19: ‘And when one of the parents of the child, or the developmentally impaired, becomes Muslim the child is Muslim, for God Almighty (made) Islam the highest over the religions and as the most high authority belongs to it.’ This is probably referring to the prominent opinion in Islamic law stating that children of a Muslim man are to be raised Muslim. F. Α. Dimitrakopoulou, ‘Ἅγιος Βάκχος ὁ Νέος’, Epistemonike epeteris tes Philosophikes Scholes tou Panepistemiou Athenon 26 (Athens: 1977–8), p. 344. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., 347. For the story of Joseph and his brothers, see Genesis 37: 25–8. ‘ὁµόφυλος ἡµῖν ὤν’ presumably means ‘religion’ here – ‘ὁµόφυλος’ is a word with the connotation of race, tribe or kinship. Liddel and Scott, though meant for earlier Greek, say ‘race or stock’; see Henry Liddel and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), on ‘ὁµόφυλος’. The Patristic Greek Lexicon, has ‘φῦλον’ as ‘tribe’. G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), and E. A. Sophocles’ Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1914) has ‘ὁµόφυλος’ as ‘sameness of race’. Dimitrakopoulou, ‘Ἅγιος Βάκχος ὁ Νέος’, pp. 347–8. Liddel and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, ‘ὁµόφυλος’. A statement referring to Jews and Christians. Ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, vol. 4, p. 1459, no. 6693. Ibid., p. 1460, no. 6696. Ibid., p. 1460, no. 6697. There are also some interesting traditions concerning whether or not Malik b. al-Dukhshum was a hypocrite, though they appear to be mainly discussing either apostasy or religious code-switching. In these traditions, he is being ridiculed for participating in unacceptable behaviour or holding unacceptable beliefs for a Muslim. See Muhammad ibn Ismaʿil Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings of ‘Sahih al-Bukhari’, Arabic–English, trans. M. Muhsin Khan (Beirut, Dar al-ʿArabiyah, 1985), vol. 9, p. 56, no. 71; Sahih Muslim, vol. 1, p. 25, no. 52. See Abu Bakr al-Khallal’s chapter on ‘Concerning Christians Learning the Qurʼan’, in Kitab Ahl al-Milal, ed. I. M. al-Sultan (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maʿarif li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawzi, 1996), pp. 120–1, nos 130–1. Thomas Sizgorich, ‘Mind the Gap: Accidental Conversion and the Hagiographic Imaginary in the First Centuries a.h.’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou, Neil McLynn and Daniel Schwartz (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015,) pp. 163–74.

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30. Ibid., and Abu Bakr al-Khallal, Kitab Ahl al-Milal, pp. 372–3, nos 830–4. 31. Abu Bakr al-Khallal, Kitab Ahl al-Milal, pp. 121–3, nos 132–3. 32. Abu Bakr al-Khallal, ‘It is disapproved of for Muslims to go out to mushrikīn festivals’, Kitab Ahl al-Milal, pp. 120–1, nos 132–3. 33. Christopher Melchert, ‘Whether to Keep Unbelievers out of Sacred Zones: A Survey of Medieval Islamic Law’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013), pp. 177–8. Arabic from Abu Nuʿaym, Hilyat al-Awliyaʾ, 10 vols (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1932–8), p. 73. 34. Melchert, ‘Whether to Keep Unbelievers out of Sacred Zones’, p. 178. Arabic from alJassas al-Razi, Mukhtasar Ikhtilaf al-ʿUlamaʾ, ed. ʿAbdallah Nadhir ibn Hanbal, 4 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Bashaʾir al-Islamiyah, 1995), p. 320. 35. Melchert, ‘Whether to Keep Unbelievers out of Sacred Zones’, p. 178. Arabic from al-Jassas al-Razi, Mukhtasar Ikhtilaf al-ʿUlamaʾ, p. 320. 36. Sidney Griffith, ‘The Arabic Account of Abd al-Masih an-Nagrani al-Ghassani’, Le Muséon: Revue d’Études Orientales 98, nos 1–2 (1985), English, p. 371; Arabic, p. 362. 37. Dimitrakopoulou, ‘Ἅγιος Βάκχος ὁ Νέος’, p. 344. 38. For an example from Melkite Canon Law, see the Summa Theologeia Arabica, British Library, MS Or 4950, f. 190a. For an example from Syriac Orthodox Canon Law, see Arthur Vööbus (ed. and trans.), ‘Canons of Patriarch Gīwargī’, in Synodicon of the West Syrian Tradition II (Leuven: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1975̧–6), p. 5. For examples from the Church of the East, see relevant chapter in Lev Weitz, ‘Syriac Christians in the Medieval Islamic World: Law, Family, and Society’, doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 2013. 39. ʿAbd al-Razzaq, Musannaf, vol. 6, pp. 79–80. 40. Edward William Lane and Stanley Lane-Poole, An Arabic–English Lexicon (New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1955–6), s.v., ‘j-n-b/janāba’ and Zeʼev Maghen, ‘Strangers and Brothers: The Ritual Status of Unbelievers in Islamic Jurisprudence’, Medieval Encounters 12, no. 2 (2006), p. 211. 41. Linant De Bellefonds, ‘ʿIdda’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). 42. ʿAbd al-Razzaq, Musannaf, vol. 6, pp. 79–80. 43. Ibid., p. 84. 44. Ibid., p. 83. 45. Ibn Abi Shayba, Musannaf, vol. 6, p. 464. 46. Ibid., p. 465.

Bibliography Abu Bakr ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanʿani, al-Musannaf, ed. Habib al-Rahman Qasimi, 11 vols (Beirut: al-Majlis al-ʿIlmi, 1970–2). Abu Nuʿaym, Hilyat al-Awliyaʾ, 10 vols (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1932–8). Bukhari, Muhammad ibn Ismaʿil, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings of ‘Sahih al-Bukhari’, Arabic–English, trans. M. Muhsin Khan, 9 vols (Beirut, Dar al-ʿArabiyah, 1985). Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Burke, Peter, ‘Relationships between Multiple Identities’, in Peter J. Burke, Timothy J. Owens, Richard Serpe and Peggy A Thoits (eds), Advances in Identity Theory and Research (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003), pp. 195–214. De Bellefonds, Linant, ‘ʿIdda’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). Dimitrakopoulou, F. A., ‘Ἅγιος Βάκχος ὁ Νέος’, Epistemonike epeteris tes Philosophikes Scholes tou Panepistemiou Athenon 26 (Athens: 1977–8). Griffith, Sidney, ‘The Arabic Account of Abd al-Masih an-Nagrani al-Ghassani’, Le Muséon: Revue d’Études Orientales 98, nos 1–2 (1985), pp. 331–74.

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Hoyland, Robert, ‘St Andrews MS 14 and the Earliest Arabic Summa Theologiae: Its Date, Authorship and Apologetic Context’, in Wout Jac Bekkum, Jan Willem Drijvers and Alexander Cornelis Klugkist (eds), Syriac Polemics, Studies in Honor of Gerrit Jan Reinink (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), pp. 159–72. Ibn Abi Shayba, ʿAbdallah ibn Muhammad, al-Musannaf, ed. Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Lahidan and Hamad ibn ʿAbdallah Jumʿa (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd Nashirun, 2006). Ibn al-Hajjaj, Muslim, Sahih Muslim: Being Traditions of the Sayings and Doings of the Prophet Muhammad as Narrated by His Companions and Compiled under the Title ‘al-Jamiʿ usSahih’, trans. Abdul Hameed Siddiqui (Beirut: Dar al-Arabia, 199?). al-Jassas al-Razi, Mukhtasar Ikhtilaf al-ʿUlamaʾ, ed. ʿAbdallah Nadhir ibn Hanbal, 4 vols (Beirut: Dar al-Bashaʾir al-Islamiyah, 1995). al-Khallal, Abu Bakr, Kitab Ahl al-Milal, ed. I. M. al-Sultan, 2 vols (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maʿarif li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawzi, 1996). Lahire, Bernard, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics 31, nos 5–6 (2003), pp. 329–55. Lampe, G. W. H., A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Lane, Edward William, and Stanley Lane-Poole, An Arabic–English Lexicon (New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1955–6). Liddel, Henry, and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). McGrath, Stamatina, ‘Elias of Heliopolis the Life of an Eighth-Century Syrian Saint’, in John W. Nesbitt (ed.), Byzantine Authors: Literary Activities and Preoccupations: Texts and Translations Dedicated to the Memory of Nicolas Oikonomides (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 85–107. Maghen, Zeʼev, ‘Strangers and Brothers: The Ritual Status of Unbelievers in Islamic Jurisprudence’, Medieval Encounters 12 (2006), pp. 173–223. Melchert, Christopher, ‘Whether to Keep Unbelievers out of Sacred Zones: A Survey of Medieval Islamic Law’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013), pp. 177–94. Rebillard, Eric, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). al-Shafiʿi, Muhammad ibn Idris, Kitab al-Umm, ed. Mahmud Matraji (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1993). Simonsohn, Uriel, ‘“Halting Between Two Opinions”: Conversion and Apostasy in Early Islam’, Medieval Encounters 19 (2013), pp. 342–70. Sizgorich, Thomas, ‘Mind the Gap: Accidental Conversion and the Hagiographic Imaginary in the First Centuries a.h.’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou, Neil McLynn and Daniel Schwartz (eds), Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 163–74. Sophocles, E. A., Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1914). Vila, David, ‘Christian Martyrs in the First Abbasid Century and the Development of an Apologetic Against Islam’, doctoral thesis, Saint Louis University, 1999. Vööbus, Arthur (ed. and trans.), ‘Canons of Patriatch Gīwargī’, in Synodicon of the West Syrian Tradition II (Leuven: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1975–6), pp. 4–7. Weitz, Lev, ‘Syriac Christians in the Medieval Islamic World: Law, Family, and Society’, doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 2013.

8 ISLAMISATION IN MEDIEVAL ANATOLIA* A. C. S. Peacock

I

slam penetrated Anatolia rather later than the rest of the Middle East. Indeed, Anatolia had been the Byzantine Empire’s bulwark against the Arabs over the seventh to tenth centuries, withstanding or at least absorbing frequent – at times more or less annual – incursions that stretched far into the peninsula.1 Initially, perhaps, the raids of the Turks who had seized control of neighbouring Iran and the Caucasus in the mid-eleventh century seemed a similarly manageable annoyance. Yet for reasons that remain inadequately understood, after defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, Byzantine authority evaporated over most of the peninsula, leaving the way open for the establishment of the first Muslim state based at Nicaea in the far west in 1081, ruled by a cousin of the Seljuq sultans of Iran and Iraq, Sulayman b. Qutlumush. Although Byzantium managed to regain control of some of western and littoral Anatolia, with the loss of so much of the empire’s revenue-producing territory the stage was set for its inexorable decline and obliteration at the hands of the Turks, culminating in the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottomans, who saw themselves as the Seljuqs’ heirs. To the Muslims, Anatolia became known as Rum, alluding to the fact it had formerly constituted part of the Eastern Roman Empire, to which after a fashion the new Muslim rulers saw themselves as successors (Figure 8.1).2 This same period between the Seljuq invasions and the conquest of Constantinople is generally considered to mark the Islamisation of Anatolia, understood as its transformation from an almost entirely Christian to an overwhelmingly Muslim population; the simultaneous process of the Islamisation of the conquering Turks, who if Muslim in name were certainly only very recent converts, has received less attention in scholarship, in part because of the paucity of sources.3 The major account of the process of Islamisation in the peninsula remains, for all its problems, the classic

* The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 208476, ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’. I am grateful to Scott Redford for comments on a draft of this chapter.

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Figure 8.1 Anatolia in the early thirteenth century.

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study by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism and the Process of Islamization in Medieval Anatolia (1971),4 which covers the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Vryonis documented in great detail, based largely on Byzantine sources, the violent disruption of Christian life by both the Turkish invasion and subsequent programmes of depopulation and resettlement. A more recent study by Michel Balivet concentrates on the same period as the epoch of conversion, although it gives more attention to the symbiosis of Christians and Muslims.5 There has been relatively little debate over the question of when the transformation happened. Yet the process was far from uncomplicated, as may be seen by a quick glance at the evidence of the taxation records (defters) from the early modern period. The great Ottomanist Victor Ménage, writing in 1979, declared on the basis of the defters that by the early sixteenth century Anatolia was 90 per cent Muslim, and indeed in most of central Anatolia the figure reached as high as 98 per cent.6 A similar figure was accepted by Speros Vryonis.7 Yet research on the Ottoman archives of the nineteenth century has suggested that by 1880 the Muslim proportion of the population of Anatolia was only some 80 per cent. Even this figure reflects a greatly increased Muslim population in the second the half of the nineteenth century as a result of the migration of Turks from the Balkans (especially Bulgaria) and the Caucasus into Anatolia, which contributed significantly to its Islamisation and Turkicisation.8 The discrepancy has been explained by the fact that Greek immigration in the nineteenth century increased the Christian population in both the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.9 Clearly, then, it is sensible to be wary of the assumption that Islamisation (i.e. the proportion of the population that was Muslim) was a linear process with Anatolia becoming slowly but progressively more Muslim until its present-day overwhelming dominance, whether this was established by c. 1500 or c. 1900. It is also necessary to treat the figures with caution. Today, few scholars would have the same unbounded confidence that Ménage and Vryonis showed in the accuracy of the statistics from the defters, which, after all, were designed to record units of tax assessment and not the religious landscape, quite apart from questions about the credibility of the figures themselves.10 For the period before 1500, we have an acute shortage of sources that are susceptible to any kind of statistical interpretation. The biographical dictionaries that form the basis of Richard Bulliet’s famous ‘conversion curve’ do not exist for medieval Anatolia: the earliest biographical dictionary is Taşköprüzade’s al-Shaqaʾiq al-Nuʿmaniyya, dating to the sixteenth century and containing only very scant information about earlier periods. In the absence of statistical information, the field is left open for speculation, and much discussion is based on assumptions that reflect the contemporary political preoccupations of scholars. For Turkish historians, the Islamisation and Turkicisation of Anatolia laid the basis for the formation of modern Turkey, and thus they have tried to emphasise the role of Turkish migrants in this process. One of the most eminent Turkish historians of the medieval period has argued, without adducing any evidence at all, that Anatolia’s Muslim population comprised 30 per cent converts and 70 per cent immigrant Turks.11 On the other hand, for the Greek-American historian Speros Vryonis, the Islamisation of Anatolia was rather the question of how a ‘Greek-speaking populace became Muslim (and eventually Turkish-speaking)’; 12 the latter was, in Vryonis’s view, a later process for which there was only significant evidence after the sixteenth century, but for Vryonis the new Turkicised Anatolia contained a ‘Byzantine ingredient’ which was present in ‘all major aspects of life’.13 In medieval Anatolia,

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Turks constituted simply a ‘small but powerful minority’.14 Islamisation came about not just through voluntary conversion, but also coercion; for example, enslavement and the Ottoman practice of the devşirme, the levy of Christian youths who were recruited into the military, converted to Islam and taught Turkish.15 That people did convert is incontrovertible, but the question must remain over their numbers versus immigrants, and the period and pace at which the transformation took place. Turan’s figure of 70 per cent Turkish immigrants certainly seems too high, and the existence of Greek- and Armenian-speaking Muslim communities in contemporary Turkey is a reminder of the complexity and longevity of these processes.16 DNA analysis offers a possible way for future researchers to establish with more certainty the proportions of migrant populations and their origins. On the rare occasions where it has been scientifically applied, the results have been striking. Research at Sagalassos in southern Anatolia has compared skeletons from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries with the contemporary population and suggests broad continuity of population, but no evidence of any Central Asian blood.17 In other words, at Sagalassos there seem to have been no migrant Turks at all, but rather a Christian population that converted and was Turkicised. Detailed analysis of comparable data from elsewhere in Anatolia may serve to demonstrate to what extent the Sagalassos data is representative. Whatever the results of such scientific research, it will leave unanswered the question of how the process of Islamisation took place, which forms the subject of this essay. I focus on the thirteenth century, widely accepted by scholars to be a turning point in the Islamisation of Anatolia. I shall argue, on the basis of evidence from thirteenth-century Konya, that rather than seeing the issue in terms of Greek converts or Turkish migrants, it is necessary to credit the role of émigré artisans and merchants from Iran. Previously, Iranian émigrés have been seen as purveyors of elite culture, but I argue their role was of broader importance and that they contributed to the rise of an urban middle class which played a part in Islamisation by patronising mosquebuilding. I then examine ways in which Muslim institutions may have become useful and attractive to non-Muslims, facilitating the process of Islamisation and ultimately conversion. I leave aside the question of the Islamisation of the Turkish, especially the nomadic, population which deserves separate treatment.

Islamic Institutions and Islamisation in ThirteenthCentury Anatolia For about seventy years after the defeat of Byzantium at Manzikert, there is pretty much no internal evidence for any kind of Muslim life in Anatolia: no mosques, madrasas or any other buildings, no inscriptions to speak of and no literature in Arabic or Persian. The few coins we have by Muslim rulers tend to be in Greek, and it is sources written in Latin, Greek, Armenian and Syriac – the languages of the vanquished – upon which historians have to rely for most of the evidence for early Muslim Anatolia, in addition to some passing references in Arabic chronicles composed elsewhere in the Muslim world. Doubtless a Muslim life of some kind existed, with perhaps churches on occasion being used as places of prayer, although this can only be postulated rather than proven.18 Nonetheless, the absence of a footprint left by the Turkish conquest on the archaeological as well as the Islamic literary record is striking and bears comparison

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with the situation in the Middle East after the Arab conquests in the seventh century, where the Arabs are similarly invisible archaeologically at first. In the middle of the twelfth century, this situation starts to change in Anatolia, but it is not really until the beginning of the thirteenth century that any significant architectural or literary corpus emerges. This period witnesses the sudden emergence and spread of the facets of Islamic civilisation in Anatolia – mosques, madrasas, caravanserais, as well as the development of a literary culture in Arabic and Persian, and scholars have tended to see an association between these institutional and architectural developments and the spread of Islam. Even for Osman Turan, the Turkish scholar who emphasised the Turkish ethnicity of medieval Anatolia’s population, the thirteenth century was a turning point, not just in terms of the development of Muslim institutions but also consequently of conversion, as the Christian populace became increasingly impressed with the Islamic civilisation that was emerging in Anatolia. According to Turan, from the end of the twelfth century, ‘conversions in Turkey became habitual and constant, parallel to development in every area of civilisation’.19 Vryonis also emphasised the thirteenth century as a turning point and agreed that the development of Muslim institutions had a major impact on the Islamisation of Anatolia. For Vryonis, this was a deliberate strategy by the Seljuq state, which ‘supported and favoured Islam in every way’,20 and in this opinion Vryonis has been followed by more recent researchers. Of the Islamic institutions that emerged over the thirteenth century, scholarship has focused on the role of two for their supposed agency in promoting Islamisation, the waqf and the madrasa. A waqf is an endowment, most commonly land, the yield from which could support a mosque, a madrasa or a caravanserai. The waqf was thus the key economic underpinning to the existence of Islamic institutions, providing the income that paid the salaries of muezzins, imams and madrasa teachers and students. Madrasas, which spread across the Middle East from the eleventh century, were schools of fiqh (jurisprudence), which regulated most aspects of Muslim life from details of how exactly to perform the prescribed rituals (ʿibādāt) to the principles of inheritance law. As Gary Leiser has argued with regard to medieval Egypt: As an institution devoted to this subject [fiqh], the madrasa promoted the strict enforcement of the rules defining the social distance between Muslims and nonMuslims. Indeed, where Islam was supreme, the principles of fiqh required the imposition of discriminatory measures, such as special clothing, on non-Muslims. Although in practice such measures frequently lapsed, fiqh nevertheless emphasized the superiority of Islam to other religions. Thus, in places where Muslims ruled large numbers of Christians and felt challenged or threatened by them, madrasas supremely equipped graduates to do battle with them on ideological grounds.21 Madrasas also taught subjects other than fiqh and from the twelfth century played an increasing role in training bureaucrats, especially in Egypt and Syria. According to Leiser’s argument, the new importance of madrasas created pressure on the Christians, who had formed a significant part of the bureaucracy, to convert. The institutions of the waqf and the madrasa have thus been seen as emblematic of Islamisation, a view that is promoted in some Muslim sources. For instance, writing

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of the semi-mythical eleventh-century Seljuq sultan of Rum, Daʾud, the fourteenthcentury author Hamdallah Mustawfi claims: Churches and monasteries were turned into mosques, he built many charitable foundations; on those charitable foundations he bestowed waqfs, and made Islam appear in that land. Many people of other religions became Muslims in that age.22 However, in modern scholarship on Anatolia, it was Osman Turan who first drew attention (albeit briefly) to the importance of waqfs in his 1959 article on Islamisation, and he published some of the most important early waqfiyyas (waqf deeds) from the period. The theme was developed by Vryonis, who argued that the waqf ‘constitutes the economic form par excellence which testifies to the spread of Islam . . . By harnessing much of the land, manpower and revenues of Anatolia to Islamic institutions, enabled the latter to achieve pre-eminence at the expense of Christianity’.23 Vryonis was keen to show that the expansion of waqfs was a deliberate policy by the Seljuq state: The sultans confiscated the vast majority of Christian lands, revenues and buildings, and bestowed them upon their Muslim secular and religious colleagues . . . Mosques, medresehs [madrasas], tekkes, hospitals and the like spread across Anatolia . . . These institutions (staffed by zealous missionaries) and Muslim society (itself religiously aggressive) easily absorbed the dejected and abandoned Christians.24 Vryonis had relatively little to say directly about madrasas, but his work was built on by Gary Leiser, who has studied both institutions. He writes that, ‘No sooner did the Turks capture a city or a town than they began to model it in an Islamic pattern by establishing in it the aforesaid institutions . . . Madrasahs were therefore part of the apparatus of Islamic colonization.’25 Leiser states that ‘all the information on the founders of madrasahs suggests, of course, that the great majority of these institutions were built by the ruling authorities and that their construction was part of a deliberate state policy’.26 As for the waqf, Leiser states that ‘the Seljuks used the waqf to impoverish Christianity and strengthen Islam in Anatolia’. It was nothing less than a way of making Christians pay for their own conversion, and responsibility is laid directly at the door of the ruling dynasty. A similar comment is made by Carole Hillenbrand, who remarks that ‘the Seljuk rulers were busy setting up an urban Islamic government and religious educational system’.27

Waqfs, Madrasas and Seljuq Policy The oldest extant Seljuq waqf deed is the endowment of the amir Shams al-Din Altun Aba of a madrasa at Konya in 1202. Towards the end of the waqfiyya, Altun Aba specifically sets aside a portion of the income derived from a khān (caravanserai) to facilitate conversion: He has endowed it as a waqf upon those who separate from company of unbelievers and leave the groups of people in error, both foreigners and people of this land, and those who cease worshipping idols and desist from prostrating themselves, and images, and crosses, and free themselves from following the vain beliefs of the Majūs, the Christians and the Jews, and stop associating with

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them in chapels, churches and monasteries [and instead . . .] his knowledge of God, the pillars of the [Muslim faith], and insisting on repudiating [his former faith], raising his voice to insult it, [saying] the word of salvation and seeking God exalted’s favour, seeking salvation and the Day of Resurrection.28 The waqfiyya goes on to stipulate that the money should be used for circumcisions and for teaching ‘enough of the Quran to say one’s prayers’. This seems then like a pretty good example of a waqfiyya – and of a madrasa – being used as tools for Islamisation, and unsurprisingly it is given prominent billing by both Vryonis and Leiser, as well as Turan, who originally published it. However, no other waqfiyya that has yet been discovered from the Seljuq period contains remotely similar information.29 Indeed, in contrast, some waqfiyyas stipulate that they are intended to benefit both Muslims and non-Muslims. Take for example, the waqfiyya of 1254 by Jalal al-Din Karatay, a senior Seljuq official of Greek origin who was a convert to Islam. He endowed a madrasa, a caravanserai and several other buildings. The caravanserai waqfiyya stipulates that the farmers whose revenues went to support the waqf should not be mistreated (ll. 227–30) and that every traveller coming to the khān, ‘Muslim or unbeliever, man or woman, slave or free’, should be given food (l. 205ff). Thus to generalise that the waqf system was damaging to non-Muslims is unwarranted and, as we shall discuss in due course, it was also a legal device used by Christians to create endowments.30 The other striking point about our waqfs is that remarkably few were endowed by sultans. Indeed, the only one of which I am aware is from Sultan ʿIzz al-Din Kaykaʾus I to endow his own hospital-mausoleum at Sivas in 1217. There has perhaps been rather too great a tendency among scholars to assume parallels between Ottoman and Seljuq policy. Certainly, fourteenth-century Thrace indicates the conquering Ottoman sultans endowed waqfs for zāwiyas, which played a crucial role in the Islamisation of the region.31 Yet there is simply no evidence of this for the Seljuq period in Anatolia. The sultans are similarly absent as agents of madrasa and mosque construction. Consider, for instance, the buildings known to have been constructed by the greatest of the Anatolian Seljuq sultans, ʿAlaʾ al-Din Kayqubad I (r. 1219–37): 32 Madrasas: 0 Mosques: 2 (repairs to facade of Konya mosque and Yivli Minare, Antalya) Caravanserais: 2 (Sultan Han and Alara Han) Palaces: 3 (Alanya citadel, Kubadabad and Kubadiyya)33 Bridges: 1 Fortresses/Fortification work: Antalya, Alanya, Sivas, Kayseri [and according to literary sources also Amasya, Ahlat, Erzincan]. The picture is similar for other sultans. As Howard Crane points out, we have twentysix structures from Seljuq Anatolia which are securely attested to be the work of sultanic patronage. Fourteen of these are military and, of the remaining twelve, the majority are caravanserais.34 Of course, it is possible, indeed probable, that there were other sultanic constructions that have not come down to us. For instance, one of the few occasions when a primary source discusses the building of madrasas and waqfs is the thirteenth-century historian Ibn Bibi’s description of the fighting over Ankara

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in 1211 between two rivals for the sultanate, brothers ʿIzz al-Din Kaykaʾus and ʿAlaʾ al-Din Kayqubad. During the year-long siege of the city, ʿIzz al-Din erected a madrasa outside it with the intention that, when the city was conquered, he would make waqfs there and the fuqahāʾ would get a satisfactory income in every respect, and if the conquest of the city was delayed, he would use it as a palace to live in. When the city was saved, the sultan fulfilled his vow and endowed many properties there. When the sultanate passed to ʿAlaʾ al-Din, he destroyed it and abrogated the waqfs, but the ruins of the madrasa remain today.35 The Ankara madrasa was thus to serve a dual function: to act if necessary as a residence, or basically as a field headquarters, and in the event of victory to serve the ulama. Its foundation and endowment was also clearly intended as a personal act of piety, a desire to solicit God’s support for ʿIzz al-Din. There is no suggestion that it had any kind of role in promoting conversion to Islam. The handful of religious buildings that were constructed or restored by the sultans seems to have been intended more to glorify the dynasty rather than to support Islamisation. The Ulu Cami in Konya, which accounts for much of their work, was part of the royal palace-mausoleum-mosque complex on the citadel; likewise ʿIzz al-Din’s tomb and hospital at Sivas.36 There is no evidence that the madrasas, which offered an Arabic-based curriculum, had the same function in educating bureaucrats that they did in Syria and Egypt. Unlike in Egypt and Syria, Persian, not Arabic, was the main language of the Anatolian bureaucracy. Arabic was used in inscriptions, but it is clear that the Seljuqs often had difficulty in finding people with a sufficient knowledge of the language, judging by the atrocious mistakes that can be found in them.37 The Seljuq sultanate certainly had a Greek-language chancery department and quite possibly an Armenian one as well.38 A bilingual Greek–Arabic inscription at Sinop further attests the use of the language for official purposes.39 The linguistic complexity is reflected in the chronicler Ibn Bibi’s references to the ‘five languages’ spoken in Rum, which were presumably Persian, Arabic, Greek, Turkish and Armenian. He remarks of the sultan Ghiyath alDin Kaykhusraw I that he was so fluent in all of these languages that the speakers of each one thought him a native.40 He portrays him addressing his servant in Persian and one of his Christian military commanders in Greek.41 Indeed, there is a considerable body of evidence attesting various Seljuq sultans’ mastery of Greek, which is hardly surprising given their Byzantine ancestry.42 There is also evidence that Greek was used by Muslims outside the bureaucracy and the court. The Sufi poets Rumi and his son Sultan Walad both have verses in Greek,43 and Aflaki recounts an anecdote about one of Rumi’s companions addressing his servant in Greek.44 We thus have in medieval Anatolia a multilingual situation in which Arabic lacked the same primacy it enjoyed in most other areas of the Middle East beyond Iran; moreover, in Anatolia, the close link between madrasa education and state service only seems to date to the fifteenth century, in particular the period of Mehmed the Conqueror (d. 1481).45 Thus the main means in which madrasas are argued to have functioned as agents of Islamisation does not seem to apply in thirteenth-century Anatolia. Indeed, far from pursuing a policy of Islamisation, several contemporary texts reveal criticism of the Seljuqs for being soft on Christians. For instance, the famous Sufi Ibn ʿArabi, who was resident in Konya, wrote a treatise dedicated to Sultan ʿIzz al-Din Kaykaʾus

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in 1212 criticising him for failing to uphold the shurūṭ ʿUmar, the traditional Islamic legal limitations on dhimmīs regulating non-Muslims’ dress and restricting Christians from building or restoring churches.46 This attitude was perhaps unsurprising given that the mothers and wives of many sultans were Christians, that the sultans themselves were probably brought up speaking Greek and some of them may have been baptised (a custom that was also widespread among Muslim families in medieval Anatolia). Rustam Shukurov has described the sultans as having a ‘dual identity’, both Christian and Muslim, between which they could slip as circumstances required.47 That Islamisation was hardly the principal concern of the Turkish rulers of Anatolia is illustrated by an anecdote in Ibn al-Athir: in 1164–5, the Seljuq sultan Qilij Arslan married the daughter of the Turkish ruler of Erzurum, Saltuq b. ʿAli b. Abi’l-Qasim. However, his bride was captured in a raid by his enemy Yaghi Arslan, the Turkish ruler of Malatya of the Danishmendid dynasty, who wanted to marry her to his nephew Dhu’l-Nun. To get round the awkward business of her already being married, he forced her to apostacise from Islam to abrogate the marriage. She then converted back and married Dhu’l-Nun.48 The jizya, or ‘poll tax’ on non-Muslims, most likely represented a significant contribution to the Seljuq treasury. Writing of the mid-thirteenth century, the bureaucrat Aqsaraʾi described it as one of the major revenue sources of Anatolia.49 This view is supported by pretty much the only contemporary source to actually put a figure on the population, the friar William of Rubruck, who visited Anatolia in the 1250s and remarked that only one in ten of the population was Muslim.50 There would have been no particular reason for the Seljuq state to encourage conversion, which would only have reduced its own revenues, and there is no evidence that it did.51 Altun Aba’s endowment of his madrasa with a view to promoting conversion should be regarded as a private, and not necessarily representative, initiative.

Konya in 1202: The Population and their Buildings as Depicted in the Altun Aba Waqfiyya The appearance of the first significant Muslim institutions in Anatolia in the thirteenth century was accompanied by a revival in Christian construction. The region of Cappadocia in the heart of the Seljuq state, situated in close proximity to the major Muslim political and economic centres of Konya, Aksaray and Kayseri, witnessed an upsurge in church construction during the thirteenth century, with at least thirty-one extant monuments dated to the period.52 Given that the number of attested madrasas in all of Anatolia in the thirteenth century is no more than fifty-six,53 one must wonder if all this building activity in fact constitutes evidence of a general economic upturn rather than the conversion of the Christian population. As Korobeinikov notes, there is no real evidence for the decline of the Church until the late fourteenth century in central and eastern Anatolia.54 Yet, even if the Church was in good health, it was still nonetheless a period of Islamisation of institutions and public space, as the establishment of waqfs, madrasas and so on indicates. The public space of cities like Konya must have come to look appreciably more Muslim, even if churches continued to be built. An insight into this process of transformation is given by the Altun Aba waqfiyya.55 Quite apart from its unique encouragement of conversion, this document offers an unparalleled description of Konya at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as it lists in detail the properties surrounding the territory allocated as waqf, naming their owners. This gives a unique snapshot of the demographic make-up of the Seljuq capital.

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Of the thirty-five personal names, largely of property owners, that feature in the waqfiyya, significantly only two definitely belong to Christians, distinguished by the phrase masīḥī after the name. There are a further three individuals described as rūmī, and who have Greek names, but it is not entirely clear that they are necessarily Christians; it is possible they are converts. In other words, the property owning classes of Konya already appear to be overwhelmingly Muslim. The waqfiyya also offers an insight into the social and religious geography of Konya because it mentions a number of mosques, most of which are named after their founders, whose professions are also recorded: Mosques: al-jāmiʿ al-ʿatīq, in the qaṣr (i.e. the Ulu Cami) of Khwaja Yusuf b. Salim al-Qunawi al-ṣāʾigh (goldsmith) of Khwaja ʿAbd al-Jabbar al-Tabrizi al-tājir (merchant) of al-Hajj ʿIsa b. Mahmud al-sharābī al-sulṭānī, in city centre of Yusuf b. Sulayman al-Qunawi al-ṣaffār (coppersmith) Waqfs: waqf of the sultan’s madrasa (al-madrasa al-sulṭāniyya) waqf of shops supporting al-jāmiʿ al-ʿatīq the waqf by the merchant Bakhtiyar b. ʿAbdallah al-Tabrizi to support a caravanserai on the Beyşehir road. Interestingly, the waqfiyya records one sultanic madrasa otherwise unknown; but it also suggests that in fact, beyond the precincts of the citadel mosque-palace-mausoleum complex, the main builders of mosques are not the sultan’s household but rather the wealthy merchants and shopkeepers of the town. Of the five mosques listed, three are built by members of the urban bourgeoisie. Just one is founded by a member of the sultanic court: the mosque of al-Hajj ʿIsa b. Mahmud, who was, interestingly, the wine steward (sharābī) to the sultan. His hajj, and his mosque, may have been his penance. It was also this Muslim urban bourgeoisie that constituted the vast majority of the property holders in Konya. Many of the individuals named have their profession specified too. Although four property holders are sulṭānī, having some association with the court, many more have professions such as ṣā’igh (goldsmith, 2), ʿaṭṭār (perfumer, 1), sarrāj (saddler, 1), farmer (2) and merchant (5). It is also striking how few seem to be converts: only one of the Muslims, ʿUthman b. Wasil (= Basil) has an obviously Greek name. Yet, contrary to Turan’s argument for the predominantly Turkish character of Muslim society, only two, Arslandoghmush and Ertmish b. Tughan, have unambiguously Turkish names. Not a single patronymic is an Ibn ʿAbdallah – the classic convert’s name. Several, however, have nisbas indicating an association with Iran: apart from the two Tabrizi merchants, ʿAbd al-Jabbar and Bakhtiyar b. ʿAbdallah, ʿAbd al-Jabbar’s nephews and his son are mentioned as well as another Tabrizi called Malikdan b. Mahmud. The waqfiyya thus points to the involvement of the urban bourgeoisie in the process of Islamisation through the sponsorship of mosque construction; it indicates that wealth was, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, concentrated overwhelmingly in the hands of Muslims in Konya, and it suggests the existence of an important migrant community of artisans from Iran. It has long been recognised that from the thirteenth century Anatolia witnessed significant immigration from Iran, and Carole Hillenbrand has rightly pointed to the role this played in the Islamisation of the region. Nonetheless, she and others have generally dated this to the period of the Mongol

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invasions of the Middle East, after c. 1220.56 Most studies have focused on the elite component – the famous Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) and his family, and writers for the court like the Sufi moralist Najm al-Din Razi (d. 1256).57 The Altun Aba waqfiyya suggests that more weight should be given to the role of Iranians outside the elite, in particular merchants, and suggests that immigration predates the Mongol invasions, a fact supported by Iranian nisbas on inscriptions in Anatolia from as early as the eleventh century.58 The presence of Iranian immigrants in these ‘middle class’ professions is also suggested by references in Ibn al-Fuwati’s biographical dictionary. Ibn al-Fuwati refers to a butcher from Tabriz resident in Konya in the year 660/1261, and several other individuals from Tabriz are mentioned as migrants to Anatolia (nazīl al-Rūm).59 This is confirmed by literary evidence which points to Persian as being the normal lingua franca of urban Anatolia. Although Persian is usually referred to in modern scholarship as the ‘official language’ of the Seljuq state, the preserve of an elite,60 there is reason to believe its use was actually much more widespread. Persian was also one of the everyday spoken languages of Anatolia and probably the lingua franca of the main cities of central Anatolia at least. The most obvious evidence for this is the extant literature. We have few Turkish texts that can be dated at all reliably to the thirteenth century. When Turkish literature starts to emerge, it does so not in the urban centres of central Anatolia, but on its peripheries, the Turkmen principalities of the west and the semi-steppe around Kırşehir.61 In contrast, we have a large corpus of Persian texts from Anatolia that can be securely dated to the thirteenth century. A manuscript of the Persian translation of al-Tabari’s famous Quran commentary suggests the role of Persian among the urban bourgeoisie. This translation, originally made in tenth-century Central Asia under the Samanid dynasty, was copied in 1224–5 by a certain Hajji b. Muhammad b. ʿAbdallah al-tājir al-Qunawi, a merchant from Konya.62 Such Persian texts, however, aimed to address not so much the needs of converts, but the existing Muslim population. There is little obviously missionary literature or even that aimed at new Muslims. Persian remained the principal language of urban central Anatolia for many years. Turkish did not simply displace Persian, but rather Turkish was used in very different parts of Anatolia under different historical circumstances. As late as the closing years of the fourteenth century, after roughly a hundred years of Turkish literary production, ʿAziz b. Ardashir Astarabadi wrote at the end of his biography of the ruler of Sivas, Burhan al-Din Ahmad – ironically himself one of the first great Turkishlanguage poets – why he had composed his biography in Persian: Since the people of the country of Rum prefer the Persian language (zabān-i fārsī) and like it, and all the inhabitants of this land speak Dari (darī qāyil wa nāṭiq), and all the proverbs, orders, correspondence, accounting, registers, laws and so on are in this language . . .63

The Islamisation of Institutions The most famous of these Persian texts produced in Anatolia is the Mathnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great poem that is considered one of the classics of Persian literature as well as one of the foundational texts of Sufism. Rumi in particular and Sufism in general has often been seen as one of the means by which Christians were induced to convert to Islam, as offering a more accommodating and less legalistic approach to

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the faith. Turan, taking the narratives in Aflaki’s fourteenth-century hagiography of the saint rather literally, argued that Rumi’s personal charisma enabled him to convert numerous Christians and Jews.64 Vryonis argued that Rumi ‘evidently considered himself divinely ordained to missionize among the Christians of Anatolia’.65 Yet although Aflaki does stress Rumi’s talents at converting not just Jews, Christians, but even the occasional sea monster, there is little evidence from Rumi’s works that proselytisation was a particular concern of his. Rather, Rumi espouses a sharia-based religiosity, and his works are intended to bring those who are already believers to an esoteric knowledge of God.66 The presence of verses in Greek, Arabic and Turkish embedded in Rumi’s Persian poetry cannot be interpreted as part of a proselytising programme, for the content is incomprehensible without reference to the Persian. Indeed, despite the reputation of Sufis and Rumi as more accommodating to Christianity, the basis for Rumi’s understanding of Christianity is purely Islamic and shows very little evidence of engagement with actual Christian doctrine.67 If the thesis that Sufism’s spiritual content offered a ‘bridge’ between Christianity and Islam must be dismissed, nonetheless some of the social forms of Sufi organisation certainly did attract Christians. It seems that one of the principal means by which Sufism spread to the Muslim artisanal classes was through an offshoot known as futuwwa (lit. manliness, chivalry). The term has a long history in Sufism denoting spiritual values, but in twelfth-century Baghdad it started to refer to an organisation with distinctive initiation rituals which appealed to the Muslim male working classes; it also had adherents among the elite. During the early thirteenth century, futuwwa spread to Anatolia, where it rapidly established itself. Although we have a number of thirteenthcentury texts from Anatolia dealing with futuwwa, the most graphic description comes in the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta’s account of his journeys across Anatolia in the early fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta describes how the fityān (sing. fatā, the adherents of futuwwa) would live together in communal houses, going out by day to practise their crafts, but returning by night to share meals together, which were strictly regulated by the rituals prescribed in futuwwa manuals. Futuwwa organisations offered men a way of living a Sufi life within the community, but at the same time futuwwa promoted a powerful esprit de corps, as Ibn Battuta graphically portrays, with fierce rivalries between futuwwa groups that could sometimes result in violence – violence which was on occasion harnessed for political ends.68 Despite their Sufi origins, futuwwa-type organisations became popular with Christians. Futuwwa’s artisanal membership may have meant there were professional reasons for non-Muslims to take an interest in futuwwa. Ibn Miʿmar (d. 1244), who wrote the first futuwwa manual in Baghdad, envisages that non-Muslims should be allowed to ‘mix with the fityān; perhaps they will convert, and that [mixing] will be the reason for their hearts’ becoming inclined [to Islam]’.69 The true fatā, however, had to be a Muslim. This process of mixing and conversion seems to be exactly what happened in Anatolia. An inscription from Konya mentions a Greek akhī, the title given to leaders of the fityān,70 while Aflaki records the existence of Armenian fityān.71 In the futuwwa manual composed by Nasiri circa 1300, Christians are specifically excluded from membership and even from entering futuwwa buildings, suggesting that by then preserving the Islamic character of futuwwa was seen as more important than conversion. Nonetheless, the very presence of the exclusion confirms Christians were keen to join, and other futuwwa manuals, citing the hadith ‘respect the guest even though he

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is an unbeliever’, left open the doors of futuwwa to non-Muslims.72 Moreover, futuwwa-type organisations started to emerge in a Christian context. The Armenian priest Hovhannes Pluz from Erzincan in north-eastern Anatolia composed two treatises in Armenian modelled on Islamic futuwwa manuals.73 These may be seen as an attempt to establish a Christian alternative to this Islamic institution at a time when the latter was attracting increasing numbers of adherents and thus ultimately converts. In addition, some futuwwa manuals themselves suggest a relationship between futuwwa, conversion and coercion. In the futuwwa manual of Najm al-Din Zarkub of Tabriz (d. 1313), three categories of futuwwa initiates are described, one of which is called the sayfi, ‘of the sword’: ‘The sayfi adherents of futuwwa are those people who accept Islam by the sword, become Muslim, then get a taste for Islam . . . In appearance they fight with the unbelievers, in reality they fight with themselves.’74 Despite the priority given to the ‘greater jihad’ against the self, texts originating from futuwwa milieus also evince a distinct interest in battling unbelief.75 A further example of the appeal of Islamic institutions for Christians is suggested by the references to the waqfs of churches and monasteries in waqfiyyas dated 1272 and 1280.76 Although the relatively scant documentation for Anatolia in this period does not allow us to judge with certainty how popular the practice was there, it is well known from Egypt and Syria, as well as from later times in the Ottoman lands.77 Endowing a church as a waqf, as with any other property, allowed it to be kept taxfree and gave it a recognised place within the Islamic legal system. Yet there was no obligation on Christians to use Islamic law: they were free to arrange their affairs within their own legal traditions. The decision to use a waqf was a choice, and probably a common one. The Armenian Mkhitar Ghosh, writing in 1184, condemns the tendency for Christians to frequent Muslim law courts.78 The use of waqfs and Islamic law by Christians in Anatolia deserves further research, but it is worth considering the findings of el-Leithy with regard to Christian waqfs in Egypt. He writes: As waqf became the crucial lifeblood of these communities – guaranteeing them enforceable, legally protected rights that were relatively better guarded from the encroachments of powerful umara’ and the state Treasury – this very safeguard had an effect on the internal dynamics, if not the very constitution, of these communities.79 A similar process may well have been at work in Anatolia with Islamic institutions first ostensibly supporting Christian communities, but at the same time, as it were, gradually sapping their life from within by rendering their users reliant on an Islamic legal frame of reference. Over the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Christian religious sites started to be adopted and adapted as shrines by Muslims, often with the patronage of members of the Seljuq elite. At Seyitgazi on the north-west frontiers of the Seljuq state, the old monastic centre of Byzantine Nakoleia dedicated to the warlike Archangel Michael became a Muslim shrine devoted to the cult of the Muslim warrior Battal Ghazi.80 In south-eastern Anatolia, a formerly Christian religious complex near Elbistan was revived under the patronage of an early thirteenth-century Seljuq amir as a cult centre dedicated to the Seven Sleepers (aṣḥāb al-kahf) of both Christian and Quranic legend.81 Some such shrines may have been frequented by both Muslims and Christians, but their Islamic identity can only have promoted the spread of Islam in rural areas inhabited by both

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Christians and nomadic Turks (the Turkmen) who, if nominally Muslim, may have had only the most rudimentary grasp of the faith.82 Such shrines were often accompanied by the construction of caravanserais. The precise function of caravanserais has been much debated, but it seems likely they fulfilled purposes other than merely offering accommodation to travellers and facilitating trade. Often (although not invariably) endowed by members of the ruling elite, it has been suggested that they also served to project the power of the state into rural areas. Certainly, they did project the faith of Islam. As Scott Redford notes, even when waqfiyyas command Muslim and Christian guests at caravanserais to be treated equally, this does not mean the two religions were on an equal footing. As he writes: ‘Most caravanserais house only one religious institution, a small mosque, with attendant preacher and muezzin. It was likely the first mosque that many rural Anatolian Christians had seen, and must have served as a good primer in the religion.’83 Similarly, such caravanserai-mosques may have represented one of the main points of contact with Muslim religious institutions for the nomadic Turkmen.

Conclusion Any conclusions about the nature of Islamisation in thirteenth-century Anatolia must be considered tentative, given the fragmentary documentation. Nonetheless, the sources presented here suggest that the conventional picture should be modified in several respects. Clearly, here the prerequisite for conversion was the presence of Islamic space: buildings and institutions that were specifically Islamic. The Altun Aba waqfiyya suggests that by the beginning of the thirteenth century the public space of Konya was already Islamised in this sense. Property in Konya was overwhelmingly in the hands of Muslims, among whom migrants and merchants from Iran played an important part. The activities of this urban bourgeoisie in building mosques and copying Islamic texts suggest their role in the spread of Islamic culture. In comparison with the efforts of the town’s merchant and artisan communities, sultanic patronage played a rather small role in Islamisation, concentrating not on religious constructions, beyond a few high-profile projects such as the dynastic mausoleum-mosque complex, but on military architecture. As Konya’s Muslim artisanal classes started to become organised into futuwwa brotherhoods, affirming a sense of identity and group loyalty, these started to attract non-Muslims. The latter may have joined simply seeing them as a way of gaining an entrée into economically and socially influential circles, hence the attempts to create Christian alternatives by the Armenian church. Yet in an environment where the very reason for the attractiveness of these organisations to outsiders may have been the concentration of wealth and hence power in the hands of their (Muslim) members, such a strategy was not destined to succeed. Islamisation, then, preceded conversion. We can have no direct knowledge of how the latter progressed, but the striking popularity of futuwwa in Anatolia – to a much greater extent than elsewhere in the Muslim world – combined with the explicit intention of its architects like Ibn Miʿmar that it should be a door to conversion are suggestive. If Sufism did indeed act as bridge to conversion, it more likely did so through the existence of such structures, rooted in the local social and economic conditions, rather than through any supposed openness to Christianity on a doctrinal level. Thus despite the vibrancy of Christian religious life in the period, as attested by the ongoing church construction, the practical attractions of

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Islamic institutions such as futuwwa, waqfs, caravanserais and shared shrines played a crucial role in the thirteenth-century transformation of Anatolia. If when Seljuq rule finally came to an end in 1307 the population was still a Christian majority – as seems likely – both demographically and culturally Anatolia was much more Muslim than it had been a hundred years earlier.

Notes 1. A few of the easterly parts of the modern territory of Turkey were absorbed into the Arab empire: Muslim emirates were established around Lake Van, while the history of the southeastern predominantly Kurdish and Christian regions around Diyarbakir, Urfa and Mardin is closely linked to that of Syria. Arguably, these regions are not part of Anatolia in a historical sense of the word. 2. See the discussion in Cemal Kafadar, ‘A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum’, Muqarnas 24 (2007), pp. 7–25. The standard survey of this period of Anatolian history in a Western language remains the now very dated work by Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c.1071–1330 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968), and its revised French version, La Turquie pré-ottomane (Istanbul: Institut Franc̜ais d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1988). 3. Here the ideas of Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966), criticised by Devin DeWeese in Chapter 17 of this volume, remain dominant in much scholarship: the Turks were attracted to Sufism because it reminded them of their shamanistic pre-Islamic beliefs. For Köprülü’s views, see Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish Invasion (Prologemena), trans. Gary Leiser (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993). For comments on reactions to Köprülü, see A. C. S. Peacock et al. , ‘Introduction’, in A. C. S. Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 4–12. 4. Speros Vryonis Jr, The Decline of Hellenism and the Process of Islamization in Mediaeval Anatolia from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 5. Michel Balivet, Rhomanie byzantine et pays de Rûm turc: Histoire d’un espace d’imbrication gréco-turque (Istanbul: Isis, 1994), esp. p. 131. 6. Victor Ménage, ‘The Islamization of Anatolia’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Maier, 1979), pp. 52–4. 7. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 445. Both Vryonis and Ménage use the figures published by the Turkish economic historian Ömer Lutfi Barkan, ‘Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans l’Empire ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Journal of the Economic and Social of the Orient 1 (1958), pp. 9–36, who refers to the data of defters dating from 1520 to 1535. 8. Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 55. 9. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 448. 10. On problems with the figures in the defters, see Heath Lowry, The Islamization & Turkification of the City of Trabzon (Trebizond), 1461–1583 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2009), p. 181ff, noting esp. on p. 188 how the external appearance – for example, the neatness of the presentation of the defter – seemed to be more important than the exact contents. For the most devastating critique of the figures in the defters, also noting the unsatisfactory publication of the defters for Anatolia, see Colin Heywood, ‘Between Historical Myth and “Mythohistory”: The Limits of Ottoman History’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988), pp. 322–37, 343. See also the comments by Reuven Amitai in Chapter 9 of this volume at p. 159.

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11. Osman Turan, ‘L’Islamisation dans la Turquie du Moyen Age’, Studia Islamica 10 (1959), p. 152. 12. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 351. 13. Ibid., p. 444. 14. Ibid., p. 181. 15. Ibid., pp. 240–4. 16. On contemporary Pontic Greek, see Hakan Özkan, ‘The Pontic Greek Spoken by Muslims in the Villages of Beşköy in the Province of Present-Day Trabzon’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 37 (2013), pp. 130–50. 17. Claudio Ottoni et al., ‘Mitochondrial Analysis of a Byzantine Population Reveals the Differential Impact of Multiple Historical Events in South Anatolia’, European Journal of Human Genetics 19, no. 5 (2011), pp. 571–6. 18. See the well-founded objections of Carole Hillenbrand, ‘Rāvandī, the Seljuk Court at Konya and the Persianisation of Anatolian Cities’, Mésogeios 25–6 (2005) (special issue Les Seldjoukides d’Anatolie, ed. Gary Leiser), p. 167. 19. Turan, ‘L’Islamisation dans la Turquie du Moyen Age’, p. 140. 20. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 351. 21. Gary Leiser, ‘The Madrasa and the Islamization of the Middle East: The Case of Egypt’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 22 (1985), p. 36. 22. Hamdallah Mustawfi, Zafarnama, vol. 5: Dawlat-i Firaq-i Al-i Saljuq, ed. Parwin Baqiri Ahranjani (Tehran: Pazhuhishgah-i ʿUlum-i Insani wa Mutalaʿat-i Farhangi, 1388), p. 312. 23. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, pp. 352, 355. 24. Ibid., p. 402. 25. Gary Leiser, ‘The Madrasah and the Islamization of Anatolia before the Ottomans’, in Joseph Lowry et al. (eds), Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in Memory of Professor George Makdisi (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004), p. 187. 26. Ibid., p. 177. A further study by Leiser reached me too late to be considered here: Gary Leiser, ‘The Waqf as an Instrument of Cultural Transformation in Seljuq Anatolia’, in Ismail K. Poonawala (ed.), Turks in the Indian Subcontinent, Central and West Asia: The Turkish Presence on the Islamic World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 64–84. 27. Hillenbrand, ‘Rāvandī’, p. 168. 28. The waqfiyya was published by Osman Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri I: Şemsüddin Altun Aba, Vakfiyesi ve Hayatı’, Belleten 11 (1947), pp. 197–235. 29. For a study of some of the ways in which waqfiyyas reflect interfaith relations and social history in Seljuq Anatolia, see Scott Redford, ‘The Rape of Anatolia’, in Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, pp. 106–16. 30. Osman Turan, ‘Selçuk Devri Vakfiyeleri III: Celaleddin Karatay, Vakıfları ve Vakfiyeleri’, Belleten 12 (1949), pp. 17–171. 31. Rıza Yıldırım, ‘Dervishes, Waqfs and Conquest: Notes on Early Ottoman Expansion in Thrace’, in Pascale Ghazaleh (ed.), Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), pp. 23–40. 32. Howard Crane, ‘Notes on Saldjuq Architectural Patronage in Thirteenth Century Anatolia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36, no. 1 (1993) pp. 1–57. 33. On these palaces, see Scott Redford, ‘Anatolian Seljuk Palaces and Gardens’, in Michael Featherstone et al. (eds), The Emperor’s House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 231–42. 34. Crane, ‘Notes on Saldjuq Architectural Patronage’. Leiser, ‘The Madrasah and the Islamization of Anatolia’, argues for a much higher number of ‘sultanic’ foundations, on the basis that numerous thirteenth-century building inscriptions on madrasas are prefaced by the word al-sulṭānī. However, as the name of the founder, who is not the sultan, is also given, it seems that the word refers not to the building but rather to the fact that many such

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35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

islamisation buildings were constructed, their inscriptions tell us, by men who were officials at the Seljuq court. Al-sulṭānī thus refers to the court affiliation of the founder; to what extent these may be said to have been acting as agents of the Seljuq state, or rather as private individuals, in founding such buildings needs further research. Certainly, it is clear that on occasion the Seljuqs ‘contracted out’ military building works to their amirs (see Scott Redford, Legends of Authority: The 1215 Seljuk Inscriptions of Sinop Citadel, Turkey [Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015], ch. 2 and p. 74 for al-sulṭānī), but there is no evidence at present that this was the case for religious buildings. Ibn-i Bibi, El-Evâmirü’l-ʿAlâʾiyye fi’l-Umûri’l-ʿAlâʾiyye, facsimile edition prepared by Adnan Sadık Erzi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1956), p. 135. For sultanic architectural patronage in this period, see Richard Piran McClary, Rum Seljuq Architecture, 1170–1220: The Patronage of Sultans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Redford, Legends of Authority, pp. 128–34. Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘“The King of the East and the West”: The Seljuk Dynastic Concept and Titles in the Muslim and Christian Sources’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 76. Redford, Legends of Authority, pp. 166–9, 234–42. Ibn-i Bibi, El-Evâmirü’l-ʿAlâʾiyye, p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. Rustam Shukurov, ‘Harem Christianity: The Byzantine Identity of Seljuk Princes’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, pp. 115–50. Ibid. Shams al-Din Ahmed al-Aflaki al-ʿArifi, Manakib al-ʿArifin, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, 2 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1976–80), § 3/270; trans. John O’Kane as The Feats of the Knowers of God (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 237. Abdurrahman Atçıl, ‘Mobility of Scholars and Formation of a Self-Sustaining Scholarly System in the Lands of Rum during the Fifteenth Century’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016), pp. 315–32. For a translation and discussion of Ibn ʿArabi’s treatise, see Giuseppe Scattolin, ‘Sufism and Law in Islam: A Text of Ibn ʿArabi (560/1165–638/1240) on the “Protected People”’, Islamochristiana 24 (1998), pp. 37–55. Similar complaints were voiced in the mid-twelfth century against the Seljuq ruler of Anatolia, Qilij Arslan. See Balivet, Rhomanie byzantine et pays de Rûm turc, p. 84. Shukurov, ‘Harem Christianity’, pp. 133–4; cf. Chapter 7 by Anna Chrysostomides in the present volume. Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh, ed. C. Tornberg (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1965–7), vol. 11, p. 317. Aqsaraʾi, Musamarat al-Akhbar, ed. Osman Turan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943), p. 153. Peter Jackson (trans.), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), p. 276. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, pp. 356–7 argues against this position on the basis of the evidence from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a very different environment. Tolga B. Uyar, ‘Thirteenth-Century “Byzantine” Art in Cappadocia and the Question of Greek Painters at the Seljuq Court’, in Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, pp. 215–16; cf. Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth to Fourteenth Centuries. Part I: The Two Patriarchates: Constantinople and Antioch’, Al-Masāq 15, no. 2 (2003), p. 197. See Atçıl, ‘Mobility of Scholars’, p. 318.

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54. Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth to Fourteenth Centuries. Part II: The Time of Troubles’, Al-Masāq 17, no. 1 (2005), pp. 3, 6; see also the comments in Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 67–78. 55. Arabic text and Turkish translation in Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri’. 56. Hillenbrand, ‘Ravandi’, p. 163. 57. See ibid. 58. Clive Foss, ‘Byzantine Responses to Turkish Attack: Some Sites of Asia Minor’, in Ihor Ševčenko and Irmgard Hutter (eds), AETOΣ: Studies in Honor of Cyril Mango (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998), pp. 157–8. 59. Ahmad b. Muhammad (Ibn al-Fuwati), Talkhis Majmaʿ al-Adab fi Muʿjam al-Alqab, ed. Muhammad al-Kazim (Tehran: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa’l-Irshad al-Islami, 1995), nos 3338; 3434. 60. E.g. Muhammad Amin Riyahi, Zaban wa Adab-i Farsi dar Qalamraw-i ʿUthmani (Tehran: Pazhang, 1369), p. 24. 61. For some preliminary reflections on these processes with further references, see A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Introduction: Language, Literature and History in Late Medieval Anatolia’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, pp. 19–45. 62. MS Bursa, İnebey Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi, Genel 4440, f. 177a. 63. ʿAziz b. Ardashir Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, ed. Kilisli Rifaat (Istanbul: Evkaf Matbaası, 1927), p. 537. 64. Turan, ‘L’Islamisation’, pp. 141–3. 65. Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 386. 66. For a sensitive discussion of Rumi and his relations with non-Muslims, as well as a review of existing literature, see two studies by Roderick Grierson: ‘“We Believe in Your Prophet”: Rumi, Palamas, and the Conversion of Anatolia’, Mawlana Rumi Review 2 (2011), pp. 96–124; ‘“One Shrine Alone”: Christians, Sufis and the Vision of Mawlana’, in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 2014), pp. 83–126. 67. Lloyd Ridgeon, ‘Christianity as Portrayed by Jalal al-Din Rumi’, in Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Islamic Interpretations of Christianity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), pp. 99–126; esp. pp. 101–6. 68. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, ed. Talal Harb (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1992), p. 302. 69. Ibn Miʿmar al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Futuwwa, ed. Mustafa Jawwad et al. (London and Beirut: Warraq, 2012), p. 161. 70. Franz Taeschner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Achis in Anatolien (14.-15. Jht.) auf Grund neuer Quellen’, Islamica 4, no. 1 (1929), p. 20; Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, p. 401. 71. Al-Aflaki, Manakib al-ʿArifin, 3/463; trans. O’Kane, Feats of the Knowers of God, p. 337 (the fityān are here described by their alternative, and less complimentary, name, runūd). 72. See Lloyd Ridgeon, Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 141–6. 73. Rachel Goshgarian,‘Futuwwa in Thirteenth-Century Rum and Armenia: Reform Movements and the Managing of Multiple Allegiances on the Seljuk Periphery’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, pp. 227–63. 74. Abdulbaki Gölpınarlı, ‘İslâm ve Türk İllerinde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı ve Kaynakları’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11 (1949–50), p. 246, f. 226a. 75. See, for instance, Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Battling Kufr (Unbelief) in the Land of the Infidels: Gülşehri’s Turkish Adaptation of ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-Ṭayr’, in Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, pp. 329–47.

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76. Redford, ‘The Rape of Anatolia’, p. 114. 77. For Christian waqfs in the Levant, see Tamer el-Leithy, ‘Living Documents, Dying Archives: Towards a Historical Anthropology of Medieval Arabic Archives’, Al-Qanṭara 32, no. 2 (2011), pp. 389–433. On monastic waqfs under the Ottomans, see Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan, pp. 88, 94, 101, 117, 125. 78. Goshgarian, ‘Futuwwa’, pp. 248–9. 79. El-Leithy, ‘Living Documents, Dying Archives’, p. 421. 80. Zeynep Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 79–82. 81. Oya Pancaroğlu, ‘Caves, Borderlands and Configurations of Sacred Topography in Medieval Anatolia’, Mésogeios 25–6 (2005), special issue Les Seldjoukides d’Anatolie, ed. Gary Leiser, pp. 249–81. 82. See on this point the discussion in Rıza Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox: A Reappraisal of Islamic Piety in Medieval Anatolia’, in Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, pp. 287–307, esp. pp. 292–8. 83. Scott Redford, ‘Caravanserais, Roads and Routes in Seljuk Anatolia’, in L. Vandeput et al. (eds), Pathways of Communication: Routes and Roads in Anatolia from Prehistory to the Seljuk Period (forthcoming).

Bibliography al-Aflaki al-ʿArifi, Shams al-Din Ahmed, Manakib al-ʿArifin, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, 2 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1976–80); trans. John O’Kane as The Feats of the Knowers of God (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Aqsaraʾi, Musamarat al-Akhbar, ed. Osman Turan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1943). Astarabadi, ʿAziz b. Ardashir, Bazm u Razm, ed. Kilisli Rifaat (Istanbul: Evkaf Matbaası, 1927). Atçıl, Abdurrahman, ‘Mobility of Scholars and Formation of a Self-Sustaining Scholarly System in the Lands of Rum during the Fifteenth Century’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016), pp. 315–32. Balivet, Michel, Rhomanie byzantine et pays de Rûm turc: Histoire d’un espace d’imbrication gréco-turque (Istanbul: Isis, 1994). Barkan, Ömer Lutfi, ‘Essai sur les données statistiques des registres de recensement dans l’Empire ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Journal of the Economic and Social of the Orient 1 (1958), pp. 9–36. Cahen, Claude, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c.1071–1330 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1968). Cahen, Claude, La Turquie pré-ottomane (Istanbul: Institut Franc̜ais d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1988). Crane, Howard, ‘Notes on Saldjuq Architectural Patronage in Thirteenth Century Anatolia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36, no. 1 (1993), pp. 1–57. Foss, Clive, ‘Byzantine Responses to Turkish Attack: Some Sites of Asia Minor’, in Ihor Ševčenko and Irmgard Hutter (eds), AETOΣ: Studies in Honor of Cyril Mango (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998), pp. 154–71. Gölpınarlı, Abdulbaki, ‘İslâm ve Türk İllerinde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı ve Kaynakları’, İstanbul Üniversitesi İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11 (1949–50), pp. 3–354. Goshgarian, Rachel, ‘Futuwwa in Thirteenth-Century Rum and Armenia: Reform Movements and the Managing of Multiple Allegiances on the Seljuk Periphery’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 227–63.

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Grierson, Roderick, ‘“We Believe in Your Prophet”: Rumi, Palamas, and the Conversion of Anatolia’, Mawlana Rumi Review 2 (2011), pp. 96–124. Grierson, Roderick, ‘“One Shrine Alone”: Christians, Sufis and the Vision of Mawlana’, in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 2014), pp. 83–126. Heywood, Colin, ‘Between Historical Myth and “Mythohistory”: The Limits of Ottoman History’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988), pp. 315–45. Hillenbrand, Carole, ‘Rāvandī, the Seljuk Court at Konya and the Persianisation of Anatolian Cities’, Mésogeios 25–6 (2005), special issue Les Seldjoukides d’Anatolie, ed. Gary Leiser, pp. 157–69. Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi’l-Taʾrikh, ed. C. Tornberg (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1965–7). Ibn al-Fuwati, Talkhis Majmaʿ al-Adab fi Muʿjam al-Alqab, ed. Muhammad al-Kazim (Tehran: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa’l-Irshad al-Islami, 1995). Ibn Battuta, Rihla, ed. Talal Harb (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1992). Ibn-i Bibi, El-Evâmirü’l-ʿAlâʾiyye fi’l-Umûri’l-ʿAlâʾiyye, facsimile edition prepared by Adnan Sadık Erzi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1956). Ibn Miʿmar al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Futuwwa, ed. Mustafa Jawwad et al. (London and Beirut: al-Warraq, 2012). Jackson, Peter (trans.), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990). Kafadar, Cemal, ‘A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum’, Muqarnas 24 (2007), pp. 7–25. Karpat, Kemal, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad, Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish Invasion (Prologemena), trans. Gary Leiser (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993). Korobeinikov, Dimitri, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth to Fourteenth Centuries. Part I: The Two Patriarchates: Constantinople and Antioch’, Al-Masāq 15, no. 2 (2003), pp. 197–214. Korobeinikov, Dimitri, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth to Fourteenth Centuries. Part II: The Time of Troubles’, Al-Masāq 17, no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–29. Korobeinikov, Dimitri, ‘“The King of the East and the West”: The Seljuk Dynastic Concept and Titles in the Muslim and Christian Sources’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 68–90. Leiser, Gary, ‘The Madrasa and the Islamization of the Middle East: The Case of Egypt’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 22 (1985), pp. 29–47. Leiser, Gary, ‘The Madrasah and the Islamization of Anatolia before the Ottomans’, in Joseph Lowry, Devin Stewart and Shawkat M. Toowara (eds), Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in Memory of Professor George Makdisi (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004), pp. 174–91. el-Leithy, Tamer, ‘Living Documents, Dying Archives: Towards a Historical Anthropology of Medieval Arabic Archives’, Al-Qanṭara 32, no. 2 (2011), pp. 389–433. Lowry, Heath, The Islamization & Turkification of the City of Trabzon (Trebizond), 1461–1583 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2009). McClary, Richard Piran, Rum Seljuq Architecture, 1170–1220: The Patronage of Sultans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Ménage, Victor, ‘The Islamization of Anatolia’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Maier, 1979), pp. 52–67. Mustawfi, Hamdallah, Zafarnama, vol. 5: Dawlat-i Firaq-i Al-i Saljuq, ed. Parwin Baqiri Ahranjani (Tehran: Pazhuhishgah-i ʿUlum-i Insani wa Mutalaʿat-i Farhangi, 1388).

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Ottoni, Claudio, François-X Ricaut, Nancy Vanderheyden, Nicolas Brucato, Marc Waelkens and Ronny Decorte, ‘Mitochondrial Analysis of a Byzantine Population Reveals the Differential Impact of Multiple Historical Events in South Anatolia’, European Journal of Human Genetics 19, no. 5 (2011), pp. 571–6. Özkan, Hakan, ‘The Pontic Greek Spoken by Muslims in the Villages of Beşköy in the Province of Present-Day Trabzon’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 37 (2013), pp. 130–50. Pancaroğlu, Oya, ‘Caves, Borderlands and Configurations of Sacred Topography in Medieval Anatolia’, Mésogeios 25–6 (2005) (special issue Les Seldjoukides d’Anatolie, ed. Gary Leiser), pp. 249–81. Papademetriou, Tom, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Peacock, A. C. S., Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Introduction’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 1–20. Peacock, A. C. S., and Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Introduction: Language, Literature and History in Late Medieval Anatolia’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016), pp. 19–45. Redford, Scott, ‘Anatolian Seljuk Palaces and Gardens’, in Michael Featherstone, Jean-Michel Spieser, Gülru Tanman and Ulrike Wulf-Reindt (eds), The Emperor’s House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 231–42. Redford, Scott, Legends of Authority: The 1215 Seljuk Inscriptions of Sinop Citadel, Turkey (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015). Redford, Scott, ‘The Rape of Anatolia’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 106–16. Redford, Scott, ‘Caravanserais, Roads and Routes in Seljuk Anatolia’, in L. Vandeput, D. Baird, K. Görkay, L. Haldon, M. Massa and S. Mitchell (eds), Pathways of Communication: Routes and Roads in Anatolia from Prehistory to the Seljuk Period (forthcoming). Ridgeon, Lloyd, ‘Christianity as Portrayed by Jalal al-Din Rumi’, in Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Islamic Interpretations of Christianity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), pp. 99–126. Ridgeon, Lloyd, Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Riyahi, Muhammad Amin, Zaban wa Adab-i Farsi dar Qalamraw-i ʿUthmani (Tehran: Pazhang, 1369). Scattolin, Giuseppe, ‘Sufism and Law in Islam: A Text of Ibn ʿArabi (560/1165–638/1240) on the “Protected People”’, Islamochristiana 24 (1998), pp. 37–55. Shukurov, Rustam, ‘Harem Christianity: The Byzantine Identity of Seljuk Princes’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 115–50. Taeschner, Franz, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Achis in Anatolien (14.-15. Jht.) auf Grund neuer Quellen’, Islamica 4, no. 1 (1929), pp. 1–47. Turan, Osman, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri I: Şemsüddin Altun Aba, Vakfiyesi ve Hayatı’, Belleten 11 (1947), pp. 197–235. Turan, Osman, ‘Selçuk Devri Vakfiyeleri III: Celaleddin Karatay, Vakıfları ve Vakfiyeleri’, Belleten 12 (1949), pp. 17–171. Turan, Osman, ‘L’Islamisation dans la Turquie du Moyen Age’, Studia Islamica 10 (1959), pp. 137–52. Uyar, Tolga B., ‘Thirteenth-Century “Byzantine” Art in Cappadocia and the Question of Greek Painters at the Seljuq Court’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 215–31.

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Vryonis, Speros Jr, The Decline of Hellenism and the Process of Islamization in Mediaeval Anatolia from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Yıldırım, Rıza, ‘Dervishes, Waqfs and Conquest: Notes on Early Ottoman Expansion in Thrace’, in Pascale Ghazaleh (ed.), Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011), pp. 23–40. Yıldırım, Rıza, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox: A Reappraisal of Islamic Piety in Medieval Anatolia’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 287–307. Yıldız, Sara Nur, ‘Battling Kufr (Unbelief) in the Land of the Infidels: Gülşehri’s Turkish Adaptation of ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-Ṭayr’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 329–47. Yürekli, Zeynep, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

9 ISLAMISATION IN THE SOUTHERN LEVANT AFTER THE END OF FRANKISH RULE: SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS AND A SHORT CASE STUDY* Reuven Amitai

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wo major trends in the development of the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean basin since the Islamic conquests of the mid-seventh century have been Arabisation and Islamisation. This is neither a trivial statement nor a tautology. History is full of examples of invaders who left little or no linguistic or religious impact on the conquered peoples: one need only think of the various Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire, many of whom were eventually Latinised while accepting Christianity. The Bulghars coming into the Balkans in the seventh and eighth centuries soon lost their Turkic language and accepted Christianity in its Greek guise. The Mongols left a great impact on the Middle East in the thirteenth century, but neither their language nor their traditional religion survived in the region (although many words from Mongolian can still be found in Turkish, Persian and occasionally even Arabic). The Franks ruled much of the Levant for almost two centuries, but left the country with little religious and even less linguistic impact. Thus the linguistic and religious success of the Arabs might be considered something of a historical exception. This is not the place or time to discuss in any detail the whole process of Arabisation and Islamisation in the Middle East, or even in Greater Syria (Ar. Bilad al-Sham). However, I will allow myself to make three short comments before I address the main topic of my chapter. First, these two processes, while related, are not identical. We know of * Initial research for this chapter was carried out when I was a member of the Center for Excellence: ‘The Formation of Muslim Society in Palestine (ca. c.e. 600–1500)’ that was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 1676/2009) and ran from 2009 to 2014 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Further research and the final version of the chapter was completed while I was a fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg (‘History and Society during the Mamluk Era [1250–1517]’) at the University of Bonn during the 2014–16 academic years. I take the opportunity to thank the Kolleg’s directors and staff for their support and assistance. A much shorter version of this chapter is forthcoming in German: ‘Christen und Muslime in der südlichen Levante nach dem Ende der Frankenherrschaft’, in Lukas Clemens (ed.), Proceedings of a conference held at the German Historical Institute in Rome, May 2012.

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plenty of Arabic-speaking Christians (and Jews) up to contemporary times (for example, the Copts in Egypt) and, at the same time, we have non-Arabic-speaking Muslims in the region (witness the Iranians). Second, it is impossible to make broad, sweeping statements about the nature of these phenomena or reduce them to a simplistic model. There are many factors that contribute to the linguistic and religious transformation of the region and we must try to study each specific country (for example, Egypt, Syria and Iraq) in detail over time; it may well be necessary or desirable to divide these regions into smaller territories for the sake of deeper study. In the aftermath of such case studies we will surely be better able to generalise about the nature of Arabisation and Islamisation in the wider Middle East (and beyond). Third, it is becoming increasingly clear these were not rapid processes, but were spread over many generations, sometimes hundreds of years, and were in some places never quite completed (mention has just been made of one particular large extant Christian minority, that of Egypt).1

Religious and Linguistic Demography in the Southern Levant Let us now focus on Palestine and the surrounding areas, which we can also refer to as the southern Levant. Some modern scholars have seen the religious and linguistic transformation of the region as a relatively quick affair and thus Palestine itself was largely Muslim by the time the Frankish Crusaders showed up at the end of the eleventh century. Other researchers, however, have suggested that the process of conversion was slower and perhaps the Crusaders may have even encountered a non-Muslim majority in the country (at least in some regions) upon their arrival.2 This latter view has been strengthened by some more recent research, particularly that of Ronnie Ellenblum, which has shown, based on archaeological and literary sources, that wide swathes of rural Palestine remained Christian until the coming of the Franks. In his view, a comparison between the areas inhabited by local Christians at the end of Byzantine rule and where these communities apparently lived at the end of the first Muslim period and the beginning of Frankish rule shows a striking continuity. Following Ellenblum, it would appear that until the establishment of the Crusader kingdom those rural areas in the inland regions of the country that were ‘Islamised’ were often mainly inhabited by Samarians and Jews, and this change came about probably through a mixture of immigration of Muslim Arabs and the conversion of the local population.3 With regard to the towns of the coastal region, Milka LevyRubin has recently shown that much of the Greek-speaking population emigrated from that part of the country, often with the active encouragement of the new Muslim authorities, and these newly vacated areas were then repopulated by Muslim settlers.4 Yet whatever the speed and extent of the conversion of Palestine and the surrounding country, it is clear that the impact of the Arabic language on all of the population was quicker, greater and more widespread. According to the research of Milka Levy-Rubin, probably by the tenth century Arabic had replaced Aramaic as the language of daily life among the Christians of Palestine, at least among the Melkite (‘Greek rite’) community. Dr Levy-Rubin based her conclusions on data related to (1) acceptance of the Arabic language (indicated inter alia by the use of translations of the Bible into Arabic and an increasing corpus of local religious texts written in Arabic, and a concurrent decline in the use of Aramaic); (2) the adoption of Arabic name forms; (3) the adoption of the Muslim calendar.5 These conclusions are only strengthened by the presence of Arabic tombstones of Christians (clearly seen by the texts and the use of crosses) that are found

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in Jerusalem from around the beginning of the tenth century: Syriac Aramaic (and perhaps Greek) had been pushed to the side here too.6 There is less information on the local Samarian and Jewish communities of this time, but here too there are indications of a deepening Arabisation: the composition of the local Samarian history in Arabic in the tenth century on the one hand7 and, on the other, the increasing use by Middle Eastern Jews of their Bible in Arabic translation (most notably that of Saadiah Gaon in Iraq in the early tenth century).8 While the process of Arabisation is separate from Islamisation, it is not completely independent of it. The encounter with Arabic and its adoption may have paved the way for an eventual conversion to Islam among many of the Christians (and by extension the Jews and Samarians), not least by facilitating greater contact with the hegemonic community. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the Christian population of the southern Levant. The Jews and Samarians have an intrinsic interest and importance. However, due to their low numbers, they are less significant for the general thrust of historical developments. The Jews, at least, I will survey another time.

From Frankish to Mamluk Rule It is a reasonable assumption that under Crusader rule there was little if any Islamisation among local Arabic-speaking Christians (and, in fact, there may have been here and there the reverse process: see below). There is some discussion among scholars as to the nature of the relations between the indigenous (now Arabic-speaking) Christians and the new Frankish elite and the larger Latin population. Notably, Raymond Smail and Joshua Prawer spoke of a great deal of distrust and even mutual alienation with the local Christians having dissimilar rites and variant beliefs and doctrine, dressing and acting differently, let alone speaking the language of the Muslim enemy.9 Ellenblum and others, however, have suggested that basic Christian solidarity may have at least partially overcome mistrust and cultural differences.10 Yet even if relations between local and foreign Christians (that is, native Arabic-speaking Christians versus Latins) had been exceedingly bad, there is no reason why any of the former group would have been compelled to abandon its faith for that of the recently defeated Muslim rulers. In fact, the time of Frankish rule can be seen as a kind of moderate ‘Indian summer’ for the local Christian communities, a certain respite after generations of existence as dhimmīs, ‘protected’ but still second-class subjects. As for the Muslim population now under Frankish rule stretching from Antioch to the north to Jaffa to the south and going inland as far as Transjordan and Edessa, there are only occasional cases of conversion to Christianity (of any type). If anything the demographic balance had been disturbed by massacres of select Muslim urban populations during the initial conquest, and the emigration of many Muslim city dwellers and even some peasants,11 and not through the conversion of Muslims. On the whole, the local Muslims enjoyed a status under the Latins not dissimilar to that of the dhimmīs under Muslim rule.12 If indeed large parts of rural Palestine and the surrounding areas had remained predominantly Christian in the first Muslim period (up to the First Crusade), and during the time of Frankish domination there was most probably no fundamental change in the nature and size of the local Christian populations, then we might ask if and when did a demographic transformation of the country take place? We can speak of such a change, as we know that by the end of the nineteenth century – several decades before the end of Ottoman rule – most of the Arabic-speaking population of Palestine was Muslim, with Christians reduced to 10–15 per cent of the Arabic-speaking population.13

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Perhaps the extant Ottoman population and tax surveys of Palestine and nearby countries from the sixteenth century can provide some concrete figures that could be a benchmark for the process of Islamisation. These registers, which have been studied independently (and for different reasons) by Bernard Lewis and Amnon Cohen,14 and Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah,15 give an initial impression of statistical terra firma. Yet, as these scholars have remarked, the use of these sources is replete with methodological problems. While there are five sets of registers (for the years 932/1525–6, c. 940–5/1533–9, 955/1548–9, 961–4/1553–7, c. 980/1572–3), not one of them is complete for the entire country and each year covers a different combination of areas. Not every village is counted – at least fully, certainly in the early registers – and in fact there seems to be an overall undercounting of Christians and perhaps of the entire population. There is a striking increase in the numbers over the century and it is unclear how much can be attributed to population growth or to just better methods of counting and registering.16 Thus, for the time being, I have despaired of presenting meaningful numbers, even provisionally, for the total population of the country, the numbers of Christians and their proportion vis-à-vis the overall population.17 Yet this being said, I can suggest, at least as a working hypothesis, that the time between the end of Frankish rule and the commencement and institutionalisation of Ottoman control was a crucial one in the Islamisation of the country. In other words, I expect that further research will show more conclusively that in the time of Ayyubid and Mamluk rule over the southern Levant the proportion of the Christian population was eroded. As in other matters, the Ayyubids set the stage for this process, laid some initial groundwork for it and then the Mamluks continued it with greater intensity of action and resources. 18 Certainly, as we will see, the country looks more Muslim at the end of over a quarter of a millennium of Mamluk rule, following many decades of Ayyubid control over parts of it. Might this changing landscape be both an indication of a growing Muslim population (in absolute numbers and perhaps also proportionally) and also a partial inducement to this process? At this point, I will offer some general thoughts on this development in the context of Palestine and its environs, and then I will focus on one specific area – Gaza and its countryside to the south-west of the country – to see if we might have some detailed results to justify the hypothesis. First, however, we need to determine when exactly was the end of Frankish rule, since it was not the same everywhere in the southern Levant. After Saladin’s great victory at Hattin in July 1187, Frankish rule was virtually eradicated in Palestine and Transjordan up the coast to Tyre. Yet a few years later, it was reconstituted along the coast and eventually in select enclaves further inland (notably the Safad region in eastern Galilee). So, most of the highlands of Palestine, Jerusalem (except in 1229–44), eastern Galilee and Transjordan passed into the hands of the Ayyubids, as Saladin’s dynasty is known. This status quo began to change only in the 1260s after the Mamluks had gained control over most of Syria in the aftermath of their victory over the Mongols at ʿAyn Jalut in September 1260 and Baybars had become sultan, ruling from 1260 to 1277. From 1265 to 1291, Frankish rule in the Levant was gradually, but consistently, eroded by the Mamluks until the coup de grâce was administered with the conquest of Acre. In short, one part of the former Frankish territories was under Muslim control from the end of the twelfth century, while the remainder only returned to Muslim rule in the second half of the thirteenth, that is after 1260.19 A number of reasons come together to explain a transformation in the religious composition of the population in Palestine and nearby regions. Let me start by stating

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that, while individual and group conversion probably played an important role, it is well possible that some of the demographic trends leading to religious change were also connected to phenomena that have nothing to do with conversion per se. One can think of immigration and emigration on the one hand and differing birth rates among the various communities on the other, both contributing to changing the religious demography. In neither of these cases does one person have to convert in order for substantial religious change to take place.20 These are, however, difficult phenomena to analyse, let alone quantify. For our present concerns, we might be able to put our finger on some people leaving the country and others coming into it; we have already seen that emigration/immigration played a role in the coastal regions during the early Muslim period, and may have done so in this later period (see below). On the other hand, it is probably impossible to discover what were the birth rates of the residents of the region in the centuries of Mamluk rule, let alone the comparative rates between Christians and Muslims. Attempting to look at present-day differences in birth rates between Muslim and Christian Arab communities in Israel, Palestine, Egypt and other nearby countries and to extrapolate for the past would be anachronistic. Yet, with the difficulty of quantifying such processes, we should keep them in mind. I can note that Michael Brett has suggested that differential birth rates among Muslims and Christians may have played their role in demographic developments in Egypt.21 It has been proposed that a possible contributory factor to the demographic change was the militant Islamic atmosphere in the Mamluk sultanate from – and especially in – its earliest days.22 The sultanate was born into a struggle against the Crusaders and the Mongols, and this continued in its first decades. The fact that the political and military leadership of the Mamluk state were one and the same certainly served as a further inducement to this ambience of holy war. To this can be added that the Mamluks continued and strengthened the patronage of Muslim institutions and men of religion, be they scholars (ulama) or mystics (Sufis), and here the Mamluks were following a path that had been well trodden since the Seljuqs.23 There can be little doubt that there was a strong militant Muslim atmosphere throughout the sultanate, no less in Syria and in recently reconquered territory. The Mamluk sultan was referred to inter alia as mujāhid (holy warrior), murābiṭ (fighter in the border fortress) and muthāghir (warrior on the frontier), as well as mubīd al-ifranj wa’l-tātār wa’l-arman (the annihilator of the Franks, the Mongols and the Armenians).24 These were important components in the ideology of the Mamluk elite and it certainly percolated down the ranks and beyond. This general militant Muslim atmosphere and the patronage of the Muslim religious establishment may have impacted on relations with the local Christians throughout the sultanate, not least in Palestine and the surrounding lands. The Mamluk authorities enforced sharia laws for the dhimmīs with relative harshness, although they were not always consistent in this application.25 It has been suggested that local Christians, and not only in Syria, were considered a kind of fifth column for the Franks and Mongols, and this perhaps contributed to a certain suspicion directed towards them by the political and religious authorities.26 Yet, while the overall hardening of Muslim attitudes towards the dhimmīs within the framework of a general militant Islamic atmosphere may have made life more difficult at times for Christians and other non-Muslims, there is as yet no clear evidence that this led to massive conversions to Islam in Palestine and its environs.27 However, these ongoing indignities and limitations perhaps wore down some of the dhimmīs, leading them to become Muslims; in Palestine this may not have led to a wave of conversion, but possibly it encouraged a gradual trickle of converts.

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One area of particular patronage by the Mamluks was that given to Sufis, or Muslim mystics. While these are often portrayed as attractive to would-be converts for their charisma, their down-to-earth and warm version of Islam (supposedly unlike the legalistic ulama), their willingness to turn a blind eye to non-orthodox or even syncretistic practices as well as their presence in the countryside,28 we should also note a more practical, even darker, side. I am not saying that Sufi piety was not appealing to common people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, but to see the effects of the Sufis as limited to only these aspects is simplistic and misleading. Thus, during the reign of Baybars, the powerful Sufi shaykh (and spiritual mentor of the sultan) Khadir al-Mihrani burst into the Georgian Monastery of the Cross outside of Jerusalem, killing its abbot, and turning it into a khānqāh (a Sufi hostel).29 In the mid-fourteenth century, a Sufi shaykh (elder or leader) of the Banu Wafaʾ family (later becoming famous as the Husayni family) moved into the village of Sharafat to the south of Jerusalem with a group of his supporters. After a few years of making life difficult for the Christian inhabitants, some converted, while others left the village. The source, Mujir al-Din al-ʿUlaymi’s history of Jerusalem and Hebron, tells this story in detail, including the mention of the direct patronage of a senior Mamluk officer who had originally given the shaykh land in the village.30 My guess is that these two stories of Sufi ruffians were repeated in Mamluk Palestine, as I hope will be revealed by future research. The one recorded incident where the local Christians felt compelled to leave or convert was almost surely not unique. It is important to note that a similar phenomenon – what I refer to as ‘muscular Sufism’ – was also taking place in Egypt, particularly in the south, as revealed by the recent research of Tamer el-Leithy.31 This ties in with the transformation of the way the countryside and cities of Syria looked (Figure 9.1). First under the Ayyubids (where applicable), and then more intensely under the Mamluks, the landscape was becoming more Muslim, filled with mosques with their minarets, shaykhs’ tombs, Sufi centres and other Muslim holy spots. One scholar – Nimrod Luz – has called this change the ‘Islamization of the landscape’.32 This theme has also been developed by Yehoshua Frenkel, particularly with regard to Baybars.33 Much of the transformation of the countryside and urban landscape in the sultanate, certainly in Palestine and the surrounding regions, was encouraged or initiated by the Mamluks, as indicated by the many examples already provided in the published volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae (CIAP) by Moshe Sharon.34 As more volumes emerge, this trend should become even clearer. The effect of the accumulated construction projects in rural and urban settings was to create a more Muslim milieu, contributing firstly to the ruling class’s legitimacy as the collective patrons of such works. A second effect was to construct an atmosphere that may have been congenial for conversion to Islam. It is, however, impossible to gauge the contribution of these changes on the developing religious demography of the country and the wider region. At this point, we might be satisfied by suggesting that the more Muslim landscape was both an expression of demographic changes and an encouragement of these trends. By itself, it could not have led to significant transformations, but together with other elements it becomes a symbol and factor in its own right. One matter that has yet to receive any attention to the best of my knowledge is the question of emigration. Many Syrian Christians (surely including those from Palestine) left the country during the time of the declining fortunes of the Franks brought about by the Mamluk campaigns. We know of substantial communities of Syrian Christians in Latin Cyprus from this time onwards.35 How many Christians actually left and what was the real effect of this exodus? This cannot yet be ascertained. However, if indeed such

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a wave of emigrants was large and contained elements of the religious, commercial and bureaucratic elite, the impact might have been significant in weakening the communities now having to deal with a self-confident and militant regime backed up by Sufis and other activists of a combative form of Sunni Islam. One can think of at least one other region where the gradual emigration of the elite, in this case mainly religious, was conducive to gradual but extensive religious change. This is Anatolia in the aftermath of the Seljuq victory at Manzikert and the subsequent Turkish takeover of most of the country. The weakening of the elite (not the least through the expropriation of church properties) had a lasting negative effect on the health and size of the Christian communities in Asia Minor, as has been shown by the work of Speros Vryonis.36 While we should perhaps be wary of directly extrapolating from the Anatolian experience for the Levant under the Mamluks, this seems a fruitful avenue for further research. Let us return to the matter of settlement. I would like to suggest that in certain areas of Palestine there was an increase in settlements under the early Mamluks.37 The early Mamluk sultans brought stability to the country and, with the waning Crusader presence, there was less fighting in the vicinity. This in itself would have been conducive to settlement, but it may be that the sultans and the senior officers themselves encouraged the process, not least in the framework of two newly created provinces in the country, Safad and Gaza, which covered most of the territory in Mandatory Palestine.38 This increasing settlement activity would in turn lead to a rise in population in general, and even to a rising number of Muslims (in absolute and possibly relative terms).39

A Short Case Study: Gaza and its Rural Hinterland Let us look at one area – the city of Gaza and the surrounding countryside40 – to see how some of these processes may have played out under the Mamluks. First, we should note that the Ayyubid period was probably not one of economic and demographic fortune for the city. Yaqut (d. 1229) very tersely sums up the data for the town (after giving the vocalisation of the name, its origins and geographic coordinates): [Gaza] is a city on the edge of Syria in the direction of Egypt. Between it and Ascalon there is a distance of two farsakhs or less. It is part of the regions of Filastin, west [sic; should be south] of Ascalon.41 Of course, beyond this laconic description (with a mistake), there might have been a prosperous town and countryside, but we have little knowledge of such.42 Whatever that state of the region in the first third or so of the century, the succeeding two decades (and a little more) of military and related activity were certainly not conducive to economic or demographic stability, let alone growth. Starting with 1239, there was the Battle of Bayt Hanun, followed in 1244 by the Battle of La Forbie (Hirbiyya), with the presence and participation of a large contingent of Khwarazmians. The decade beginning in 1250 was one of battles and skirmishes between Syrian Ayyubid forces and those of the new Mamluk state (and fighting between various Mamluk factions). This was followed by the crucial year of 1260, which began with concentrations of Syrian troops and people fleeing the Mongols, most eventually moving on to Egypt. Then, later in the spring until the mid-summer, there was the presence of a Mongol vanguard (which had first raided in the area), followed in middle to late August with skirmishing (and maybe more) between this force and the Mamluk advance guard. Soon after the

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Figure 9.1 The administrative structure of south-west Bilad al-Sham in the fourteenth century (map prepared by Tami Soffer).

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Mongol defeat at ʿAyn Jalut on 3 September 1260, the Mamluks occupied the region.43 The more than two decades of coming and going of armies, accompanied by many horses (and other animals) and baggage trains, along with frequent fighting over large areas (La Forbie stands out here) would have had a negative impact on agriculture and rural populations as well as the local townspeople. We cannot be sure of the exact nature of this difficult situation, but the trend was already reversed early in the Mamluk period. Here is what Ibn Shaddad alHalabi (d. 1283) writes on this early period when describing Gaza in his historicalgeographical work, al-Aʿlaq al-Khatira: When al-Malik al-Muzaffar Sayf al-Din Qutuz al-Muʿizzi al-Turki defeated the Mongols near ʿAyn Jalut, he took back the country and the inhabitants [of Gaza] returned to [Gaza] and it was rebuilt (ʿummirat).44 In our time – when this book was composed – there are in it governors of our lord, the Sultan alMalik al-Zahir Rukn al-Dunya wa’l-Din Baybars al-Salihi – may God make his reign last forever and bring his rule over the entire land!45 This initial trend of repopulation and rebuilding continues under the Mamluk sultans. Important evidence is provided in different types of Arabic sources. Thus Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari (d. 1349), the Syrian administrator and encyclopaedist, writes about the city and its environs in the section on Syria and Egypt (that is, the lands of the Mamluk sultanate) of the Masalik al-Absar: Gaza is a city between Egypt and Damascus. Hashim b. ʿAbd al-Manaf was buried in it, and there al-Shafiʿi – may God have mercy on him – was born. It is built of stone and plaster; its buildings are solid, on a high spot, at a distance of a mile from the Mediterranean Sea. It has good and pure water that is easy to digest, but it is not considered tasty. The drinking water of its inhabitants [originates] in wells and it has a reservoir for rainwater into which the winter rains run, although this [reservoir] is considered small. It has many fruits, of which grapes and figs are the best. [Gaza] has a hospital, which this sultan (al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun) – may God give him reward – built; those passing this place have recourse to it. In [this town] are colleges (madāris) and gravesites that adorn it. It is an exalted district in which there is a contingent of the army, Bedouins (al-ʿarab) and Turkmen. It borders the land and the sea on its two sides, and it is near the Sinai Desert. To its south are agricultural and pasturelands, and it is a meeting place between settled and nomadic people. Its sedentary people are tribesmen (ʿushran), with one being the enemy of the other. Were it not for the fear of the government, the fire of battle would not abate there, and the sword would not be put back in the scabbard. No inhabitant would feel secure there and would not settle there, not in [the city] or outside it.46 Beyond learning about some aspects of urban infrastructure, educational institutions47 and the role played by the sultan’s patronage (more about this below), we also see that the city of Gaza (note that it has been upgraded from a ‘town’ to a ‘city’, madīna) is home to part of the Mamluk army as well as nomadic irregulars, with the latter, certainly in the countryside, practising a nomadic lifestyle and raising livestock.48 In fact, the presence of nearby pastoral nomads is explicitly noted in the passage; indeed the region of Gaza is a frontier area with steppe and desert to its south-west and south-east,

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and other areas of mixed populations, as mentioned here. To my mind, however, the real eye-opener in this passage is that at least some of the settled population is of tribal (ʿushran, i.e. nomadic) origin, and this may indicate a process of sedentarisation under the firm hand of the Mamluk authorities. By implication, we see that these authorities also sought to keep the nearby Bedouins under control, which is confirmed by other sources.49 It might be asked whether a high-level Mamluk administrator could do anything but sing the praises of the cities of the sultanate and ruling sultan whose largesse spread everywhere. Perhaps, but Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari did not necessarily pull his punches, and he is also known for going to prison for disagreeing with the sultan (the same one mentioned above). In addition, we can find some confirmation from an independent observer, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who passed this way around 1326, writing about Gaza: From [Qatya] we went to the city (madīna) of Gaza, which is the first of the towns (bilād) of Syria on the borders of Egypt, a place of spacious dimensions, much building (kathīrat al-ʿimāra) and attractive bazaars. It contains numerous mosques and there is no wall round it (lā sūr ʿalayhā). There was formerly a fine congregational mosque in the town. The mosque in which the Friday service is now held there was built by the illustrious officer (amīr) al-Jawli; it is an elegant building of solid construction and its minbar is made of white marble. The qadi of Gaza was Badr al-Din al-Salkhadi al-Hawrani, and the professor of its madrasa ʿAlam al-Din b. Salim. The Salim family are the notable inhabitants of this town, and one of them is Shams al-Din, the qadi of Jerusalem.50 This passage pretty much speaks for itself, confirming information on the quantity and quality of the buildings in it, the existence of at least two major mosques and at least one Islamic religious college. Two points are worth noting here. First, we have here an indication of how Gaza fits into a network of local (that is, ‘Palestinian’) educational institutions. I plan to devote some attention to this topic in the future. Second, we have mention of the officer called here only by a nickname, alJawli, whose full name was ʿAlam al-Din Sanjar al-Jawli.51 This officer was a leading member of the Mansuriyya, the large regiment of Mamluks bought and raised by al-Mansur Qalawun (1279–90). A small number of officers from this group pretty much ran the Mamluk sultanate from the murder of al-Ashraf Khalil b. Qalawun in 1293 until al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun’s third accession to the sultanate in 1310; three of them even briefly held this office. Al-Jawli survived the vicissitudes of the era and, soon after al-Nasir’s return to power, was appointed governor of the newly formed Gaza province. In 1320 (or perhaps a year earlier), he was arrested in the aftermath of a conflict with the all-powerful governor of Damascus, Tankiz, and released a decade later. Until his death in 1344, he then enjoyed high rank and prestige, and also managed another short stint as governor of Gaza after al-Nasir’s death in 1341. Here is what al-Safadi (d. 1363), author of the massive biographical compendium al-Wafi bi’l-Wafayat, has to say about al-Jawli’s achievements as governor in Gaza, probably mostly referring to his first term: [Sanjar al-Jawli] built (ʿammara) in Gaza an extremely gigantic bath, a madrasa, and a Friday mosque (jāmiʿ) without parallel, and he built (ʿammara) a travellers’ caravanserai by Gaza . . . He is the one who turned Gaza into a city and urbanised

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it (wa-huwa alladhī maddana ghazza wa-maṣṣarahā). He built (banā) a hospital in it and created much waqf property (awqāfan jalīlatan) for the sake of al-Nasir Muhammad; the supervision of it was handed over to the governors of Gaza. He erected (ʿammara) in Gaza the hippodrome and the palace.52 The explicit list of major construction projects certainly fits the statement that alJawli indeed ‘turned Gaza into a city’, in terms of size, institutions and consciousness – both of locals and people throughout the sultanate. This was, of course, not just his doing; al-Jawli was continuing the work that began under Baybars, and as we can see he was supported by the reigning sultan.53 Yet, without a doubt, this dynamic governor made a clear impression on the history of the city. The timing of al-Jawli’s achievements was not coincidental, and this is connected to two interrelated developments. First, it was soon after the beginning of the third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad (1310–41) that a separate province (niyāba or mamlaka) of Gaza was established, with the eponymous town as its capital (see Figure 9.1).54 Second, al-Nasir Muhammad’s return to power was also the beginning of a burst of increased construction projects, initiated and encouraged at the time, but felt throughout the sultanate, often at the initiative of members of the political-military elite stationed in the provinces.55 However, al-Jawli’s activities in Gaza, with the clear support and encouragement of the sultan, was only one stage of ongoing Mamluk patronage in the city of Gaza, and, as we will see, also in the surrounding countryside. A clear indication of the extent of this patronage is the sixty-nine inscriptions from the Mamluk period in Gaza.56 Just to put this number into perspective, there are some seventy Mamluk-era inscriptions for Jerusalem.57 These inscriptions can be looked at in a number of ways. First, we can break them up into what they commemorate and the types of work that they adorn (see Table 9.1). Second, the forty-two inscriptions for new buildings, reconstructions and repairs, and endowments can be broken down as shown in Table 9.2. The main focus of patronage, royal and otherwise, were the mosques (thirty out of forty-two inscriptions, with 45 per cent of these devoted to one mosque). Four inscriptions commemorate the building of colleges, while there is a scattering of other projects, mostly with a clear religious character (and the case can be made that a bath and public fountain also have religious implications, not just because they are clearly for the public good).58 Finally, Table 9.3 shows the chronological spread of these inscriptions.59 Table 9.1 Breakdown of Mamluk-era inscriptions in Gaza by type. Type of Inscription

Numbers

Construction/reconstruction and repair/waqf

42

Epitaphs

20

Sultanic and caliphal orders, not connected to construction

5

Quranic texts

2

Total

69

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Table 9.2 Types of construction, reconstruction and waqf projects in Mamluk Gaza. Building Great Mosque

Number of Inscriptions 13

Jamiʿ of Ibn ʿUthman

7

Mosque of ʿAli b. Marwan

2

Jamiʿ of al-Jawli

1

Miscellaneous minor mosques

9

Madrasas

4

Zāwiyas (small Sufi lodges)

3

Mazārs (tombs serving as focus for pilgrimage)

3

Hammam

1

Sabīl (public fountain)

1

Total

42

Table 9.3: Chronological spread of Mamluk construction inscriptions in Gaza. Years 1260–1309 1310–41

Number of Inscriptions 8 10

1342–1400

9

1401–60

8

1461–1516

7

Total

42

To sum up this section, we can see that the Mamluk military-political elite, led by the sultan and his governors, maintained a policy of building, repairing (from minor reconstructions to major renewal projects) and establishing endowments to found and maintain religious structures and institutions in the city of Gaza, and this was fairly constant throughout the period of Mamluk rule.60 This befits the capital of a province and fits the profile of other provincial capitals in Bilad al-Sham under the Mamluks. Gaza was clearly a Muslim city, full of mosques, madrasas and other religious buildings. The city was also home to Jewish and Christian communities, and at least one church and synagogue (and apparently another for the Samaritans) were found,61 but the landscape – and the overall ambience – was surely determined by numerous prominent Muslim buildings (and surely many smaller ones).

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The Countryside near Gaza If Gaza City in the first century of Mamluk rule – and probably afterwards – projected both prosperity and a strong Muslim identity, what of the surrounding countryside? As to be expected, the study of the rural hinterland is not an easy task. Gaza City itself is not frequently mentioned in our main historiographical sources, and we have even less information for the nearby countryside. Here again, however, the epigraphic evidence comes to our aid. From the published volumes of the CIAP,62 we know of a number of inscriptions from the late Ayyubid and Mamluk periods in a number of villages in the immediate rural hinterland of Gaza City, laid out in Table 9.4. Table 9.4 Inscriptions from the countryside around Gaza (late Ayyubid and Mamluk periods). Village

Date

Description

Source

Bayt Hanun

637/1239

Construction text of a mosque to commemorate victory over Franks

CIAP, vol. 2, pp. 98–104

Bayt Lahiya

897/1492

Epitaph of Muslim children (of the amir Aqbay, died from plague that year)

CIAP, vol. 2, pp. 149–51

Bayt Tima

792/1390

Construction text of a local mosque. Also an Ottoman inscription from 1252/1836

CIAP, vol. 2, pp. 158–60

Burayr

2nd half 9th Part of construction text century/15th with blazon of dawādār century

CIAP, vol. 3, pp. xlvii–l (addenda and corrigenda)

Darum (Dayr 690/1290 al-Balah)

Epitaph of a Mamluk, with a blazon

CIAP, vol. 3, pp. 11–19

Dimra

676/1277

Construction text, perhaps CIAP, vol. 3, pp. 138–41; Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari, from a mosque (that may have been destroyed in Qabaʾil al-ʿarab, p. 10963 WWI, and was in secondary usage in a newer, simpler mosque). 3 pieces now in Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. The Banu Jabir tribe lived near Dimra in the Mamluk period

Majdal

700/1300

Inscription in a mosque from Salar al-Mansuri

CIAP, vol. 1, pp. 185–6 (no. 15); RCEA, vol. 13, p. 204 (no. 5099)64

Niʿilya

645?1247–8

Unclear

CIAP, vol. 1, p. 18965

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Thus we have epigraphic evidence for the existence of some type of settlement in late Ayyubid and Mamluk periods for eight villages, not a trivial matter for the Palestinian countryside at this time. But that is not all. We have additional information for a number of other villages (see Table 9.5). Table 9.5 Settlements in the Gaza area from textual evidence, from the Ayyubid period to the end of Mamluk rule. Village

Information

Source

Barbara

Near Ascalon. There is the mazār of the Shaykh Yusuf al-Barbarawi

Mujir al-Din, al-Uns al-Jalil, vol. 2, p. 148

Bayt Jirja

Listed as Jarha: one of the villages of Ascalon in the early 13th century

Yaqut, Muʿjam, vol. 2 p. 5666

Dayr Sunayd

A bridge was built there (‘near Gaza’) during the reign of Baybars

Ibn Shaddad, Taʾrikh, p. 352

Darum

The Bedouin tribe of Jarm was located near there and Gaza in early half of 14th century. Also appears as a stop in Frankish itineraries from the Mamluk period

Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari, Qabaʾil al-ʿArab, p. 107; Paviot, Projets de Croisade, p. 4767

Hirbiyya

One of the villages of Ascalon in early 13th century. Written here as Farbiyya/Firbiyya. Site of important battle with Franks in 1244 (La Forbie)

Yaqut, Muʿjam, vol. 3, p. 867

Jababiyya

One of the villages of Ascalon. Written as Habla

Yaqut, Muʿjam, vol. 2, pp. 198–968

Kufiyya

The headman (rayyis) of this village, from the region of Gaza, is rewarded by Baybars

Ibn Shaddad, Taʾrikh, p. 293

We see that there is textual evidence for three additional settlements in the Mamluk period and, according to Yaqut’s geographic dictionary, another three villages were in existence earlier in the thirteenth century. Thus, altogether we have the names of nine villages that clearly existed at some point in the Mamluk period, two more than were in existence in the late Ayyubid period (1240 to 1260) and another three from earlier that century. This gives us a total of fourteen settlements. Of course, we need to immediately express reservations: (1) we cannot say with certainty that the settlements from the Ayyubid period survived into and through the Mamluk period, although this is not an unreasonable supposition; (2) we have only ‘snapshots’ of the Mamluk-era villages, not a full picture of their histories for the two and a half centuries of Mamluk rule; (3) we do not know if these settlements existed during the entire Mamluk period, or what their trajectory was in terms of population, building and size. Yet, with all of these reservations, it is possible to put this information on a map and thus get some idea of how the countryside around the city of Gaza looked during the time of Mamluk rule (see Figure 9.2).

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Figure 9.2 Tentative settlement map for the region of Gaza (prepared by Tami Soffer).

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With all of the reservations just expressed, we can say with almost complete certainty that every village listed here was in existence early in the Ottoman period, on the basis of the sixteenth-century Ottoman tax registers studied by Hütteroth and Abdulfattah.69 At this point in my research, I have not put on the map in Figure 9.2 the villages that appear in only the sixteenth-century Ottoman tax registers, and do not have clear Mamluk or Ayyubid antecedents. I think it unlikely that these villages did not exist under the Mamluks, but for now I have resisted the temptation to augment the Mamluk settlement map unduly. A reasonable working hypothesis is that there was a certain continuity of settlement from the mid-Ayyubid period until the first decades of Ottoman rule. However, at this time we cannot speak with much surety of more specific trends within this general description. We have seen that there was apparently a demographic and economic crisis in the last two decades of Ayyubid rule, and things appear to have picked up soon after the establishment of Mamluk rule in the region. If the agricultural region reflects what was going on in Gaza City, the regional urban centre, then the first half of the fourteenth century was one of prosperity and stability in the rural area. This is what Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari hints at in his description of the countryside of Gaza (although one must note that he is referring mainly to the area to the south of the city). Our provisional settlement map alludes to a fairly thick matrix of villages surrounding the city, at least to its north and north-east. Longer term trends in both the city and the countryside – the latter part of the fourteenth and the entire fifteenth century – will have to wait for further research, but at least later travellers’ reports indicate some continuation of prosperity in the city.70 We have seen continuity of Mamluk patronage in Gaza City, and we find this in the nearby rural sector as well.

Concluding Remarks How does this short case study, a preliminary examination that is part of a larger research project on the social, economic, settlement and cultural history of the region, tie in with the more general considerations of the effects of Mamluk rule on the region’s religious demography? The extensive construction (ex nihilo and reconstruction work) commemorated in the inscriptions of Gaza City both contributed and testified to a thriving Muslim community. This auspicious economic situation, which surely had positive demographic and cultural implications, were partially the result of elite patronage and the stability provided by the state, along with local activity. Beyond the symbolic effect on the landscape of both monumental and modest Muslim buildings, as mentioned before, we can assume that a large Muslim community enjoyed these institutions and gained solace from them. Surrounding the city were many villages, and there too we find Muslim buildings, although smaller and more humble by nature. This too indicates – and encourages – a flourishing Muslim population. Yet with all the reservations and caution, one could speak of a growing Muslim population, not least due to increased prosperity. If so, what was the basis for these additional Muslim inhabitants? Natural growth? Locals, hitherto keeping a low profile, now enjoying new affluence and stability? Immigrants from other regions of Palestine or further afield? Converts? Perhaps several – or all – of these components were involved, along with sedentarising nomads, as alluded to by Ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari. Christians and Jews also lived in the area, the former perhaps also in the nearby countryside, all partaking of the general prosperity.71 But given the clear nature of the Muslim rule of

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the Mamluks and their patronage, we may not be amiss if we claim that the Muslims were clearly the predominant and hegemonic population, and may well have been getting bigger in relative and absolute terms. Before concluding, I would like to make two further, but short, observations. We can note that Gaza was an exception to the general Mamluk policy regarding the southern Syrian coast (approximately covered by modern Israel and Lebanon), in which almost invariably the fortified coastal cities and ports were destroyed after they were taken from the Franks.72 Ascalon, some 30 km north of Gaza, already in an abandoned and devastated state, remained so and Jaffa further up the coast was also demolished when taken in 1268. Several reasons might explain the decision not only to keep Gaza, but even to develop it. First, Gaza itself was not conquered from the Franks, but had already been in Muslim hands for generations. Second, it really was not on the coast, but rather a few kilometres inland; we can mention that none of the Arabic sources from the Mamluk period mention a port for Gaza, as al-Idrisi did in 1154, that is during the Frankish period.73 If this port did continue to exist under the Mamluks, it does not seem to have been very active or large, and apparently would not have served as a serious bridgehead for an invading Crusader army. Finally, we can note that at both ends of the coastline, denuded of fortification, the Mamluk leadership had provincial capitals a few kilometres from the sea. In the north, there was ‘New’ Tripoli, rebuilt inland, after the conquest and destruction of the Frankish city of this name.74 In the south, we find Gaza on its original site, but bustling like it had not for generations. The second observation regards Sufi activity in Gaza and its environs. The inscriptions provide some evidence of a Sufi presence in the city and nearby, naming two zāwiyas in the city, along with two mazārs.75 However, the CIAP provides us with information on another ten buildings that were probably centres of Sufi activities, including the nearby shrine of Shaykh ʿAli al-Muntar76 and several smaller mosques that were named after shaykhs who also appear to have been Sufis.77 Mohamed-Moain Sadeq refers to some of these in his monumental work on Mamluk architecture in the city, along with one zāwiya not mentioned in the CIAP.78 Multiple foci of Sufi activity in the city compares well with the situation found in the northern provincial capital of Safad.79 On the other hand, rural Sufis or Sufi centres in the nearby countryside – with the exception of the village of Barbara mentioned above – are lacking,80 and this is strikingly different from the rural area around Safad. It may be that further research will uncover a more substantial rural Sufi presence in the south-west of the country. We can, however, already see that in the Gaza region, Sufis played a big role in the religious life of the Muslims and may well have influenced relations with the non-Muslim population too. Early in this chapter we saw a number of elements that came together under the Mamluks to create a situation where the population of Palestine and the surrounding regions became more Muslim in size and character. In this case study of Mamluk Gaza and its nearby countryside, some of these elements were clearly at play. The sultans and their underlings certainly worked to create an unequivocal Muslim ambience. The Mamluk elite supported, initiated and patronised various Muslim institutions in large – even impressive – numbers, including mosques, colleges and Sufi centres and related establishments. There is no doubting the important role that Sufis of different types played in the local religious and cultural life; whether and how they also contributed to the demographic transformation of the region will be determined by further research. Under Mamluk rule, Gaza and its rural hinterland enjoyed a degree of prosperity, leading to and reflected in a rising urban and rural population. I have also suggested

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that much, probably most, of this increasing population was Muslim. The changing landscape – now unequivocally more Islamic in character – gave expression to these changes and encouraged them. In short, in Gaza, as elsewhere in Palestine and Syria (and the entire territory of the sultanate), here too the Mamluks made a lasting impression on the country, unwittingly preparing the ground for subsequent times, including the modern period, in many ways.

Notes 1. Two comprehensive surveys of the subject recently appeared in Michael Cook (gen. ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): Mercedes García-Arenal, ‘Conversion to Islam: From the “Age of Conversions” to the Millet System’, in Maribel Fierro (ed.), vol. 2: The Western Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Century, pp. 586–606; David J. Wasserstein, ‘Conversion and the Ahl al-Dhimma’, in Robert Irwin (ed.), vol. 4: Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 184–208. I also found very useful the recent article by Philip Wood, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000: Conquest, Competition and Conversion’, in A. C. S. Peacock et al. (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 23–50. Nehemia Levtzion’s 1979 discussion of Islamisation remains important, as do many of the other articles in the same volume: ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 1–23. 2. For a survey of this literature, see Milka Levy-Rubin, ‘Arabization versus Islamization in the Palestinian Melkite Community during the Early Muslim Period’, in Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds), Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), p. 149 n. 3. To this discussion can be added Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Conversion to Islam in Syria and Palestine and the Survival of Christian Communities’, in Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi (eds), Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 229–311 (esp. p. 290), who does not come down firmly in either camp regarding the extent of conversion. Claude Cahen (‘An Introduction to the First Crusade’, Past & Present 6, no. 1 [1954], p. 7) writes: ‘In Palestine and Syria it is probable that Christians remained at the end of the XIth century as numerous as Moslems, and in some places, like Lebanon, much more numerous.’ I agree with this statement, but I would have been happier had Cahen provided some support for it. 3. Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. part 4; Ronnie Ellenblum, ‘Settlement and Society Formation in Crusader Palestine,’ in Thomas Evan Levy (ed.), The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), pp. 502–11. See also: Milka Levy-Rubin, ‘New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period-The Case of Samaria,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 23, no. 3 (2000), pp. 257–76. 4. Milka Levy-Rubin, ‘Changes in the Settlement Pattern of Palestine Following the Arab Conquest’, in K. G. Holum and H. Lapin (eds), Shaping the Middle East: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in an Age of Transition 400–800 C E. (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2011), pp. 155–72. 5. Levy-Rubin, ‘Arabization versus Islamization’, pp. 149–62. 6. These will be published by Prof. Moshe Sharon in the forthcoming volumes devoted to Jerusalem in the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae (hereafter CIAP); hitherto six volumes have been published since 1997 by Brill of Leiden. 7. Milka Levy-Rubin (ed. and trans.), The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle of Abu l-Fath al-Samiri al-Danafi (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2002).

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8. Abraham S. Halkin et al., ‘Saadiah (Ben Joseph) Gaon’, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edn (Detroit, MI: Gale Cengage Learning, 2007), vol. 17, pp. 612–13. I assume that this need among Jews for usable translations into Arabic also applied to Palestine. 9. Raymond Charles Smail, Crusading Warfare (1097–1193): A Contribution to Medieval Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 40, 52, 62–3, 204; Joshua Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), pp. 214–32. 10. See Ellenblum, ‘Settlement and Society Formation’. 11. Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Réfugiés syro-palestiniens au temps des Croisades’, Revue des Études Islamiques 35 (1967), pp. 135–48. 12. See the full discussion in Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant’, in James M. Powell (ed.), Muslims under Latin Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 135–74. 13. The numbers available are not necessarily exact, but give some indication of the magnitude of the population of the country and the size of the different groups that composed it. Thus based on the sālnāme (yearbook) of the province of Syria from 1288/1871–2 we see that out of 60,140 households in Palestine, 6,952, or about 11.56%, were Christian (I have not used the numbers for the ʿAjlun or Salt districts, since these are not in Mandatory Palestine). What comprised an average household in Palestine at that time remains an open question, and likewise we would want to resolve whether there was a difference between average Muslim and Christian households (or between urban and rural ones). My intention here is only to provide a magnitude of size. See Alexander Schölch, ‘The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (1985), pp. 485–505, especially pp. 485–8. 14. Bernard Lewis, ‘Studies in the Ottoman Archives – I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16 (1954), pp. 469–501; Amnon Cohen and Bernard Lewis, Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine in the Sixteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 15. Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the Late Sixteenth Century (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1977). See also Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth, Palästina und Transjordanien im 16. Jahrhundert: Wirtschaftsstruktur ländlicher Siedlungen nach osmanischen Steuerregistern, Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients B, 33 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1978). 16. These matters are also discussed by Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, pp. 124–5, 135. 17. I was more optimistic about this matter when I gave the lecture at St Andrews on which this chapter is based, and this confidence also finds expression in my forthcoming paper in German (see the introductory note to this chapter). I still hope that further research will yield reliable statistics that can be the basis for convincing generalisations at least regarding the proportion of Christians among the overall population in the sixteenth century. 18. Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, pp. 253–4, writes: ‘It can be assumed, therefore, that the comparative size of the Christian community continued to decrease during the early Mamluk and Ottoman periods and that the demographic-cultural change was, in general, irreversible.’ My study here – and in general on post-Frankish Palestine – takes this statement as one of its main starting points. 19. For the post-Saladin Ayyubids and their relations with the Franks, see R. Stephen Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193–1260 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977). For Mamluk relations with the Franks, see Mustafa M. Ziada, ‘The Mamluk Sultans to 1293’, in Kenneth Setton (gen. ed.), A History of the Crusades, vol. 2: Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard (eds), The Later Crusades 1189–1311 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 735–58; Reuven Amitai, ‘The Early Mamlūks and the End of the Crusader Presence

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

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in Syria (1250–1291)’, in Adrian Boas (ed.), The Crusader World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 324–45. For these two phenomena, see Ronnie Ellenblum, ‘Demography, Geography and the Accelerated Islamisation of the Eastern Mediterranean’, in Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (eds), Religious Conversion: Historical Experiences and Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), p. 65. In private conversation and lectures, Ellenblum has referred to these as part of the ‘geography of conversion’. Michael Brett, ‘The Islamisation of Egypt and North Africa’, The First Annual Levtzion Lecture (Jerusalem: The Nehemia Levtzion Center for Islamic Studies, 2006). Available online at: www.hum.huji.ac.il/upload/_FILE_1415822924.pdf (accessed 3 December 2015). See Eliyahu Ashtor, ‘Mamluks’, Encyclopaedia Judiaca, 1st edn, (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing Company; New York: Macmillan, 1971–2), vol. 11, p. 834; Claude Cahen, ‘Dhimma’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), vol. 2, p. 230; Philip K. Hitti, ‘The Impact of the Crusades on Moslem Lands’, in Kenneth Setton (gen. ed.), A History of the Crusades, vol. 5: Norman P. Zacour and Harry W. Hazard (eds), The Impact of the Crusades on the Near East (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 49–50; Levtzion, ‘Conversion to Islam in Syria and Palestine’, p. 300. For this phenomenon in general, see Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: An Islamic History (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 117–41; Ira Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1967), chs 3–4; R. Stephen Humphreys, ‘A Cultural Elite: The Role and Status of the ʿUlamaʾ in Islamic Society’, in R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 187–208. For these and other titles, see Reuven Amitai, ‘Some Remarks on the Inscription of Baybars at Maqām Nabī Mūsā’, in David J. Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon (eds), Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 45–53. For the larger context of Baybars’ search for legitimisation, see Denise Aigle, ‘Legitimizing a Low-Born, Regicide Monarch. Baybars and the Ilkhans’, in Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 221–43. For the developing effort of the Mamluk sultans to project power and enjoy legitimacy, particularly in Syria, see Anne Troadec, ‘Les Mamelouks dans l’espace syrien: Strategies de domination et résistances (658/1260– 741/1341)’, doctoral thesis, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2014. See Donald P. Little, ‘Religion under the Mamluks’, The Muslim World 73 (1983), pp. 165–81. Reprinted in Donald P. Little, History and Historiography of the Mamlūks (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). Cahen, ‘Dhimma’, p. 230; Ashtor, ‘Mamluks’, pp. 834–5; Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, p. 38. Actually, my own research on the Mongol occupation of Syria, especially in 1260, leads me to the conclusion that there was not really collaboration between the local Christians and the Mongols. Invariably, these Syrian ‘quislings’ were local Muslims, joining other Muslims from afar who were already working for the Mongols. The big ‘crime’ of the local Christians in Damascus (and nowhere else to my knowledge) was taking advantage of the Mongol occupation to practise their religion in an open, and even provocative, manner. Reuven Amitai, ‘Mongol Provincial Administration: Syria in 1260 as a Case-Study’, in Iris Shagrir et al. (eds), Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 117–43. However, cf. the situation in Egypt, where this may have been the case, especially in the fourteenth century; Donald P. Little, ‘Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Baḥrī Mamlūks, 692–755/1293–1354’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39 (1976), pp. 552–69. Donald P. Little, History and Historiography of the Mamlūks (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986).

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28. This is the tenor of much of the literature about Sufis in general and the sultanate in particular. See, for example, Daphna Ephrat, Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety: Sufis and the Dissemination of Islam in Medieval Palestine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 29. Qutb al-Din Musa b. Muhammad al-Yunini, Dhayl Mirʾat al-Zaman fi Taʾrikh al-Aʿyan (Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, Osmania University, 1954–61), vol. 3, pp. 267–8; Peter Thorau, The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century, trans. Peter M. Holt (London and New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 225–9. However, cf. Richard Gottheil, ‘An Answer to the Dhimmis’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 41 (1921), pp. 411–12, where a contemporary Muslim writer reports that local Christians, Armenians and Georgians living in the vicinity of the monastery were engaged in spying for the Mongols, and this was the basis of the expropriation of the building. The nature of the anti-dhimmī polemic in which this is found and the lack of external confirmation leads me to question the credibility of this account. 30. Nimrod Luz, ‘Aspects of Islamization of Space and Society in Mamluk Jerusalem and its Hinterland’, Mamluk Studies Review 6 (2002), pp. 145–6, 148–9; Mujir al-Din ʿAbd alRahman b. Muhammad al-ʿUlaymi al-Hanbali, al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Taʾrikh al-Quds wa’lKhalil, ed. Muhammad Musa al-Muhtasib, 2 vols (Amman: Maktabat al-Muhtasib, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 147–8, cited by Luz, ‘Aspects of Islamization’, p. 148 n. 60. 31. Tamer el-Leithy, ‘Sufis, Copts and the Politics of Piety: Moral Regulation in FourteenthCentury Upper Egypt’, in Richard J. McGregor and Adam Sabra (eds), Le développement du soufisme en Égypte à l’époque mamelouke, published as Cahiers des Annales islamologiques 27 (2006), pp. 75–119. 32. Luz, ‘Aspects of Islamization’, pp. 133–54. A further treatment of this subject is in his book The Mamluk City in the Middle East: History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 33. Yehoshua Frenkel, ‘Baybars and the Sacred Geography of Bilād al-Shām: A Chapter in the Islamization of Syria’s Landscape’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001), pp. 153–70; see also Yehoshua Frenkel, ‘Public Projection of Power in Mamluk Bilād al-Shām’, Mamluk Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2007), pp. 39–53. 34. To date, six volumes have been published in this series by Brill (Leiden, 1997–). 35. Jean Richard, ‘Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle’, Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979), pp. 157–73. Reprinted in Jean Richard, Croises, Missionaires et Voyageurs (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), article VII; David Jacoby, ‘The Rise of a New Emporium in the Eastern Mediterranean: Famagusta in the Late Thirteenth Century’, Meletai kai Hypomnemata, vol. 4 (Nicosia: 1984), pp. 145–79 (esp. pp. 157, 160–1, 173–5), reprinted in David Jacoby, Studies on the Crusader States and Venetian Expansion (Northampton: Variorum Reprints, 1989); Benjamin Arbel, ‘Venetian Cyprus and the Muslim Levant, 1473-1570’, in Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Riley-Smith (eds.), Cyprus and the Crusades (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1995), pp. 159–85 (esp. pp. 173, 178), reprinted in Benjamin Arbel, Cyprus, the Franks and Venice (13th–16th Centuries) (London: Ashgate, 2000). For some names of Syrian Christian families in Cyprus in the fifteenth century, see Nicholas Coureas, ‘Mamluks in the Cypriot Chronicle of George Boustronios and Their Place within a Wider Context’, in Kristof D’Hulster and Jo van Steenbergen (eds), Continuity and Change in the Realms of Islam: Studies in Honour of Professor Urbain Vermeulen (Leuven, Paris and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2008), pp. 136, 142. For the descendants of Maronites from Lebanon in Cyprus, see Hitti, ‘The Impact of the Crusades on Moslem Lands’, p. 56. 36. Speros Vryonis, Jr, ‘Religious Change and Continuity in the Balkans and Anatolia from the 14th through the 16th Century’, in Speros Vryonis, Jr (ed.), Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1975), pp. 133–4.

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37. Long-term trends of population size and settlement density in Palestine are beyond the scope of this article. It has been suggested that there was a dramatic demographic decline in the country from the original Muslim conquest to the beginning of the Ottoman period; see Levtzion, ‘Conversion to Islam in Syria and Palestine’, pp. 289–90. Recent research, however, has begun to question this paradigm; Gideon Avni, The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), sees demographic and settlement continuity well into the Muslim period. Whatever the situation in the long run, it appears that the early and mid-thirteenth century were not propitious for stable population and settlement, and there may have been a certain decline before the Mamluks took over in Syria in 1260. 38. For the former, see Joseph Drory, ‘Founding a New Mamlaka: Some Remarks Concerning Safed and the Organization of the Region in the Mamluk Period’, in Amalia Levanoni and Michael Winter (eds), The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 163–87. For Gaza, see below. 39. Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, p. 216 notes briefly that settlement flourished in the eastern Galilee under the Mamluks, returning to this point later in his study; ibid., pp. 269–73: in the western Galilee, however, there may have been a decline. See also Bethany Walker, ‘The Early Mamluk Age and the Strengthening of a Tradition’, in Guido Vannini and Michele Nucciotti (eds), La Transgiordania nei secoli XII–XIII e le ‘frontiere’ del Mediterraneo medieval, BAR International Series 2386 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), pp. 197–204, who discusses the vibrant nature of the economy and construction in Transjordan in the early Mamluk period. In this last case, however, there was great continuity with the Ayyubid period. 40. I will not discuss the entire province of Gaza (see map in Figure 9.2), but rather a radius of about 20 km around the city, from the coast in the north to that in the south. This is the distance that could reasonably have been travelled by a peasant in a day, and represents the immediate agricultural hinterland of the city. In future research, I plan to extend the reach of this survey. 41. Shihab al-Din Abu ʿAbdallah Yaqut b. ʿAbdallah, Kitab Muʿjam al-Buldan (Jacut’s geographisches Wörterbuch), ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, 6 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866–73), vol. 3, p. 799. 42. Cf. the following statement: ‘The city was restored by the Moslems and became an administrative, military and commercial centre.’ Meron Benvenisti, The Crusaders in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1970), p. 191. 43. For these events (and many more), see Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, pp. 261–363. 44. This verb also has the meaning of ‘was populated’ and ‘became prosperous’, all of which would fit here and do not contradict each other. 45. ʿIzz al-Din Muhammad b. ʿAli ibn Shaddad al-Halabi, al-Aʿlaq al-Khatira fi Dhikr Umaraʾ al-Sham wa’l-Jazira, vol. 2, part 2, published as Liban, Jordanie, Palestine: Topographie historique d’Ibn Šaddād, ed. Sami Dahan [al-Dahhan] (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1963), p. 266. 46. Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Yahya ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar d’Ibn Fadl Allah al-ʿUmari (Shihab Fadl Allah b. Yahya b. Fadl Allah m. 749/1349): l’Égypte, la Syrie, le Higaz, ed. Ayman Fuʾad Sayyid (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1984), pp. 142–3. Hisham b. ʿAbd al-Manaf was the great grandfather of the prophet Muhammad. Al-Shafi’i (d. 820) was the founder of the legal school that carries his name. 47. See Hatim Mahamid, ‘The Construction of Islamic-Educational Institutions in Mamluk Gaza’, Nebula 4, no. 4 (December 2007), pp. 36–40. Available online at: www.nobleworld. biz/images/Mahamid3.pdf (accessed 31 October 2015). Mahamid counts nine madrasas from the Mamluk period. We have four extant inscriptions from such institutions; see below.

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48. For the bringing of Turkmen nomads to the Palestinian coast by Baybars, see Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk–Īlkhānid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 69–70. As early as 1263, Baybars was arranging the affairs of the Turkmen near Gaza; Muhyi al-Din ʿAbdallah ibn ʿAbd alZahir, al-Rawd al-Zahir fi Sirat al-Malik al-Zahir, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Khuwaytir (Riyadh: n.p., 1976), pp. 148–9. Under this sultan, the Turkmen were settled along the coast from Gaza to Antioch; ʿIzz al-Din Muhammad b. ʿAli ibn Shaddad al-Halabi, Taʾrikh al-Malik al-Zahir (= Die Geschichte des Sultans Baibars), ed. Ahmad Hutayt (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983), p. 335. In the diploma for the commander of the army of Gaza, Bedouins and Turkmen are mentioned together with Kurds as part of the auxiliary force in the region; Shihab al-Din Ahmad b.ʿAli al-Qalqashandi, Subh al-Aʿsha fi Sinaʿat al-Insha, 12 vols (Cairo: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa’l-Irshad al-Qawmi, 1963; repr. with corrections, Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Khidiyawiyya, 1913–22), vol. 12, p. 218. 49. In 1263, Baybars also met the leaders of local Bedouin tribes: al-ʿAbid, Jarm and Taʿlaba and was able to integrate them into the Mamluk political and military system. See Ibn ʿAbd al-Zahir, al-Rawd al-Zahir, p. 149. For Mamluk policy in general towards the Bedouin of Syria, see Mustafa A. Hiyari, ‘The Origins and Development of the Amīrate of the Arabs during the Seventh/Thirteenth and/Fourteenth Centuries’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38 (1975), pp. 509–24; Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks, pp. 64–9; and now Kurt Franz, ‘Bedouin and States: Framing the Mongol-Mamlūk Wars in Long-term History’, in Kurt Franz and Wolfgang Holzwarth (eds), Nomad Military Power in Iran and Adjacent Areas in the Islamic Period (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2015), pp. 29–105. 50. Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn ʿAbdallah ibn Battuta, Tuhfat al-Nuzzar fi Gharaʾib alAmsar wa-ʿAja’ib al-Asfar (= al-Rihla), published as Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, ed. and trans. Charles Defrémery and Beniamino R. Sanguinetti, 2nd edn (Paris: Collection d’Ouvrages Orientaux, 1874–9), vol. 1, pp. 113–14; the translation here is partially based on that of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 4 vols (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1958–2000), vol. 1, p. 73. Cf. Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn ʿAbdallah ibn Battuta, alRihla (Beirut: Dar al-Turab, 1969), pp. 50–1: wa’l-aswār ʿalayhā. Given evidence elsewhere that the city did not have a wall around it, this last possibility is clearly a mistake. 51. This name is transliterated in various ways. It is derived from a Turkish word čavlı, meaning ‘a (little) falcon’ of some type. See Jean Sauvaget, ‘Noms et surnoms de Mamelouks’, Journal Asiatique 238 (1950), p. 46; Gerald Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish (Oxford: Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 397 (root CBL), cf. p. 410 (čagrı). However, the officer’s personal name (ism) was Sanjar, while al-Jawli is here used as a nisba (in principle, this might be al-Jawliyyi, but was just too unwieldy) to show that his first patron was a Mamluk named Jawli, who had been a Mamluk of Sultan Baybars. With his first patron’s death, Sanjar al-Jawli was transferred to the Mamluks of Qalawun. Taqi al-Din Ahmad b. ʿAli al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-Mawaʿiz wa’l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa’l-Athar (= Kitab al-Khitat), ed. Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman Quttah al-ʿAdawi, 2 vols (Cairo: Dar al-Tibaʿah al-Misriyah, 1853–4), vol. 1, p. 398. 52. Salah al-Din Khalil ibn Aybak al-Safadi, al-Wafi bi’l-Wafayat, ed. Bernd Radtke, vol. 15 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979), p. 483 (for the entire biography, pp. 482–4); this translated text is embedded in a longer list of al-Jawli’s achievements and construction projects in Egypt and Syria. For more on this figure, see Amir Mazor, The Rise and Fall of a Muslim Regiment: The Manṣūriyya in the First Mamluk Sultanate, 678/1279–741/1341 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress; Bonn University Press, 2015), index. Mazor’s book is an excellent survey and analysis of the politics in this period of the Mamluk sultanate. This passage is translated and discussed in Katia Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām, BAR International Series 2130 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), pp. 51–2. There is no apparent remnant (at least identified as such) of al-Jawli’s caravanserai in Gaza.

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53. In fact, Ibn Taghri Birdi (1470) says, after listing all of the projects of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad in the city of Gaza, that it was he who ‘urbanised it, and gave it this form. Before that it was just one of the villages of Syria. [The Sultan] put a nāʾib over it, who was called malik al-umarāʾ. Before that [Gaza] had been nothing more than one of the hamlets of Ramla.’ Jamal al-Din Abu al-Mahasin Yusuf ibn Taghri Birdi, al-Nujum al-Zahira fi Muluk Misr wa’l-Qahira (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya and al-Hayʾa al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma li’l-Kitab, 1930–72), vol. 9, p. 193. Given the striking similarity of the beginning of this text to that of al-Safadi cited above, we can safely assume that Ibn Taghri Birdi took the earlier text and changed it as he saw fit, attributing this urban renewal project to the sultan and not to his governor. 54. Mamhud ʿAli Khalil Ata Allah, Niyabat Ghazza fi’l-ʿAhd al-Mamluki (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, 1986), pp. 187–8. Under Baybars, a district governor (wālī) not a provincial one (nāʾib) was appointed to run the city and its surroundings; Ibn Shaddad, Taʾrikh, p. 104. 55. Ellen V. Kenney, Power and Patronage in Medieval Syria: The Architecture and Urban Works of Tankiz al-Nāṣirī (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2009), pp. 12–13 and the studies mentioned in notes 79–80. For the wider historical context, see David Ayalon, ‘The Expansion and Decline of Cairo under the Mamlūks and its Background’, Itinéraires d’Orient: hommages à Claude Cahen, published in Res Orientales 6 (1994), pp. 13–20. 56. This information is derived from the evidence presented in Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, in the long section devoted to Gaza (Ghazzah). 57. This will be shown in forthcoming volumes of the CIAP devoted to Jerusalem. We should note, however, the difference between the Mamluk epigraphy of the two cities: in Jerusalem, most of the inscriptions are on individual buildings and projects, while in Gaza, many buildings have more than one inscription, particularly the Great Mosque with thirteen. 58. This list and short comments do not alleviate the need to analyse carefully the full range of Mamluk-era building in Gaza and its environs. A full discussion of these matters, however, is beyond the scope and nature of this article. See Mohamed-Moain Sadek, Die mamlukishche Architektur der Stadt Gaza (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1991); ‘Gaza, Art and Architecture’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2007–). 59. These sub-periods are not all of the same length: the first two reflect two distinct chapters in the history of Mamluk rule in Syria (from the beginning of this rule until the beginning of al-Nasir Muhammad’s third reign, and then this entire reign) and the next three are of approximately equal length. 60. There are three early indications of sultanic patronage in the city: (1) two large carved ‘felines’ (often called lions, but probably panthers or leopards), most surely from the time of Baybars (Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, p. 58, no. 10; the accompanying inscription has been lost); (2) two inscriptions commemorating work on the Great Mosque in 696/1298 by Sultan al-Mansur Lajin (r. 1296–8) (Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, pp. 75–8, nos 19̧–20); (3) two inscriptions commemorating further repair work on the Great Mosque from the second reign of al-Nasir Muhammad (1298–1309), when he was still just a puppet sultan (Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, pp. 80–4, nos 24–5). The final sultanic inscription is from the last Mamluk sultan to rule in Syria, al-Ashraf Qanṣuh al-Ghawri, apparently in 922/1516, not long before his defeat and death at the hands of the Ottomans at the Battle of Marj Dabiq (Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, pp. 183–6, no. 78). 61. For the Jewish community, see Yosef Braslavsky, ‘On the History of Jewish Settlement in Gaza in the 14th Century’ [Hebrew], Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society 3, no. 4 (1936), pp. 133–6; J. Kenaani, ‘The Jewish Population at Gaza in the Middle Ages’ [Hebrew], Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society 5, nos 1–2 (1936), pp. 33–41. For a Greek church possibly active under the Mamluks, see Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009), vol. 1, pp. 216–19 (no. 93). For testimony on a Greek community in Gaza in the late fifteenth

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62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

islamisation century, see Felix Fabri, Fr. Felicis Fabri Evagatorium in Terræ Sanctæ, Arabiæ et Ægypti peregrinationem, trans. Aubrey Stewart as The Wanderings of Felix Fabri (ca. A.D. 1480–1483), vol. 2, part 2 (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1893), pp. 432–3. See note 6 above for this work. Full details: Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Yahya ibn Fadlallah al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar: Qabaʾil al-ʿArab fi’l-Qarn al-Tasiʿ wa’l-Thamin al-Hijriyyayn, ed. Dorothea Krawulsky (Beirut: Markaz al-Islami li’l-Buhuth, 1985). RCEA full details: Étienne Combe et al. (eds), Répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe, 18 vols (Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1931–91). Here the author only makes passing reference to this inscription (as well as another from the Fatimid period) and refers us to the article ‘Niʿilya’ in a forthcoming volume of the CIAP. The village is also mentioned in an inscription from 958/1551 as containing waqf property supporting a mosque in nearby Majdal (CIAP, vol. 1, pp. 187–9, no. 16). An Ottoman inscription from 1241/1825 is also found in this village (CIAP, vol. 2, pp.143̧–4). Full details: Jacques Paviot, Projets de Croisade (v. 1290–v. 1330) (Paris: L’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2008). Uri Tal (ed. and trans.), Eretz Israel in Medieval Arabic Sources (634-1517): Selected Translations [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi; Ascalon: Ashkelon Academic College, 2014), p. 152 n. 232 makes this suggestion, but discusses other possible identification for the entry in Yaqut. Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geography, pp. 142–61: P76, P276, P296, M11, M21, M23, M25, M26, Z31, Z33, Z34, Z101, Z110, Z198. Dimra appears to be Z188, listed here as Dummar al-Najd, which are in the same general location. Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade (trans.), with preface and notes by Bellarmino Bagatti, Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384 by Frescobaldi, Gucci & Sigoli (Jerusalem: Franciscan Press, 1948), pp. 122, 178; Meshullam of Volterra (c. 1481), as found in Elkan Nathan Adler (ed. and trans.), Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1987), p. 180. If we can take the first Ottoman tax registers as a good indication of the situation of the Christians at the end of the Mamluk era, we can note that these were concentrated in two places: Gaza City and Darum. In 932/1525–6, there were 235 Christian households in the former survey (out of a total of 833 households plus forty-one Muslim bachelors) and fiftysix Christian households in the latter survey (out of a total of 140 households). In Darum, in 940–5/1533–9, there were 136 Christian households (plus twenty-six bachelors and forty religious figures – with families? – out of a total 1,528 households plus 120 bachelors and seventy-four religious figures) in the former and fifty-four households (and eight bachelors, out of 134 households, fourteen bachelors and two religious figures) in the latter. To simplify matters, Hütteroth (Palästina und Transjordanien im 16. Jahrhundert, p. 24) notes that a fifth of the population of Gaza City were Christians. As for the Jews, there were 199 households in Gaza in 932/1525–6 and 224 (plus nineteen bachelors) in 940–5/1533–9. No other Jews are recorded for the region of Gaza. For general Mamluk policy regarding the Syrian coast, see David Ayalon, ‘The Mamlūks and Naval Power: A Phase of the Struggle between Islam and Christian Europe’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities1, no. 8 (1967), pp. 1–12 (reprinted in David Ayalon, Studies on the Mamlūks of Egypt (1250–1517) [London: Variorum Reprints, 1977]); Albrecht Fuess, ‘Rotting Ships and Razed Harbours: The Naval Policy of the Mamlūks’, Mamlūk Studies Review 5 (2001), pp. 45–71. Abu ʿAbdallah Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Idrisi (c. 1154), Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq, published as Opus Geographicum, ed. Enrico Cerulli et al. (Naples and Rome: Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli and Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1970–9), p. 356: Gaza ‘is now very populous and is in the hands

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74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

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of the Greeks [al-Rūm!, meaning Crusaders, R.A.]. The port of [Gaza] is called Tida [or Taida, from Anthredon, R.A.].’ Translation based on Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land (Cambridge: Biberside Press, 1890), p. 442. For the names of the port of Gaza, see Benvenisti, Crusaders in the Holy Land, p. 190. Nimrod Luz, ‘Tripoli Reinvented. A Case of Mamluk Urbanization’, in Yaacov Lev (ed.), Town and Material Culture in the Medieval Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 52–72. One zāwiya and one mazār each have two inscriptions. On this maqām, see Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, pp.119–20. This structure, on the south-east outskirts of late Ottoman Gaza, contains the epitaph of the daughter of a Mamluk officer who died in 765/1364. CIAP, vol. 4, pp. 54–5, 59, 62–3, 91, 112–13, 115, 124–7, 144̧–5, 174–5. Sadek, Die mamlukische Architektur der Stadt Gaza, pp. 113–28, 145–51, 256–64. See ibid., pp. 326–7, for the zāwiya not mentioned in the CIAP. This has been recently surveyed and analysed by Or Amir, ‘Muslim Religious Life in the Safed Area during the 13th and 14th Centuries According to a “New-Old” Source’ [Hebrew], Cathedra 156 (2015), pp. 39–70, based on the Taʾrikh Safad by Shams al-Din Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Rahman al-ʿUthmani (fl. 1370s). Part of this source was published in Bernard Lewis, ‘An Arabic Account of the Province of Safed – I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 15 (1953), pp. 477–88. Clermont-Ganneau notes several shrines – of shaykhs or ‘prophets’ – in the area of Gaza: Bayt Hanun, Burayr, Barbara and Bayt Jirja. It is unclear, however, when these were constructed and it cannot yet be ascertained if they existed in the pre-Ottoman period. Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, Archaeological Researches in Palestine 1873–1874, trans. J. McFarlane (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1896), vol. 2, pp. 349–78, 439.

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Lewis, Bernard, ‘An Arabic Account of the Province of Safed – I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 15 (1953), pp. 477–88. Lewis, Bernard, ‘Studies in the Ottoman Archives – I’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16 (1954), pp. 469–501. Little, Donald P., ‘Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Baḥrī Mamlūks, 692–755/1293–1354’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39 (1976), pp. 552–69. Reprinted in Donald P. Little, History and Historiography of the Mamlūks (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). Little, Donald P., ‘Religion under the Mamluks’, The Muslim World 73 (1983), pp. 165–81. Reprinted in Donald P. Little, History and Historiography of the Mamlūks (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). Little, Donald P., History and Historiography of the Mamlūks (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). Luz, Nimrod, ‘Aspects of Islamization of Space and Society in Mamluk Jerusalem and its Hinterland’, Mamluk Studies Review 6 (2002), pp. 133–54. Luz, Nimrod, ‘Tripoli Reinvented. A Case of Mamluk Urbanization’, in Yaacov Lev (ed.), Town and Material Culture in the Medieval Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 52–72. Luz, Nimrod, The Mamluk City in the Middle East: History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Mahamid, Hatim, ‘The Construction of Islamic-Educational Institutions in Mamluk Gaza’, Nebula 4, no. 4 (December 2007), pp. 36–40. Available online at: www.nobleworld.biz/ images/Mahamid3.pdf (accessed 31 October 2015). al-Maqrizi, Taqi al-Din Ahmad b. ʿAli, Kitab al-Mawaʿiz wa’l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa’lAthar (= Kitab al-Khitat), ed. Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman Quttah al-ʿAdawi, 2 vols (Cairo: Dar al-Tibaʿah al-Misriyah, 1853–4). Mazor, Amir, The Rise and Fall of a Muslim Regiment: The Manṣūriyya in the First Mamluk Sultanate, 678/1279–741/1341 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress; Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2015). Mujir al-Din ʿAbd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-ʿUlaymi al-Hanbali, al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Taʾrikh al-Quds wa’l-Khalil, ed. by Muhammad Musa al-Muhtasib, 2 vols (Amman: Maktabat alMuhtasib, 1973). Paviot, Jacques, Projets de Croisade (v. 1290–v. 1330) (Paris: L’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2008). Prawer, Joshua, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). Pringle, Denys, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009). al-Qalqashandi, Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. ʿAli, Subh al-Aʿsha fi Sinaʿat al-Insha, 12 vols (Cairo: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa’l-Irshad al-Qawmi, 1963; repr. with corrections, Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Khidiyawiyya, 1913–22). Richard, Jean, ‘Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle’, Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979), pp. 157–73. Reprinted in Jean Richard, Croises, Missionaires et Voyageurs (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983). Sadek, Mohamed-Moain, Die mamlukishche Architektur der Stadt Gaza (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1991). Sadek, Mohamed-Moain, ‘Gaza, Art and Architecture’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2007–). al-Safadi, Salah al-Din Khalil ibn Aybak, al-Wafi bi’l-Wafayat, ed. Hans Ritter et al., 32 vols (Istanbul, etc.: Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft, 1931–2013). al-Safadi, Salah al-Din Khalil ibn Aybak, al-Wafi bi’l-Wafayat, vol. 15, ed. Bernd Radtke (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979).

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Sauvaget, Jean, ‘Noms et surnoms de Mamelouks’, Journal Asiatique 238 (1950), pp. 31–58. Schölch, Alexander, ‘The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (1985) pp. 485–505. Sharon, Moshe, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae (CIAP), 6 vols (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1997–). Sivan, Emmanuel, ‘Réfugiés syro-palestiniens au temps des Croisades’, Revue des Études Islamiques 35 (1967), pp. 135–48. Smail, Raymond Charles, Crusading Warfare (1097–1193): A Contribution to Medieval Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). Tal, Uri (ed. and trans.), Eretz Israel in Medieval Arabic Sources (634-1517): Selected Translations [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi; Ascalon: Ashkelon Academic College, 2014). Thorau, Peter, The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century, trans. Peter M. Holt (London and New York: Longman, 1992). Troadec, Anne, ‘Les Mamelouks dans l’espace syrien: Strategies de domination et résistances (658/1260–741/1341), doctoral thesis, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2014. al-ʿUmari, Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Yahya ibn Fadlallah, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik alAmsar d’Ibn Fadl Allah al-ʿUmari (Shihab Fadl Allah b. Yahya b. Fadl Allah m. 749/1349): l’Égypte, la Syrie, le Higaz, ed. Ayman Fuʾad Sayyid (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1984). al-ʿUmari, Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Yahya ibn Fadlallah, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar: Qabaʾil al-ʿArab fi’l-Qarn al-Tasiʿ wa’l-Thamin al-Hijriyyayn, ed. Dorothea Krawulsky (Beirut: Markaz al-Islami li’l-Buhuth, 1985). Vryonis, Speros, Jr, ‘Religious Change and Continuity in the Balkans and Anatolia from the 14th through the 16th Century’, in Speros Vryonis, Jr (ed.), Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1975), pp. 127–40. Walker, Bethany, ‘The Early Mamluk Age and the Strengthening of a Tradition’, in Guido Vannini and Michele Nucciotti (eds), La Transgiordania nei secoli XII–XIII e le ‘frontiere’ del Mediterraneo medieval, BAR International Series 2386 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), pp. 197–204. Wasserstein, David J., ‘Conversion and the Ahl al-Dhimma’, in Michael Cook (gen. ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4: Robert Irwin (ed.), Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 184–208. Wood, Philip, ‘Christians in the Middle East, 600–1000: Conquest, Competition and Conversion’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno de Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 23–50. Yaqut, Shihab al-Din Abu ʿAbdallah Yaqut b. ʿAbdallah, Kitab Muʿjam al-Buldan (Jacut’s geographisches Wörterbuch), ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, 6 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866–73). al-Yunini, Qutb al-Din Musa b. Muhammad, Dhayl Mirʾat al-Zaman fi Taʾrikh al-Aʿyan (Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, Osmania University, 1954–61), vol. 3, pp. 267–8. Ziada, Mustafa M., ‘The Mamluk Sultans to 1293’, in Kenneth Setton (gen. ed.), A History of the Crusades, vol. 2: Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard (eds), The Later Crusades 1189–1311 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 735–58.

Part III

The Muslim West

10 CONVERSION OF THE BERBERS TO ISLAM/ ISLAMISATION OF THE BERBERS Michael Brett

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he title of this chapter begs some three or four questions to be addressed before we get down to the details: Who are, and who were, the Berbers for the purpose of this exercise? Why single out the question of their conversion to Islam as distinct from, say, the conversion of all North Africans, Berbers, Latins and Greeks? And, as a corollary to that, what were they converted from? Finally, what in their case was meant by ‘conversion’ – was it an individual or collective decision to enter into the new faith or a more gradual, incremental assimilation into Islam as it evolved over the centuries? The answers are not straightforward, since the questions themselves are ideologically charged. Some seventy years ago, in La Berbérie musulmane et l’Orient au moyen âge, Georges Marçais gave an answer in the tradition of French colonial historiography; in other words, he took the Berbers for granted as the native population of North Africa which had been turned away from a western Latin Christian civilisation towards the oriental Arab civilisation of Islam by the Arab conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries.1 The unspoken conclusion, spelt out four years later in 1950 by Eugène Guernier in La Berbérie, l’Islam et la France, was that it was the mission of France to recover that population for the heirs of Rome.2 Thus its specifically religious conversion is treated by Marçais under the rubric of the first chapter, ‘L’orientalisation de la Berbérie’, in a sequence that begins with the submission of the Berbers, continues with their Islamisation and Arabisation, and the replacement of Latin by Arabic as the written language of the faith, and ends with the Kharijite reaction, that is the mid-eighth-century rebellion of these Islamised Berbers against the Arabs in the name of Islam. Despite the French interpretation of history that governs its approach, this is an important answer to the question of conversion, which nevertheless ignores the fact that, under that name, the Berbers themselves are an ideological construction not of the French, but of the Arabs. The native inhabitants of North Africa the Berbers may have been, but they were conceived as a generic whole only by the Arab conquerors, who classified them on the one hand as the ‘Barbar’ – a race descended from Noah on the basis of their barbarian language, which distinguished them from the Latin and Greek populations of North Africa – and on the other as Muslim on the basis of an initial submission to 189

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those conquerors. That in turn depended upon the classification of the great majority of these Barbar as pagan, neither Christian nor Jewish nor Magian, and thus compelled by their submission to be muslim (one who submits), subjected not only to the Arabs but to their God. Thus, slotted into the racial and religious hierarchy of the Arabs and their faith, the Barbar could enter into that oriental civilisation as it developed from the Arab conquest onwards.3 They began to do so much as Marçais said. The submission of the Barbar, the Berbers of Byzantine Africa, was sufficiently complete by the beginning of the eighth century to permit their recruitment into the Arab armies as these advanced across the Maghrib to Tangier and into Spain (see Figure 10.1), only to end in the middle of the century with the revolt of all these new Muslims against the Arabs in the name of their new faith. Out of that revolt emerged for the first time a sense of Berber nationhood predicated on the supposed purity of their Islam. Politically, that Berber consciousness ran through the three great revolutions of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries – the Fatimid, Almoravid and Almohad – which broadened the appeal of militant Islam to tribal populations that had escaped the original Arab conquest, to find its final expression in Ibn Khaldun’s monumental history of the race and its Islamic empires.4 Meanwhile, beneath the political unity that these empires imposed upon the Maghrib, a social and economic history of urbanisation and trade articulated by Islamic law drew the Berbers as a whole into a global Islamic society and outlook on the world.5 The cultural and religious consequences of this incorporation were not only the participation of the Berbers in Arabic and Islamic scholarship, but also its converse, the Islamisation of folk beliefs and practices with the spread of Sufism and its attendant cult of saints from the twelfth century onwards. Sufism and its saints progressively transformed the society as well as the culture of the Berber countryside, even as the Berbers themselves were progressively Arabised with the influx of Arab nomads into the Maghrib from the eleventh century onwards. The result was a religious revolution of a different order, which, by the end of Marçais’s period, had created a particular North African form and practice of Islam. In this history of progressive Islamisation, the question of conversion – at what point the Berbers may be said to have become Muslim – seems if not irrelevant, then at best incremental. The irony is that in the course of this Islamisation the Berbers themselves, with their language and ways of life, were in retreat, no longer politically dominant and well on the way to becoming a minority confined to the mountains and deserts. Their resuscitation by the French as the aboriginal population of la Berbérie has indeed led to the appearance of a modern Berber nationalism in independent North Africa, but this is notably secular rather than religious.6 To take this line of argument any further would be to follow Alfred Bel in his projected trilogy, La Religion musulmane en Berbérie, of which only the first volume was published back in 1938.7 But, since the Islamisation of the Berbers did indeed begin with the Arab conquest, it is more useful for the present purpose to start at the beginning with the questions of which Berbers the Arabs first encountered; what, in the first instance, these Berbers may have been converted from; and in what did their initial conversion, their acceptance of Islam, actually consist? The problem is with the sources, which not only tell the story of the conquest from the point of view of the

Figure 10.1 Arab expansion into North Africa and Spain.

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conquerors, but do so in retrospect from the ninth century onwards.8 Thus the ninthcentury account of the conquest by Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam belongs to the genre of futūḥ, or ‘conquest’, literature, concerned on the one hand to celebrate the imposition of the divine order on the world and more particularly to show how this was done according to the law of Islam as this was becoming established in the doctrines of the schools.9 From this and other works of the same kind, notably the Kitab Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri,10 sprang the narrative which was elaborated over the centuries to end in the fourteenth century with the works of Ibn ʿIdhari11 and Ibn Khaldun.12 On inspection, however, what emerges from the account of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam is something like an apology, an attempt to reconcile the realities of the conquest with the ideal of its achievement. Thus the ‘Barbar’, the race categorised for the purpose of this achievement under the name which has stuck to them as the Berbers, are obscurely divided into two branches, the Butr and the Baranis. It has been supposed that these were respectively nomads and sedentaries, but all we are told is that some of the Baranis were Christian, while the Arabs recruited from the Butr. Whoever they were, the Christian Baranis should then have been classified along with the Afariqa – ‘the Africans’, the Latinate Christians of the Byzantine province – as dhimmīs, subjected to a poll tax in exchange for their submission as a recognised People of the Book. As for the rest, Baranis and Butr alike were deemed to be pagans, whose islām, or ‘submission’, to the Arabs entailed their acceptance of the Islamic religion and their submission to God. However, two narratives then emerge to qualify this simple story. Thus for Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam, the Barbar were first encountered in Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, where they initially submitted, subsequently rebelled and were duly punished, after their resubmission by the imposition of a tribute of slaves. In other words, a legal justification has been provided for a conquest which from the beginning rewarded itself with booty, in this case most notably slaves, both men and women. By the ninth century, when the conquest narrative was established and the islām or ‘submission’ of the Barbar was indeed held to have entailed their acceptance of Islam, the enslavement of Muslims was illegal, and for a jurist such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam it was necessary to explain it away. The enslavement of the Barbar along the coast from Egypt had nevertheless resulted in the appearance in the ranks of the Arabs of a body of mawālī muslimūn, ‘muslim/Muslim clients’, whom we first hear of at Tripoli in the 680s; women, who may have been in the majority, are mentioned chiefly as a tribute to Damascus. Meanwhile to the west, as the Arab armies advanced to the conquest of Byzantine Africa, a narrative of alliance rather than submission enters into the tale. Once again we have a story of initial acceptance followed by rebellion, final defeat and ultimate submission. But Qayrawan, the name of the future capital of the Arab province of Ifriqiya, founded about 670 by the legendary hero ʿUqba b. Nafiʿ, is most probably an Arabisation of takirwan, a Berber ‘place of assembly’. ʿUqba’s successor went on to govern from this place in alliance with the Berber prince Kasila. Kasila, however, went on to slay ʿUqba on his return from the east about 683 and proceeded to rule by himself from this takirwan, seemingly in alliance with the Byzantines, who continued to hold the old capital Carthage down to its final fall in 698. The prospect of a native Berber kingdom in the old Byzantine province of Africa ended with Kasila’s death in battle with an Arab force in 686; however, when the Arabs returned in 695 to achieve its final conquest, they were initially repulsed by a second Berber coalition under the legendary figure of the Kahina, the ‘Prophetess’. She is alleged by Ibn Khaldun to have

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been Jewish, but indications from the earlier sources all point to her Christianity, unsurprising in a country largely Christian for the past 400 years.13 However, when finally defeated in 701, so the story goes, she had not only earned her title by predicting her death in battle at the hands of the Arabs, but had commended her two sons to the victorious Hasan b. al-Nuʿman. These were then duly received into the army and faith of the conquerors at the head of 12,000 of their warriors. In this way, they and their followers would have converted, not so much from paganism, but from a blend of the Christianity which must have governed the relations of these Berbers with the Byzantines for the previous 150 years. More importantly, we see them accepting Islam as a condition of their joining with the Arabs as allies rather than subjects. The story itself is not improbable: a Berber chieftain fighting the French in Morocco acted just as the Kahina is said to have done.14 As a legend of origin, not only does it stand for the incorporation of these Berbers as Muslims into the Arab armies, but the token number of 12,000 – 6,000 each under the command of the two sons, then 12,000 under the command of the elder – becomes the 12,000 commanded by the Berber Tariq at Tangier, the force he led to conquer Visigothic Spain in 711. Whether or not Tariq was that son of the Kahina under an Arab name, the whole story may once have provided him with an appropriate ancestry as a Berber high in the service of the Commander of the Faithful at Damascus. In the record, however, he appears as the mawlā, or ‘client’, of Musa b. Nusayr, the governor of the new province of Ifriqiya, who from 705 to 710 employed his Berber forces to advance from Qayrawan to Tangier. As mawlā of Musa, Tariq was perhaps only the most notable of a number of Berber commanders taken into the personal service of the new governor on his arrival in the Maghrib as members of his staff. But he disappears from the record when both he and Musa were summoned back to Damascus in 715 to account for their doings in Spain, leaving behind his Berber warriors to continue with its conquest. Meanwhile in North Africa, the prospect of an alliance of relative equals came to nothing. Musa’s campaigns to the west had been nakedly for booty, mainly slaves; these continued under his successors, whether over the Pyrenees in France or overseas to Sicily and Sardinia, or in North Africa up into the mountains and southwards and westwards into the Sahara and Morocco. Twenty years later, under ʿUbaydallah b. al-Habhab, the governor appointed by Caliph Hisham at Damascus as part of his attempt to regularise the administration of the empire, his deputy at Tangier, al-Muradi, proceeded to the takhmīs of the Berbers, that is, categorising them all as fayʾ, ‘booty’, of which a fifth was due to the Commander of the Faithful whether or not they were kuffār – infidels conquered in the manner of Musa b. Nusayr – or muslimūn/Muslims.15 According to the History of the Coptic Patriarchs, the result of such treatment under ʿUbaydallah was a tax or tribute paid by the Berbers in the form of women and Persian lambskins, a luxury which involved beating the ewes to induce premature birth and which was equally resented. Meanwhile, the status of the Berbers recruited by Musa into his guards remained ambiguous; in 720, they murdered the governor Yazid b. Abi Muslim, who had branded them on the left arm with the word ḥarasī, ‘my guard’, and on the right with his name, in effect as his slaves.16 By 740, right across North Africa, the islām or submission of the Barbar treated in this way, whether they were those simply conquered, conscripted as mawālī or recruited as allies, had turned to revolt against the Arabs in the name of their Islam, the faith they had been obliged to profess, for the right that it represented against the wrong done by its rulers.17

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The Islam for this purpose was Kharijism, the secessionist credo of those who had ‘gone out’ of the army of ʿAli at the Battle of Siffin in 657, which had turned into violent hostility to the Umayyads in Iraq on the part of the Azraqis or ‘Blues’ and the Sufris or ‘Yellows’ and more quiet opposition on the part of the Ibadis or ‘Whites’. By the eighth century, this opposition had taken doctrinal form in an argument over the status of the sinner, who was held to have ‘gone out’ of the community and thus be worthy of death. Applied to the leader of the community, in other words the Caliph, this was a prescription for revolt. Its corollary, that only the best Muslim was entitled to lead the community of the faithful, irrespective of race, had an obvious appeal to the Berbers of the empire in North Africa and Spain. Fanned therefore by the revolutionary preaching of Kharijites from Iraq, the rebellion that broke out in 740 at Tangier and immediately appeared in Ifriqiya was led by a number of upstart claimants to the Caliphate. Such uncoordinated risings failed where the Abbasids succeeded in ousting the Umayyads. Nevertheless, under their various leaders, they broke up the Arab empire in North Africa and, in doing so, precipitated the breaking away of al-Andalus. There, the rebellion of Berbers along the line of the Pyrenees and the northern frontier helped bring to a halt the conquest of northern Spain and the advance into France, which came to an end with the fall of Narbonne to the Franks in 759.18 In North Africa itself, Ifriqiya initially became independent under a great-grandson of ʿUqba b. Nafiʿ, but in the 750s fell to a second Kharijite attack, first Sufri and then Ibadi. Unlike the initial risings, the success of the Ibadites who took control of Qayrawan in 758 was down to a more methodical winning of the Berbers of the Jabal Nafusa in Tripolitania by missionaries from Iraq led by Abu’l-Khattab al-Maʿafiri, who had become their imam and taken control of Tripoli. In 761, a determined effort by the Abbasids to recover Ifriqiya for the empire drove them out only for Abu’l-Khattab’s deputy, the Iranian Ibn Rustam, to establish a new capital for himself and his Berber followers at Tahart in western Algeria. For the next decade, he and the Ibadites of Tripolitania returned to the attack upon Ifriqiya until it was finally brought under Abbasid control, leaving Ibn Rustam as the imam of a swathe of tribal Berbers stretching from Tahart through the Djerid of southern Ifriqiya to the Jabal Nafusa and the Fezzan. Meanwhile, the Sufri Abu Qurra had taken possession of Tlemcen as caliph, while Sijilmasa in the oases of the Tafilelt in south-eastern Morocco had been founded by the equally Sufri Midrarids, to form with the Ibadites a Kharijite Berber world created, as Ibn Rustam’s successor ʿAbd al-Wahhab is recorded as saying, by the swords of the Nafusa, but sustained by the wealth of the Mazata, the Berber nomads of the northern Sahara.19 In other words, having been made by force of arms, it flourished on the trade which had followed the flag of the Arab conquests, from east to west through Tahart into Spain and from north to south across the Sahara for slaves and gold.20 Its Islam had acquired an economic value as the creed of a merchant community. Politically, meanwhile, by the ninth century Islam had been accepted by the Berbers instead of Christianity as a principle of authority for leadership and for state formation in the Maghrib, an acceptance that proved to be permanent. This was demonstrated not only by the Iranian Rustamids at Tahart, but also by the welcome given to the Arab Idrisids at Fes on the strength of their very different claims to the inheritance of the Prophet, while its appeal as a revolutionary cause for collective action was evidenced by the Barghawata on the Atlantic plains of Morocco, imitating the Arabs in their jihad in the name of a Berber Islam with a Berber prophet and a Berber Quran.21

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And, as these examples show, Islam had lost any necessary connection with the Arabs, becoming indeed the faith of their enemies in the case of the Kharijite Berbers, for whom Islam had become the proof of Barbar nationhood. Thus the polemics generated by the Berber rebellion turned up from the ninth century onwards in traditions from the Prophet and ʿUmar b. al-Khattab that Ifriqiya was one of the gates of hell, and that the Barbar were the wickedest people in the world.22 In the Ibadi literature of Tahart, on the other hand, the Barbar appeared to the opposite effect in Prophetic tradition as the purest of Muslims, destined to restore the true faith to the Holy Places after their desecration by the Arabs.23 That sense of a Muslim Berber nationhood continued through the centuries, through the three great revolutions of the central Middle Ages – the Fatimid, Almoravid and Almohad24 – to find literary expression at the beginning of the fourteenth century in a work titled Mafakhir al-Barbar, or ‘Boasts of the Berbers’, unfortunately fragmentary and anonymous, but reciting their past achievements.25 More importantly, it was the inspiration for Ibn Khaldun’s monumental account of their history in his Kitab al-ʿIbar,26 and in his Muqaddima it was formulated into a theory of civilisation in general.27 Meanwhile, from its beginning in the eighth century, the Islamisation of the Berbers continued much less obtrusively in a variety of ways that most probably began with the proliferation of the Muslim city across North Africa. As seen in the first instance at Qayrawan, this was an Islamised version of the old Roman city that the Romans had systematically employed to colonise and civilise the populations of their empire in North Africa. In the new Islamic city, the forum, the central meeting place with its temples and law courts surrounded by markets and baths, was replaced for the purpose by the courtyard mosque; the difference was that, in this monarchical society, the magistrates of the original Roman city had been replaced by princes, evolving from provincial governors into independent dynasts, whose seats migrated from the centre of the city to the periphery and eventually outside, turning as they did so into palatial fortresses. Outside Ifriqiya, the process can be seen at work in Idrisid Morocco in the ninth and tenth centuries, which from the seat of the dynasty at Fes – itself a new foundation in place of Roman Volubilis – was colonised by Idrisid princelings in the form of little capitals centred on the mosque, the market and the castle.28 Proliferating along the new trade routes from east to west, and increasingly from north to south across the Sahara, these were so many poles of economic and political attraction for rural populations which exposed them to the dominant culture of Islam. Meanwhile, those same populations were recruited into the armies or into the military service of the monarchies, and it was only a matter of time before they themselves provided the rulers for the Berber dynasties which governed the Maghrib down to the sixteenth century in the name of Islam. Under their fluctuating sway, the spread of Sufism chimed with the proliferation of the saint or holy man, who in the countryside became a focus of society as a coloniser of the land, a peacekeeper and an arbiter of disputes.29 In life and death, his residence and tomb became a source of baraka, or ‘blessing’, a place of visitation and pilgrimage that sanctified the land as well as the people. By the early eighteenth century, Islamisation in all its forms was so far complete that Joseph Morgan, British vice consul at Algiers, could write: There is not one natural African, on this side the Niger, who if asked, of what Religion he is, will not, with Indignation in his Countenance, on account of so affronting a Question, immediately reply: ‘I am, God be praised, a Mussulman.’30

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Notes 1. Georges Marçais, La Berbérie musulmane et l’Orient au moyen âge (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1946; repr. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1991). 2. Eugène Guernier, La Berbérie, l’Islam et la France: le destin de l’Afrique du Nord, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions de l’Union Française, 1950). 3. Cf. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 81–3. 4. Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar (7 vols, Bulaq, 1848; 14 vols, Beirut, 1983); the section on North Africa was edited by M. de Slane as Taʾrikh al-Duwal al-Islamiyya bi’l-Maghrib, 2 vols (Algiers: n.p., 1847), and translated as Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique du Nord, 4 vols (Paris, 1852; new edn, Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1969). 5. Cf. Michael Brett, ‘The Islamisation of Morocco from the Arabs to the Almoravids’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. I. 6. For this account, and for what follows, cf. Brett and Fentress, Berbers, ch. 3, ‘The unification of North Africa by Islam’, and ch. 4, ‘The Arabization of North Africa’; ch. 8, ‘Berbers and Berberism’, updated by Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), which deals with the present situation. 7. A. Bel, La religion musulmane en Berbérie, vol. 1: Établissement et développement de l’Islam en Berbérie du VIIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1938). 8. Cf. Michael Brett, ‘The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From 500 BC to 1050 AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 490–5, 506. 9. Cf. R. Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ‘Abdalh’akam et la conquête de l’Afrique du Nord par les Arabes: Étude critique’, in R. Brunschvig, Études sur l’Islam classique et l’Afrique du Nord (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), a critical review of the edition and translation of the relevant chapter of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, ed. C. C. Torrey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922) by A. Gateau, Conquête de l’Afrique du Nord et de l’Espagne (Algiers: Éditions Carbonel, 1942). 10. Al-Baladhuri, Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, ed. M. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1863–6). 11. Ibn ʿIdhari al-Marrakushi, Kitab al-Bayan al-Mughrib, vol. 1: ed. G. S. Colin and É. LéviProvençal, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord de la conquéte au XIe siêcle (Leiden: Brill, 1948). 12. See above note 4. 13. Cf. Mohamed Talbi, ‘Un nouveau fragment de l’histoire de l’Occident musulman (62–196/682– 812), l’épopée d’al-Kāhina’, in Mohamed Talbi, Études d’histoire ifriqiyenne et de civilisation musulmane médiévale (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1982), pp. 125–67. 14. Ibid., pp. 160–1. 15. Ibn ʿIdhari, Bayan, pp. 51–2. 16. Ibid., p 48. 17. Cf. Brett, ‘Arab Conquest’, pp. 516–18. 18. Cf. Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989), pp. 107–9, 150, 173–4. 19. Cf. Brett, ‘Arab Conquest’, pp. 522–5; for the Ibadites, see Elizabeth Savage, A Gateway to Hell, a Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997), and for the quotation, p. 113. 20. Cf. Michael Brett, ‘Ifrīqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century a.d.’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. II, pp. 356–8. 21. Cf. al-Bakri, Description de l’Afrique septentrionale, ed. and trans. M. de Slane, revised edn (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1965), text pp.134–41, trans. pp. 259–71; Mohamed

conversion of the berbers to islam

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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Talbi, ‘Hérésie, acculturation et nationalisme des Berbères Barghawāṭa’, in Mohamed Talbi, Études d’histoire ifriqiyenne et de civilisation musulmane médiévale (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1982), pp. 81–104. Cf. Marçais, La Berbérie musulmane, p. 20; Mohamed Talbi, L’émirat aghlabide (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1966), p. 19. Ibn Sallam, Kitab fi Badʾ al-Islam wa-Sharaʾiʿ al-Din /Kitab Ibn Sallam, ed. W. Schwartz and Salim ibn Yaʿqub (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986), pp. 121–5. Cf. Brett and Fentress, Berbers, ch. 3, ‘The Unification of North Africa by Islam’. Published by E. Lévi-Provençal under the title Fragments historiques sur les Berbères au moyen-âge (Rabat: Moncho, 1934). See above note 4. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. F. Rosenthal, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), vol. 1, passim. Cf. Brett, ‘The Islamisation of Morocco’. Cf., for example, Michael Brett, ‘Arabs, Berbers and Holy Men in Southern Ifrīqiya, 650-750 h/1250–1350 ad’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. XI, and Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). J. Morgan, A Complete History of Algiers (London, 1731; repr. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 71.

Bibliography al-Bakri, Description de l’Afrique septentrionale, ed. and trans. M. de Slane, revised edn (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1965). al-Baladhuri, Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, ed. M. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1863–6). Bel, A., La religion musulmane en Berbérie, vol. 1: Établissement et développement de l’islam en Berbérie du VIIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1938). Brett, Michael, ‘The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From 500 BC to 1050 AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 490–555. Brett, Michael, and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Brett, Michael, ‘The Islamisation of Morocco from the Arabs to the Almoravids’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. I. Brett, Michael, ‘Ifrīqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century a.d.’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. II. Brett, Michael, ‘Arabs, Berbers and Holy Men in Southern Ifrīqiya, 650–750 h/1250–1350 ad’, in Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldūn and the Medieval Maghrib (Aldershot: Variorum Reprints, 1999), no. XI. Brunschvig, R., ‘Ibn ‘Abdalh’akam et la conquête de l’Afrique du Nord par les Arabes: Étude critique’, in R. Brunschvig, Études sur l’Islam classique et l’Afrique du Nord (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), no. XI. Collins, Roger, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989). Gateau, A., Conquête de l’Afrique du Nord et de l’Espagne (Algiers: Éditions Carbonel, 1942). Gellner, Ernest, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). Guernier, Eugène, La Berbérie, l’Islam et la France: le destin de l’Afrique du Nord, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions de l’Union Française, 1950). Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, ed. C. C. Torrey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922). Ibn ʿIdhari al-Marrakushi, Kitab al-Bayan al-Mughrib, vol. 1: ed. G. S. Colin and É. LéviProvençal, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord de la conquéte au XIe siêcle (Leiden: Brill, 1948).

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Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar, ed. M. de Slane as Taʾrikh al-Duwal al-Islamiyya bi’l-Maghrib, 2 vols (Algiers: n.p., 1847). Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-ʿIbar (7 vols, Bulaq, 1848; 14 vols, Beirut, 1983). Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique du Nord, 4 vols (Paris, 1852; new edn, Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1969). Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. F. Rosenthal, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Ibn Sallam, Kitab fi Badʾ al-Islam wa-Sharaʾiʿ al-Din / Kitab Ibn Sallam, ed. W. Schwartz and Salim ibn Yaʿqub (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986). Lévi-Provençal, É., Fragments historiques sur les Berbères au moyen-âge (Rabat: Moncho, 1934). Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Marçais, Georges, La Berbérie musulmane et l’Orient au moyen âge (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1946; repr. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1991). Morgan, J., A Complete History of Algiers (London, 1731; repr. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970). Savage, Elizabeth, A Gateway to Hell, a Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997). Talbi, Mohamed, L’émirat aghlabide (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1966). Talbi, Mohamed, ‘Un nouveau fragment de l’histoire de l’Occident musulman (62–196/682– 812), l’épopée d’al-Kāhina’, in Mohamed Talbi, Études d’histoire ifriqiyenne et de civilisation musulmane médiévale (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1982), pp. 125–67. Talbi, Mohamed, ‘Hérésie, acculturation et nationalisme des Berbères Barghawāṭa’, in Mohamed Talbi, Études d’histoire ifriqiyenne et de civilisation musulmane médiévale (Tunis: Université de Tunis, 1982), pp. 81–104.

11 THE ISLAMISATION OF AL-ANDALUS: RECENT STUDIES AND DEBATES* Maribel Fierro

D

escribing al-Andalus – that is, the Muslim-ruled lands that now comprise Spain and Portugal – in the tenth century, the geographers al-Muqaddasi and Ibn Hawqal convey a landscape filled with Islamic markers such as mosques and religious scholars while lacking others such as storytellers (quṣṣāṣ). Ibn Hawqal refers to some rural areas where thousands of Christians ignorant of urban life resided. These rebelled from time to time, taking refuge in fortresses from which they fought ferociously and persistently against Muslim armies, and risking eventual extermination through their fierce resistance to being brought to obedience.1 This description fits the first decades of the tenth century, when the eighth Umayyad amir of Cordoba, ʿAbd al-Rahman III, proceeded to ‘pacify’ those territories of al-Andalus where not only Christians but also Arabs, Berbers and new converts defied Umayyad rule. This successful endeavour eventually led to his proclamation as caliph in the land that an army of Arab and mostly Berber Muslims had conquered back in 711. We have here the main ingredients for any reconstruction of the process of Islamisation of al-Andalus: the ethnic and religious components of the population; the competition among them for rule, which in turn influenced the process of conversion; the visual and auditory transformation of space through Islamic markers such as mosques, the call to prayer, ways of speaking and dressing, and most especially through the emergence and formation of the world of Islamic scholarship, which was the decisive step in consolidating an Islamic society in the Iberian Peninsula. Space could also be transformed by those resisting the process of Islamisation, for example through the erection of fortresses by the local population. This is understood by some modern scholars as reflecting a different social, political and religious order in which monasteries and churches such as those built by the most famous convert rebel, ʿUmar b. Hafsun (d. 918), were also an integral part.

* I wish to thank Virginia Vázquez for her help. This chapter has been written within the KOHEPOCU research project funded by an ERC Advanced Research Grant.

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The aim of this chapter is not to offer a specific reconstruction of these developments, but to familiarise the reader with, first, a chronological overview of such developments and, second, the main approaches taken by scholarship to understand them. We examine them from the vantage point of different scholarly disciplines in an attempt to provide an interdisciplinary overview.

From the Conquest to the Cordoban Caliphate: An Overview In the year 711, Muslim troops consisting mostly of Berbers crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, defeating King don Rodrigo and destroying the Visigothic kingdom.2 With the waves of conquerors that followed, the Iberian Peninsula fell under Muslim control, although settlements of Muslims were few in many regions and almost non-existent in the most remote northern area. There are varying accounts of how the conquest was legally conceptualised in the different regions, with pacts being established with some local lords. Eventually, dhimmī status was considered to have been granted to the Christians that constituted the majority of the population and also to the Jews, whose presence is mentioned in the Arabic sources in spite of their forced conversion under Visigothic rule and whose numbers in any case must have been low. No garrison cities were founded and the Muslim conquerors settled in the land collecting the tribute paid by the local population. The twenty-one amirs who ruled in the name of the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus between the conquest and the establishment of an independent Umayyad emirate were appointed most of the time via Qayrawan, the town which eventually became the capital of the largely autonomous Aghlabid Ifriqiya. Three decades after the conquest, in 741, there was a new influx of Muslim troops. The Syrian army sent from Damascus to fight the Berber rebels in North Africa was defeated and part of it took refuge in the Iberian Peninsula. The Syrian junds (regiments), which included many Umayyad clients (mawālī), settled in different areas of the Iberian Peninsula and with the increase in the numbers of Arabs there was also an increase in the rate of Arabisation and thus of Islamisation. In 756, an Umayyad prince escaping the massacre of his relatives at the hands of the Abbasids in the East crossed the Straits and, with the support of the Umayyad mawālī and the Yemenis who had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, carved an independent polity for himself in which Arabic ethnicity and culture played a major role. ʿAbd al-Rahman I thus started a dynasty with its capital in Cordoba whose members ruled first as amirs and then, from the tenth century, as caliphs, a dynasty that lasted until 1031 when the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus was abolished.3 Under the successors of ʿAbd al-Rahman I, the initial stages of the reception of Medinan jurisprudence – soon to be reduced to Malikism – took place, with Hanafism finding a hostile environment given its links with the Umayyads’ enemies, the Abbasids.4 Under ʿAbd al-Rahman II (r. 822–52), court culture gained much impulse through the reception of men, practices and ideas coming from the East.5 Religious scholars (the ulama) grew in numbers and became increasingly assertive regarding their role in society, and the characteristic features of the Islamic world of scholarship emerged: networks of teachers and students for whom a stay in Cordoba and travel to the East for study played crucial roles, a set of cultural practices informing

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the relationships among themselves, with other social groups and most importantly with the ruler, together with a body of texts the study and interpretation of which was the basis on which their authority over the rest of society resided.6 With the emergence of scholars in towns, judges started to be recruited among them. Judges thus ceased to be soldiers and instead were now ulama, and converts as well as Arabs were admitted to their ranks.7 The process of Arabisation in Cordoba motivated one prominent Christian there, Alvarus, to complain that Christian youths were attracted to Arabic poetry and failed to write in decent Latin.8 Out of a sense of cultural and religious threat, a Christian faction emerged that decided to oppose acculturation by seeking voluntary martyrdom, with some dozens of Cordoban Christians being executed by the Muslim authorities for publicly insulting Islam and its prophet. Some of those executed were children of mixed marriages and had been brought up as Christians by female family members. Trials for blasphemy against Islam took place coinciding with the movement of the Cordoban ‘voluntary martyrs’. Under the reign of ʿAbd al-Rahman II’s successor, the Christian secretary Qumis b. Antunyan was pressured to convert to Islam, with doubts voiced later about whether he had died as a crypto-Christian.9 From the mid-ninth century onwards, Andalusi scholars returning from their travels (riḥla) to the East brought back with them the science of the Prophetic tradition (ʿilm al-ḥadīth) and al-Shafiʿi’s legal doctrines. These were received with hostility by some sectors of the Maliki legal establishment, while others advocated convergence and conciliation between the ahl al-raʾy (proponents of the use of personal informed opinion in law) and the ahl al-ḥadīth (proponents of the use of hadith as a source of law).10 Muʿtazilism had a limited influence on a number of individuals.11 On the political level, during the second half of the ninth century, a period known as the fitna (discord), Arab, Berber and ‘indigenous’ lords (the latter referred to as muwalladūn)12 ‘rebelled’ and seized power in different areas of the Iberian Peninsula. The bid for autonomy was especially strong in the frontier areas.13 Internal fragmentation and challenges to Umayyad rule coincided with an external threat from the Ismailis, who in 909 managed to establish a Fatimid caliphate in Ifriqiya.14 After taking the main fortress of the most dangerous rebels, the Hafsunids, ʿAbd al-Rahman III proclaimed himself caliph in 929. In 940, after having been defeated by the Christians and betrayed by the Muslim frontier lords in the battle of al-Khandaq, the new caliph withdrew from military activity and started to build his palatine town of Madinat al-Zahra on the slope of a mountain near Cordoba. This construction activity was a crucial facet of a far-reaching and complex effort to strengthen caliphal political and religious legitimacy both internally and externally, and in this area most especially against the religious appeal of Ismailism and Fatimid expansionist policies.15 The caliphate was meant to erase all internal differences among Muslims, thus creating an Andalusi identity.16 In this context, the Cordoban judge Mundhir b. Saʿid (d. 966) allowed the use of the nisba ‘al-Ansari’ by those who lacked an Arab nisba, emphasising the religious marker above the ethnic.17 By the tenth century, Malikism reigned alone and represented the Sunni identity of al-Andalus in the legal sphere. Bāṭinī (esoteric) trends circulated among the more philosophically oriented with figures such as Ibn Masarra (d. 931), whose works claimed that the Quran was the explanation of creation and that human beings could

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reach prophethood through spiritual purification and through the process of reasoning. While Ibn Masarra kept his distance from the ruler, the career of Maslama b. Qasim al-Qurtubi (d. 964) – the author of the Ghayat al-Hakim on astrological magic and the Rutbat al-Hakim on alchemy, as well as the transmitter of the Neoplatonic corpus of Arabic texts known as the Rasaʾil Ikhwan al-Ṣafaʾ to al-Andalus – attests to the existence of interest in such matters at court, perhaps as a way for the Umayyads to have their own ‘Batinism’ to counteract that of the Fatimids.18 Gifts brought by a Byzantine embassy led to the translation of Orosius’ History from Latin into Arabic and to the revision of the Arabic translation of Dioscorides’ Greek Materia Medica,19 while al-Hakam II (r. 961–76), both as heir to the throne and as caliph, constructed his image as that of a ‘wise king’ promoting scientific activities and the foundation of a caliphal library.20

Debates on Islamisation: What is Discussed and Why21 The three centuries dealt with in this brief overview is generally considered to be the period in which both the Arabisation and the Islamisation of al-Andalus gained impetus, with Arabisation being instrumental in opening the way to Islamisation.22 As mentioned above, Arabs had settled in the land, mixing with the local population and thus promoting their transformation into muwalladūn, the term used to refer to the non-Arabs born among the Arabs and educated as Arabs. Arabness is what is stressed in the term muwalladūn, with religious conversion to Islam not being necessarily implied, and in fact we find in the sources a distinction between al-muwalladūn and al-musālima (converts).23 There are divergent views regarding how a reliable chronology can be established for the process of conversion to Islam. Richard Bulliet’s proposal to use onomastic data in order to reconstruct such a process has been influential, with most scholars assuming – following his results – that by the end of the tenth century the majority of the local population that would convert had done so. Nonetheless, there have been corrections and caveats formulated by different scholars, who have not, however, yet articulated an alternative vision.24 Arabisation seems to have helped weaken the identity of the Christian community, with the facility of emigration to the Christian lands on the other side of the frontier also contributing to their decrease in certain areas. Mikel de Epalza has pointed out that some of the choices made by some Christian authorities led to a reduction in the number of episcopal sees, a scarcity of bishops affected the numbers of the clergy, and the absence of clergy weakened the communities, exposing them to Islamisation.25 Arabisation, on the other hand, did strengthen the Jewish community, which started to flourish culturally after the establishment of the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate.26 During the period under consideration here there was no serious or continuous threat from the Christians – be they Carolingians, Byzantines, ‘Galicians’ (Asturians and Leonese), Catalans or Basques – or from the Vikings. In spite of this, only a few years after the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (r. 717–20) is said to have thought it advisable that the Muslims should abandon it, as he was concerned that their survival there was not ensured.27 This concern is also reflected in a tradition predicting that the Christians would regain territorial

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control in the Peninsula, as it would be impossible for the Muslims to stop them, and that the Muslims would eventually have to flee from al-Andalus to Ifriqiya.28 This tradition might easily be thought to have originated after such Christian advance actually became a reality, especially after the fall of Toledo in 1085 and then the loss of the main southern towns (Cordoba, Seville and Valencia) in the first half of the thirteenth century, when the emigration of Andalusis towards North Africa intensified. But in fact this is a tradition recorded in the Kitab al-Fitan by the Eastern author Nuʿaym b. Hammad (d. 842), which circulated in al-Andalus during the ninth century and reflects an apparent feeling that Muslim control in the Iberian Peninsula was precarious. Its most enduring legacy is its description of al-Andalus as an island (jazīra) surrounded by the sea and by the Christians,29 and the myth of the location of the legendary ‘Copper City’ in al-Andalus, a legend in which the Iberian Peninsula appears as a territory on the border of the known world, occupying a contested space between order and chaos. The legend is found in one of the earliest texts written by an Andalusi, the Taʾrikh by ʿAbd al-Malik b. Habib.30 With ʿAbd al-Malik b. Habib – a scholar who died in 852, almost a century and a half after the Muslim conquest was initiated in 711 – we enter what can be considered the first stage of the Islamisation of al-Andalus in terms of intellectual and religious life. ʿAbd al-Malik b. Habib belongs in fact to the generation of local scholars who brought from the East a considerable body of Islamic learning. These texts covered a varied and extensive thematic range from the condemnation of usury to the narratives of the conquest of al-Andalus, from the description of Paradise to the medicine of the Prophet, from pious incitements to fear God and behave according to what was right to books on women and their guiles.31 Through ʿAbd al-Malik b. Habib’s life and works and those of other scholars, the process of Islamisation can be documented from the point of view of the emergence and diffusion of Islamic teachings and scholarship.32 One of his contemporaries was the Cordoban jurist al-ʿUtbi (d. 869?), who collected a vast number of legal questions that allow us to recover the issues debated during this early period and analyse to what extent they may correspond to actual problems faced by the Muslim community, and more specifically to what extent they shed light on the formative period of the Andalusi Islamic society.33 While the literature produced during these three centuries still awaits detailed studies, other issues have attracted more scholarly attention, such as how best to characterise Andalusi society or societies and how the changes taking place were linked to the process of Islamisation. Is it possible to speak of tribes in al-Andalus? How do we understand the social background of the fitna? Should the fitna be seen as the moment in which the pre-Islamic feudal trends present in Visigothic Iberia were definitely defeated, with the establishment of the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate representing the triumph of an ‘Islamic social formation’? The latter is a position to be connected with the characterisation of al-Andalus as a ‘tributary society’ in opposition to the feudal social formation of the neighbouring Christian kingdoms and the feudal trends existing in the territories under Muslim rule in the early period. The existence of tribalism – both Arab and Berber – was first argued for by Pierre Guichard,34 and subsequently by the late Miquel Barceló in a number of articles dealing most especially with the Levantine area of al-Andalus and the rural context. To Barceló we owe the

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famous question: ‘Why do academic historians prefer to speak of Islamisation instead of speaking of peasants?’35 Tribalism as a social reality and an explanatory concept has been criticised by a number of scholars, pointing both to evidence found in the sources that challenges it and to the need to free ourselves of the straitjacket provided by the terminology employed in those sources.36 Patricia Crone’s understanding that the tribal language expressing conflict masked military and political factionalism could also be applied to the Andalusi case.37 The concept of a ‘tributary society’ proposed by Samir Amin was adopted by the late historian Manuel Acién Almansa, to whom we owe the most sustained effort to understand the social and economic aspects of the transition from Visigothic Hispania to caliphal al-Andalus.38 For him, the second half of the ninth century was the moment when Umayyad pressure from Cordoba to gain effective control over the rest of the Peninsula – and when erosion of former patterns of social and economic domination due to the Islamisation process, such as the growing imposition of Islamic legal norms – resulted in the rebellion of Ibn Hafsun and other local lords. According to Acién, Ibn Hafsun (d. 918) and the other muwallad rebels represented what remained of the old Visigothic feudal lords striving to keep control over land and men against the expansion of the centralising Cordoban emirate and their varied reactions to religious conversion and Arabo-Islamic acculturation. Their example – rebellion – was followed by the Arabs and Berbers who had participated in the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and who were also losing territorial and military control to the Umayyads. The resulting period of civil strife ended with the victory of ʿAbd al-Rahman III, who, after two decades of military campaigns, managed to ‘pacify’ al-Andalus and impose a new political and social order. Excellent presentations of the debates surrounding Acién’s proposal can be found in two historiographical and critical analyses by Alejandro García Sanjuán,39 in which he also discusses Eduardo Manzano’s revision of Amin’s concept of ‘tributary mode of production’ and of Acién’s position,40 as well as my view that the muwallad rebels may have been ‘new men’ and not necessarily descendants of the Visigothic landlords.41 This debate has engaged mostly historians, but not Arabists.42 This is an academic differentiation that is slowly being eroded thanks to the fact that medievalists such as those mentioned, as well as younger historians, have taken care to acquire linguistic competence in Arabic, while among those trained as Arabists who engage in the history of al-Andalus there is likewise a concern to think as historians. Thus the famous dictum of Bernard Lewis, that the history of Islamic societies was being written in the Western academic world by historians who knew no Arabic and by Arabists who knew no history, is progressively becoming outdated. Another discipline needs to be mentioned: archaeology. The contributions by those who engage in it have been and still are decisive in gaining a better understanding of the social, economic, political and cultural processes that started with the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. It can be safely stated that for no other Islamic society do we possess so many archaeological findings covering the whole period of Muslim presence. French scholarship has been decisive in the development of the archaeology of al-Andalus, starting again with Pierre Guichard, whose research was carried out in close connection with the archaeologists André Bazzana and Patrice Cressier, especially regarding the relationship between villages, fortresses and the state. The debate

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about the function and meaning of the term ḥiṣn (pl. ḥuṣūn) has filled many pages, linked as it is with the debates about feudalism and tributary society, and about the reactions to conversion and Islamisation. The bibliography is abundant and mostly in French and Spanish. Thomas F. Glick published a presentation in English reviewed by Manuela Marín and Heather Ecker in which attention was paid to the issue of how language affects the diffusion and knowledge of modern debates.43 In present-day academic milieus, what is written in English tends to become that which is quoted and thus exists, sometimes erasing or throwing into oblivion scholarship written in languages other than English. As pointed out in the review, a synthesis in English of research done in French and Spanish by other scholars may eventually become the reference work for the subject; this fact could be seen as irrelevant or not, depending on which linguistic side one stands. It also happens sometimes that scholarship written in Spanish and French is not taken into account when discussing similar issues for other regions in the Islamic world, while the reverse case is not frequent. Academic linguistic barriers and how they affect a truly ‘globalising’ approach in scholarship should be taken into account when dealing with issues such as Islamisation that are translocal and transcend chronological periodisations. Archaeological excavations conducted in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula have mapped both differences and similarities in rural and urban settlements during the transition from Visigothic Hispania to al-Andalus, differences and similarities that are connected with the pre-Islamic past, land use, ethnicity and geography, among other factors. Apart from the studies devoted to specific areas,44 there have also been attempts at providing a general picture and at synthesising existing results,45 with a monographic article devoted to analysing the process of Islamisation from the archaeological point of view.46 Two areas in this field are particularly interesting for understanding such process: the archaeology of death and the archaeology of architecture. Patterns of burial and cemeteries offer a unique window to trace the changing components in the population, with cases of religiously diverse burial areas in close proximity documented for example in the central Meseta,47 while in Pamplona (Navarra, near the Basque country) a cemetery dating from the eighth century has been excavated which reveals some dental practices that are understood as suggesting the presence of Berber individuals.48 There are again many studies dealing with specific cemeteries that have been excavated, together with some attempts at offering syntheses.49 Regarding the archaeology of architecture, the so-called ‘Mozarabic’ churches that allegedly preserved a pre-Islamic tradition that might have influenced local Islamic art have been revisited, and the extent to which certain features dated by some to Visigothic times should actually be attributed to Islamic times has become a hotly debated issue. The introduction of archaeological data into a field dominated until now by stylistic criteria has allowed new theories to be advanced and the pioneering work by Luis Caballero has been followed and enlarged by younger scholars.50 Another area of debate is linked to the analysis of the literary sources and the extent to which they can be used to reconstruct the past. Most of the scholarship collected in the two-volume The Formation of al-Andalus published in 1998 comprised studies based on literary sources.51 Chronicles and other historical writings have been subject to detailed historiographical analyses, most notably by Luis Molina52 and

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Eduardo Manzano,53 also by María Jesús Viguera and other Spanish scholars,54 to whom now British scholars should also be added.55 A wide range of positions exist regarding the use of such sources, from a medievalist like Roger Collins, who completely dismisses them,56 to other medievalists with a knowledge of Arabic, such as Pedro Chalmeta, Felipe Maíllo, Eduardo Manzano and Alejandro García Sanjuán. The latter, in spite of a critical approach, argue that these sources can be employed to reconstruct how the conquest took place and how it set in motion the process of formation of an Islamic society.57 Medievalist historians’ interest in how to approach the Arabic literary sources, especially for the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, is not new, given the scarcity of other types of historical sources,58 and thus those interested in the fall of the Visigothic kingdom and the subsequent emergence of new Christian polities need to use what those Arabic sources contain.59 Their study was already a concern for the highly influential Spanish medievalist Claudio Sánchez Albornoz (d. 1984), who said regarding the year 711: ‘I cannot think without emotion of this tragic moment of world history. For years I have been obsessed by the idea that this was the decisive moment in the life of Spain.’60 Many other such quotations could be adduced, pointing to the fact that the study of the Muslim conquest and the changes it brought to the Iberian Peninsula – and especially religious conversion – has often not been neutral and dispassionate, but on the contrary has stirred a range of emotions among some Spanish scholars. In 2011, the 1300th anniversary of 711 was commemorated in Spain. There was no official commemoration as in the case of the fifth centenary of 1492 (when America was ‘discovered’, Nasrid Granada was conquered and the Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula) that took place in 1992, and as has happened with other dates ‘positively’ integrated into the standard narratives of Spanish history. This is again a clear indication of the highly polemical and emotional place that the history of al-Andalus and especially the Muslim conquest has in such narratives.61 Studies carried out among Spanish secondary school students show that the majority identify themselves with those vanquished in 711, as if there were continuity between them and modern Spaniards. Thus, when speaking about those events, it is normal for those students to say things like ‘“we” were defeated’ and ‘we took refuge in the North and we initiated the fight to recover what belonged to us’.62 Such a position is not universal in present-day Spain. In Andalusia, that is in the southern region of the Iberian Peninsula where Muslim rule lasted longer, many cherish a past considered to have been brilliant and much more economically and artistically advanced than that of other Iberian regions during the Middle Ages – just the opposite to how the situation is often perceived nowadays. There is in any case a wide range of positions in Andalusia regarding such a Muslim past. Of special interest because of its recent popularity among Andalusian nationalists, some Spanish converts to Islam and conspiracy theorists is the position argued from in 1969 by a peculiar figure, the Basque Ignacio Olagüe (1903–74). He was close to the views of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos (1905–36), the least ‘religious’ of the Spanish Fascist thinkers.63 Olagüe wrote a polemical book titled in French Les Arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne, and in the Spanish translation La revolución islámica en Occidente.64 An independent man of letters who was stronger on imagination than on scholarship, Olagüe claimed that what is generally considered the early ‘Islamic’ society of

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al-Andalus was originally endogenous, arising in anti-Trinitarian local milieus and only later converging with the religion revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In this way, Olagüe could also claim that the brilliant civilisation that developed in the southern regions of the Iberian Peninsula had fundamentally no debt to a ‘Semitic’ and Islamic legacy, as it was simply the result of local conditions. I have summarised, trying to give some coherent meaning to what is a rather chaotic and verbose oeuvre that fundamentally was ignored when it first appeared, but that acquired new life when it was reprinted and adopted by others.65 These views in their original and now recycled formulations are immensely successful on internet sites, especially those favouring the uncovering of conspiracies to hide the ‘real truth’. Scholarly attempts to reveal their inanity, such as that undertaken by Alejandro García Sanjuán in a number of publications, start from the conviction that myths such as these have a life of their own that can never be stopped, even when the evidence against them is overwhelming such as that provided by the material culture.66 In an effort nevertheless to set the record straight, books, articles and reviews have been written that have enriched our knowledge of the period,67 in an exchange of views that reveals the impact of different academic backgrounds and of the different trends in diverse academic milieus, which sometimes converge and at other times diverge. In any case, the Muslim conquest of Iberia, the ensuing spread of Islam as both a religion and a culture, how it took place and how it was resisted or not continues to be an area of study that attracts interest, promotes debates and provokes reactions.

Notes 1. Ibn Hawqal, Kitab Surat al-Ard, ed. J. Kramers (Leiden: Brill, 1873), p. 111. 2. A. García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la Península Ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: Del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2013), pp. 359–439. 3. H. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 1–129; P. Guichard, Al-Andalus: 711–1492 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2000), pp. 11–108. On the issue of what exactly such ‘abolition’ meant, see D. Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and M. Fierro, ‘On Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus: A Review Article’, review of David Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Peter Scales, The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba: Berbers and Andalusis in Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 1994), in Der Islam 73 (1996), pp. 138–50. 4. M. Fierro, ‘Proto-Mālikīs, Mālikīs and Reformed Mālikīs’, in P. Bearman et al. (eds), The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 57–76. 5. M. A. Makki, Ensayo sobre las aportaciones orientales en la España musulmana y su influencia en la formación de la cultura hispano-árabe (Madrid: Publicaciones del Instituto de Estudios Islamicos en Madrid., 1968); J. Ramírez del Río, La orientalización de al-Andalus: Los días de los árabes en la Península Ibérica (Seville: Universidad, 2002). 6. The reception, appropriation and management of Arabo-Islamic knowledge can now be followed and visualised thanks to the data collected in Historia de los Autores y Transmisores de al-Andalus (HATA): http://kohepocu.cchs.csic.es (accessed.27 September 2016). The formation of the world of scholarship can be traced now in detail thanks to the data

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

islamisation collected in Prosopografía de los ulemas de al-Andalus: www.eea.csic.es/pua (accessed 27 September 2016) and Biblioteca de al-Andalus, chief ed. J. Lirola Delgado, 7 vols (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl, 2004–12); Apéndice, ed. J. Lirola Delgado (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl, 2013); La producción intelectual andalusí: balance de resultados e índices (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl, 2013). M. Fierro and M. Marín, ‘La islamización de las ciudades andalusíes a través de sus ulemas (ss. II/VIII-comienzos s. IV/X)’, in P. Cressier and M. García-Arenal (eds), Genèse de la ville islamique en al-Andalus et au Maghreb occidental (Madrid: Casa de Velasquez, 1998), pp. 65–98. D. Wasserstein, ‘A Latin Lament on the Prevalence of Arabic in Ninth-Century Cordoba’, in A. Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix, Luminosus Britannicus: Essays in Honour of A. F. L. Beeston on his Eightieth Birthday (Reading: Oxford Oriental Institute Monographs, 1991), pp. 1–7. J. Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); M. Fierro, ‘Andalusian fatāwā on Blasphemy’, Annales Islamologiques 25 (1990), pp. 103–17. More recently, R. Johnsrud Zorgati, Pluralism in the Middle Ages: Hybrid Identities, Conversion, and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia (New York: Routledge, 2012). Fierro, ‘Proto-Mālikīs, Mālikīs and Reformed Mālikīs’. S. Stroumsa, ‘The Muʽtazila in al-Andalus: The Footprints of a Phantom’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 2 (2014), pp. 80–100. See below for a discussion of this term. The standard general study for this period is still É. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, 3 vols (Paris and Leiden: Brill, 1950–3), vol. 1, pp. 279–395, and vol. 2, pp. 1–32. See also E. Manzano, La frontera de al-Andalus en época de los Omeyas (Madrid: CSIC, 1991). H. Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids, trans. M. Bonner (Leiden: Brill, 1996); M. Brett, The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Tenth Century CE (Leiden: Brill, 2001). M. Fierro, ‘The Battle of the Ditch (al-Khandaq) of the Cordoban Caliph ʽAbd al-Raḥmān III’, in Asad Q. Ahmed et al. (eds), The Islamic Scholarly Tradition: Studies in History, Law, and Thought in Honor of Professor Michael Allan Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 107–30 and ‘Madīnat al-zahrā’, el Paraíso y los fatimíes’, Al-Qanṭara 25 (2004), pp. 299–327, revised English trans. in S. Günther and T. Lawson (eds), Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). G. Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie omeyyade: La construction de la légitimité du Califat de Cordoue (Xe–XIe siècles) (Madrid: Casa de Velâzquez, 1992), and Identité andalouse (Paris: Sindbad, 1997). M. Fierro, ‘The Anṣārīs, Nāṣir al-Dīn, and the Naṣrids in al-Andalus’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 31 (2006), pp. 232–47. M. Fierro, ‘Plants, Mary the Copt, Abraham, Donkeys and Knowledge: Again on Bāṭinism during the Umayyad Caliphate in al-Andalus’, in H. Biesterfelt and V. Klemm (eds), Differenz und Dynamik im Islam: Festschrift für Heinz Halm zum 70. Geburtstag / Difference and Dynamics in Islam: Festschrift for Heinz Halm on his 70th Birthday (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2012), pp. 125–44. On this episode and the problems involved in the narrative, see P. Orosio, Kitāb Hurūšiyūs, traducción árabe de las ‘Historiae adversus paganos’ de Orosio, ed. and study M. Penelas (Madrid: CSIC, 2001); I. Toral, ‘Translations as Part of Power Semiotics: The Case of Caliphal Cordova’, paper presented at 3rd Alexandria–Toledo Workshop, Copenhagen,

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20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

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15 March 2013, www.greekarabictransfer.com/HTM/AEP/DOC/ResumenIsabelToral-Niehoff.pdf (accessed 24 October 2016). D. Wasserstein, ‘The Library of al-Hakam II al-Mustansir and the Culture of Islamic Spain’, Manuscripts of the Middle East 5 (1990–1), pp. 99–105; J. Samsó, Las ciencias de los antiguos en al-Andalus (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992; 2nd edn, Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl, 2011); Marie Geneviève Balty-Guesdon, ‘Al-Andalus et lʼhéritage grec dʼaprès les Ṭabaqāt al-umam de Ṣāʽid al-Andalusī’, in A. Hasnawi et al. (eds.), Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique grecque: Actes du colloque de la SIHSPAI (Société Internationale dʼHistoire des Sciences et de la Philosophie Arabes et Islamiques), Paris, 31 mars-3 avril 1993 (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), pp. 331–42. The bibliographical references will be limited to studies published in the last three decades, excepting only those studies that have been seminal. A. Vicente, El proceso de arabización de Alandalús: un caso medieval de interacción de lenguas (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2007). M. Fierro, ‘Four Questions in Connection with Ibn Ḥafṣūn’, in M. Marín (ed.), The Formation of al-Andalus. Part 1: History and Society, The Formation of the Classical Islamic World 46 (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998), pp. 291–328, p. 309 (English trans. of ‘Cuatro preguntas en torno a Ibn Ḥafṣūn’, Al-Qanṭara 16 [1995], pp. 221–57). R. W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 114–27; H. Kassis, ‘The Arabisation and Islamisation of the Christians of al-Andalus: Evidence of Their Scriptures’, in R. Brann (ed.), Languages of Power in Islamic Spain (Occasional Publications of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University, 3, Bethesda, MD: CDI Press, 1997), pp. 136–55; M. Penelas, ‘Linguistic Islamisation of the “Mozarabs” as Attested in a Ninth-Century Chronicle’, in Ernst Bremer et al. (ed.), Language of Religion, Language of the People: Medieval Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mittelalter Studien 11 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), pp. 103–14; C. Aillet, ‘L’islamisation et évolution du peuplement chrétien en al-Andalus (VIIIe–XIIe siècle)’, in D. Valérian (ed.), Islamisation et arabisation de l’Occident musulman médiéval (VIIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 151–92; A. Harrison, ‘Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited’, Al-Masāq 24, no. 1 (2012), pp. 35–51; D. Wasserstein, ‘Where Have all the Converts Gone? Difficulties in the Study of Conversion in al-Andalus’, Al-Qanṭara 33 (2012), pp. 325–42. A good summary in M. de Epalza, ‘Falta de obispos y conversión al islam de los cristianos de al-Andalus’, Al-Qanṭara 15 (1994), pp. 385–400. For a critical view of Epalza’s understanding, see C. Aillet, Mozarabes: Christianisme, islamisation et arabisation en Péninsule Ibérique (IXe–XIIe siècle), preface by G. Martínez-Gros (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010). The differences between the two communities have been explored mostly by D. Wasserstein, ‘The Christians of al-Andalus: Some Awkward Thoughts’, Hispania Sacra 54 (2002), pp. 501–14. Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Wansharisi, al-Miʿyar al-Muʿrib wa’l-Jamiʿ al-Mughrib ʿan Fatawi Ahl Ifriqiya wa’l-Andalus wa’l-Maghrib, 13 vols (Rabat: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa’l-Shuʾun al-Islamiyya, 1981), vol. 2, p. 140. The oldest sources for this narrative are Ahmad al-Razi (d. 955) and Ibn al-Qutiyya (d. 977) (I owe this information to Luis Molina). M. Fierro and S. Faghia, ‘Un nuevo texto de tradiciones escatológicas sobre al-Andalus’, Sharq al-Andalus 7, no. 16 (1990), pp. 99–111. Abu Muhammad al-Rushati (d. 1147) and Ibn al-Kharrat al-Ishbili (d. 1186), Al-Andalus en el Kitāb iqtibās al-anwār y en el Ijtiṣār Iqtibās al-anwār, ed. E. Molina and J. Bosch Vilá

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30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

islamisation (Madrid: CSIC, 1990), p. 134: fa-jazīrat al-Andalus qīla lahā jazīra li-annahā bayna’l-baḥr wa-bilād al-naṣārā fa-hiya munqaṭiʿa ʿan ahl millatihā. J. Hernández Juberías, La península imaginaria: Mitos y leyendas sobre al-Andalus (Madrid: CSIC, 1996), pp. 27–67. On Ibn Habib’s production, see M. Arcas Campoy and D. Serrano Niza, ‘Ibn Ḥabīb al-Ilbīrī, ʽAbd al-Malik’, Biblioteca de al-Andalus, vol. 3, pp. 219–27, no. 509. See also A. Christys, ‘The History of Ibn Ḥabīb and Ethnogenesis in al-Andalus’, in Richard Corradini et al. (eds.), The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: The Transformation of the Roman World 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 323–48. See above notes 4 and 5. A pioneering effort in this respect has been made by Ana Fernández Félix: Cuestiones legales del islam temprano: La ʽUtbiyya y el proceso de formación de la sociedad islámica andalusí (Madrid: CSIC, 2003); ‘Children on the Frontiers of Islam’, in M. García-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen/Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 61–72. See also Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013). P. Guichard, Al-Andalus: Estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en Occidente (Barcelona: Barral, 1974; repr. 2005, with introduction by Antonio Malpica). See also P. Sénac, ‘Al-Andalus en la historiografía francesa: Un breve balance de la cuestión’, Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos 63 (2014), pp. 319–33. M. Barceló, ‘¿Por qué los historiadores académicos prefieren hablar de islamización en vez de hablar de campesinos?’, Archeologia Medievale 19 (1992), pp. 63–73; The Design of Irrigation Systems in al-Andalus (Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1998); Los Banu Ru‘ayn en al-Andalus: Una memoria singular y persistente (Granada: Al-Baraka, 2004). C. Barceló, ‘¿Galgos o podencos? Sobre la supuesta berberización del país valenciano en los siglos VIII y IX’, Al-Qanṭara 11 (1990), pp. 429–60; M. Acién Almansa, Entre el feudalismo y el islam: ʽUmar b. Ḥafṣūn en los historiadores, en las fuentes y en la historia, 2nd edn (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 1997). Fierro, ‘Four Questions in Connection with Ibn Ḥafṣūn’, p. 301, n. 39, referring to P. Crone, ‘Were the Qays and the Yemen Political Parties?’, Der Islam 71 (1994), pp. 1–57. S. Amin, Sobre el desarrollo desigual de las formaciones sociales (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1974); Acién Almansa, Entre el feudalismo y el islam; also M. Acién, ‘Sobre el papel de las ideologías en la caracterización de las formaciones sociales: La formación social islámica’, Hispania 58, no. 3/200 (1998), pp. 920–1. A. García Sanjuán, ‘El concepto tributario y la caracterización de la sociedad andalusí: Treinta años de debate historiográfico’, in A. García Sanjuán (ed.), Saber y sociedad en al-Andalus: IV–V Jornadas de Cultura Islámica (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2006), pp. 81–152; ‘El hecho tribal y el concepto tributario: Tres propuestas de caracterización de la sociedad andalusí’, in M. Fierro et al. (eds), 711–1616: de árabes a moriscos. Una parte de la Historia de España (Cordoba: Fundación al-Babtain, 2012), pp. 187–219. E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Relaciones sociales en sociedades precapitalistas: Una crítica al concepto de modo de producción tributario’, Hispania 58, no. 3/200 (1998), pp. 881–914; E. Manzano, Conquistadores, emires y califas: Los omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006). Fierro, ‘Four Questions in Connection with Ibn Ḥafṣūn’, and M. Fierro, ‘El conde Casio, los Banū Qasī y los linajes godos en al-Andalus’, Studia Historica: Historia Medieval (Los mozárabes entre la Cristiandad y el Islam) 27 (2009), pp. 181–9. On this, see now E.

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42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

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Manzano, ‘A vueltas con el conde Casio’, Studia Historica 31 (2013), pp. 255–66. García Sanjuán has also discussed the views of Virgilio Martínez Enamorado, who suggests a Berber origin for Ibn Hafsun, in a review published in Anuario de Estudios Medievales 42, no. 2 (2012), pp. 973–4 of Martínez Enamorado’s book, ʽUmar ibn Ḥafṣūn: de la rebeldía a la construcción de la Dawla. Estudios en torno al rebelde de al-Andalus (880–928) (San José de Costa Rica: Cátedra Ibn Khaldun, UCR, 2012). In the Spanish academic context, the term ʽArabist’ is used to refer to those trained in departments of Arabic and Islamic studies where Arabic philology is taught; that is, the focus is on the acquisition of the language as a means to access Arabic texts traditionally having to do with the history of al-Andalus: see M. Marín, ‘Arabismo e historia de España (1886-1944): Introducción a los epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios’, in M. Marín et al., Los epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios: Introducción, catálogo e índices (Madrid: CSIC, 2009). T. F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Spanish trans. Paisajes de conquista: Cambio cultural y geográfico en la España medieval (Valencia, 2007); review by M. Marín and H. Ecker in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 2 (1998), pp. 335–48. Some examples: V. Martínez Enamorado, Al-Andalus desde la periferia: La formación de una sociedad musulmana en tierras malagueñas (siglos VIII–X) (Malaga: Servicio de Publicaciones, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga, 2003); V. Salvatierra, El Alto Guadalquivir en época islámica (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2006); P. Sénac (ed.), Villes et campagnes de Tarraconaise et d’al-Andalus (VIe–XIe siècles): La transition (Paris: CNRS, 2007); J. Lorenzo Jiménez, La dawla de los Banū Qasī: Origen, auge y caída de una dinastía muladí en la frontera superior de Al-Andalus (Madrid: CSIC, 2010); S. Gilotte, Aux marges d’al-Andalus: Peuplement et habitat en Estrémadure centre-orientale (VIIIe–XIIIe siècles) (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2010). P. Cressier and S. Gutiérrez Lloret, ‘Archéologie de l’islam européen: Sept siècles de présence arabo-berbère’, in J.-P. Demoule (ed.), L’Europe: Un continent redécouvert par l’archéologie (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 148–57; Antonio Malpica, ‘La arqueología para el conocimiento de la sociedad andalusí’, Historia de Andalucía: VII Coloquio (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2009), pp. 31–50; J. L. Boone, Lost Civilisation: The Contested Islamic Past in Spain and Portugal (London: Duckworth, 2009); M. Valor and A. Gutiérrez (eds), The Archaeology of Medieval Spain 1100-1500 (Sheffield: Equinox, 2014); J. C. Carvajal, ‘Review Article. The Archaelogy of al-Andalus: Past, Present and Future’, Medieval Archaeology 58 (2014), pp. 318–39. J. C. Carvajal, ‘Islamización y arqueología: Reflexiones en torno a un concepto controvertido y necesario desde un punto de vista arqueológico’, in F. Sabaté and J. Brufal (eds), Arqueología medieval V: Reçerca avanzada en Arqueologia Medieval (Lérida: Pagès, 2013), pp. 127–56. A. Vigil-Escalera, ‘Sepulturas, huertos y radiocarbono (siglos VIII–XIII d.C.): El proceso de islamización en el medio rural del centro peninsular y otras cuestiones’, Studia Historica: Historia Medieval 27 (2009), pp. 97–118. Mª Paz de Miguel Ibáñez, ‘Mortui viventes docent. La maqbara de Pamplona’, XXXIX Semana de Estudios Medievales. Estella. 17-20 julio 2012. De Mahoma a Carlomagno. Los primeros tiempos (siglos VII–IX) (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2013), pp. 351–75. See also G. P. McMillan and J. L. Boone, ‘Population History and the Islamisation of the Iberian Peninsula: Skeletal Evidence from the Lower Alentejo of Portugal’, Current Anthropology 40 (1999), pp. 719–26. G. Roselló Bordoy, ‘Almacabras, ritos funerarios y organización social en al-Andalus’, Actas III Congreso de Arqueología Medieval Española. Oviedo 27 de marzo – 1 de abril

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51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

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59. 60.

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61. O. Herrero, ‘Recordando el 711: La memoria de la conquista de al-Andalus en el mundo actual. Representaciones y controversias’, in M. Fierro et al. (eds), 711–1616: de árabes a moriscos. Una parte de la Historia de España (Cordoba: Fundación al-Babtain, 2012), pp. 405–27; A. García Sanjuán, ‘Al-Andalus en la historiografía del nacionalismo españolista (siglos XIX–XXI): Entre la Reconquista y la España musulmana’, in F. Vidal and D. Melo (eds), A 1300 años de la conquista de al-Andalus (711–2011): Historia, cultura y legado del Islam en la Península Ibérica (Coquimbo, Chile: n.p., 2012), pp. 65–104. 62. C. López et al., ‘Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conception of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative’, Journal of the Learning Sciences 24, no. 2 (2015), pp. 252–85. 63. M. Fierro, ‘Al-Andalus en el pensamiento fascista español: La Revolución islámica en Occidente de Ignacio Olagüe’, in M. Marín (ed.), Al-Andalus/España: Historiografías en contraste, siglos XVII–XXI (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2009), pp. 325–49. 64. I. Olagüe, La revolución islámica en Occidente, 2nd edn, with preface by Ricardo de Olagüe, introduction by Bernard Vincent, ed. René Palacios More (Cordoba: Plurabelle, 2004 [Madrid, 1974]). It was previously published in French as Les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne (Paris: Flammarion, 1969). 65. As in the case of E. González Ferrín, Historia General de Al Ándalus: Europa entre Oriente y Occidente (Cordoba: Almuzara, 2006). See A. García Sanjuán’s review in Medievalismo 16 (2006), pp. 327–32. 66. For example, the lead seals employed in the process of collecting booty, taxes and payment to the troops: T. Ibrahim, ‘New Evidence for the Umayyad Conquest of Hispania: The Lead Seals’, www.academia.edu/5751302 (accessed 27 September 2016); P. Sénac et al., ‘Nouveaux vestiges de la présence musulmane en Narbonnaise au VIIIe siècle’, Al-Qanṭara 35 (2014), pp. 61–94. 67. As the much-needed book by Alejandro García Sanjuán quoted in note 1, on whose reception compare Kenneth Wolf’s review in Revista de Libros, 9 June 2014, www.revistadelibros.com/articulos/la-conquista-islamica, and Luis Molina’s review in Medievalismo 25 (2015), pp. 455–9.

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University Press, 1995), in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 2 (1998), pp. 335–48. Marín, M., M. Fierro and J. Samsó (eds), The Formation of al-Andalus, 2 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Marín, M., C. de la Puente, F. Rodríguez Mediano and J. I. Pérez Alcalde, Los epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios: Introducción, catálogo e índices (Madrid: CSIC, 2009). Martínez Enamorado, V., Al-Andalus desde la periferia: La formación de una sociedad musulmana en tierras malagueñas (siglos VIII–X) (Malaga: Servicio de Publicaciones, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga, 2003). Martinez-Gros, G., L’idéologie omeyyade: La construction de la légitimité du Califat de Cordoue (Xe–XIe siècles) (Madrid: Casa de Velâzquez, 1992). Martinez-Gros, G., Identité andalouse (Paris: Sindbad, 1997). Molina, L., ‘Sobre la Historia de al-Rāzī: Nuevos datos en el Muqtabis de Ibn Ḥayyān’, Al-Qanṭara 1 (1980), pp. 435–42. Molina, L., ‘Sobre la procedencia de la Historia preislámica inserta en la Crónica del moro Rasis’, Awraq 5–6 (1982–3), pp. 133–9. Molina, L., ‘Orosio y los geógrafos hispanomusulmanes’, Al-Qanṭara 5 (1984), pp. 63–92. Molina, L., ‘Los Ajbār maŷmūʽa y la historiografía árabe sobre el período omeya en al-Andalus’, Al-Qanṭara 10 (1989), pp. 513–42. Molina, L., ‘Los itinerarios de la conquista: El relato de ‘Arīb’, Al-Qanṭara 20 (1999), pp. 27–45. Molina, L., review of Alejandro García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la Península Ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: Del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2013), in Medievalismo 25 (2015), pp. 455–9. Olagüe, I., La revolución islámica en Occidente, 2nd edn, with preface by Ricardo de Olagüe, introduction by Bernard Vincent, ed. René Palacios More (Cordoba: Plurabelle, 2004 [Madrid, 1974]). Orosio, P., Kitāb Hurūšiyūs, traducción árabe de las ‘Historiae adversus paganos’ de Orosio, ed. Mayte Penelas (Madrid: CSIC, 2001). Paz de Miguel Ibáñez, Ma, ‘Mortui viventes docent: La maqbara de Pamplona’, XXXIX Semana de Estudios Medievales. Estella. 17-20 julio 2012. De Mahoma a Carlomagno. Los primeros tiempos (siglos VII–IX) (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2013), pp. 351–75. Penelas, M., ‘Linguistic Islamisation of the “Mozarabs” as Attested in a Ninth-Century Chronicle’, in E. Bremer, J. Jarnut, M. Richter and D. Wasserstein (eds), Language of Religion, Language of the People: Medieval Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mittelalter Studien 11 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), pp. 103–14. Ramírez del Río, J., La orientalización de al-Andalus: Los días de los árabes en la Península Ibérica (Seville: Universidad, 2002). Roselló Bordoy, G., ‘Almacabras, ritos funerarios y organización social en al-Andalus’, Actas III Congreso de Arqueología Medieval Española. Oviedo 27 de marzo - 1 de abril 1989, vol. 1: Ponencias (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1989), pp. 237–54. al-Rushati, Abu Muhammad, and Ibn al-Kharrat al-Ishbili, Al-Andalus en el Kitāb iqtibās al-anwār y en el Ijtiṣār Iqtibās al-anwār, ed. E. Molina and J. Bosch Vilá (Madrid: CSIC, 1990). Sabaté, F., and J. Brufal (eds), Arqueología medieval V: Reçerca avanzada en Arqueologia Medieval (Lérida: Pagès, 2013). Safran, Janina M., Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013). Salvatierra, V., El Alto Guadalquivir en época islámica (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2006).

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Samsó, J., Las ciencias de los antiguos en al-Andalus (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992; 2nd edn, Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl, 2011). Sánchez Albornoz, C., De la invasión islámica al Estado continental (Seville: n.p., 1974). Sánchez Medina, E., and L. García Moreno (eds), Del Nilo al Guadalquivir: II Estudios sobre las fuentes de la conquista islámica. Homenaje al profesor Yves Modéran (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2013). Sánchez Medina, E., L. García Moreno and L. Fernández Fonfría (eds), Historiografía y representaciones: III Estudios sobre las fuentes de la conquista islámica (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2015). Sénac, P. (ed.), Villes et campagnes de Tarraconaise et d’al-Andalus (VIe–XIe siècles): La transition (Paris: CNRS, 2007). Sénac, P., ‘Al-Andalus en la historiografía francesa: Un breve balance de la cuestión’, Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos 63 (2014), pp. 319–33. Sénac, P., S. Gasc, P.-Y. Melmoux and L. Savarese, ‘Nouveaux vestiges de la présence musulmane en Narbonnaise au VIIIe siècle’, Al-Qanṭara 35 (2014), pp. 61–94. Stroumsa, S., ‘The Muʽtazila in al-Andalus: The Footprints of a Phantom’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 2 (2014), pp. 80–100. Torres Palomo, M. P., and M. Acién Almansa (eds), Estudios sobre cementerios islámicos andalusíes (Malaga: Universidad de Málaga, 1995). Uscatescu, A., and J. C. Ruiz Souza, ‘El “occidentalismo” de Hispania y la koiné artística mediterránea (siglos VII–VIII)’, Goya: Revista de arte 347 (2014), pp. 95–115. Valérian, D. (ed.), Islamisation et arabisation de l’Occident musulman médiéval (VIIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011). Valor, M., and A. Gutiérrez (eds), The Archaeology of Medieval Spain 1100–1500 (Sheffield: Equinox, 2014). Vicente, A., El proceso de arabización de Alandalús: Un caso medieval de interacción de lenguas (Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2007). Vidal, F., and D. Melo (eds), A 1300 años de la conquista de al-Andalus (711–2011): Historia, cultura y legado del Islam en la Península Ibérica (Coquimbo, Chile: n.p., 2012). Vigil-Escalera, A., ‘Noticia preliminar acerca del hallazgo de una necrópolis altomedieval de rito islámico en la Comunidad de Madrid: El yacimiento de La Huelga (Barajas, Madrid)’, Bolskan 21 (2004), pp. 57–61. Vigil-Escalera, A., ‘Sepulturas, huertos y radiocarbono (siglos VIII–XIII d.C.): El proceso de islamización en el medio rural del centro peninsular y otras cuestiones’, Studia Historica: Historia Medieval 27 (2009), pp. 97–118. al-Wansharisi, Ahmad ibn Yahya, al-Miʿyar al-Muʿrib wa’l-Jamiʿ al-Mughrib ʿan Fatawi Ahl Ifriqiya wa’l-Andalus wa’l-Maghrib, 13 vols (Rabat: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa’l-Shuʾun alIslamiyya, 1981). Wasserstein, D., ‘The Library of al-Hakam II al-Mustansir and the Culture of Islamic Spain’, Manuscripts of the Middle East 5 (1990–1), pp. 99–105. Wasserstein, D., ‘A Latin Lament on the Prevalence of Arabic in Ninth-Century Cordoba’, in A. Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix, Luminosus Britannicus: Essays in Honour of A. F. L. Beeston on his Eightieth Birthday (Reading: Oxford Oriental Institute Monographs, 1991), pp. 1–7. Wasserstein, D., The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Wasserstein, D., ‘The Christians of al-Andalus: Some Awkward Thoughts’, Hispania Sacra 54 (2002), pp. 501–14. Wasserstein, D., ‘Where Have all the Converts Gone? Difficulties in the Study of Conversion in al-Andalus’, Al-Qanṭara 33 (2012), pp. 325–42.

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E-resources ‘Coloquio Internacional Quienes fueron, qué fueron y qué hacían: Identidad y arqueología funeraria entre los siglos V y VIII’, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 17–18 October 2013, http://ehutb.ehu. es/es/serial/1476.html (accessed 27 September 2016). Historia de los Autores y Transmisores de al-Andalus (HATA): http://kohepocu.cchs.csic.es (accessed 27 September 2016). Ibrahim, T., ‘New Evidence for the Umayyad Conquest of Hispania: The Lead Seals’, www. academia.edu/5751302 (accessed 27 September 2016). Prosopografía de los ulemas de al-Andalus: www.eea.csic.es/pua (accessed 27 September 2016). Toral, I., ‘Translations as Part of Power Semiotics: The Case of Caliphal Cordova’, Paper presented at 3rd Alexandria–Toledo Workshop, Copenhagen, 15 March 2013, available at: www.greekarabictransfer.com/HTM/AEP/DOC/ResumenIsabelToral-Niehoff.pdf (accessed 24 October 2016). Wolf, K., review of Alejandro García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la Península Ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: Del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2013), in Revista de Libros, 9 June 2014, www.revistadelibros.com/articulos/laconquista-islamica (accessed 27 September 2016).

Part IV

Sub-Saharan Africa

12 THE OROMO AND THE HISTORICAL PROCESS OF ISLAMISATION IN ETHIOPIA Marco Demichelis

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he historical interaction between Islam and Christianity in the Horn of Africa is profoundly connected with the region’s specific historical, linguistic and cultural characteristics. While the western coast of Africa faces the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, since antiquity the northern part of Africa’s eastern coast as far as the Bab al-Mandab has interacted with the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula. The Arab geographers called all the various populations living on the western coast of the Bab al-Mandab ‘Habash’, while Abyssinia is the ancient name of the northern parts of modern Ethiopia, corresponding to modern Tigray and Eritrea. In recent scholarship, the term ‘Greater Ethiopia’ has been used to refer to Ethiopia in its twentieth-century borders before the independence of Eritrea in 1993.1 To understand the historical evolution of the relationship between the Islamic world and Ethiopia, we must outline the main characteristics of this area: 1. A geography that is intercontinental: the south of Arabia, the south of Egypt, the Eritrean coast and the Ethiopian Highlands formed a single cultural region. Relations between the ancient Yemeni kingdoms (such as Qataban, Saba – the biblical Sheba – Himyar and Hadramawt) and their contemporaries in Ethiopia, Aksum and the Aksumite rulers, as well as Meroe in the Sudan, are attested by archaeological evidence. Early Aksumite civilisation, before conversion to Christianity, also reflected the deep influence of south Nilotic culture, as an expression of southern Nubian and Meroitic civilisation. 2 Aksum was therefore able to intermingle with southern Arabia, but also with southern Nubia in late antiquity.3 2. The presence of a long-established written language tradition that stimulated the production of historical documents for at least two thousand years. The earliest of these inscriptions, the Ezana stele (ad 330), was written in three languages, Greek, Ge‘ez and Sabaean, and mentions the king of Ezana, the first Aksumite ruler to convert to Christianity.4 3. A myth that traces the roots of the Aksumite kingdom to Old Testament biblical tradition. The only Ethiopian represented in the Old Testament is portrayed as a 223

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islamisation man of high moral character (Ebed-Melech, an officer of the court of Zedekiah, king of Judah),5 while the biblical relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reported in the Old Testament too (Kings 10: 1–13). However, it is in the Ethiopic text the Kebra Negast, the most important written source concerning the Solomonic line of the emperors of Ethiopia, that these connections are elaborated in full. The text contains an account of the encounter between the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba (who is also called Makeda from mk-kdi, which means ‘female divinity’ in Meroitic) with King Solomon and how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with Menelik I, the son of their union. The Kebra Negast (datable in its current form to the fourteenth century, although elements date back to a period between the fourth and sixth centuries ad) has been described by the famous Ethiopian studies expert Edward Ullendorf as ‘not merely a literary work, but a repository of Ethiopian national and religious feelings’.6

These features characterised Ethiopia during its long interaction with Islam and a vigorous process of Islamisation that, if we exclude religiously motivated clashes in the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was mainly peaceful. From the sixteenth century, the Oromo ethnic group played a prominent role in these interactions. This originally pastoralist, nomadic Cushitic tribe took a conciliatory religious approach, alleviating the Islamic–Christian military conflict. Some of the Oromo converted to Christianity, while the majority embraced Islam, and their defence of their new religious identity permitted a form of integration that was sometimes violent and sometimes peaceful. Yet both Muslim and Christian Oromo continued to intermarry, while maintaining their own religious identities. The Oromo, then, played an important role in the religious environment of the region and it is on them that this essay will focus to explore the spread of Islam in Ethiopia from the sixteenth century onwards. First, however, it is necessary to outline the earlier spread of Islam in the region in the medieval period. Christianity had reached the Ethiopian Highlands via Nubia, and Islam also came by the same route (see Figure 12.1). After embracing Christianity during the third to fifth century, Nubia’s Islamisation was finally achieved under the Mamluks in the thirteenth to fifteenth century.7 Nonetheless, the fierce resistance of Christian Nubia to Arab-Muslim penetration from the seventh century onwards is attested by different Arabic sources. The Muslim historian of the expansion of Islam, al-Baladhuri (d. 892), describes the early Arab attacks on Nubia,8 while al-Tabari (d. 923) portrayed fighting between the Arabs and the Beja, the inhabitants of the territory to the east of the Nile as far as the Red Sea.9 A further costly invasion ten years later deterred the Arabs from again attacking ‘those people whose booty is meagre, and whose spite is great’.10 Instead, in 652 they made a truce, known as the baqṭ, with the kingdom of Makuria, which undertook to deliver 360 slaves a year in return for Egyptian products and an agreement to respect each other’s traders.11 For the next 500 years, slaves, doubtless acquired from the south or west, were exported to Egypt, while Arabs settled in the Christian kingdom as traders and miners of gold and precious stones. Egypt’s Fatimid rulers (969–1170) relied on black slave soldiers and their rule coincided with the apogee of Christian Nubia.12 However, crisis arrived when in 1268 a local Nubian usurper appealed for recognition from the

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Mamluks. Dynastic wars and Egyptian intervention followed: in 1317, a Muslim ruler (Shekanda) gained control of the remnants of the Nubian realm of Makuria and, during the following centuries, the Christian presence slowly but steadily disappeared. The end of Christian Nubia was described by the Mamluk historians al-Maqrizi (d. 1442)13 and al-Nuwayri (d. 1332).14 The presence of churches and buildings in Nubia was not enough to secure the survival of Christianity within a region where ‘no vestige of royal authority has remained in their country’, as reported by Ibn Khaldun.15 Arab pastoralism and clan nomadism brought utter disorder and unceasing warfare.16 Sovereignty in the region passed to the Funj, an ethnic group whose origin is still unknown today, who conquered the area and rapidly adopted Islam. The main reasons for the disappearance of the Christian identity in Nubia are probably the abandonment in the first half of the thirteenth century of the old Greek-Nubian liturgical language for Coptic on the one hand and for Arabic on the other, in parallel with the annihilation of the Christian kingdoms. In contrast, in Ethiopia an independent Christian identity was maintained through the Fetha Negast (a legal code compiled around 1240), the role of monasticism in symbiosis with the political role of the dynasty, as well as the historic connection with the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria, which, in conjunction with the Solomonic legend of origins expressed by the Kebra Negast, helped give birth to a proto-national tradition.

Islam in Ethiopia, from the Muslim Occupation of the Coasts to Restoration of the Solomonic Dynasty (Seventh to Fourteenth Century) Islam penetrated the Ethiopian Highlands from an early date and one of Ethiopia’s communities associated with this event is the Argobba. According to Christian tradition, the Argobba were an indigenous population which needed a putative Arab ancestral origin to legitimise their conversion to Islam. Questions about the Argobba’s cultural origins have puzzled scholars and laymen alike and, despite the uncertainties and obscurities, a plethora of hypotheses have been proposed.17 According to Aklilu Asfaw,18 this term referred to the entrance of the Arabs into the Horn of Africa: Arab geba, ‘the Arabs have entered’. Although the Argobba today consists of a largely Muslim (96 per cent) population that lives in the ‘Afar, an Islamic region of the country, 4 per cent are affiliated with the Christian Orthodox Church, indicating that, as in the past, a part of this tribe was linked to the predominantly Christian group of the Amhara. However, according to local sources in eastern Hararghe, the name Argobba could also come from the Arabic term al-rujba/rajagib beher, ‘the tutor family’ (rujba means ‘tutor’ or ‘joints of the fingers’, rawajib), and then historically designated those who held the ‘right’ knowledge of Islam, the urban elites and the early missionaries who played a key role in the spread of Islam in the hinterland of the Horn of Africa from the eleventh century. In any event, the first interpretation does not completely contradict the second one; both terms confirm that the ‘Afar and Hararghe regions were among the first to undergo a process of Islamisation. Identifying the precise geographical area in which the Argobba lived during the early centuries of the Muslim presence in the region is complicated. While Ahmed Hassan Omar argued that,

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Figure 12.1 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, showing the main regions discussed.

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according to local Arabic manuscripts, ‘Argobba’ designates the inhabitants of one ancient Muslim city (Goba) in Ifat (which must not be confused with the still existent city of Goba in the Bale region) and the specific language that they spoke, eventual confirmation of this would not, however, modify the historical–mythological origin of this term.19 However, according to Muslim legend, the Muslims of Argobba are to be identified with the descendants of forty members of the Islamic community who emigrated from Mecca in 614 to the protection of the Emperor of Aksum. According to Ibn Hisham’s Sirat Rasul Allah, the biography of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad advised his followers who were being persecuted by the Quraysh in Mecca that, ‘If you go to Abyssinia, you will find a king under whom none are persecuted. It is a land of righteousness where God will give you relief from what you are suffering.’20 Muslim legends praise the piety of the Ethiopian king, who is said to have secretly converted to Islam.21 Legendary though such accounts are, they serve to emphasise the similarities between the pre-Islamic and Aksumite civilisations, as is also shown by their protourban societies, their extensive commercial activities and their original plurality of religions, which culminated in the adoption of a monotheistic faith officially supported by the political leadership. Just as the Quran is indebted to the Old and New Testament tradition (apocryphal and not), the Kebra Negast – even if not comparable to Islamic revelation because it is not considered to represent the divine word – is a product of the same cultural–religious melting pot that proclaims continuity between the Jewish tradition of the kings and the new one established in Ethiopia by divine right and certified by the Ark of the Covenant. If Muhammad was the ‘Seal of Prophecy’ (Q. 33: 40), Menelik I was the ‘Seal of divine kingship’. The beginning of the relationship between Islam and the empire of Aksum was thus peaceful, and Ethiopia was considered a pious country to be exempted from early Islamic expansionism. It was only with the caliphate of the Umayyad ʿAbd alMalik (r. 685–705) that some strategic harbours on the Red Sea began to play a more important commercial and strategic role. Al-Tabari reports that the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea off the Eritrean coast were occupied in the seventh century to transform them into a penal colony;22 important Qadarite theologians were deported there under the Umayyad caliph Hisham (r. 724–43).23 The first Arab historian to give us more precise information about the Aksumite kingdom and its affiliation with the early Muslim converts in the Horn of Africa is al-Yaʿqubi. In his Kitab al-Buldan (ad 872), he describes the political situation in the north of the region at the time when the Beja, a Nilotic–Cushitic population, took advantage of Aksumite decline to create five kingdoms in the north of Eritrea.24 The Beja were not yet Islamised, but the new faith began to spread gradually due to the presence of settlements inhabited by Muslims who worked in the gold mines of the region.25 With the tenth century, a peaceful relationship based on trade was established between the Aksumite capital Kuʿbar and the local Yemeni chief Ibrahim Ibn Ziyad (902–4), a Zaydite ruler.26 In the ports of Zailaʿ, Dahlak and Badiʿ, Muslim traders were tributaries (dhimmī) to the Christian rulers. After the year 1000, Muslim traders played a significant role in linking the different reaches of ‘Greater Ethiopia’ in a period in which the political rulers of the region were changing. It was because of this role that Muslim traders were tolerated, but they were actively persecuted whenever they attempted to proselytise. Islamic communities were established in the Benadir, Brava and Merca areas. The

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geographer al-Idrisi (1100–62) gives a fairly accurate description of their locations in his geographical treatise written in about 1150, but it is not until the thirteenth century that we have a depiction of the coastal town of Mogadishu in which Arab, Persian and perhaps Indian traders lived.27 However, it was probably from the tenth and eleventh centuries that Arab Muslims left a permanent imprint on the southeastern coast of the Horn of Africa through the creation of clans such as the Darod and Ishaq (still represented today in the region), which were the forerunners of Somali identity.28 The eleventh and twelfth centuries remain particularly obscure and even the leading experts in Ethiopian studies have few theories about them. The figure of Judith or Gudit, who attacked Aksum at the end of the tenth century, was probably a female ruler of Jewish origin related to the Agaw tribe, according to Edward Ullendorff,29 or the Queen of the Damot kingdom, led by the Sidamo tribe, for O. G. Crawford.30 This is significant because, during this period in which Christianity was in retreat, trade passed increasingly into the hands of Muslim families and clans. Muslim Amhara and Tigreans known as Jabarti braved the severe hardship of caravan life in Ethiopia – attacks by bandits, oppressive tariffs, swollen rivers, steep plateaux and wild beasts – to carry their goods, and in the process ideas and news, from one region to another. Muslims controlled this trade and the peoples along the route gradually adopted Islam: first the Cushitic-speaking Somalis of the eastern lowlands, then Semitic speakers on the south-eastern highland fringes, where small Islamic emirates had existed since the thirteenth century in eastern Shoa and Ifat. As masters of Egypt, the Fatimids could exert considerable influence on Christian Ethiopia, as it was the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria who appointed the Bishop of the Ethiopian Church. There are some indications that the ruling dynasty of Cairo put pressure on the Patriarch to ensure that the interests of Islam and Muslim merchants were safeguarded in Ethiopia. They even interfered in the selection of the metropolitans sent to the Christian kingdom. However, it seems that there were also often internal problems between the two churches.31 In 1137, an Agaw prince seized the throne and created the Zagwe dynasty, which until 1270 ruled a large part of the northern Ethiopian Plateau, seeking legitimacy through constructing impressive rock-hewn Christian churches in Lalibela, the city of Zion, or the ‘black Jerusalem’, as it was subsequently described by the first Western travellers. Christian settlements extended southwards through the eastern lowlands to the coast at Zailaʿ, in search of higher rainfall and the lure of trade, exchanging slaves, gold and ivory for salt from the lowlands and imported Islamic luxuries. As Christian kingdoms retreated further and further onto the Plateau, Muslim traders took control of the coasts of the Horn, developing their commercial interests and creating local emirates. However, after Salah al-Din’s reconquest of Jerusalem (1187), in 1189 he fulfilled a long-standing request of the Zagwe dynasty by reserving the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and an altar in the Church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem for the Abyssinians, an act that would have been much appreciated. The arrangement has survived till today, confirmed by the presence of Ethiopian monks at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the thirteenth century, the Zagwe still controlled a limited part of what had formerly been the Aksumite kingdom: Tigray, Lasta, Angot and part of the Begamder, and, even if their royal

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titles described them as the ‘kings of kings of Ethiopia’, their territories bordered a countless number of small multiethnic emirates under Muslim control. It is reported by al-ʿUmari that Muslim colonies had even established themselves in the Christian part of the Highlands at the beginning of the thirteenth century, although all of them were required to pay a tax of three afiqaḥīs (ingots of iron), which was the Abyssinian currency.32 The struggle with Islam was further embittered by the fact that the Coptic Church sometimes colluded with the Egyptian rulers by appointing abunas (bishops), who worked for the promotion of Islamic economic interests in the Ethiopian Highlands. Abunas from Egypt were not able to establish themselves by assuming anti-Islamic positions. While the Zagwe dynasty strove to maintain a positive relationship with the main Muslim rulers of the Horn of Africa, it also sought to convert to Christianity largely pagan areas such as Gojjam and Shoa. The Muslim–Christian relationship during the century of Zagwe leadership encouraged peaceful economic interactions that on the one hand allowed Islam to build bridgeheads towards the Ethiopian Highlands, but on the other maintained the status quo, keeping the entire region free from violent quarrels. Even if the Zagwe dynasty stimulated the building of monasteries and the monastic presence in areas previously not yet Christianised, it was overshadowed by the general belief that, as a non-Aksumite line, its power was acquired through an illegitimate act of usurpation. To paraphrase Taddesse Tamrat, the Late Antique Aksumite Christian tradition was saved and preserved by the Zagwe dynasty before the return of a Solomonic line.33 The situation changed drastically with the restoration of the Solomonic dynasty. Yikunno Amlak (1270–85), renamed Tesfa Iyesus, ‘Hope of Jesus’, ended the Zagwe dynasty and claimed to be an heir to the rulers of Aksum. Donald M. Levine believes that this re-establishment was related to the advent of the Amhara, an Agaw people who developed a distinct southern Ethiopian-Semitic tongue through a process of pigeonisation and creolisation. The predominance of Tigray, which has been the most important area of the Christian empire since the early Aksumite kingdom of late antiquity, was definitively ended. The Amharaland was more mountainous than the rest of the Ethiopian Highlands, but with fertile hills and valleys: barley, wheat and millet were as abundant as honey and horned cattle. The independent kingdoms led by local Muslim or Falasha (Jewish) dynasties in Lasta as in Damot and in Gojjam as in Bale, which the Zagwe had permitted, were not endorsed by the Solomonic rulers. Under the kings of Amhara, such as Yikunno Amlak and his successors, the Christian sphere of influence expanded considerably. The great breakthrough in military expansion occurred during the reign of Amde Siyon (1314–44), the founder of the Ethiopian state. In his thirty-year career, he conquered Damot, Hadiyya and Gojjam, subdued the hostile Muslim emirates of Ifat and Fatigar and those of the south, Dewaro and Bale, and finally defeated the Falasha troops in the north which had been mobilised to support the Muslim cause. The Arab writers of the 1340s described him as the ruler of more than 99 kings.34 It was in this period that interreligious conflict in the Horn of Africa began to assume an international dimension: the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad, began a persecution of the Copts of Egypt and demolished many churches (even if many mosques were burned by the local Christian community as well); in

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response, Amde Siyon increased the military campaigns against the emirates of the Horn, leading to the intervention of the Muslims of Ifat who, between 1332 and 1338, sent an embassy to Cairo to ask the sultan to mediate with the Abyssinians on their behalf. Al-ʿUmari relates: The Muslim kingdoms of Abyssinia were seven in number: Awfat, Dewaro, ʿArababni, Hadya, Sharka, Bale and Dara. These kingdoms, which belonged to seven kings, are weak and poor, because the cohesion between the inhabitants is weak, the produce of the country is not abundant and the king of Amhara imposes his authority on the other kings of Abyssinia, not to mention the religious antipathy which exists between them and the disputes which separate Christians and Muslims.35 However, if the political relationship between the Mamluk and the Solomonic dynasties was increasingly difficult, the diplomatic titles used in official correspondence from the Mamluks addressed to the Ethiopian court highlight the importance of the Abyssinian kingdom for Cairo. The Christian Ethiopian ruler is addressed as al-jalīl (the Sublime), al-ḍirjām (the Brave), rukn al-umma al-ʿīsawiyya (the supporter of the community of Jesus) and muʿaẓẓim kanīsat ṣahyūn (one who makes magnificent the church of Zion). Al-Qalqashandi, referring to the term al-jalīl, voiced some doubts about the use of a divine epithet for a Christian king, which highlights how the Mamluk chancellery was little concerned about the religious appropriateness of the titles and more interested in the diplomatic niceties.36 The first two centuries of the new Solomonic dynasty also played a crucial role in forging a Christian religious identity through the creation of a vast field of missionary activity for the Ethiopian Church. Its evangelists were the spiritual counterparts of military heroes: holy men like St Takla Haymanot (d. 1313), who created pioneer monasteries in non-Christian areas, practised extreme self-mortification, waged epic struggles against indigenous primitive religions and attracted the people to Christianity by their power, sanctity, miracles and the services they could perform in the new Christian order, in a way not so dissimilar from the early Sufi orders that would reach the Horn of Africa from Iran and India. The pre-eminent Ifat sultanate, which was responsible in the thirteenth century for the annexation of the former sultanate of Shoa in the Ethiopian Highlands, rapidly increased commerce with the port of Zailaʿ, which it controlled and which was one of the main ports on the Gulf of Aden. Tensions with the Christian Solomonic dynasty increased, erupting in conflict in the following century and leading to partial occupation of Ifat and the establishment of a Christian garrison at a number of important sites. The lack of unity among the Muslims and the military superiority of the Christian army were the main reasons for the submission of Ifat, Dewaro, Sharka and Bale. Al-ʿUmari describes how every time a local Muslim chief died, his sons and heirs would come to the Christian emperor’s court with presents to obtain a sort of official confirmation of their title as new chief of the Muslim provinces, emphasising de facto Christian control over the entire area. The failed Muslim insurrection of 1332 against the Ethiopian ruler, led by the part of the Ifat sultanate that did not submit to the Christians, destroyed the sultanate’s independence for many decades. In its place arose the sultanate of ʿAdal in the same region.37

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Peace and War, Victory and Defeat: Ethiopian Resistance to Muslim Encroachment (Fifteenth to Sixteenth Century) In the reign of Zara Yacob (1434–68), as reported by the Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, the struggle between the neo-Solomonic dynasty and the emirates of the coast continued.38 The diplomatic interaction between Zara Yacob’s successors and the ʿAdal emirate, the main local Islamic sultanate, was characterised by fluctuating policies: under Baeda Maryam I (1468–78), relations with Badlay b. Saʿd al-Din were peaceful until his death, while under Iskinder (1478–94), Baeda Maryam’s son who reached the throne at six years old, regency was granted to his mother, Queen Eleni, who was a convert to Christianity and daughter of the Muslim king of Hadiya. From her childhood, Eleni retained awareness of the wider Muslim world and sought to reach a reconciliation with ʿAdal, not least to promote commercial relations.39 Two new developments arose at the turn of the sixteenth century, making the conflict assume a more international aspect: the arrival of the Portuguese and the unification of the Muslim emirates of the coast around a local leader, Imam Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Ghazi (r. 1506–43).40 After the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa, Vasco da Gama bombarded the port of Mogadishu and in 1507 established a settlement on the island of Socotra. The Mamluks were unprepared for the Portuguese naval incursions and in the first decades of the sixteenth century the Europeans bombed and sacked the main harbours of Zailaʿ and Berbera. However, after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, which united most of the Islamic Mediterranean world politically, Istanbul sought to exert control over the Red Sea and the maritime trade routes to the Indian subcontinent. The struggle between the Portuguese and the Turks for mastery of the Arabian Sea was destined to have a profound effect upon the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and Muslim emirates of the coast. The Somali and ʿAfar campaigns within the Islamic emirates of the coast, in particular those of ʿAdal, Ifat and Harar, would cause a hardening in relations with the inhabitants of the Ethiopian Highlands, but also within the Muslim emirates themselves. The emirs first recruited their forces from the ʿAfar tribes, who were lured by the promise of plunder, but afterwards were soon joined also by Somalis, Banu Jirri, Zerba, Habr Maqadi and many others. These leaders, of whom the most famous were Mahfuz and Ahmad b. Ibrahim (both Somali and related to each other), replaced the title of emir after their first successes with that of imam, transforming the raiding and pillaging of the inhabitants of the Plateau into a holy war against the Christian enemy.41 However, without Ottoman supply of firearms to the ʿAfar and Somalis, they would not have met with such military success: Mahfuz, the Imam of Harar, had already been killed by Lebna Dengel in the 1517 campaign against his territories.42 However, the early defeat of Mahfuz gave the Christians an exaggerated false sense of security. None of the first armed conflicts between the two states before 1516 was sufficiently disastrous to dispel the false notion of military superiority which Lebna Dengel and his officials continued to presume in their relations with ʿAdal.43 Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Ghazi, nicknamed the Gragn, the ‘left-handed’, by the Ethiopians, was able to rebuild Muslim political power in south-eastern Ethiopia. His marriage to the daughter of Mahfuz assured him the loyalty of his supporters while the Ottoman–Portuguese conflict for control of the sea routes prompted Istanbul to

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occupy the ports of Suakin and Zailaʿ and to establish relations with the Muslims in Portuguese-occupied Masawwaʿ. At the same time, in Zailaʿ, Catalan merchants, rivals of the Portuguese, were initially supplying the Muslim forces with arms. In 1531, Ahmad b. Ibrahim launched a well-planned attack that brought three quarters of Highland Ethiopia under his sway. The former Muslim kingdoms of Bale and Hadya and the Sidamo and Gurage realms were taken quite easily. The conquest was devastating in its destruction, irresistible in its ferocity and appalling in its cruelties:44 churches and monasteries were burned and many Christians forced to convert.45 Confronted with the stone churches of Lalibela, Ahmad b. Ibrahim looted objects made of precious metals, burnt manuscripts and everything of wood, but did little damage to the churches themselves. In 1535, Ahmad, in control of the south and centre of Highland Ethiopia, for the first time invaded Tigray, where he encountered strong opposition from the hardy mountain tribes and suffered some reverses; however, his advance was not stopped.46 Lebna Dengel became a hunted fugitive, harried from one mountain fastness to another. The havoc and destruction continued for more than fourteen years, during which virtually the whole of Highland Ethiopia was conquered and a great many centres of Ethiopian Christian civilisation destroyed, shaping the Christian perception of Muslims as the enemy within. The jihad was finally ended by Christian guerrilla resistance and with the help of a contingent of Portuguese soldiers, sent upon the request of the Ethiopian king, who arrived in 1541.47 Lebna Dengel died in battle in 1540 and was succeeded on the throne by eighteen-year-old Emperor Galawdewos (r. 1540–59), who received military support from the Portuguese and was able to retake large amounts of territory.48 Finally, Sarta Dengel (r. 1563–97), in a brilliant series of campaigns, decisively put an end to Harar as an Islamic military power, to the Ottoman expansion into Eritrea and to the independence of the Falasha kingdoms. Despite continued harassment and attempted invasions from foreign Muslim centres in subsequent centuries, the Solomonic kingdom re-established sufficient security to contain external Muslim threats thereafter. This new relationship between Islam and Christianity could be observed over the next century, in the Amhara Gondarine era, under the reigns of Fasilidas (r. 1632–67) and his son Yohannes I (r. 1667–82). This period was particularly important for the role the Amhara played on the Ethiopian Highlands in the evolution of the Orthodox Church as a national institution in opposition to the increasing interference of the Jesuits, who had been established in Ethiopia as a result of the Portuguese alliance since the mid-sixteenth century.49 However, Fasilidas’s policy also increased Ethiopian isolationism towards any foreign political or economic entity. He signed various alliances with the Muslim rulers of the coast, sending an envoy to the Imam al-Muʾayyad bi’llah of Yemen in 1642 asking him to banish or kill any Portuguese he came across. A few years later, he asked for a Muslim alim to be sent to his court. The alim arrived in Gondar in 1648, but was greeted with such opprobrium by the population that the king advised him, for his safety, to depart and sent him away loaded with costly gifts. The defence of true faith against heresy assumed with the Jesuit presence a very different character from the same discourse in the pre-Jesuit era. The Muslim–Christian divide was replaced with an Orthodox–Catholic/heretic one, shaping Ethiopia’s identity.50 Although Fasilidas’s Gondar castle, as well as the churches of Lalibela, remain symbolic of the complexity and cultural richness of Ethiopia, the isolationist policy (to which the Jesuits’ definitive expulsion in the 1630s was an important contribution)

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reached new heights under Emperor Johannes I (r. 1667–82). In 1668, the royal council promulgated an edict of religious discrimination, which decreed that the Franks (the descendants of the Portuguese) must leave the country unless they joined the National Church, while Muslims, who could not be expelled because they played a significant role in the economic life of the country, were forbidden to live with Christians and had to inhabit separate villages and separate quarters in the towns. Amharic nationalism was emerging, but not within a modern historical context; on the contrary, a process of feudalisation characterised Ethiopia. The kingdom became completely isolated, while the surrounding local Islamic emirates dominated the trade routes and all commercial activities.51 Muslim traders supplied the population of the Plateau with manufactures and complex goods, but also slaves and agricultural products from the broad basin of the Red Sea, and from the Indian subcontinent and the Mediterranean.

The Oromo’s Role in Shaping Ethiopian Interreligious Identity The other factor that prevented Abyssinia – and indeed ‘Greater Ethiopia’ as a whole – from returning to a pre-jihad status quo was a series of invasions by an east Cushitic people from the south, who attenuated the Muslim–Christian antagonism by weakening the position of both parties.52 These were the Galla, or Oromo. The Oromo presence, as Donald N. Levine has argued, would moderate Muslim–Christian antagonism and, over the following centuries, gave rise to a peaceful interreligious interaction that has survived until modern times (that is, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). It is therefore important to emphasise that, if a sort of ‘clash of civilisations’ started with the restoration of the Solomonic dynasty and erupted more violently when the ʿAfar and Somalis started to receive Ottoman support, it failed to destroy the Tigrinya and Amhara of Highland Ethiopia and developed increasingly as an interethnic conflict which assumed religious dimensions. The first Oromo emigration (the term Galla is today considered particularly offensive) for which there are any documents occurred during the 1520s when they invaded Bale, although there is evidence for an Oromo presence in the southern part of Ethiopia from at least the thirteenth to the fourteenth century.53 During the 1530s, they crossed the Webi Shabeelle, one of the ever-flowing rivers of the southern Ethiopian– Somali area, and invaded the Arsi–Bale–Dewaro regions.54 At the height of Ahmad b. Ibrahim’s expansion, the Oromo had already made significant inroads into Muslim territory in south-east Ethiopia and, after the amir’s death, it was the Muslims of Harar who suffered most from the beginning of the Oromo’s geographical relocation.55 In the 1540s and 1550s, the Oromo penetrated northwards to invade Fatigar and Shoa, while other groups devastated the Harar region; not until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century had they reached Gojjam, Amhara, Wollo and Damot. By invading parts of the recently Islamised areas of southern Ethiopia from the south, the Oromo were favouring the Christian resistance in the north. However, they maintained an effective equidistance from the religious conflict. The Oromo’s monotheistic religion, expressed through a belief in the sky god Waqaa (who acquired different names in different areas), is an expression of a Cushitic religiosity that dates back to an obscure historical period, probably prior to the sixteenth century.56 Today, approximately 47 per cent of the Oromo are Sunni Muslim, 30 per cent are Orthodox Christian and 17 per cent Protestants, while a

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limited minority remain bound to an indigenous Oromo religious tradition.57 They had a more markedly egalitarian culture (in comparison with the Somali clan system and the Amhara hierarchical regal structure) with a complex age-based class system, through which all men rotated in their lifetime. These branches were organised into a family clan structure and socially stratified in accordance with the male Gadaa, or age grade system, which remains in use among the Borana tribe. The classes of Gadaa, called Luba, are related to the members’ age. A man’s Luba was strictly associated with that of his father. There were eleven grades of Luba; a man belonged to each grade for a cycle of eight years and each grade was characterised by a particular set of rights and responsibilities; members of different Luba had the opportunity to reach a higher Luba level. Finally, the Oromo popular assembly, called the Gumi Gayo, established laws that were in force for each eight-year period until the next Gumi Gayo was held with a new elected leader.58 The Oromo adapted to the new geographical region into which they had migrated, some of them increasing their skills as pasture tenders and learning to use horses, others becoming stable farmers. However, their expansion was not calculated to extend political dominion over others, because the aforesaid internal structure did not at the beginning seek to gain recognition for a central authority to collect tribute or impose a national religious culture. Instead, being Oromo was probably linked to socio-political projects promoting the political-economic autonomy and legitimacy of rural civitates, in contrast to the more structured societies already established within the different areas they reached.59 Oromo leaders in direct contact with Christian or Muslim areas in the sixteenth to seventeenth century began a long process of integration that increased their importance.60 After they had settled and became Christian or Muslim, the Oromo often intermarried with the Amhara or the ʿAfar and Somalis. In the southern part of the country, especially in Bale and Arsi, the Oromo remained the dominant element of the population and maintained the awama, their traditional folk religion. There they created several kingdoms, gaining dominance over the indigenous Sidamo or Omotic people of the area and remaining essentially independent from Ethiopian imperial authority until the nineteenth century.61 The Oromo, geographically closer to Amharaland than to Harar, from the sixteenth century onwards absorbed many Abyssinian social and political institutions, losing their former structure and becoming powerful warrior tribes independent and antagonistic to each other, whilst many were recruited into the armies of the Negus. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of the Horn underwent a process of Islamisation, not as a result of military force, as older scholarship argued, but with the increasing and predominant role of trade, and this also affected the Oromo. The Oromo’s integration into Ethiopian society and their partial transformation into a praetorian guard did not prevent them from converting to Islam; on the contrary, the Muslim faith became significant as symptomatic of Oromo identity in regions geographically remote from the Abyssinian capital. The majority of the Oromo population living in the Islamic southern areas of the Horn – Harar and Arsi– Bale – gradually adopted Islam from the sixteenth century on, accepting the Imam of Harar as their nominal master while preserving some aspects of their original culture and socio-political organisation. Also in these regions, local Islamic authorities started

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to favour interethnic marriages with Somali and Oromo women to assure tribal support. As Mohammed Hassen argues: The Oromo appear to have wanted to counter Christian unity and strength by making Islam a major unifying factor, part of their cultural life, and a mark of their independence. Trimingham’s observation is accurate when he writes that the Oromo in Wollo reinforced their independence by the adoption of Islam. He goes on to argue that the Oromo in Wollo accepted Islam as a bulwark against being swamped by Abyssinian nationalism. Indeed, Islam appears to have served as a powerful symbol of Oromo identity and a reliable fortress against the domination of their Christian neighbours.62 In the seventeenth century, the Ethiopian Emperor Susenyos (r. 1606–32) took a keen interest in the Oromo. He had come to power with Oromo support,63 learnt their language, married an Oromo woman and integrated them into Ethiopian politics. However, after an initial period of peace between the Amhara and the Oromo, the emperor tried to Christianise those who were not geographically close to the Amhara territories, reigniting conflicts and bringing the war back to areas that had been comparatively peaceful since the arrival of the Oromo.64 Oromo warriors flooded into Susenyos’ domain and within a short time outnumbered his Amhara followers. During the reign of Iyasu I (1682–1706), the Amhara army of the north penetrated the Shoa region with the intention of attacking the Oromo of the south, but the unenthusiastic response of the local Amhara rulers to attacking their neighbours, who were partly ‘Amharised’ and with whom they maintained relatively friendly relations, convinced the emperor to maintain the status quo. The Oromo interaction with the previously subdued populations of the Ethiopian Highlands, such as the Sidamo, Mecha or the peoples of Innarya, Gibe and Damot, promoted an increasing number of coalitions in which a cultural mixture during the Zemene Mesafint (the Era of Princes) consolidated the leading role of the Oromo in parallel with an Islamic revival in the second half of the eighteenth century, partially due to the great development of caravan trade on the Plateau. This factor combined with Islam to become a unifying factor which helped the Oromo chiefs to consolidate their authority. During the eighteenth century, Iyasu II (r. 1730–55) was the last Negus who had any semblance of authority; nevertheless, the unity of the Ethiopian kingdom already depended on Oromo military support and Islamic trade. When a rebellion broke out in the Damot region shortly after the coronation of Iyasu II, the Oromo chief Waranna became local governor and his troops allowed the capital at Gondar to be supplied with basic necessities. The Oromo’s militarisation permitted lower-ranking warriors of many clans to rise to prominence and, with the increasing importance of the Shoa region (where the next capital, Addis Ababa, would be founded), the Oromo who converted to Christianity acquired a greater standing, emerging as new rulers of the area. Gondar was unable to control the Ethiopian Highlands while those who benefitted from the situation were the ‘Amharised’ Oromo who obtained important positions within the administration, the army and the Ethiopian court. The Christian Oromo partly ‘Amharised’ to reach a higher level within the Solomonic hierarchies and the majority of the emperors of Ethiopia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had Oromo blood. However, despite sharing the same religion with the Abyssinians, they

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did not share the political-ideological orientation of the Ethiopian Church, whose main interest was to preserve a structural inequality rooted in fascinating myths and legends, putting religious power in the service of the empire.65 Muslim-born local Oromo chiefs had to become nominal members of the Church for political reasons, but did not change their sympathies. As reported by Ferret and Galinier, but also by the Capuchin monk G. Massaia: A fundamental law of the Ethiopian state was that princes had to be Christians, therefore Muslims who aspired to the status of nobility had to change their religion. Such conversions were only nominal and when made governors of provinces they did all they could to favour Islam.66 The result was the increasing discontent of the Abyssinian clergy with Oromo supremacy and it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that the morale of the Church was at its lowest ebb because conversion to Islam in the Highlands had reached its apex. The social and economic activism of Muslim communities in the Highlands was clearly superior to the still feudal way of living of the Christian communities, while all commercial activities at the coastal ports were univocally in Muslim hands. In the Wollo region, the Oromo converted in large numbers to Islam during the eighteenth century, or at least this was the perception of the Amhara and Tigray elite in Gondar. The Yajju state and an anti-Oromo prejudice increased the interethnic conflict, de facto favouring the emergence of the Yajju Oromo, nobility whose conversion to Christianity from Islam was never accepted as genuine. The Islamic presence in Wollo was rooted in the prevalence of different Sufi confraternities, in particular the Qadiri and Shadhili, quite probably as early as the sixteenth century.67 The appeal of Sufi orders was their emphasis on common religious performances through dhikr (invocations), piety and solidarity, but also their interaction with non-Muslim communities. The Islamic mystical presence fostered a rich spiritual tradition interconnected with local non-Muslim folk practices which did not impose Arabic as the main identifying religious idiom, but developed an intermingled hybrid religious culture, albeit maintaining stronger links with centres of Islamic learning in the wider Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. In the Ethiopian countryside, mostly populated by farmers, local traders and craftsmen, there developed zāwiyas (local monasteries not so dissimilar to those of the Christian Ethiopian tradition) and Islamic education. Around these zāwiyas, there grew up places for local pilgrimages, usually connected with saints’ graves and mosques.68 The local male and female zāwiyas were viewed entirely as places of retreat and religious study where Muslims were committed to the pious life, prayer and the study of the Quran and fiqh. The Christian monastic influence was evident in the Horn of Africa too and even if the Quran (57: 27) expressed an Islamic opposition to cenobitism, religious seclusion for spiritual reasons became particularly popular in the Wollo region with the expansion of Sufi holy places that transformed the saints’ shrines into pilgrimage sites where students and common people prayed and encouraged spiritual experience.69 The subsequent emergence, in the nineteenth century, of women’s convents linked to the Qadiriyya, but clearly influenced by Christian nuns’ orders, in the Amhara, ʿAfar, Argobba and Oromo territories is symptomatic of the existence of a cultural–religious melting pot able to introduce innovations. These sacred areas of pilgrimage allowed for conversion and for religious-conflict mediation between the various local ethnic groups. This was a prominent characteristic, quite

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unusual, but paradigmatically connected with the growing interreligious identity of the Plateau.

Conclusion: The Islamisation of the Ethiopian Highlands and Ethiopia’s National Identity The rising power of the Oromo defused the Muslim–Christian clash of civilisations that characterised the sixteenth century with Ahmad b. Ibrahim’s attempt to annihilate the Christian presence from the Ethiopian Highlands (although the Solomonic dynasty, despite fighting fiercely against the Islamic emirates of the coast, never tried to extirpate the Muslim presence in the region due to the usefulness of their role as traders). The rising Oromo role in the Horn of Africa on both sides, the Christian as well as the Islamic, is due to their great pliability and to the fundamental aspect that emphasised the roots of a national identity outside a religious dimension. Muslim, Christian and traditional folk praxis in any case fully shared a clear Oromo identity, which increased their importance in the Horn regardless of their religious beliefs. Oromo society today is still multireligious, through a village system in which church and mosque are not so distant. We can therefore problematise the process of Islamisation in the Ethiopian Highlands as follows. First, forced conversion remained rare, especially outside the violent clashes of the sixteenth century, which nonetheless did not lead to a concrete transformation of the religious geography of the Plateau. Second, the arrival of the Oromo preserved the status quo in the south-eastern part of the Ethiopian Highlands, de facto freezing the interreligious conflict. Third, the process of feudalisation in Ethiopia, as a response to the internationalisation of the Muslim–Christian conflict, helped to defuse the religious clashes of the sixteenth century in an attempt to preserve its Christian identity. Fourth, the ‘isolationist’ policy of the Ethiopians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resulted in the increasing importance of Muslim trade activities between the coast of the Horn and the main urban areas of the Highlands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the paradigmatic figure of Ligg Yasu, the son of Ras Mika’el, the chief of the Wollo-Galla region (to whom Menelik had married his favourite daughter) who tried to secure his son’s the succession to the throne with the support of the Wallo tribes, an intermixed, predominantly Muslim, Oromo people,70 clarified the level that the process of Islamisation in the Ethiopian Highlands had reached.71 Ligg Yasu’s pro-Islamic orientation, following his accession to the throne, was the main cause of his defenestration: Christian Ethiopian society could not approve the existence of an emperor whose Christianity was just a facade. However, it is important that, after this ‘incident’, Ethiopian society, both Christian and Muslim, preserved its unity, making it ready for the Italian invasion of the 1930s. The Oromo ethnic element of Ethiopia can be considered the cornerstone on which the unitarian national identity of the country has been reshaped in the last centuries. Their interreligious and long-standing assimilation contributed to the end of the Muslim–Christian clash of the sixteenth century, weakening ʿAfar and Somali attempts to restructure the internal equilibrium of the Highlands, and keeping them on the geographical and social margins of contemporary Ethiopian society.

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Notes 1. Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, 2nd edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 2. J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c. 500 bc to ad 1050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 252. 3. Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 87; Francis E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 88. 4. Richard K. P. Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Royal Chronicles (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 2ff; George Hatke, Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 5. Jeremiah 38: 7–13. 6. Edward Ullendorf, Ethiopia and the Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 75. 7. Michael Brett, ‘The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 584; J. Cuoq, Islamisation de la Nubie chretienne, VII–XVI siècle (Paris. L. Orientaliste Geuthner, 1986). 8. Al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, Being the Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān, trans. Philip Khuri Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), p. 379ff. 9. Yusuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan: From the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 182–202. Ibn Hawqal (d. 988), in G. Vanini (ed.), Oriental Sources concerning Nubia (Heidelberg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975), p. 162. 10. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 55. 11. A. J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 325, 338, 427ff; P. Forand, ‘Early Muslim Relations with Nubia’, Der Islam 48 (1971), pp. 111–21; Jay Spaulding, ‘Medieval Christian Nubia and the Islamic World: A Reconsideration of the Baqt Treaty’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (1995), pp. 577–94. 12. Fage, Cambridge History of Africa, p. 569. 13. Al-Maqrizi, al-Kitab al-Mawaʿiz wa’l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa’l-Athar, ed. by G. Wiet (Cairo: IFAO, 1911), vol. 1, p. 323; al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte, trans. M. Quatremère (Paris: Institut de France, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 106, 113, 127–40, 150. 14. Al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte, vol. 1, p. 16. 15. Ibn Hawqal in Vanini (ed.), Oriental Sources concerning Nubia, p. 563. 16. Ibid. 17. Abbebe Kifleyesus, Tradition and Transformation: The Argobba of Ethiopia, Aethiopistische Forschungen (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2006) p. 43. 18. Aklilu Asfaw, ‘A Short History of the Argobba’, Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000), pp. 173–83. 19. Abbebe Kifleyesus, Tradition and Transformation, pp. 41ff., 48ff. 20. Ibn Hisham, Sirat Rasul Allah, ed. F. Wustenfeld (Gottingen: n.p., 1858–60), p. 208; J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1965), p. 44. 21. Levine, Greater Ethiopia, p. 5. 22. Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Taʾrikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901), vol. 2, p. 1777. 23. J. van Ess, ‘Les Qadarites et la Ġailānīya de Yazīd III’, Studia Islamica 31 (1970), p. 272. 24. Al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, ed. M. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1892), vol. 2, p. 336; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 49.

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25. Al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, vol. 2, p. 319. 26. Al-Masʿudi, Muruj al-Dhahab, ed. B. de Meynard and P. de Courteille (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1863), vol. 3, p. 34; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 51. 27. Ibn Hawqal, Opus Geographicum auctore Ibn Hawkal, ed. J. H. Kramer (Leiden: Brill, 1938), vol. 1, pp. 50–6. 28. Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, in Roland Olivier (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3: From c. 1050 to c. 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 138ff. 29. Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 6ff. 30. O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958), p. 81ff. 31. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 56. 32. Al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al- Amsar, ed. M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris: Geuthner, 1927). 33. Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Processes of Ethnic Interaction and Integration in Ethiopian History: The Case of the Agaw’, The Journal of African History 29, no. 1, special issue in honour of Roland Olivier (1988), pp. 5–18. 34. Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, pp. 13–28; al-Maqrizi, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte, vol. 4, p. 183; Levine, Greater Ethiopia, p. 72; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 70. 35. al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar, pp. 1–2. 36. Alessandro Gori, ‘Sugli Incipit delle missive inviate dalla cancelleria mamelucca ai sovrano d’Etiopia nel XIV–XV secolo’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, n.s., 1 (2002), pp. 29–44. 37. Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, p. 148ff. 38. Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, pp. 29–40; J. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zara Ya‘eqob et de Ba’eda Maryam (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1893), p. 88. 39. Šihab ad-Din Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Qader, Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, trans. Paul Lester Stenhouse (Los Angeles: Tsehai Publishing, 2003), pp. 7–9. 40. Ibid., pp. 20–1, 45, 54, 57. 41. Ibid., pp. 27–33. 42. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 81ff; Pankhurst, Ethiopian Royal Chronicles, pp. 49–69. 43. Carlo Conti Rossini, ‘La storia di Lebna Dangel re d’Etiopia’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei 3 (1894), pp. 624, 635. 44. Šihāb ad-Din, Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, pp. 88, 152, 167, 181, 192. 45. Ibid., pp. 210, 242–52. 46. Ibid., p. 352ff.; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 87. 47. Jon Abbink, ‘An Historical-Anthropological Approach to Islam in Ethiopia: Issues of Identity and Politics’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 11–12 (1998), p. 114. 48. Özbaran, Salih, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion: Studies on OttomanPortuguese Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the Arab Lands During the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1994). 49. Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300-1700 (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2015), p. 341. 50. Matteo Salvadore, ‘The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555-1634) and the Death of the Prester John’, in Allison B. Kavey (ed.), World Building and the Early Modern Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 141–72. 51. Ibid., p. 103. 52. Levine, Greater Ethiopia, pp. 77–8.

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53. Dimitri Toubkis, ‘Les Oromo à la conquête du trône du rois des rois (XVI–XVIII siècle)’, Afriques 1 (2010), http://afriques.revues.org/470 (accessed July 2016); P. T. W. Baxter et al. (eds), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996); G. Schlee, ‘Oromo Expansion and its Impact on Ethnogenesis in Northern Kenya’, in T. Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies: University of Addis Ababa, 1984 (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), pp. 711–23. 54. Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom, p. 15ff. 55. Éloi Ficquet, ‘ La fabrique des origines Oromo’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), p. 56. 56. Thomas Zitelmann, ‘Oromo Religion, Ayyaana and the Possibility of Sufi Legacy’, Journal of Oromo Studies 12, nos 1–2 (2005), p. 86ff. 57. Éloi Ficquet, ‘Une apologie éthiopienne de l’Islam’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), pp. 7–35; Abbas Haji Gnamo, ‘Islam, the Orthodox Church and Oromo Nationalism (Ethiopia)’, in Cahiers d’Études Africaines 165 (2002), pp. 99–120. 58. Marco Demichelis, ‘Oromo’, in Steven Danver (ed.), Native People of the World: An Encyclopaedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 69–72. 59. Thomas Osmond, ‘Competing Muslim Legacies along City/Countryside Dichotomies: Another History of Harar Town and its Oromo Rural Neighbours in Eastern Ethiopia’, Journal of Modern African Studies 52, no. 1 (2014), pp. 1–23; Thomas Osmond, ‘Knowledge, Identity and Epistemological Choices: An Attempt to Overcome Theoretical Tensions in the Field of Oromo Studies’, in S. Epple (ed.), Creating and Crossing Boundaries in Ethiopia: Dynamics of Social Categorization and Differentiation (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 189–212. 60. Mordechai Abir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in Richard Gray (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4: From c. 1600 to c. 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 550ff. 61. Zitelman, ‘Oromo Religion’, p. 91. 62. Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom, p. 344ff. 63. Ibid., p. 340. 64. Demichelis, ‘Oromo’, p. 71; Abir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, p. 537ff. 65. Patrick Desplant and Terje Østebø (eds), Muslims of Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics and Islamic Reformism (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 66. M. M. Ferret et Galinier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans les provinces du Tigrè, du Samen et de l’Amhara (Paris: Pauline–Libraire Éditeur, 1847), vol. 2, p. 324; G. Massaia, I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia (Rome: Tipografia Manuzio, 1922–30), vol. 4, pp. 78–9. 67. Ficquet, ‘Une apologie éthiopienne de l’Islam’, pp. 7–35; Jon Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries? Some Aspects of Religious Culture in Northern Ethiopia’, Aethiopica 11 (2008), pp. 117–33; Jon Abbink, ‘Transformations of Islam and Communal Relations in Wallo, Ethiopia’, in Benjamin Soares and René Otayek (eds), Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 65–84; Ahmed Zekaria, ‘Some Remarks on the Shrines of Harar’, in Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp (eds), Saints, Biographies and History in Africa (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2003), pp. 19–29. 68. Hussein Ahmad, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, Ethiopia: Revival, Reform, Reaction (Brill: Leiden, 2001), p. 71; Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries?’, p. 121ff. 69. Ahmad, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, pp. 68–9; Abbink, ‘Muslim Monasteries?’, p. 123. 70. Éloi Ficquet and Wolbert G. C. Smidt, The Life and Times of Ligg Yasu of Ethiopia: New Insights (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 5–29. 71. Paolo Borruso, L’ultimo impero cristiano: politiche e religione nell’Etiopia contemporanea (1916-1974) (Milan: Guerini e Associati Editore, 2002), p. 45ff.

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Bibliography Abbink, Jon, ‘An Historical-Anthropological Approach to Islam in Ethiopia: Issues of Identity and Politics’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 11–12 (1998), pp. 109–24. Abbink, Jon, ‘Transformations of Islam and Communal Relations in Wallo, Ethiopia’, in Benjamin Soares and René Otayek (eds), Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 65–84. Abbink, Jon, ‘Muslim Monasteries? Some Aspects of Religious Culture in Northern Ethiopia’, Aethiopica 11 (2008), pp. 117–33. Abir, Mordechai, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in Richard Gray (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4: From c. 1600 to c. 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 537–77. Abir, Mordechai, Ethiopia and the Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim-European Rivalry in the Region (London: Routledge, 1980). Ahmad, Hussein, Islam in Nineteenth Century Wallo, Ethiopia: Revival, Reform, Reaction (Brill: Leiden, 2001). Asfaw, Aklilu, ‘A Short History of the Argobba’, Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000), pp. 173–83. al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State, Being a Translation of ‘Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān’, trans. Philip Khuri Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916). Baxter, P. T. W., Jan Hultin and Alessandro Triulzi (eds), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996). Borruso, Paolo, L’ultimo impero cristiano: Politiche e religione nell’Etiopia contemporanea (1916-1974) (Milan: Guerini e Associati Editore, 2002). Brett, Michael, ‘The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c.500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 490–555. Butler, A. J., The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902). Cerulli, Enrico, Documenti Arabi per la Storia d’Etiopia (Roma: G. Bardi, 1931). Crawford, O. G. S., Ethiopian Itineraries, circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958). Cuoq, J., Islamisation de la Nubie chretienne, VII–XVI siècle (Paris: L. Orientaliste Geuthner, 1986). Demichelis, Marco, ‘Oromo’, in Steven Danver (ed.), Native People of the World: An Encyclopaedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 69–72. Desplant, Patrick, and Terje Østebø (eds), Muslims of Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics and Islamic Reformism (New York: Palgrave, 2013). Doresse, Jean, Histoire sommaire de la corne orientale de l’Afrique (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1971). van Ess, Josef, ‘Les Qadarites et la Ġailānīya de Yazīd III’, Studia Islamica 31 (1970), pp. 269–86. Fage, J. D., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c.500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Ferret et Galinier, M. M. Voyage en Abyssinie, dans les provinces du Tigrè, du Samen et de l’Amhara (Paris: Pauline–Libraire Éditeur, 1847). Ficquet, Éloi, ‘Une apologie éthiopienne de l’Islam’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), pp. 7–35. Ficquet, Éloi, ‘La fabrique des origines Oromo’, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002), pp. 55–71. Ficquet, Éloi, and Wolbert G. C. Smidt, The Life and Times of Ligg Yasu of Ethiopia (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014). Forand, P., ‘Early Muslim Relations with Nubia’, Der Islam 48 (1971), pp. 111–21. Gnamo, Abbas Haji, ‘Islam, the Orthodox Church and Oromo Nationalism (Ethiopia)’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 165 (2002), pp. 99–120.

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Gori, Alessandro, ‘Sugli Incipit delle missive inviate dalla cancelleria mamelucca ai sovrano d’Etiopia nel XIV–XV secolo’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, n.s., 1 (2002), pp. 29–44. Hasan, Yusuf Fadl, The Arabs and the Sudan from the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967). Hassen, Mohammed, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia, 1300–1700 (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2015). Hatke, George, Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Henze, Paul B., Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2004). Ibn Hawqal, Opus Geographicum auctore Ibn Hawkal, ed. J. H. Kramer (Leiden: Brill, 1938). Ibn Hisham, Sirat Rasul Allah, ed. F. Wustenfeld (Gottingen: n.p., 1858–60). Iliffe, John, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Kifleyesus, Abbebe, Tradition and Transformation: The Argobba of Ethiopia, Aethiopistische Forschungen (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2006). Levine, Donald N., Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, 2nd edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). al-Maqrizi, Histoire des sultans mamlouks de l’Égypte, trans. M. Quatremère (Paris: Institut de France, 1840), vol. 1. al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-Mawaʿiz wa’l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa’l-Athar, ed. G. Wiet (Cairo: IFAO, 1911), vol. 1. Massaia, G., I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia (Rome: Tipografia Manuzio, 1922–30). al-Masʿudi, Muruj al-Dhahab, ed. B. de Meynard and P. de Courteille (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1863). Munro-Hay, Stuart, Aksum: An African Civilization in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). Osmond, Thomas, ‘Competing Muslim Legacies along City/Countryside Dichotomies: Another History of Harar Town and its Oromo Rural Neighbours in Eastern Ethiopia’, Journal of Modern African Studies 52, no. 1 (2014), pp. 1–23. Osmond, Thomas, ‘Knowledge, Identity and Epistemological Choices: An Attempt to Overcome Theoretical Tensions in the Field of Oromo Studies’, in S. Epple (ed.), Creating and Crossing Boundaries in Ethiopia: Dynamics of Social Categorization and Differentiation (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 189–212. Özbaran, Salih, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion: Studies on OttomanPortuguese Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the Arab Lands During the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1994). Pankhurst, Richard K. P., The Ethiopian Royal Chronicles (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Perruchon, J., Les chroniques de Zara Ya‘eqob et de Ba’eda Maryam (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1893). Peters, Francis E., Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Rossini, Carlo Conti, Storia d’Etiopia (Rome: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1929). Rossini, Carlo Conti, ‘La storia di Lebna Dangel re d’Etiopia’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei 3 (1894), pp. 617–40. Salvadore, Matteo, ‘The Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia (1555-1634) and the Death of the Prester John’, in Allison B. Kavey (ed.), World Building and the Early Modern Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), pp. 141–72. Schlee, G., ‘Oromo Expansion and its Impact on Ethnogenesis in Northern Kenya’, in T. Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, University of Addis Ababa, 1984 (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), pp. 711–23.

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Šihab ad-Din Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Qader, Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, trans. by Paul Lester Stenhouse (Los Angeles: Tsehai Publishing, 2003). Spaulding, Jay, ‘Medieval Christian Nubia and the Islamic World: A Reconsideration of the Baqt Treaty’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (1995), pp. 577–94. al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn Jarir, Taʾrikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje, (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901). Tamrat, Taddesse, Church and State in Ethiopia 1270-1527 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Tamrat, Taddesse, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, in Roland Olivier (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3: From c. 1050 to c. 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 98–182. Tamrat, Taddesse, ‘Processes of Ethnic Interaction and Integration in Ethiopian History: The Case of the Agaw’, The Journal of African History 29, no. 1, special issue in honour of Roland Olivier (1988), pp. 5–18. Toubkis, Dimitri, ‘Les Oromo à la conquête du trône du rois des rois (XVI–XVIII siècle)’, Afriques 1 (2010), http://afriques.revues.org/470 (accessed July 2016). Trimingham, J. Spencer, Islam in Ethiopia (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1965). Ullendorff, Edward, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Ullendorf, Edward, Ethiopia and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). al-ʿUmari, Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar, ed. M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris: Geuthner, 1927). Vanini, G. (ed.), Oriental Sources concerning Nubia (Heidelberg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1975). al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, ed. M. De Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1892). Zekaria, Ahmed, ‘Some Remarks on the Shrines of Harar’, in Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp (eds), Saints Biographies and History in Africa (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2003), pp. 19–29. Zitelmann, Thomas, ‘Re-Examining the Galla/Oromo Relationship: The Stranger as a Structural Topic’, in P. T. W. Baxter, Ian Hultin and Alessandro Triulzi (eds), Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996), pp. 103–13. Zitelmann, Thomas, ‘Oromo Religion, Ayyaana and the Possibility of Sufi Legacy’, Journal of Oromo Studies 12, nos 1–2 (2005), pp. 80–99.

13 THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ISLAMISATION IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Timothy Insoll

T

he archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa is remarkably diverse in relation to its material components, its geographical and chronological frameworks, and the life ways that were influenced by Islam, from settled and nomadic populations, peasants and kings, to merchants, farmers, warriors and townspeople. Islamisation processes were equally varied involving, for example, trade, proselytisation, jihad and prestige. Economically, new markets might be reached. Politically, the adoption of Arabic, of new forms of administration and of literacy could have a significant impact. Socially, material culture and ways of life could alter as manifest via diet and funerary practices, house types and settlement patterns. It is not possible to adequately summarise this diversity here.1 Instead emphasis will be placed upon selectively considering the evidence in order to indicate what archaeology can tell us about Islamisation processes in Africa, and to demonstrate the value and utility of archaeology for examining this Islamisation. Two regions will be the focus: Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, and the Western Sahel (Figure 13.1). These reflect in environments, chronology, life ways, Islamisation processes and material culture the diversity just mentioned and are both regions where this author has completed significant archaeological fieldwork. Moreover, although Islamic archaeology might be the focus, it is necessary to stress two points. First, this forms part of African Iron Age archaeology and thus fits into the preexisting archaeological context. Second, the presence of Muslims from a certain point in time does not imply that everyone was Muslim and that a uniform suite of Islamic material culture appeared. On the contrary, the archaeology frequently reflects a continuing mosaic of different belief systems – Islam, African indigenous religions and, in Ethiopia, Christianity – and of dynamic historical and social processes. Beyond the two regions that are the focus, the archaeological study of Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa, defined here as referring both to religious2 and cultural change,3 has varied significantly across the continent, reflecting research interests but also facilities and ease of working. The East African coast and, until recent strife in the region precluded fieldwork, the Western Sahel are the two most thoroughly investigated areas. 244

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Figure 13.1 The subdivisions of the continent of Africa.

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By comparison, the Islamic archaeology of Ethiopia, and to a lesser extent the Nilotic Sudan, has been neglected, for archaeological priorities have focused on different periods, materials and traditions. This is evident in, for instance, the focus on prehistoric, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic complex societies in both Ethiopia and the Nilotic Sudan.4 In contrast, the archaeology of the central Sudan as a whole remains underexplored, whilst the Islamic archaeology of the eastern and central African interior and of southern Africa is limited and late in date, and that of the Muslim communities of the West African Sudan and forest needs further investigation.

The Social Dynamics of Conversion Why and how people converted to Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa has been the focus of study by anthropologists, historians and religious studies specialists, but much less frequently by archaeologists. Influential formative studies of conversion processes include those of Trimingham5, Fisher6 and R. Horton.7 The first two emphasise phased patterns of conversion (Table 13.1), whereas Horton, whose model is largely concerned with Christianity but has been influential also in relation to Islam,8 suggests a two-tiered structure to African cosmology involving microcosm (local spirits) and macrocosm (supreme being). For Islamisation (and Christianity) to succeed, it was necessary for a breakdown in the microcosm and a corresponding growth in importance of the macrocosm. Elements of these models can occasionally help in interpreting the archaeology of Islamisation and Islamic conversion in Sub-Saharan Africa, as is discussed below. However, beyond the sometimes evocative language used, these models are too all-encompassing to be applied effectively to explain Islamisation universally within such a diverse and complex area as Sub-Saharan Africa. Table 13.1 Stages or phases in African Islamic conversion proposed by Trimingham (1968) and Fisher (1973, 1985).9 Conversion Stage or Phase

Description

Germination (Trimingham)

Preparatory contacts. Indigenous religions not unduly disturbed. Items of Islamic material culture such as dress and amulets adopted

Crisis (Trimingham)

Assimilation of elements of Muslim practice, e.g. dietary prohibitions and prayer, alongside continuation of indigenous religious practices

Reorientation (Trimingham)

Indigenous religious cults lose power and accompanying reorientation to Islam

Quarantine (Fisher)

Islam confined to a specific group such as traders

Mixing (Fisher)

Islamic conversion occurs and Islam mixed with indigenous beliefs and practices via syncretic processes

Reform (Fisher)

Wave of Islamic reform occurs

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Of greater utility is a three-phase model invoking ‘inclusion’, ‘identification’ and ‘displacement’ developed by Eaton to explain conversion to Islam in Bengal.10 This is a model, as this author has described elsewhere,11 which has utility for thinking about Sub-Saharan African Islamisation in particular contexts as it ‘allows for gradual religious change and, importantly, assimilation of older elements within the process as well’.12 Besides recognising staggered chronologies, local cultural adaptations and what could be described as syncretic processes, recent studies of Islamisation and conversion to Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa by anthropologists and historians indicate an interpretive shift from a universal level to one emphasising regional or local context.13 Generally, though, archaeologists working on Islamic material in Africa south of the Sahara have still tended to neglect Islamisation and conversion to Islam in favour of questions surrounding chronology, trade and urbanism, though this is beginning to change, as is considered below beginning with Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa Islamic archaeology in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa has been neglected.14 In Ethiopia, for example, there are very few exceptions,15 a reflection perhaps of the secondary status ascribed to Ethiopian Islam more widely.16 As a correlate, reviews of Islam in Ethiopia tend to lack a material dimension.17 This is an omission of consequence, as arguably Ethiopia and Eritrea were among the first areas of Sub-Saharan Africa to be in contact with Islamic communities.18

The Red Sea Coast Building upon extensive pre-Islamic connections across the Red Sea,19 historical records suggest close relations were maintained between the early Muslim community and Ethiopia.20 A group of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers fleeing persecution in Mecca in 615 who found asylum in the Kingdom of Aksum21 provides probably the most famous example of this. Hadith also record that an Ethiopian, Bilal b. Rabah, was appointed as the first muezzin by the Prophet Muhammad and that the Prophet’s spear was a gift from the Ethiopian ruler.22 Materially, there is very little to indicate these early Islamic Ethiopian connections, reflecting in part the absence of relevant research.23 Surveys have been completed in some areas (for example, parts of Shoa24) and Arabic funerary inscriptions have been the focus of research, for example in Shoa, Quiha and the Dahlak Islands in neighbouring Eritrea.25 The Dahlaks were one of the earliest Muslim centres of settlement in the region (Figure 13.2). ‘Abyssinian’ pirates were recorded as having attacked Jeddah in 702–326 and as a reaction to this the islands were occupied in the early eighth century by Muslim naval forces. The islands then variously served as a place of exile and a major trade centre. Unfortunately, direct material correlation of this earliest Islamic period is lacking, as the over 200 basalt Arabic funerary inscriptions recorded from the Dahlaks date from between 911 and 1539 (Figure 13.3).27 The earliest Islamic archaeological chronology also remains unknown, pending excavation, though survey has found the remains of an extensive settlement, cisterns for water storage and scattered trade

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Figure 13.2 Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, indicating some of the principal sites discussed.

items of types widely found on the East African Indian Ocean and Red Sea coasts.28 These include monochrome glass beads, Chinese celadon (green wares), blue-andwhite wares, white wares and Islamic sgraffiato wares of the ninth to twelfth century and of Mesopotamian or Iranian provenance.29 Trade was the likely primary agent of Islamisation in the Dahlak Islands and on the neighbouring African Red Sea coast.30 Examples of key mainland trade centres that functioned as significant nodes for Islamisation, were Zailaʿ and Berbera on the Gulf of Aden in Somaliland. Yaqut mentions Zailaʿ as early as 891–2,31 and substantial settlement remains have been recorded in and around the town and on the neighbouring island of Saad Din.32 Fauvelle-Aymar et al.33 have recently explored the archaeology of Zailaʿ with interesting results. The Qiblatayn mosque, or so-called mosque ‘avec deux mihrab’,34 was test excavated – this name reflects the belief that the mosque was aligned to both Mecca and Jerusalem, thereby reflecting the prayer orientation of the earliest Muslims, and was, according to oral tradition, one of the earliest mosques in Sub-Saharan Africa.35 A second excavation was focused on the suspected location of an old pathway passing this and the other two main mosques in Zailaʿ. However, the earliest ceramic material recovered from the excavations was Yemeni ‘mustard’ or black-on-yellow wares of the thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries. Fauvelle-Aymar et al.36 suggest, based on this evidence and the historical sources, that the Islamisation of Zailaʿ was comparatively late, at the end of the twelfth to the beginning of the thirteenth century. However, further surface survey at Zailaʿ recovered turquoise glazed wares, dated to the third to tenth century

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Figure 13.3 Muslim tombstone, Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea (photo: C. Spence).

based on parallels elsewhere,37 indicating that the Islamisation of Zailaʿ was likely earlier, but at a date as yet unknown.

The Ethiopian Highlands Trade, allied with proselytisation, spread Islam into the Ethiopian interior.38 FauvelleAymar and Hirsch in their important studies of 2010 and 201139 have suggested that this was through two axes, initially from the ninth to tenth century via the Dahlak Islands and Masawwaʿ to Shoa and, second, from the thirteenth century via Zailaʿ and Berbera to Harar and onto the southern lakes region. An important exception to the absence of excavation of Islamic sites is provided by their work40 at Nora, an abandoned town in north-east Shoa linked with the more northerly trade route. Excavation was completed in the main mosque and radiocarbon dated to between the mid-twelfth and late thirteenth centuries.41 The importance of this work lies in part in the fact that Nora was the first Islamic site in Ethiopia where excavation ‘excède le cadre de simples repérages et sondages’.42 Within Ethiopia, the southern Islamisation/trade route has also been the focus of recent archaeological investigation focused on the city of Harar and the nearby abandoned settlement of Harlaa (Figure 13.2).43 The importance of Harar is indicated by its size and is reflected in the listing of the Old City as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Harar’s city wall, the djugel, contains within it approximately 2,000 houses, eighty-two mosques and over a hundred saints’ tombs and shrines, the result of significant urban development over many centuries and making it a focal point of sanctity (Figure 13.4). Harar has significant historical depth, although the origins are obscured by conflicting

Figure 13.4 The Old City of Harar from the south-east (photo: T. Insoll).

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traditions. These range from it being founded by Arabs from the Hadramawt in the late seventh century44 to it being established by local people in the tenth century,45 or even that it was a later foundation in the sixteenth century.46 An alternative hypothesis distinguished in Harari local traditions is that the city had dual foundation dates: the first described as occurring about the tenth century and the second during the reign of Amir Nur (1552–68). 47 Each theory holds different implications, not just for the foundations of the city, but for understanding the chronology of Islamic conversion and form of Islamisation processes throughout the region, and their links with trade networks. Harar connected the eastern Ethiopian Highlands with the arid lowlands and the Gulf of Aden.48 Harar was also a centre of Islamic learning. As such it was sometimes colloquially referred to as the ‘Timbuktu of Ethiopia’ because of this status and Harar was, and still is, a major centre of Muslim pilgrimage. It was also a locus of proselytisation and a nucleus of Islamisation from an unconfirmed date, perhaps from the twelfth century and the migration of the Muslim Argobba into the region,49 or perhaps later in the fifteenth to sixteenth century, a more likely date for its foundation based on the currently available archaeological data. Hamburti is the core area of early settlement in Harar; the explorer Richard Burton described Gay Hamburti as ‘the historic rock upon which Saint Nur held converse with the prophet Khizr’.50 Within local tradition, Hamburti is referred to as the ‘navel’ of Harar, suggesting it is a significant location in the foundation history of the city. Two test excavations were completed in this area, one in a domestic compound and the other in the courtyard outside the former palace of one of the amirs of Harar, Amir Abdur Shakur according to local informants, though this precise association remains unproven. A radiocarbon date of the mid-fifteenth century was obtained from near the base of the sequence at the palace excavations. The other unit only provided modern material.51 Excavation was also completed adjacent to the shrine of Amir Nur (d. 1567). Amir Nur, previously mentioned, and Shaykh Abadir (thirteenth century), a notable scholar and influential in the ‘dissemination of Islam’,52 are the two most revered saints in Harar53 and their shrines the most important Muslim sites in the city. A sequence of Muslim burials was recorded (left in situ and, other than noting their presence and orientation, undisturbed). A radiocarbon date of the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth century was obtained from the base of the excavation. This is significant as no inscriptions were found in the cemetery and the date indicates the shrine became a focus of burial some time after Amir Nur was interred at this location, but again provided no corroboration of an early foundation date for Harar. Evidence for participation in international trade was also minimal, comprising a sherd of white-glazed pottery and a single green glass flask neck from the palace site, and a sherd of blue-and-white ware from an undated iron-working site. Both the sherds and the glass are likely of Yemeni or Middle Eastern provenance. Although archaeology is currently indicating that Harar was seemingly a late foundation or potentially a re-foundation, that is post mid-fifteenth century, Muslim communities existed at an earlier date elsewhere in the eastern Highlands. At Harlaa, c. 40 km north-west of Harar, an extensive, and at least partially Islamised, trade centre has been recorded, dated to between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through radiocarbon samples and artefacts.54 Four engraved Arabic stelae have also been recorded at Harlaa,55 three are undated and one is possibly dated to 1048–57. 56 Two test excavations have been completed. One was in a ruined stone-built mosque and exposed the mihrab built of blocks of coralline limestone, possibly indicative of

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Figure 13.5 The mosque excavated at Harlaa, indicating the mihrab and adjacent niche (photo: T. Insoll). Red Sea architectural influences, and a white lime mortar and gravel floor (Figure 13.5). A radiocarbon date was obtained from the floor of the mid-twelfth to midthirteenth century. Two niches were also found in the walls, one in the mihrab likely used for storing the Quran and the other next to the mihrab for the imam to sit in while delivering a sermon, according to local informants. The second excavation was in the settlement area and uncovered a wall and areas of stone floor. Two radiocarbon dates indicated occupation again spanned the mid-twelfth to mid-thirteenth century. In contrast to Harar, extensive evidence for involvement in long-distance trade was found at the settlement site, which is in the process of being analysed. It includes both Chinese (celadon, white ware, possibly Qingbai) and Islamic ceramics (black-onyellow or ‘mustard’ wares, as found at Zailaʿ [see above], unidentified green-, blackand brown-glazed wares) (Figure 13.6). Numerous glass vessel and bracelet fragments were also recorded. One bracelet fragment has a raised polychrome glass drop decoration and is broadly comparable to glass bracelets from Zailaʿ (site Z1),57 suggesting possible connections. The bead assemblage was particularly diverse in both the materials and the forms represented including glass, carnelian, rock crystal, coral and banded agate. The origins of this material are as yet unknown, but could include, besides the Chinese ceramics, Egypt and the Near East for the glass vessels and some of the glass beads and glass bracelets, the Red Sea for the coral and some of the shell, elsewhere in East Africa for the rock crystal, western India for some of the carnelian beads, Yemen for some of the glazed pottery, for example ‘mustard wares’,58 and some of the glass bracelets, and the Maldives for the cowry shells.59

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Figure 13.6 Examples of imported ceramics from Harlaa (HAR 15 [B]). Top row: 1, Yemeni ‘mustard’ ware; 3, 4, 5, celadon (photo: T. Insoll). Further insight into trade connections and the potential areas of the Islamic world the inhabitants of Harlaa were indirectly connected with was provided by unstratified finds made by villagers during farming activities at the site.60 This included three whole silver coins, ten clipped silver coins and two bronze coins, which preliminary reading indicates were mostly Ayyubid issues of the twelfth to thirteenth century.61 A bronze Chinese coin was also recorded with the inscription ‘Kaiyuan tonbao’, meaning ‘circulating treasure of the new beginning’.62 These coins were issued from 621 (Tang dynasty), but remained in circulation for a considerable time afterwards.63 At Harlaa, the first ever analysis of faunal remains from an Islamic site in Ethiopia is also being completed by Veerle Linseele.64 Dietary remains, particularly from animals, can be critical in the material investigation of conversion to Islam through the presence or absence of indicators of a halal (permitted) diet and haram (prohibited) species in the archaeological record.65 Linseele’s analysis has indicated that domesticated animals dominate (sheep/goats, cattle, chickens), with some marine fish species found, presumably indicating their trade from the Red Sea, which is c. 100 km north-east.66 Cut marks on some of the bones are also well preserved, which should permit the reconstruction of butchery patterns that might provide further evidence of Islamisation through comparison with faunal assemblages from other Islamic sites in better investigated areas of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.67 Overall, it is apparent that Islam was established in some urban contexts in Highland Ethiopia by at least the mid-twelfth century, and this appears to have been linked with trade directed to the Red Sea and then into the Indian Ocean networks.

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The Nomadic Factor Space precludes a detailed review of the Islamic archaeology elsewhere in the Horn of Africa,68 but another facet of Islamisation evident in the region needs briefly exploring. This is the correlation between certain nomadic groups and early conversion to Islam that is sometimes apparent in parts of the Horn of Africa, though the caveat needs adding that it is difficult to discuss this archaeologically, owing to a lack of research into Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, to the often ephemeral imprint of nomadic life upon the archaeological record69 and to the problems of drawing on recent pastoralist/ nomadic ethnography for interpreting the archaeological record. 70 Amongst the Somalis, for instance, the Islam of the Shafiʿi school of law was already established by the eleventh century,71 but materially this is difficult to explore. Within Somalia, relevant archaeological research has been limited, concentrated upon the coastal strip and key towns such as Mogadishu,72 and wholly absent for the past two decades. In contrast, in Somaliland, archaeological research, albeit exploratory, is taking place at the coastal ports, as previously described, and also at abandoned stone towns linking the coast with the interior.73 Ultimately, these urban centres might contribute to understanding aspects of nomad Islamisation, but potentially more relevant are the large numbers of burial tumuli that have been recorded at various locations in Somaliland.74 These stone cairns are undated but have various forms including outer rectangular, oval or circular stone perimeters, and the presence of stelae on two cairns allowed their identification as Islamic,75 suggesting that Muslim burial rites were incorporated within pre-existing monument forms. Other nomadic groups were later in converting to Islam, as were the ʿAfar. A sultanate, Aussa, was established in the single fertile area in ʿAfar territory on the Awash River in the sixteenth century.76 But ʿAfar Islam, as Lewis noted, ‘has not yet acquired anything like as strong a hold over the nomadic population of Dankalia as it has among the Somali’.77 Moreover, Lewis has indicated how indigenous religious elements such as a ‘cult of the dead’ persisted,78 as evident in grave monuments built in parts of the Danakil Depression including ones that were finished with a line of upright stones indicating the deceased man’s victims.79 The spread of Islam amongst the Oromo was also a slow process and, though exposed to the religion certainly from the fifteenth century, ‘the pastoral Oromo on the whole retained their traditional religion’ largely until the nineteenth century.80 Hence there is a degree of correlation between nomadic groups and early Islamic conversion, but it is not uniform and attempting to apply a phased model to Islamisation in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa does not work.

The Western Sahel First Contacts and Nomads: Essuk/Tadmekka In the Western Sahel, phased conversion models are more applicable. According to Arabic historical sources, the first Muslim contacts with the Western Sahel were made by Kharijite Ibadi merchants.81 These began soon after the establishment of the Imamate of Tahert in Algeria in the late eighth century, with historical mentions of an envoy being sent from Tahert to the ruler of either Ghana or Gao circa 823–72.82 Trade would appear to have been the original impetus for contacts, but in both Gao (Mali) and Tegdaoust (Mauritania and probably the Awdaghust of the Arabic sources linked

Figure 13.7 The Western Sahel, indicating the locations of some of the principal sites discussed.

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to the Kingdom of Ghana),83 the archaeological evidence for such contacts is tenuous, amounting to a few sherds of glazed pottery.84 Essuk/Tadmekka in the Adrar des Iforas mountains in northern Mali provides an exception to the absence of archaeological evidence for these early Islamic contacts (Figure 13.7). This town, whose name was recorded by al-Bakri as meaning ‘the Meccalike’,85 was one of the earliest centres of Islam in West Africa. Excavation of Essuk/ Tadmekka has transformed our understanding of life on the southern frontier of the Sahara with an occupation sequence uncovered dating from the mid-first millennium ad to c. 1400.86 The first evidence for trans-Saharan trade associated with permanent architecture dates to the mid-eighth century. From layers associated with this period, Islamic vessel glass and three grains of wheat were found, the latter of great significance as possibly attesting commerce in staple cereals, with wheat of potential importance ‘to an Islamic diet’ and as a luxury foodstuff.87 A fragment of imported silk textile, unique archaeologically in West Africa, was also recovered, as were three fragments of coin moulds dated to c. 850–950, containing microscopic traces of gold and probably used to make unstamped gold coin blanks that were then exported north of the Sahara.88 Although unequivocal evidence of the population being Muslim at Essuk/Tadmekka at this time is lacking, the likelihood is that at least some were Muslims. Whether they were Ibadi is also unknown, but Nixon indicates that Ibadi groups were ‘significantly composed of Saharan Berbers’ and that the Ibadi leader Abu Yazid was born at Essuk in the late ninth century of a trader and a slave.89 Both points suggest that in the formative period of Islamisation an Ibadi linkage is not improbable. Essuk/Tadmekka has also provided abundant Arabic epigraphic evidence.90 The inscriptions cover the period between c. 1013–14 and 1387. One of these inscriptions (number 104) confirms the identification of the site as ancient Tadmekka91 in making reference to ‘a market in conformity to (or: a longing for) Bekka (or: Mecca)’, 92 that is making a comparison between Mecca and Essuk/Tadmekka and their respective valleys93 as described by al-Bakri. Other inscriptions provide important information on Islamisation, indicating that local Berber speakers were engraving the shahāda (cf. inscription number 105)94, or in recording the Muslim names of the engravers of inscriptions as on inscription number 110 signed by Muhammad, son of Sulayman in ah 547 (ad 1152).95 This information on Islamisation, however, transcends the recording of Muslim names. Essuk/Tadmekka was a settlement connected with Sahelian Berber/Tuareg nomads, and Moraes Farias has described how part of the process of Islamisation was the ‘investment of Islamic meanings into spatial landmarks’. 96 This, he argues, was achieved through Muslim converts familiarising themselves with new markers of directionality centred on the qibla, and via engraving dates on stone, the latter producing ‘materialisations of axial time computed according to the Islamic calendar’. These processes had occurred by not later than the eleventh century and Moraes Farias convincingly indicates how Islamisation of the landscape was facilitated by the predisposition of nomadic pastoralist life to being existent in a ‘constant state of orientation’ centred on knowledge of routes, pastures, and wells. With reorientation to Islamic directionality and time, cardinal points and perceptions of auspicious or inauspicious directions ‘would come to be defined by reference to the position of the person at prayer and the corpse in the tomb’.97 Moreover, Østebø posits that mobility is a further factor in nomad Islamic conversion: ‘The movements of different nomadic groups created meeting points across spatial and cultural boundaries – facilitating the

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dissemination of the new faith.’98 Hence there can be, as at Essuk/Tadmekka, but need not always be a strong linkage between nomads and early conversion to Islam.

Traders and Townspeople: Gao At Essuk/Tadmekka, there is a decline evident archaeologically from c. 1050. Nixon suggests that this might be due to the actions of the Almoravids in reducing the importance of both Essuk/Tadmekka and Tegdaoust/Awdaghost while establishing more direct links with southerly centres such as Gao.99 Such a scenario is feasible for at Gao there is extensive evidence for both trans-Saharan trade and Islamisation, particularly from the twelfth to thirteenth century.100 Moreover, the archaeology indicates that conversion to Islam was gradual and not attributable to zealous hordes of Almoravid warriors as once thought.101 What we can see at Gao is increasing Islamisation over time. During the initial period of contact (c. tenth century) between Muslim merchants and the local inhabitants, settlement at Gao followed a pattern of twin centres.102 Initially, this separation at the sites of Gao Ancien and Gao-Saney, 7 km north-east of the city, was probably due to religious differences, but the persistence of dual settlements after Islam had spread to the inhabitants of Gao Ancien in the late eleventh to the early twelfth century may have been attributable to security considerations, in particular the desirability of keeping nomads at a distance from Gao Ancien.103 This pattern of double settlement, one for the Muslim merchants and their followers and the other for the local ruler and his people, was a common one in the ‘first contact’ situation in this region where the two groups, Muslims and non-Muslims, met for the first time.104 At Gao, rapprochement gradually occurred and Gao-Saney ceased to be occupied by c. 1100.105 Archaeology indicates that Gao was a multi-component urban centre.106 A central citadel was at Gao Ancien, where stone buildings were constructed and abandoned107 prior to elaborate mud and fired-brick buildings being occupied in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.108 These included the aisle of what appeared to be a sizeable mosque, attesting a Muslim community in Gao Ancien, part of a house belonging to a rich merchant109 (Figure 13.8) and part of an elite or royal residence.110 A fragment of window glass found along with parts of drilled alabaster frames suggests that the walls of some of the principal buildings in Gao Ancien were inset with glazed panels,111 perhaps similar to the palace of the king of Ghana described by al-Idrisi as ‘provided with glass windows’.112 Gao Ancien was a mercantile settlement and the likely location of the ruler. Adjacent to Gao Ancien was another quarter, Gadei, that differed architecturally. Here buildings were constructed from liquid mud, or banco, and, rather than using rectilinear plans, roundhouses were built, one of which was uncovered.113 It would appear that Gadei was an area of local settlement. Explicit indicators of Islamisation such as mosques and Muslim burials were not found in Gadei, although a large wooden bead from a set of prayer beads and a copper casing from what might have been a Muslim amulet were recorded.114 These suggest that some Muslims might have been present or that aspects of Islamic material culture were being adopted without, necessarily, conversion to Islam occurring. The faunal remains recorded indicate the fact that not all the population of Gadei was Muslim. Ten identified faunal elements (bones) from dogs, interpreted as food refuse based on their association with other food remains,115 were present in levels dated to between the early/mid-eleventh and late sixteenth centuries, certainly after

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Figure 13.8 Part of a house excavated in Gao Ancien (photo: T. Insoll). Islam was the dominant religion in Gao.116 In contrast, only two identifiable faunal dog elements were recorded in the evidently more Islamised quarter of Gao Ancien.117 It is not known if these constituted food refuse. In other respects, the faunal assemblages from Gadei and Gao Ancien were broadly comparable,118 with both wild and domesticated species present.119 The botanical remains recovered were not indicators of Islamisation in the same way as animal species, for they were not subject to dietary prohibition,120 but were nonetheless informative. For example, a stone of Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm, recovered from Gadei exceeded the fruit length of the native wild Phoenix reclinata. This indicated either the growth of dates in the region after the spread of Phoenix dactylifera south of the Sahara with trans-Saharan trade or the import of dates via the same networks.121 Similarly, one complete and several partial cotton (Gossypium sp.) seeds and a small charred fragment of wool or hair cloth from Gadei122 attest the possession and likely wearing of fabrics. Cotton weaving is generally regarded as having diffused from East to West Africa during the Islamic period.123 Hence, indirectly, these plant remains and textile fragments provide further evidence for participation in trade networks connected to the wider Muslim world. A third area of occupation was at Gao-Saney, a site comprising a mound where settlement was dated to between 700 and 1100,124 and a cemetery that has provided various inscribed Muslim tombstones.125 The provenance of the marble and the style of epigraphy suggest that five of these gravestones were imported ready carved from the vicinity of Almería in southern al-Andalus in the early twelfth century.126 The inscriptions seem to have served to proclaim Muslim identity, for three of the kings

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commemorated, including two on imported Almerían stelae, were recent converts to Islam. This is shown by the successive adoption of the name of the Prophet and the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and ʿUmar.127 It is likely that rulers such as those at Gao were early converts to Islam, but seemingly, as Levtzion has stressed, they ‘adopted a middle position’ between Islam and indigenous religion, patronising Muslim religious specialists and indigenous shrines and their custodians.128 The imported stelae at Gao-Saney attest the Almoravid links previously mentioned. At Gao, these were further indicated by architectural parallels discernible between the Alcazaba in Almería and the fired brick structures in Gao Ancien,129 green-glazed ceramics from both sites,130 and sherds of lustreware pottery from Gao Ancien comparable to twelfth-century ceramics from Malaga.131 Traders appear to have been the carriers of Islam in Gao, and trade was maintained between the Almoravids and Gao, with gold likely to have been a major commodity sent north across the Sahara. Analysis of the composition of the single gold bead recovered from Gao, at Gadei, reinforces the image of Almoravid connections for the gold precisely matched that of Almoravid gold dinars minted at Sijilmasa, Morocco, indicating West African ore was used, in all probability sourced via Gao.132 Other commodities traded north across the Sahara included slaves, largely archaeologically invisible, and ivory. 133 Further Muslim cemeteries ringed Gao Ancien and have also proven informative on Islamisation. At Gorongobo, for instance, conclusive proof for local conversion to Islam by the early thirteenth century was provided by a funerary stele dated to 1210 and inscribed with the female Songhai name of either Buwy or Waybiya, dependent on the reading (Figure 13.9).134 The Songhai remain the dominant ethnolinguistic group in Gao, and this indicates that Islam was becoming established among the local population of the town, beyond the circle of rulers.

Figure 13.9 Funerary inscription from Gorongobo dated to 1210 (photo: T. Insoll).

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Gradual Diffusion: Sedentary Agriculturalists The archaeological record in Gao, as currently investigated, is largely mute from the start of the fourteenth century.135 Thus, based on archaeological sources, the focus here, it is not possible to make inferences about the spread of Islam in Gao itself, though south of Gao an Islamic ‘frontier’ appears to have existed.136 Sites such as Egef-NTawaqqast and Bentiya (Kukiya), where Arabic funerary inscriptions dated to the thirteenth to fifteenth century have been recorded,137 indicate that Islamisation extended to this point, but evidence for Islam dating from before the fifteenth century is seemingly lacking further south on the River Niger and adjacent areas in Mali and northern Niger. Similarly, at Kissi in north-east Burkina Faso, in the hinterland of the eastern Niger Bend, no evidence for Islamisation was found in the settlement areas and cemeteries excavated and dated approximately to between the second and thirteenth centuries. 138 Beyond the Gao region, it is apparent that conversion to Islam and the Islamisation of the bulk of the population of the Western Sahel, the sedentary agriculturalists – Bamana, Songhai, Senufo, Dogon, Mossi, Mande and others – was a gradual and long, drawn out process which in some contexts is still incomplete.139 It was a process that had to yield to the need to incorporate or substitute indigenous religious beliefs and ritual practices tied to, for example, the ancestors and the land.140 Over time, this changed with, following Robin Horton’s conversion model discussed previously, readjustment occurring from the primacy of the microcosm centred on local indigenous beliefs and ritual practices to that of the macrocosm of the Supreme Being – Allah – as conversion to Islam and Islamisation proceeded.141 Elsewhere in the Western Sahel, archaeological investigation of sites relevant to considering Islamisation and postdating the fourteenth century has been limited. However, recent fieldwork in the Segou region of south-central Mali will, potentially, substantially increase our knowledge. MacDonald’s research is focusing on a range of different sites that are linked with the Bamana, Bozo, Soninke and Marka ethnolinguistic groups and predominantly dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century,142 a period, certainly at the latter end, when conversion to Islam was occurring.143

Tentative Comparisons: Islamisation and Archaeology in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa with the Western Sahel Comparing the archaeology of Islamisation in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa with the Western Sahel indicates both similarities and contrasts. Similarities exist in the material markers of Islam, the appearance of mosques, changes in diet (appearance of halal slaughter, disappearance of haram species), burial (orientation, disappearance of grave goods) and changes in domestic space (greater emphasis on privacy).144 Differences exist in the processes of Islamisation. Phased conversion to Islam – nomads, traders, rulers, townspeople, sedentary agriculturalists – is apparent archaeologically in the Sahel,145 whereas, as described, this is not evident in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Warfare seems also to have been of little significance as an agent of Islamic conversion in the Western Sahel until the nineteenth-century Fulani jihads.146 In contrast, it seems to have been a factor of consequence in Harar, where warfare was another agent of Islamisation alongside those previously described. Harar was also the centre

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of the Sultanate of ʿAdal147 and as such the powerbase of Ahmed Gragn, the renowned Muslim leader who used it to launch a series of jihads against the Christian Highlands, including Shoa in 1529, Amhara in 1531 and Tigre in 1535.148 Harar also differs from the Western Sahelian centres such as Gao and Timbuktu in other ways. It was a town that proved influential in the later conversion to Islam of certain groups, for by the end of the eighteenth century it was ‘the radiant centre for religious propagation among the Oromo’.149 This must have included pastoralist Oromo,150 whereas in the Western Sahel nomads, for example Berbers/Tuaregs, were some of the earliest converts to Islam through exposure to Muslim-dominated trade151 and were instrumental in bringing Islam to the urban context,152 as has been indicated. Harar as madīnat al-awliyāʾ, ‘town of the saints’,153 exerted influence on different socio-economic groups. Through this influential position it is broadly comparable to Sahelian centres such as Gao where Islam was similarly diffused from the urban population to agriculturalist groups in a long drawn out process involving trade, proselytisation and the incorporation and adaptation of pre-Islamic practices starting from the ninth century.154 But a further significant difference exists: saints were of little significance in Gao, more so in Timbuktu,155 but perhaps not to the extent of Harar where over 100 shrines have been recorded156 and where the incorporation and Islamisation of pre-Islamic shrines and associated veneration practices was also significant to the success of Islamisation in Harar,157 and more widely in Ethiopia (Figure 13.10).158 In other respects, there are similarities: Qadiriyya Sufism was significant in Harar, where it was introduced in the fifteenth century by Sharif Abu Bakr b. ʿAbdallah al-Aydarus,159 and appeared also in Timbuktu in the sixteenth century at approximately the same time

Figure 13.10 The shrine of Amir Nur, Harar (photo: T. Insoll).

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as the Tijaniyya.160 Trade was of considerable significance in both areas in facilitating conversion to Islam, in terms of merchants functioning to open up routes and communities for Muslim clerics, who might accompany or follow the traders.161 Thus there are points of similarity, but also significant differences, in comparing Islamisation and archaeology in the Horn of Africa with the Western Sahel.

Conclusions The archaeology of Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa is remarkably complex and also reflective of continual processes of religious change and adaptation, as currently manifest through the growth of Salafism in parts of both Ethiopia162 and the Western Sahel.163 Unfortunately, furthering our understanding of both the processes and the material culture involved is being hampered by politics and conflict, restricting research in many key regions: Mali, northern Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria, western Sudan, large parts of Chad, Eritrea, Somalia – the list is long. Over time, this will inevitably change and archaeological accessibility will hopefully once again be possible. This is vital for, in the likelihood that no new or limited new historical sources will be found (possibly excluding epigraphy), archaeology offers the only means of learning about Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa aside from the recent past. Archaeological research directions are also altering, with less emphasis evident on cataloguing – pot sherds or mosque forms, for example – and more of an apparent shift towards a concern with social processes, new forms of identities and impacts linked with Islamisation as manifest through diet or changes in uses or relationships with architectural space. This too is vital in acknowledging that Islamisation in the past related to people, as it does in the present.

Notes 1. Cf. T. Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. Cf. N. Levtzion, Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 7. 3. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. 4. Cf. D. Edwards, The Nubian Past (London: Routledge, 2004), and N. Finneran, The Archaeology of Ethiopia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 5. J. S. Trimingham, The Influence of Islam on Africa (London: Longman, 1968). 6. See H. J. Fisher, ‘Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa’, Africa 43 (1973), pp. 27–40, and H. J. Fisher, ‘The Juggernaut’s Apologia: Conversion to Islam in Black Africa,’ Africa 55 (1985), pp. 153–73. 7. See R. Horton, ‘African Conversion’, Africa 41 (1971), pp. 85–108; R. Horton, ‘On the Rationality of Conversion’, Africa 45 (1975), pp. 219–35, and Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 8. Cf. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 31–2; T. Østebø, Localising Salafism: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 15–17. 9. Trimingham, Influence of Islam; Fisher, ‘Conversion Reconsidered’ and ‘The Juggernaut’s Apologia’. 10. R. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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11. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 29–30. 12. Ibid., p.29. 13. E.g. N. Levtzion and R. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); P. F. de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); S. Kaplan, ‘Themes and Methods in the Study of Conversion in Ethiopia: A Review Essay’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (2004), pp. 373–92; M. Horton, ‘Islam, Archaeology, and Swahili Identity’, in D. Whitcomb (ed.), Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2004), pp. 67–88; Østebø, Localising Salafism. 14. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. 15. F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar and B. Hirsch, ‘Muslim Historical Spaces in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: A Reassessment’, Northeast African Studies 11 (2010), pp. 25–53; ‘En guide d’introduction: Sur les traces de l’Islam ancien en Ethiopie et dans la Corne de l’Afrique’, in F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar and B. Hirsh (eds), Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au moyen âge (Paris: De Boccard, 2011), pp. 11–26. 16. H. Ahmed, ‘The Historiography of Islam in Ethiopia’, Journal of Islamic Studies 3 (1992), pp. 15–16. 17. J. S. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (London: Oxford University Press, 1952); L. Kapteijns, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), pp. 227–50; Kaplan, ‘Themes and Methods’; R. Loimeier, Muslim Societies in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 18. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. See also the discussion by Marco Demichelis in Chapter 12 of the present volume. 19. D. Phillipson, Ancient Ethiopia (London: British Museum, 1998); Finneran, Archaeology of Ethiopia. 20. A. Kifleyesus, Tradition and Transformation: The Argobba of Ethiopia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), p.48. 21. See I. M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 25 and Kapteijns, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, p. 228. 22. T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012), p. 95. 23. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 45. 24. Cf. C. Tilahun, ‘Traces of Islamic Material Culture in Northeastern Shoa’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 23 (1990), pp. 303–20. 25. For example, M. Schneider, ‘Stèles funéraires arabes de Quiha’, Annales d’Éthiopie 7 (1967), pp. 107–18; ‘Stèles funéraires de la région de Harar et Dahlak (Éthiopie)’, Revue des Études Islamiques 37 (1969), pp. 339–43; ‘Stèles funéraires musulmanes de la province du Choa’, Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970), pp. 73–8; G. Oman, Necropoli islamica di Dahlak Kebir (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1976); T. Insoll, ‘Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea: From Aksumite to Ottoman’, Adumatu 3 (2001), pp. 39–50. 26. S. Tedeschi, Note Storiche Sulle Isole Dahlak: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1969), p. 52. 27. Oman, Necropoli islamica di Dahlak Kebir. 28. Insoll, ‘Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea’; Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. 29. Cf. Insoll, ‘Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea’. 30. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa; Power, The Red Sea. 31. R. Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns from the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), p. 54. 32. A. T. Curle, ‘The Ruined Towns of Somaliland’, Antiquity 11 (1937), pp. 315–27. 33. F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar and B. Hirsch (eds), Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au moyen âge (Paris: De Boccard, 2011).

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34. Ibid., p. 46. 35. S. Mire, ‘Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland: Religion, Art, Script, Time, Urbanism, Trade and Empire’, African Archaeological Review 32 (2015), p. 129. 36. Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, Espaces musulmans, p.63. 37. A. González-Ruibal, J. de Torres and M. A. F. Fernández, Report on an Archaeological Trip to Somaliland, June 2015 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2015), p.13. 38. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 58. 39. Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, ‘Muslim Historical Spaces’, p. 47; Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, ‘En guide d’introduction’, pp. 19–21. 40. Cf. Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, ‘Muslim Historical Spaces’. 41. Ibid., p.36. 42. F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar et al., ‘Archéologie et histoire de l’Islam dans la Corne de l’Afrique: État des recherches’, Civiltà del Mediterraneo 16–17 (2009–10), p. 58. 43. T. Insoll et al., ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, and Sofi, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia: A Preliminary Fieldwork Report’, Nyame Akuma 85 (2016), pp. 23–32; see also T. Insoll et al., ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia, July-August 2014: A Preliminary Fieldwork Report’, Nyame Akuma 82 (2014), pp. 100–9. 44. R. P. Azaïs and R. Chambard, Cinq années de recherches archéologiques en Éthiopie (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1931), p. 3. 45. E. D. Hecht, ‘Harar and Lamu: A Comparison of Two East African Muslim Societies’, Transafrican Journal of History 16 (1987), p. 2. 46. Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns, p. 49. 47. Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, ‘En guide d’introduction’, p. 23. 48. R. Wilding, ‘The Desert Trade of Eastern Ethiopia’, in R. E. Leakey and B. A. Ogot (eds), Proceedings of the 8th Panafrican Congress (Nairobi: Louis Leakey Institute, 1977), pp. 379–80; U. Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2004). 49. Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture, pp. 108–9. 50. R. F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar, vol. 2 (1894; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1987), p. 40. 51. Insoll et al., ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harari Regional State’. 52. Østebø, Localising Salafism, p. 50. 53. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 249. 54. Insoll et al., ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, and Sofi’. 55. Schneider, ‘Stèles funéraires de la région de Harar’, pp. 339–43. 56. A. Chekroun et al., ‘Les Harla: archéologie de mémoire des géants d’Ethiopie,’ in F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar and B. Hirsch (eds), Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au moyen âge (Paris: De Boccard, 2011), p. 79. 57. Cf. González-Ruibal et al., Report on an Archaeological Trip to Somaliland, pp. 13, 17. 58. Cf. R. Bridgman, ‘From the Tihamah Plain to Thailand and Beyond: Preliminary Analysis of Selected Ceramics from Quseir al-Qadim’, in L. Blue et al. (eds), Connected Hinterlands, BAR International Series 2052 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), pp. 136–7. 59. Insoll et al., ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, and Sofi’. 60. Ibid. 61. V. S. Curtis, personal communication, 15 September 2015. 62. J. K. Wilson and M. Flecker, ‘Dating the Belitung Shipwreck’, in R. Krahl et al. (eds), Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010), p. 38.

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63. H. Wang, personal communication, 15 September 2015; J. Cribb and D. Potts, ‘Chinese Coin Finds from Arabia and the Arabian Gulf’, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 7 (1996), pp. 109, 112. 64. T. Insoll and V. Linseele, ‘The Archaeology of Islamization and Trade in Eastern Ethiopia’, Journal of Islamic Archaeology (in preparation). 65. E.g. T. Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 96–9; P. Bangsgaard, ‘Animal Bones from the Barbar Well’, in K. Frifelt (ed.), Islamic Remains in Bahrain (Moesgaard, Denmark: Jutland Archaeological Society, 2010), pp. 183–200; I. Smith, ‘The Mammal, Bird, Reptile, and Mollusc Remains from Bilad al-Qadim’, in T. Insoll (ed.), The Land of Enki in the Islamic Era: Pearls, Palms, and Religious Identity in Bahrain (London: Kegan Paul, 2005), pp. 193–239. 66. Insoll and Linseele, ‘Archaeology of Islamization and Trade’. 67. Ibid. 68. Cf. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, ch. 2. 69. Cf. R. Cribb, Nomads in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); V. Linseele, ‘The Archaeology of Pastoralism in the West African Savannah’, in H. Bollog et al. (eds), Pastoralism in Africa: Past, Present and Future (New York: Berghahn 2013), p. 163. 70. J. Szuchman, ‘Integrating Approaches to Nomads, Tribes and the State in the Ancient Near East’, in J. Szuchman (ed.), Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009), p. 7. 71. I. M. Lewis, ‘Islam in Somalia’, in K. S. Loughran et al. (eds), Somalia in Word and Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 139–42; I. M. Lewis, Peoples of the Horn of Africa (repr. Asmara: Red Sea Press, 1994), p. 140. 72. E.g. N. Chittick, ‘Medieval Mogadishu’, Paideuma 28 (1982), pp. 45–62. 73. E.g. F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar et al., ‘Le port de Zeyla et son arrière-pays au moyen âge’, in F.-X. Fauvelle-Aymar and B. Hirsch (eds), Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au moyen âge (Paris: De Boccard, 2011), pp. 27–74; Mire, ‘Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland’, pp. 111–36; González-Ruibal et al., Report on an Archaeological Trip to Somaliland. 74. González-Ruibal et al., Report on an Archaeological Trip to Somaliland, pp. 23–7. 75. Ibid., p. 23. 76. W. Thesiger, The Danakil Diary (London: Flamingo, 1998). 77. Lewis, Peoples of the Horn of Africa, p. 172. 78. Ibid., p. 172. 79. Cf. W. Thesiger, ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate’, The Geographical Journal 85 (1935), p. 10–11; Thesiger, Danakil Diary, p. 128; L. M. Nesbitt, Desert and Forest (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), pp. 77, 210–12. 80. M. Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570-1860 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994), p. 150. 81. T. Lewicki, ‘L’état nord-africain de Tahert et ses relations avec le Soudan occidental à la fin du VIIIe et au IXe siècle’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 8 (1962), pp. 513–35; ‘The Ibadites in Africa and Arabia’, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 13 (1971), pp. 3–130. 82. Lewicki, ‘The Ibadites in Africa and Arabia,’ p. 119. 83. D. Robert, ‘Les fouilles de Tegdaoust’, Journal of African History 11 (1970), pp. 471–93. 84. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 215. 85. N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2000), p. 85. 86. S. Nixon, ‘Excavating Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali): New Archaeological Investigations of Early Islamic Trans-Saharan Trade’, Azania 44 (2009), p. 217. 87. Ibid., p. 251.

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118. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 24. 119. Cf. Hutton MacDonald and MacDonald, ‘A Preliminary Report’; Barrett-Jolley, ‘The Faunal Remains from Gao Ancien’; Stangroome, ‘The Faunal Remains from Gadei’. 120. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam, pp. 99–100, 30. 121. D. Fuller, ‘The Botanical Remains’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 28–35. 122. Ibid., pp. 32–5. 123. A. M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), cited in Fuller, ‘The Botanical Remains’, p. 33. 124. Cissé et al., ‘Excavations at Gao-Saney’, p. 19. 125. C. Flight, ‘The Medieval Cemetery at Sané: A History of the Site from 1939 to 1950’, in Le sol, la parole et l’écrit: Mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre Mer, 1981), pp. 91–107. 126. J. Sauvaget, ‘Les épitaphes royales de Gao’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (B) 12 (1950), pp. 418–40; M. M. Vire, ‘Notes sur trois épitaphes royales de Gao’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (B) 20 (1958), pp. 368–76; Moraes Farias, ‘The Oldest Extant Writing of West Africa’ and Arabic Medieval Inscriptions. 127. C. Flight, ‘Thoughts on the Cemetery at Sané’, unpublished paper, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, p. 1, and Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 235. 128. N. Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800’, in N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), p. 66. 129. Insoll, Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade, pp. 24–5. 130. Ibid. 131. Cf. M. Jenkins, ‘Medieval Maghribi Lustre-Painted Pottery’, in La céramique médiévale en Méditeranée occidentale (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1980), p. 339. 132. M. F. Guerra, ‘Appendix 1: A Report on the Composition of a Gold Bead from Gao’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 153–4. 133. Insoll, Islam Archaeology and History and Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. 134. P. F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Appendix 2: The Inscriptions from Gorongobo’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), p. 157. 135. Insoll, Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 251. 136. T. Insoll, ‘Syncretism, Time, and Identity: Islamic Archaeology in West Africa’, in D. Whitcomb (ed.), Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2004), p. 100. 137. Cf. Moraes Farias, ‘The Oldest Extant Writing of West Africa’, pp. 105–6; N. Arazi, ‘An Archaeological Survey in the Songhay Heartland of Mali’, Nyame Akuma 52 (1999), pp. 38–9. 138. S. Magnavita, 1500 Jahre am Mare de Kissi (Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2015), p. 173. 139. E.g. E. P. Skinner, The Mossi of the Upper Volta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); R. Bravmann, Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), A. Glaze, Art and Death in a Senufo Village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); P. Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan’; J.-P. Colleyn, Bamana (Milan: 5 Continents, 2009).

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Flight, C., ‘The Medieval Cemetery at Sané: A History of the Site from 1939 to 1950’, in Le sol, la parole et l’écrit: Mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre Mer, 1981), pp. 91–107. Flight, C., ‘Thoughts on the Cemetery at Sané’, unpublished paper, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. Fuller, D., ‘The Botanical Remains’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 28–35. Glaze, A., Art and Death in a Senufo Village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). González-Ruibal, A., J. de Torres and M. A. F. Fernández, Report on an Archaeological Trip to Somaliland: June 2015 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2015). Guerra, M. F., ‘Appendix 1: A Report on the Composition of a Gold Bead from Gao’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 153–5. Hassen, M., The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570–1860 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1994). Hecht, E.-D., ‘Harar and Lamu: A Comparison of Two East African Muslim Societies’, Transafrican Journal of History 16 (1987), pp. 1–23. Horton, M., ‘Islam, Archaeology, and Swahili Identity’, in D. Whitcomb (ed.), Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2004), pp. 67–88. Horton, R., ‘African Conversion’, Africa 41 (1971), pp. 85–108. Horton, R., ‘On the Rationality of Conversion’, Africa 45 (1975), pp. 219–35. Horton, R., Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Hutton MacDonald, R., and K. MacDonald, ‘A Preliminary Report on the Faunal Remains Recovered from Gao Ancien and Gao-Saney (1993 Season)’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Islam, Archaeology and History: Gao Region (Mali) Ca. AD 900–1250, BAR International Series 647 (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996), pp. 124–6. Insoll, T. (ed.), Islam, Archaeology and History: Gao Region (Mali) Ca. AD 900–1250, BAR International Series 647 (Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1996). Insoll, T., ‘Iron Age Gao: An Archaeological Contribution’, Journal of African History 38 (1997), pp. 1–30. Insoll, T., ‘Islamic Glass from Gao, Mali’, Journal of Glass Studies 40 (1998), pp. 77–88. Insoll, T., The Archaeology of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Insoll, T (ed.) (with other contributions), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000). Insoll, T., ‘Dahlak Kebir, Eritrea: From Aksumite to Ottoman’, Adumatu 3 (2001), pp. 39–50. Insoll, T., ‘Timbuktu and Europe: Trade, Cities, and Islam in “Medieval” West Africa’, in P. Linehan and J. Nelson (eds), The Medieval World (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 469–84. Insoll, T., The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Insoll, T., ‘Syncretism, Time, and Identity: Islamic Archaeology in West Africa’, in D. Whitcomb (ed.), Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2004), pp. 89–101. Insoll, T., R. MacLean and B. Engda, ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, and Sofi, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia: A Preliminary Fieldwork Report’, Nyame Akuma 85 (2016) pp. 23–32.

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Insoll, T., H. Tesfaye and M. S. Mahmoud, ‘Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia, July–August 2014: A Preliminary Fieldwork Report’, Nyame Akuma 82 (2014), pp. 100–9. Jenkins, M., ‘Medieval Maghribi Lustre-Painted Pottery’, in La céramique médiévale en Méditeranée occidentale (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1980). Kaplan, S., ‘Themes and Methods in the Study of Conversion in Ethiopia: A Review Essay’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (2004), pp. 373–92. Kapteijns, L., ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), pp. 227–50. Kifleyesus, A., Tradition and Transformation: The Argobba of Ethiopia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). Lapidus, I. M., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Levtzion, N. (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979). Levtzion, N., ‘Rural and Urban Islam in West Africa: An Introductory Essay’, Asian and African Studies 20 (1986), pp. 7–26. Levtzion, N., ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800’, in N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), pp. 63–91. Levtzion, N., and Hopkins, J. F. P., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2000). Levtzion, N., and Pouwels, R. L. (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). Lewicki, T., ‘L’état nord-africain de Tahert et ses relations avec le Soudan occidental à la fin du VIIIe et au IXe siècle’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 8 (1962), pp. 513–35. Lewicki, T., ‘The Ibadites in Africa and Arabia’, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 13 (1971), pp. 3–130. Lewis, I. M., ‘Islam in Somalia’, in K. S. Loughran, J. Loughran, J. Johnson and S. S. Samatar (eds), Somalia in Word and Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) pp. 139–42. Lewis, I. M., Peoples of the Horn of Africa (repr. Asmara: Red Sea Press, 1994). Linseele, V., ‘The Archaeology of Pastoralism in the West African Savannah’, in H. Bollog, M. Schnegg and H.-P. Wotzka (eds), Pastoralism in Africa: Past, Present and Future (New York: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 145–70. Linseele, V., ‘The Faunal Remains from Harlaa and Harar’, in T. Insoll (ed.) Becoming Muslim. Conversion to Islam and Islamisation in Eastern Ethiopia (Leiden: Brill, in preparation). Loimeier, R., Muslim Societies in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). MacDonald, K. C., ‘“A Chacun son Bambara”, encore une fois: History, Archaeology, and Bambara Origins’, in F. Richard and K. C. MacDonald (eds), Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2015), pp. 119–44. Magnavita, S., 1500 Jahre am Mare de Kissi (Frankfurt: Africa Magna Verlag, 2015). Mire, S., ‘Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland: Religion, Art, Script, Time, Urbanism, Trade and Empire’, African Archaeological Review 32 (2015), pp. 111–36. Moraes Farias, P. F. de, ‘The Oldest Extant Writing of West Africa’, Journal des Africanistes 62 (1990), pp. 65–113. Moraes Farias, P. F. de, ‘Appendix 2: The Inscriptions from Gorongobo’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 156–9. Moraes Farias, P. F. de, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Nesbitt, L. M., Desert and Forest (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934). Niezen, R. W., ‘The “Community of Helpers of the Sunna”: Islamic Reform among the Songhay of Gao (Mali)’, Africa 60 (1990), pp. 399–424. Nixon, S., ‘Excavating Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali): New Archaeological Investigations of Early Islamic Trans-Saharan Trade’, Azania 44 (2009), pp. 217–55.

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Nixon, S., T. Rehren and M. F. Guerra, ‘New Light on the Early Islamic West African Gold Trade: Coin Moulds from Tadmekka, Mali’, Antiquity 85 (2011), pp. 1353–68. Oman, G., Necropoli islamica di Dahlak Kebir (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1976). Østebø, T., Localising Salafism: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Pankhurst, R., History of Ethiopian Towns from the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985). Phillipson, D., Ancient Ethiopia (London: British Museum, 1998). Power, T., The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012). Robert, D., ‘Les fouilles de Tegdaoust’, Journal of African History 11 (1970), pp. 471–93. Rouch, J., La religion et la Magie Songhay (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1989). Saad, E. N., Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Sauvaget, J., ‘Les épitaphes royales de Gao’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (B) 12 (1950), pp. 418–40. Schneider, M., ‘Stèles funéraires arabes de Quiha’, Annales d’Éthiopie 7 (1967), pp. 107–18. Schneider, M., ‘Stèles funéraires de la région de Harar et Dahlak (Éthiopie)’, Revue des Études Islamiques 37 (1969), pp. 339–43. Schneider, M., ‘Stèles funéraires musulmanes de la province du Choa’, Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970), pp. 73–8. Skinner, E. P., The Mossi of the Upper Volta (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). Smith, I., ‘The Mammal, Bird, Reptile, and Mollusc Remains from Bilad al-Qadim’, in T. Insoll (ed.), The Land of Enki in the Islamic Era: Pearls, Palms, and Religious Identity in Bahrain (London: Kegan Paul, 2005), pp. 193–239. Smith, R. S., Warfare and Diplomacy in Pre-Colonial West Africa (London: James Currey, 1989). Stangroome, C., ‘The Faunal Remains from Gadei’, in T. Insoll (ed.), Urbanism, Archaeology and Trade: Further Observations on the Gao Region (Mali): The 1996 Fieldseason Results, BAR International Series 829 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), pp. 56–61. Stoller, P., The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Szuchman, J., ‘Integrating Approaches to Nomads, Tribes and the State in the Ancient Near East’, in J. Szuchman (ed.), Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2009), pp. 1–13. Takezawa, S., and M. Cissé, ‘Discovery of the Earliest Royal palace in Gao and its Implications for the History of West Africa’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 208 (2012), pp. 813–44. Tedeschi, S., ‘Note Storiche Sulle Isole Dahlak,’ Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1969), pp. 49–74. Thesiger, W., ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate’, The Geographical Journal 85 (1935), pp. 1–23. Thesiger, W., The Danakil Diary (London: Flamingo, 1998). Tilahun, C., ‘Traces of Islamic Material Culture in Northeastern Shoa’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 23 (1990), pp. 303–20. Trimingham, J. S., Islam in Ethiopia (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). Trimingham, J. S., A History of Islam in West Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Trimingham, J. S., The Influence of Islam on Africa (London: Longman, 1968). Vire, M. M., ‘Notes sur trois épitaphes royales de Gao’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (B) 20 (1958), pp. 368–76.

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Watson, A. M., Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Wilding, R., ‘The Desert Trade of Eastern Ethiopia’, in R. E. Leakey and B. A. Ogot (eds), Proceedings of the 8th Panafrican Congress (Nairobi: Louis Leakey Institute, 1977), pp. 379–80. Wilson, J. K., and M. Flecker, ‘Dating the Belitung Shipwreck’, in R. Krahl, J. Guy, J. K. Wilson and J. Raby (eds), Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010), pp. 35–43. Zahan, D., The Bambara (Leiden: Brill, 1974).

Part V

The Balkans

14 THE ISLAMISATION OF OTTOMAN BOSNIA: MYTHS AND MATTERS* Sanja Kadrić

A

s Colin Heywood notes in his work on Ottoman Bosnia, the question of Islamisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one ‘that historians approach at their peril’.1 He refers to the debates among scholars and nationalists regarding the causes, circumstances and effects of the process. While historians eschew nationalist debates, they generally agree that the Islamisation of Bosnia was remarkable. The primary reason is its comprehensiveness in comparison with the remainder of the Balkans, even when taking into account substantial Muslim populations in Albania and Kosovo (Figure 14.1). Various explanations have been posited for this comprehensiveness, but to contextualise them we should first examine the pre-Ottoman history of the Kingdom of Bosnia. During the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Bosnia reached its maximum extent owing to the consolidation efforts of King Stjepan Kotromanić II (r. 1322–53). Though Stjepan’s successor was able to capitalise on these gains and expand further, his death was followed by inter-nobility fighting and territorial losses. Ottoman frontier commanders took advantage of this disunity to make incursions into the region. Thus began a multi-pronged conflict between the Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Bosnian king and his lords, and the surrounding Balkan powers. The Ottomans had been present in Bosnia since the mid-fourteenth century, so we can date the beginnings of Islamisation to that time.2 With this context in mind, how have historians accounted for the comprehensiveness of Islamisation in Bosnia? The stability following the Ottoman conquest of the region is a fair starting point. The aforementioned multi-pronged conflict had socially, religiously, politically and

* Many thanks to the conference organisers for their hospitality and to Prof. Jane Hathaway, Prof. Tijana Krstić, Prof. Timothy Insoll and fellow conference attendees for their feedback. This research was aided by a Fellowship for East European Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies as well as research grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the OSU Office of International Affairs, and the OSU Department of History Ruth Higgins Award and Helen and Harold Kapiloff Award.

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Figure 14.1 The Ottoman Balkans.

economically destabilised Bosnia. Simply put, it was neither the optimal place nor the time to be a peasant. However, Ottoman conquest and administration brought about a period of relative stability. The Ottoman victory over the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and the contemporaneous captures of numerous Hungarian fortresses in Bosnia, brought great prestige to the empire. They also pushed the frontier further north, which relieved pressure on the Bosnian peasantry. A secure frontier and the removal of the Hungarian threat contributed to the Islamisation of the region.3 The economic stability brought by the Ottomans is another oft-mentioned factor. Political and military stability had positive effects on all levels of the economy. Lighter labour services, tax relief, new economic opportunities, expanded trade networks and greater physical safety all contributed to the health of the economy and to Islamisation.4 However, some have argued against the idea of economic incentives for conversion, noting that the tax-exempt military class was open to non-Muslims. Others have noted that, well into the sixteenth century, various communities in Bosnia paid the same taxes regardless of religion.5 A factor that transcends the Balkans when discussing the spread of Islam is urbanisation. The transformation of non-Muslim settlements into centres of Islamicate culture spurred Islamisation. The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was built up by Ottoman-Bosnian governors from small scattered settlements into an expansive city. While this aided the Islamisation of existing communities, it also drew in Muslim newcomers. In post-conquest Bosnia, we see increasing migration to Ottoman urban centres from the countryside. By the seventeenth century, cities and towns in Bosnia had acquired various Islamicate features. As sites of Ottoman culture, their development occurred

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alongside the conversion of the inhabitants to Islam. Regions with monasteries such as Fojnica and Kreševo experienced slower rates of conversion than towns that acquired mosques, madrasas and dervish lodges.6 Sufi brotherhoods such as the Naqshbandis, Halvetis, Mevlevis and Qadiris had large followings in Bosnia and also contributed to its Islamisation. Sufi emphasis on saint veneration complemented the cults of saints espoused by the Christian peasantry and served as a major attraction to Islam.7 Some have also suggested that religious syncretism aided Islamisation, implying that a superficial conversion to Islam occurred that allowed Bosnians to reap the benefits of majority status and situate themselves in their new world while continuing the traditions of the old. Ottoman tolerance towards this religious eclecticism made conversion to Islam more attractive to the Bosnian population.8 Another oft-discussed factor is Franciscan proselytisation prior to Ottoman incursions. The proliferation of various sects in the Kingdom of Bosnia had left the region vulnerable to religiously sanctioned invasions by the Pope’s Hungarian legates. To prevent this, Bosnian kings had allowed Franciscans to proselytise and construct monasteries in the region. The Franciscans then attacked these sects in an attempt to impose Roman Catholicism. Some have theorised that this persecution led indigenous communities to more readily accept Islam and the Ottomans.9 One of the sects in question was that of the Bogomils. Those who have studied it caution that our knowledge of its theology and the extent to which it was truly heretical remain incomplete. Some have argued that it was consciously heretical and dualist, while others have claimed that it was Orthodox Christian with a separate Bosnian hierarchy. John V. A. Fine, Jr has suggested a middle line, that the church was neither dualist nor Orthodox, but independent, schismatic, yet orthodox.10 We know that the Bogomils were perceived as a threat by the Pope and his legates and persecuted up until the Ottoman conquest. Some hold that this persecution, as well as the similarities in teachings between Islam and the Bogomil faith, led the sect to accept Islamisation en masse upon their submission to Mehmed II (r. 1444–6, 1451–81) in 1463. In other words, this mass conversion was responsible for the comprehensive Islamisation of Bosnia.11 However, lack of consensus on the history of the sect problematises using it as a basis for theories on the Islamisation of the region. Ottoman writers present at the time of the conquest of Bosnia never mention such a mass conversion.12 Various scholars negate it as well, noting poll tax registers, cadastral surveys, military rolls and court records that give no indication of immediate or rapid rates of conversion, but rather show a moderate pace and variable rates from one location to another. These records also confirm the existence of a large number of Christianheld timars (military fiefs) in the years following the Ottoman conquest, refuting the notion of immediate conversion.13 Some question the size of the Bogomil sect and its impact on the Bosnian peasantry, believing it to have been much less influential than originally posited. Others reject the idea that Bosnians had any ‘theological affinity’ for Islam and wonder why a large-scale conversion did not occur in other Ottoman-conquered lands with Bogomil populations.14 All in all, the Bogomil theory is outdated and rests on nationalist assumptions. It is a better reflection of the political and social priorities of the modern Balkans than of the realities of Islamisation in Bosnia. While there are no records from the time of the

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Ottoman conquest of Bosnia to verify a mass conversion, a story does appear in an Ottoman source, The Laws of the Janissaries, written nearly 150 years after the conquest. Because the implications of this source have never been thoroughly examined, I propose to do so here in the hope of contributing a new element to the discussion of Islamisation.

The Ottoman Myth The Laws of the Janissaries was composed as a reform manual for Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) around 1606. Although the author’s name is unknown, he appears to have been a wellconnected member of the janissary corps, the famed Ottoman elite infantry. He served as a Janissary guard and bookkeeper and was the grandson of the Janissary agha of Istanbul.15 The work reflects a trend in the Ottoman literature of the period of manuals recommending political, economic and military reform.16 This manual was intended to address changes to the methods of recruitment to the devşirme, a uniquely Ottoman levy of young men from the rural, mostly Christian, Ottoman subjects in the Balkans and Anatolia. These recruits were trained and educated extensively and channelled into the Janissary corps or the palace pages, some ultimately obtaining high administrative and military posts. They were considered elite servants instrumental to the maintenance of the empire and for this reason there were extensive laws governing the institution. The author of the manual perceived that changes to the methods of recruitment to the devşirme were contributing to political turmoil within the empire, so he sought to rectify this.17 In the first chapter of the manual, a story about the Islamisation of Bosnia appears that supports the idea of a mass conversion. It recounts that following the conquest of Bosnia by Mehmed II in 1463 people met and bowed to the sultan. In awe of him, they converted to Islam voluntarily. Upon seeing this, the sultan asked what they wished of him and their wish was for young men from their region to be taken into the devşirme. The sultan approved and it became customary that both circumcised and uncircumcised young men, implying both Muslims and non-Muslims, be taken from Bosnia. The author notes that boys from this region are usually not inspected, but that this should be done to prevent corruption. We may infer that he is referring to the standard devşirme selection process during which the recruits’ parentage, baptismal records, mental health and physical appearances were inspected. The author notes that up to his time the majority of young men taken from Bosnia have proven themselves good in their service in the palace, the garden and elsewhere, and have shown themselves to be wise and capable people. This is why they are sent to the sultan’s palace and gardens while the ‘Turks’, presumably referring to Turcophone Muslims, are barred from this service. The author uses the story to explain why Bosnian Muslims are acceptable for the devşirme, whereas other native-born Muslims are not.18 What are we to make of a story like this appearing more than a century after conquest, when Bosnia was already a well-integrated Ottoman province? It is helpful to look first to the questionable legality of the devşirme. The institution was at odds with sharia, which forbade the enslavement of protected subjects under Muslim sovereignty. Ottoman intellectuals such as Idris Bitlisi and Mustafa Ali wrote on the subject, but no debates ever hindered the practice.19 In this case, we are contending with a double illegality of enslaving not just protected subjects, but Muslims as well. This

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practice was also against the Ottoman kanun (sultanic law) governing the devşirme, which did not prescribe the recruitment of Muslims.20 Was the story composed as an attempt to justify this illegal practice or does it reflect post-conquest conversion in Bosnia? I argue for the former and suggest that the story speaks more to conditions in the early seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. At this time, the empire faced inconclusive wars on two fronts, rebellions throughout Anatolia, underage sultans and a generally unstable political climate. Devşirme recruits were implicated in this political unrest and the revolts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 1622, Osman II’s (r. 1618–22) plans to supplement the Janissary corps and the Ottoman army with non-devşirme recruits from the empire’s south-eastern provinces led to a rebellion by his kullar, the elite slaves recruited through the devşirme. The rebellion ended with his deposition and execution by the same group.21 Though this occurred after the composition of The Laws of the Janissaries, the work was composed amid the upheaval leading up to it. Therefore, it may have been an attempt to defend the institution and its recruits, advocating reform as opposed to abolition. The Laws of the Janissaries reflects not just tensions between the sultan and the devşirme element, but also ethno-regional tensions between devşirme recruits and a growing body of non-devşirme elite slaves (mamluks) imported into Ottoman territory from the Caucasus and south-eastern provinces. In supporting the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims, the author was supporting the domination of palace and military service by devşirme elements who hailed overwhelmingly from the Balkans and western Anatolia. During the seventeenth century, these ‘westerners’ faced growing competition from the ‘easterners’, who offered an alternative to the rebellious devşirme recruits. The tension between these groups is visible in the works of other authors from this period who extoll Bosnians and Albanians while deriding easterners.22 The author of The Laws of the Janissaries may have perpetrated this story in part to defend the continued levying of ‘westerners’, and above all Bosnians. This narrative promotes a seventeenth-century agenda rather than sheds light on Islamisation in post-conquest Bosnia.

The Matter of Bosnia and the Poturnaks In a revisionist article, Benjamin Braude discusses the foundation myths of the Ottoman Empire’s Jewish, Greek and Armenian communities (millets) and how they were used to create the impression of privileged standing, playing on the notion of each community’s close relationship with Mehmed II. The mass conversion story in The Laws of the Janissaries can be understood as a similar foundation myth. It likewise invokes Mehmed II and the privilege that he granted to the Bosnian community. Foundation myths may have been used to make pleas to the Ottoman court in the expectation that they would be honoured. The myths were also composed to justify new policies by relating them to the past and allowing communities to claim privileges based on this past. However, the inclusion of Bosnian Muslims in the devşirme was not a new policy, as records attest to their presence in the early sixteenth century. Nevertheless, the author may have adduced this story in an attempt to explain this presence, illegal in the eyes of both sharia and kanun, on the basis of their long-standing privileged status. Such foundation myths were recognised and honoured by the Ottoman government.23

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The author may have also been defending the devşirme itself. Colin Imber has noted that the question of legality, although the subject of debate in the sixteenth century, never hindered the practice. However, in 1581, Mustafa Ali scathingly criticised those in charge of carrying out the levy, noting not only their brutishness, but also their lack of adherence to the laws presiding over the institution. He commented that the institution was inconsistent with sharia and was only adopted in the past for Islamisation purposes. However, rather than suggest abolition, he recommended that the levy be implemented by local personnel instead. Nevertheless, he clearly challenged the legality of the devşirme and may have been channelling a contemporaneous debate occurring in elite Ottoman circles on the subject. It may be that the author of The Laws of the Janissaries, writing twenty-five years later during a period of acute political tension surrounding the devşirme, felt the need to defend the institution as a whole.24 The earliest mention of Bosnian Muslims being levied occurs in Feridun Beg’s Mecmuʿa-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin (Correspondence of Sultans). Feridun Beg (d. 1583) was the private secretary of the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and rose to the posts of court calligrapher and chief of scribes. He compiled the aforementioned work under Sokollu Mehmed Pasha’s patronage as a gift to Sultan Murad III upon his accession in 1574–5. It was a collection of more than 500 state records to which he had access as a member of the Ottoman chancery. The authenticity of some of the records and the impetus behind its creation have been questioned. Rather than simply a manual on diplomatic protocol for scribes, Dimitris Kastritsis’ work approaches the collection as a reflection of Sokollu’s imperial vision and an act of imperial legitimation. The collection spanned the lifetimes of numerous sultans, including Selim I (r. 1512–20). The records that fall under his reign include a note regarding the levying of recruits from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It details that, in late 1515, an order was given for the governor of Bosnia, Mustafa Pasha, and the governor of Herzegovina, Evrenosoğlu Iskender Beg, to collect 1,000 yeniçeri oğlanı (janissary recruits) from the young men of the Muslim Poturnaks (Müslüman olan Poturnak oğlanlarından).25 This peculiarity has been mentioned in passing by various scholars but calls for a more detailed examination. Who were these Poturnaks? Some have argued that the term Potur is not Bosnian in origin and was used to refer to provincial Islamised or Turkicised Bosnian Slavs.26 The term is almost certainly Bosnian, despite claims to the contrary. In the BosnianSerbo-Croatian language, the ‘po-’ prefix is combined with a verb stem to denote action upon something. Thus, Potur likely derives from the Bosnian verb poturčiti se, meaning to ‘Turkify oneself’ or to ‘become Turkish’.27 This word is often found in regional folk songs. One in particular details the story of a Vlach boy guarding sheep, wishing that wolves would eat them all so that he could be recruited by the sultan and serve in Istanbul. He daydreams that he will undergo a conversion (poturči me), study in a madrasa, be given control of the treasury and the army, and conquer numerous regions around Bosnia.28 Another use of the term occurs in Matija Mažuranić’s travelogue of Bosnia in 1839 and 1840. A member of the Croatian Illyrian National Movement, Mažuranić sought out his long-lost Bosnian brethren. He recounts a story about the Bosnian devşirme recruit Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier in 1565–79, who made his brothers cavalrymen and persuaded his mother to convert to Islam, but could not persuade his father. For this reason, he built their mausoleums according to their respective faiths.

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Mažuranić uses the verb poturčiti to describe both conversion to Islam and entry into the Ottoman administration and military. He calls the new convert ‘Poturčenjak’.29 The salient question then is whether Potur signified Islamisation, Ottomanisation or both. The aforementioned folk song hints at incorporation into the Ottoman military and administrative elite, yet Mažuranić’s account, as well as other sources explored in this article, also imply religious conversion. This raises questions of who was an Ottoman and what it meant to be one. Given the relatively few sources we have on Poturnaks, it is difficult to say for certain. The verb poturčiti se is, and has been in the past, used to signify becoming Turkish. In one respect, this may have included a change in behaviour and customs as well as religion. Stanford Shaw describes this as becoming a member of the Ottoman ruling class by adopting the ‘complicated customs, behavior, and language which was known as the “Ottoman Way”’.30 However, it is important to recognise that not every Poturnak was integrated into the Ottoman elite, and that Islamisation did not necessarily mean Ottomanisation. The idea of ‘Ottomanness’ itself was neither static nor widely agreed upon and changed over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.31 I suggest that early sixteenth-century Poturnaks were Bosnian converts to Islam. Some of them may have gradually become culturally and socially Ottomanised. The youth levied from the group and incorporated into the Ottoman elite would have certainly followed that path. The group’s service to the Ottoman state likely earned them continued acceptance into the devşirme and the high status of kullar (elite slaves) for their progeny. This tallies nicely with the detail offered in The Laws of the Janissaries that these young men did not have to be inspected, were sent to Istanbul separately from the regular non-Muslim recruits and did not follow the normal channels whereby most recruits ended up in the Janissary ranks. Instead, this group was funnelled directly into palace service as pages, a fast track to more prestigious military and administrative positions. The Laws of the Janissaries notes that these recruits were sent to the palace and palace gardens, so it is interesting that we do indeed find records of new Muslims being rewarded with appointments as hass bahçe oğlanları (imperial garden recruits). In 1556, a notice was issued to Ali Agha, the steward of the gatekeepers, that two new Muslims (yeni müslüman olan) by the names of Iskender and Mehmed should be added to the imperial garden recruits.32 In 1559, the same is done for a converted zimmi (dhimmī) named Mehmed from Çatalca (Turkey) and a zimmi named Yorgi, noting in both cases that they should be sent to the imperial gardens.33 Finally, İ. H. Uzunçarşılı reproduces an imperial correspondence from 1582 that expresses the need for recruits in the Edirne palace gardens. The correspondence asks that thirty suitable young men of worth be provided from those ‘who have come to Islam’ (İslama gelen oğlanların yarar olup).34 While we cannot say whether any of these young men were Bosnian, these records indicate that palace and garden service were open to new converts. The Ottomans were known to offer exemption from the devşirme as a privilege to some groups, so why offer entrance into it to others? Simply put, it was a privilege of another kind. It was not exclusive to the Bosnian Muslim community, as we have indications that other groups were granted similar rights.35 Because the devşirme was, according to the kanun, closed off to Muslims, new converts such as the Poturnaks would not have had access to this channel for social and political mobility. Periodically allowing their sons into the levy meant a continual incorporation of this

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group into the Ottoman state as kullar of the sultan. Palace service could lead to at least a low-ranking military and administrative position such as a timar holder (military fief holder) and, at best, the highest positions in the Ottoman Empire. Bosnia alone produced more than twenty Ottoman grand viziers.36 In fact, we have records of Bosnian kullar in high positions in the Ottoman court as early as 1444.37 Acceptance into the levy was arguably the best opportunity to achieve status and wealth in the Ottoman Empire. Poturnaks and their sons are mentioned during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in various Ottoman sources. The Mecmuʿa-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin of Feridun Beg mentions 1,000 Poturnak sons collected as janissary recruits in 1515. This occurred at a time of strained Ottoman–Safavid relations. Selim I came to power in 1512, and within two years war against the Safavids had begun. In 1514, a year before the Poturnak levy, Selim defeated Shah Ismail at the Battle of Çaldıran, a definitive turning point against the Safavids. However, the battle did not secure the eastern frontier. Moreover, Selim was already looking to Egypt and Syria under the Mamluk sultanate. His conquest of these regions would occur in 1516 and 1517. The preparation for campaigns against the Safavids, and upcoming campaigns against the Mamluks, is very visible in the same section of the Mecmuʿa-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin in which we find the excerpt regarding the Poturnak levy. It stands to reason that this group was levied for military purposes in a time of dire need and wars on multiple fronts. There is also reason to believe that these newly raised Bosnian troops were preferred over existing ones, specifically the troops of Balkan frontier commanders, as the latter were suspected of Shiite sympathies.38 The relatively small number of recruits may result from the fact that Bosnia itself was not thoroughly conquered in 1515 and native troops may have been necessary on the Hungarian front.39 Cadastral surveys for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1520 to 1533 reveal new converts, but they are not designated as Poturnaks.40 Benedikt Kuripešić, a member of a delegation sent by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in 1530 to sue for peace with the Ottomans, takes note of Christians and converts to Islam as he passes through Bosnia. He writes that the Christian peasantry has been allowed to retain their faith, churches and clergy. However, some have been led by youthful folly to convert and perniciously wage war against Christians. He notes that the sultan prefers to take agile Bosnian youths and that all of the janissaries and the best servants and functionaries are Bosnian. Turks consider them the best, most pious and trustworthy people who proudly carry themselves as real Turks, and are more trusted than actual Turks.41 We cannot be sure how he procured this information and must recognise his bias, but his account gives us some idea of Islamisation in this period and it may be a reference to Poturnaks. Poturnaks are mentioned again in the 1539 kanunname (code of law) for the districts of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Zvornik regarding ispence payments. The ispence was a twenty-five-akçe cadastral tax on non-Muslim adult subjects. In practice, the amount differed according to region, and converts paid a slightly lower form called resm-i çift. Certain groups in service to the state were either exempt from or paid a percentage of the tax.42 This particular law code stipulates that they should pay ten akçe. Kafirs (non-Muslims) should give twenty-five akçe, married Poturs should give twenty-two akçe, and unmarried Poturs who are of age should give twelve akçe.43 The first point of note is the use of Potur as opposed to the standard term denoting new converts in Ottoman documents, nevi müslimin. This could indicate that more

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than religious conversion distinguished the Poturnaks at this time. Another point of note is the variation in payments. While married Poturs did not receive a significant tax break, the unmarried ones paid an amount similar to that of groups performing a service to the state. While this could be chalked up to regional variations, it also confirms that Poturs were converts and paid the ispence as such. The group reappears nearly three decades later in a 1565 piece of imperial correspondence. It records the recruitment to the devşirme of a group referred to as sünnetli oğlanları (circumcised youths) from the districts of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Klis (Croatia). Though the term Potur does not appear, the correspondence seems to refer to the same phenomenon of levying a group of circumcised Muslim youths. It specifies that this is a long-standing tradition, that recruits should be suitable young men native to this area and that care must be taken to avoid confusion or trickery.44 Similar letters exist from 1573 and 1589, and both make use of the term Potur. The 1573 letter notifies the judges of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Klis that the Anadolu agha45 has been dispatched to collect recruits for the Janissary corps. While he is to recruit from the sons of non-Muslim reaya (tax-paying subjects), recruits may also be collected voluntarily from the Potur group (Potur taifesinden).46 The 1589 letter addresses the governor of Bosnia, ordering the collection of more Potur youths according to the established custom. The note insists that these recruits be circumcised, but not Turcophone, presumably invoking the customary prohibition against native Turks. Lastly, it cautions that the collector should be careful to avoid being tricked into accepting those who falsely claim to be Poturs. It implies that this was a closely guarded privilege.47 An anonymously authored mecmūʿa (miscellany) mentioning Poturs is written around the same time (1585) as the aforementioned correspondences pertaining to the Potur levies. It may be that the author was aware of and responding to their occurrence. The mecmūʿa provides another apocryphal story regarding the conversion of Bosnia. After the conquest, the poor Bosnian peasantry, in collaboration with a sympathetic Mesih Pasha who was sent to survey the land, petitioned the state to alleviate their tax burden. When this failed, they came up with a plan for select individuals of each village to convert in order to avoid taxation. Some became genuine converts and good Muslims, while some retained their Christian faith. The majority, however, converted but stuck to their previous faith, proliferating a host of bad habits such as polytheism. This group of ‘half-Turk’ hybrids is identified as Poturs, and they were prohibited from the janissary corps.48 The reference to Mesih Pasha is a curious but fitting anachronism, given that he was a prominent Byzantine convert with a questionable reputation. Tijana Krstić further contextualises the story by suggesting that it was humour-laced commentary on developments within the empire during this time. In the late sixteenth century, social, religious and political trends revolved around religious orthodoxy. For these reasons, it was increasingly important to emphasise strict adherence to Sunni orthodoxy. Krstić and others who have analysed the source suggest that it may have been authored by an elite Bosnian Muslim. Through humour, and in the wider context of increasing religious sensitivity, he may have been distancing himself from his religiously questionable compatriots. One of the groups whose conversion was called into question during this time was the ‘peoples of Rum’, a designation including Bosnians, who comprised a very powerful ethno-regional interest group within the Ottoman elite. The author apparently saw the need to defend true Bosnian Muslims and condemn heretics.49

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Lastly, we have an undated roll from the sixteenth century listing the names and detailed descriptions of sixty young men from Bosnia, forty-four Muslims and sixteen Christians, recruited for the devşirme. While the term Potur is not used, the Muslims are denoted by their names (for example, Veli veled-i Ahmed), which differ from those of the non-Muslims (for example, Ahmed: Nikola veled-i Havido, meaning Nikola, newly named Ahmed, the son of Havido).50 In the seventeenth century, when devşirme levies were more sporadic, a Poturnak mention appears in a 1638/1639 record sent to Rumelia, Bosnia and Albania. Along with the customary levy, it notes that if there are suitable Albanian and Bosnian Muslim volunteers they should be accepted. Antonina Zhelyazkova mentions a similar record in 1666.51 One last mention of Poturnaks can be found in the writings of Paul Rycaut, an English consul living in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-seventeenth century. He refers to them as a religiously syncretic sect made up of those who speak Persian and Arabic and pay the same taxes that the Christians do.52 These records sum up the history of the group and provide us with snapshots of Islamisation in Bosnia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As they demonstrate, the Poturnaks emerged as a distinct group in the decades after the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia. Over the course of the centuries, some were levied regularly for military and palace service and incorporated into the Ottoman state. The question that remains is the effect of this group on the Islamisation of Bosnia.

Conclusion The Poturnaks raise the question of whether the devşirme should be seen as an instrument of Islamisation not just in Bosnia, but in all the regions where it was levied. It is true that non-Muslim recruits were converted upon their arrival in Istanbul, and that the institution, while irregular and implemented only in times of need, pulled a fair number of individuals from the provinces. Nevertheless, Anton Minkov reminds us that, outside of Bosnia, the most extensive conversion of peasants occurred in the seventeenth century when the levy was applied only sparingly. How, then, do we answer the question? Minkov’s definition of the devşirme as ‘a powerful social institution for the integration of Muslims and non-Muslims into one realm’ is a start.53 When taking into account the devşirme and Islamisation, the conversion of individual recruits is not the only matter of significance. The salient question is whether the devşirme served as a tool of integration and influenced the Islamisation of wider networks of Ottoman subjects. Did the practice of welcoming Poturnak sons into the devşirme contribute to the Islamisation of Bosnia? I would answer in the affirmative. Whether or not the formation of this community reflected a conscious Ottoman effort to encourage the Ottomanisation and Islamisation of Bosnia, it is undeniable that such a long-lasting practice would have contributed to both. Recruits remained connected to their families, so it would not be far-fetched to posit that their incorporation into the Ottoman state also meant a degree of incorporation for their communities of origin. In the mid-sixteenth century, we find numerous records of palace personnel either bringing newly converted family members into palace service or seeing that they were rewarded with a timar (military fief).54 This influence extended beyond families, as evidenced by a peculiar sixteenth-century list of young non-Muslim Bosnian men. According to Metin Kunt, the list seems to represent recommendations made to a devşirme collector by palace pages suggesting suitable acquaintances from their home region. Under the heading of Sarajevo

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stand two locations, ‘Dolnakora’ and ‘Honiçe’. Kunt speculates that the names in the document were written by someone who was unfamiliar with the region and Slavic languages. I suggest that the locations are Donja Gora and Konjic, located sixty to a hundred kilometres west of Sarajevo. The notation following the village of Donja Gora is that Radoya has three sons, the youngest being a good young man (üç oğlu var imiş, ama kiçisi eyü oğlan imiş). A similar notation follows the town of Konjic.55 The list indicates that those already in service provided recommendations for wider networks of neighbours and acquaintances. The Poturnak phenomenon was almost certainly a major factor in the comprehensiveness of Islamisation in Bosnia, and it should be added to the factors discussed at the beginning of this chapter. There is no single explanation for the Islamisation of the Balkans. The factors were numerous and varied according to local conditions. Minkov has proposed that the pace of Islamisation was faster when numerous factors combined. Given the many factors that combined in Bosnia, it is perhaps less surprising that Islamisation was comprehensive there. Poturnak sons began to be levied as early as 1515, only half a century after the conquest of Bosnia, so perhaps this accounts for higher levels of conversion earlier. This high and sustained conversion rate is one reason why Bosnia is considered a regional variation. In the remainder of the Balkans, the first wave of conversions had concluded by the middle of the sixteenth century. By this time in Bosnia, however, nearly half of the population had converted to Islam. The Poturnaks must be regarded as a factor in this conversion profile.56 Much work remains to be done in defining the Poturnak community. Given that Albanians sometimes appear alongside Bosnians in documents mentioning Poturs, it may be that the acceptance of Muslims was not limited to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Evgeni Radushev has shown that similar privileges were given to Muslims and Muslim converts in rural regions of Bulgaria in the mid-seventeenth and early eighteen centuries.57 The existence of such peculiarities in the devşirme is interesting in and of itself. It suggests that the institution operated with an element of flexibility, that it was adapted to various regions and times, and that it should be approached as such.

Notes 1. Colin Heywood, ‘Bosnia under Ottoman Rule, 1463-1800’, in Mark Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 32. 2. Hazim Šabanović, Propast Bosanskog Kraljevstva i Osnivanje Bosanskog Sandžaka (Sarajevo: ND NRBiH Djela – Odjeljenje Istoriskofilološih Nauka, 1959), pp. 38–43; Ramiza Ibrahimović, ‘Struktura Vojničke Klase u XV i Početkom XVI Vijeka s Posebnim Osvrtom na Širenje Islama u Bosni’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 41 (1991), p. 269; Hazim Šabanović, ‘Vojno Uređenje Bosne od 1463 Godine do Kraja XVI Stoljeća’, Godišnjak Društva Istoričara Bosne i Hercegovine 11 (1960), p. 213; Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 12; Jelena Mrgić, ‘Transition from Late Medieval to Early Ottoman Settlement Pattern: A Case Study of Northern Bosnia’, Südost-Forschungen 65–6 (2006–7), p. 54. 3. Adem Handžić, Population of Bosnia in the Ottoman Period: A Historical Overview (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1994), pp. 20–2; Machiel Kiel, ‘Ottoman Sources for the Demographic History and the Process of Islamization of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria in the 15th–17th Centuries: Old Sources – New Methodology’, in Markus Köller and Kemal

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

islamisation H. Karpat (eds), Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 93, 104–7; Miloš Mladenović, ‘The Osmanlı Conquest and the Islamization of Bosnia’, Études Slaves et Est-Européennes / Slavic and East European Studies 3, no. 4 (1958–9), pp. 219–23; Alexander Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans with Special Reference to Bosnia’, Journal of Islamic Studies 5, no. 2 (1994), pp. 163–72; Benedikt Kuripešić, Putopis Kroz Bosnu, Srbiju, Bugarsku i Rumeliju, trans. Ðorđe Pojanović (Belgrade: Svjetlost, 2001), p. 26; Aladin Husić, ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu (15. i 16. Stoljeće)’, Anali Gazi Husrev-begove Biblioteke 27–8 (2008), p. 126; Hatidža Čar-Drnda, ‘Demografsko Kretanje, Socijalni i Konfesionalni Sastav Stanovnika u Visočkoj Nahiji’, Prilozi za Orijetalnu Filologiju 41 (1991), pp. 206–7. Fikret Adanır, ‘The Formation of a “Muslim” Nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Historiographic Discussion’, in Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 289–90; Handžić, Population of Bosnia, pp. 20–2; Heywood, ‘Bosnia under Ottoman Rule’, pp. 32–40; Antonina Zhelyazkova, ‘Islamization in the Balkans as a Historiographical Problem: The SoutheastEuropean Perspective’, in Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 227; Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), pp. 63–5; Husić, ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu’, p. 116; Nenad Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization of Peasants in Bosnia: Demystifications’, in Machiel Kiel and Abdeljelil Temimi (eds), Mélanges prof. Machiel Kiel (Zaghouan: Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l’Information, 1999), pp. 355–6. Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004) pp. 96–8; Čar-Drnda, ‘Demografsko Kretanje’, pp. 201–2. Handžić, Population of Bosnia, pp. 15–28; Kiel, ‘Ottoman Sources for the Demographic History’, pp. 104–7; Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance, p. 57; Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans,’ pp. 163–72; Husić, ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu’, pp. 124–30. Zhelyazkova, ‘Islamization in the Balkans’, pp. 249–57; Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance, p. 70; Muhamed Hadžijahić, ‘O Jednom Manje Poznatom Domacem Vrelu za Proučavanje Crkve Bosanske’, Prilozi – Institut za Istoriju 10, no. 2 (1974), p. 89. Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance, p. 67; Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans’, pp. 175–7; Ćiro Truhelka, O Porijeklu Bosanskih Muslimana (Sarajevo: Nova Tiskara, 1934), pp. 11–12. Handžić, Population of Bosnia, pp. 4–23; Heywood, ‘Bosnia under Ottoman Rule’, pp. 32–40. John V. A. Fine, Jr, The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1975), pp. 1–8, 375–87. Handžić, Population of Bosnia, pp. 4–23; Eugen Sladović, Islamsko Pravu u Bosni i Hercegovini (Belgrade: Izdavačka Knjižarnica Gece Kona, 1926), pp. 3–4; Mladenović, ‘The Osmanlı Conquest’, pp. 219–24; Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans’, pp. 163–72; Truhelka, O Porijeklu Bosanskih Muslimana, pp. 11–14; Mehmed Handžić, Islamizacija Bosne i Hercegovine I Porijeklo Bosansko-Hercegovačkih Muslimana (Sarajevo: Islamska Dionička Štamparija, 1940), pp. 20–1. Tursun Beg, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Halil İnalcık and Rhoads Murphey (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica Inc., 1978), pp. 50–3. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), Tapu Tahrir Defteri 0056; Husić, ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu’, pp. 120–6; Čar-Drnda, ‘Demografsko Kretanje’, pp. 200, 206–7,

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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240–8; Metin İ. Kunt, ‘Transformation of Zimmi into Askeri’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), pp. 55̧–9; Ahmed Aličić, ‘Popis Bosanske Vojske Pred Bitku na Mohaću 1526 Godine’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 25 (1975), pp. 171–2, 182–92; Ahmed Akgündüz, 91, 164, MAD 540 ve 173 Numaralı Hersek, Bosna ve Izvornik Livalari – İcmal Tahrir Defterleri 926-939 / 1520-1533 (Ankara: Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, 2006), pp. 31–109; Adem Handžić, Dva Prva Popisa Zvorničkog Sandžaka iz 1519 i 1533 Godine (Sarajevo: Akademija Nauka i Umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1986), pp. 23–196; Fine, The Bosnian Church, pp. 375–87; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, p. 353. Fine, The Bosnian Church, pp. 1–8, 375–87; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, p. 353; Adanır, ‘Formation of a “Muslim” Nation’, pp. 289–90; Heywood, ‘Bosnia under Ottoman Rule’, pp. 32–40; Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans’, pp. 163–77; Hadžijahić, ‘O Jednom Manje Poznatom Domacem Vrelu’, p. 89; Kuripešić, Putopis Kroz Bosnu, p. 26. Benedikt Kuripešić passed through Bosnia in 1530 and referred to the Bosnians as Roman Catholics. He made no mention of Bogomils or any other sect. Adem Handžić, ‘O Janičarskom Zakonu’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 46 (1996–7), pp. 142–50. Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnâmeleri ve Hukûkî Tahlilleri: IX Kitap I. Ahmed, I. Mustafa ve II. Osman Devirleri Kanunnâmeleri 1012/1603-1031/1622 (Istanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1996). Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 122–9; Metin İ. Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550-1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 32; Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 50. Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnâmeleri, p. 141; Handžić, ‘O Janičarskom Zakonu’, pp. 148–50; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocakları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kumumu Basimevi, 1943), pp. 18–19; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, pp. 354–5. Handžić and Moačanin disagree over the translation of the passage in question, both using another copy of The Laws of the Janissaries located in Saint Petersburg, edited and translated by I. E. Petrosyan. The Akgündüz copy used here states: ‘Bosna diyârında cemʿ olunan oğlanların cümlesi müslüman iken cemʿ olunmak kanun olduğundan (Of all of the youths collected in the land of Bosnia, it is customary for those who are Muslim to be collected).’ While this debate is worth noting, the particulars are not central to our subject. J. A. B. Palmer, ‘The Origin of the Janissaries’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 35 (1952), pp. 448–80; V. L. Ménage, ‘Sidelights on the Devshirme from Idris and Sa’duddin’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18, no. 1 (1956), pp. 181–3; V. L. Ménage, ‘Devshirme’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005); Kunt, ‘Transformation of Zimmi’, pp. 56–7; Paul Wittek, ‘Devshirme and Shari‘a’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, no. 2 (1955), pp. 272–6; Mustafa bin Ahmet Ali, Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581: Edition, Translation, Notes, trans. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 29–30. Yeniçeri Oğlanı Cemi Etmek Kanunnamesi (Devşirme Kanunnamesi), Beyazit Devlet Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, MS Veliyuddin Efendi Koleksiyon 1969, ff. 134–7; Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri: II Kitap II Bayezid Devri Kanunnameleri (Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1990), pp. 123–7. Baki Tezcan, ‘The History of a “Primary Source”: The Making of Tûghî’s Chronicle on the Regicide of Osman II’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 1

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24. 25.

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28. 29.

30.

islamisation (2009), pp. 41–62; Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 115–90; Mustafa Ali, Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for Sultans, p. 30; Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 19–27. Metin İ. Kunt, ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 3 (June 1974), pp. 233–9; Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy, p. 181; Snježana Buzov, ‘Ottoman Perceptions of Bosnia as Reflected in the Works of Ottoman Authors Who Visited or Lived in Bosnia’, in Markus Köller and Kemal Karpat (eds), Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 85–7; Ibrahim Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi – Historija 1520-1576 Ibrahima Alajbegović Pećevija, trans. Fehim Nametak (Sarajevo: El-Kalem and Orijentalni Institut, 2000), pp. 45, 81. Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation Myths of the Millet System’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), pp. 69–88; Gottfried Hagen, ‘From Haggadic Exegesis to Myth: Popular Stories of the Prophets in Islam’, in Roberta S. Sabbath (ed.), Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 305–16. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 134, 334; Mustafa Ali, Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for Sultans, pp. 29–30. Feridun Beg, Mecmua-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Takvimhane-yi Âmire, 1858), pp. 471–3; Dimitris Kastritsis, ‘Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşe’ātü’s-Selātīn (“Correspondence of Sultans”) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World’, in Sahar Bazzaz et al. (eds), Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2013), pp. 91–110. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 60; Mehmed Zeki Pakalin, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basimevi, 1946–56), p. 80. An anonymously authored mecmūʿa (miscellany) from the year 1585 that will be discussed later provides an alternate definition of the term. It divides it into ‘po’ and ‘tur’, claiming that ‘po’ translates to ‘half’ and that ‘tur’ translates to ‘Turkish’. Therefore, a Potur is a heretical Bosnian Christian–Muslim hybrid. Scholars who have analysed this miscellany suggest that the author may have been a native of Bosnia making a joke for native speakers. I prefer my definition of potur for the following reasons. The story about Poturnaks in the miscellany is apocryphal and anachronistic. In addition, the division of the term potur does not conform to grammatical standards. Given the emphasis on the miscellany’s socially and politically conscious humour, it may be that the author was engaging in wordplay and intentionally modifying the term to call into question the orthodoxy of this particular group; see Tijana Krstić, ‘Conversion and Converts to Islam in Ottoman Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds), Writing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 72–9; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, pp. 357–8. Luka Marjanović, Hrvatske Narodne Pjesme: Junačke Pjesme Muhamedovske (Zagreb: Tiskara Karla Albrechta, 1898), vol. 3, pp. 57–60. Matija Mažuranić, Pogled u Bosnu ili Kratak Put u Onu Krajinu, Učinjen 1839-40 po Jednom Domorodcu (Zagreb: Zaklada Tiskara Narodnih Novina u Zagrebu, 1938), pp. 20, 54, 66. Stanford J. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman View of the Balkans’, in Charles and Barbara Jelavich (eds), The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

291

Since the Eighteenth Century (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974), p. 58; Kunt, ‘Transformation of Zimmi’, p. 59. Krstić, ‘Conversion and Converts’, pp. 58–73. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul (hereafter: BOA), Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 74, N. 670. BOA, Mühimme Defteri 4, S. 5, N. 34; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 4, S. 5, N. 35. Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocakları, p. 116. Historijski Arhiv Sarajevo (HAS), Fond Haci Sinanova Tekija, S. 269, 1655 Rudo Ferman; Vassilis Demetriades, ‘Some Thoughts on the Origins of the Devshirme’, in Elizabeth Zachariadou (ed.), The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389): Halcyon Days in Crete I: A Symposium Held in Rethymnon (Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 1993), pp. 24–31; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocakları, pp. 113–14; Evgeni Radushev, ‘Peasant Janissaries?’, Journal of Social History 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 447–67; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, p. 354; Aleksandar Matkovski, ‘Prilog Pitanju Devširme’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 14–15 (1964–5), pp. 301–6. Lopašić, ‘Islamization of the Balkans’, p. 180. Halil İnalcık, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkiler ve Vesikalar, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1954), pp. 215–17. Mariya Kiprovska, ‘The Mihaloğlu Family: Gazi Warriors and Patrons of Dervish Hospices’, The Journal of Ottoman Studies 32 (2008), pp. 193–4, 200–22. Aličić, ‘Popis Bosanske Vojske’, pp. 171–92; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, p. 354. Akgündüz, Hersek, Bosna ve Izvornik Livalari, pp. 36, 78. Kuripešić, Putopis Kroz Bosnu, pp. 26–36. Halil İnalcık, ‘Ispend̲j̲e’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005); Adem Handžić, Opširni Popis Bosanskog Sandžaka iz 1604 Godine (Sarajevo: Bošnjački Institut Zürich Odjel Sarajevo and Orijentalni Institut u Sarajevu, 2000), p. xlvii; Husić, ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu’, p. 125; Čar-Drnda, ‘Demografsko Kretanje’, pp. 200–3. Kanuni i Kanunname za Bosanki, Hercegovački, Zvornički, Kliški, Crnogorski i Skadarski Sandžak, trans. Hazim Šabanović et al. (Sarajevo: Štamparski Zavod Veselin Mesleša, 1957), pp. 50–1. BOA, Mühimme Defteri 5, S. 96, N. 220. The Anadolu agha was the head commander of Anatolia and counterpart to the head commander of Rumelia. BOA, Mühimme Defteri 22, S. 292, N. 590. BOA, Mühimme Defteri 66, S. 69, N. 143. Krstić, ‘Conversion and Converts’, pp. 58–79; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, pp. 356–8. Krstić, ‘Conversion and Converts’, pp. 58–79; Moačanin, ‘Mass Islamization’, pp. 356–8; see note 27 for my discussion of the wordplay in this story. Rifki Melül Meric, ‘Birkaç Mühim Arşiv Vesikası’, in Ahmed Ateş (ed.), Istanbul Enstitüsü Dergisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbaası, 1957), pp. 35–40. Matkovski, ‘Prilog Pitanju Devširme’, pp. 301–6; Zhelyazkova, ‘Islamization in the Balkans’, pp. 276–7. Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: n.p., 1686), pp. 247–8. Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans, pp. 66–77, 108–9. BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 51, N. 464; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 103, N. 1036; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 11, N. 108; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 2, N. 14; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 163, N. 1505; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 173, N. 1573; BOA, Mühimme Defteri 2, S. 224, N. 2009. Meric, ‘Birkaç Mühim Arşiv Vesikası’, pp. 40–1; Kunt, ‘Transformation of Zimmi’, p. 61. Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans, pp. 40–7, 66–77, 108–9. Radushev, ‘Peasant Janissaries?’, pp. 447–67.

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Bibliography Archival Documents (arranged by archive, collection and document number) Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), Istanbul Mühimme Defterleri 2, S. 74, N. 670, year 1556. 2, S. 2, N. 14, year 1556. 2, S. 11, N. 108, year 1556. 2, S. 51, N. 464, year 1556. 2, S. 163, N. 1505, year 1556. 2, S. 173, N. 1573, year 1556. 2, S. 103, N. 1036, year 1560. 2, S. 224, N. 2009, year 1556. 4, S. 5, N. 34, year 1559. 4, S. 5, N. 35, year 1559. 5, S. 96, N. 220, year 1565. 22, S. 292, N. 590, year 1573. 66, S. 69, N. 143, year 1590. Tapu Tahrir Defteri 0056, year 1516. Beyazit Devlet Kütüphanesi, Istanbul Yeniçeri Oğlanı Cemi Etmek Kanunnamesi (Devşirme Kanunnamesi), MS Veliyuddin Efendi Koleksiyon, 1969, ff. 134–7. Historijski Arhiv Sarajevo (HAS) Fond Haci Sinanova Tekija, S. 269, 1655 Rudo Ferman Published Sources Adanır, Fikret, ‘The Formation of a “Muslim” Nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Historiographic Discussion’, in Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 267–304. Akgündüz, Ahmed, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri: II Kitap II Bayezid Devri Kanunnameleri (Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1990). Akgündüz, Ahmed, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri: IX Kitap I. Ahmed, I. Mustafa ve II. Osman Devirleri Kanunnameleri 1012/1603-1031/1622 (Istanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 1996). Akgündüz, Ahmed, 91, 164, MAD 540 ve 173 Numaralı Hersek, Bosna ve Izvornik Livalari: Icmal Tahrir Defterleri 926-939 / 1520-1533 (Ankara: Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, 2006). Ali, Mustafa bin Ahmet [Gelibolulu], Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581: Edition, Translation, Notes, trans. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982). Aličić, Ahmed, ‘Popis Bosanske Vojske Pred Bitku na Mohaću 1526 Godine’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 25 (1975), pp. 171–201. Braude, Benjamin, ‘Foundation Myths of the Millet System’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), pp. 69–88. Buzov, Snježana, ‘Ottoman Perceptions of Bosnia as Reflected in the Works of Ottoman Authors Who Visited or Lived in Bosnia’, in Markus Köller and Kemal Karpat (eds), Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 83–91. Čar-Drnda, Hatidža, ‘Demografsko Kretanje, Socijalni i Konfesionalni Sastav Stanovnika u Visočkoj Nahiji’, Prilozi za Orijetalnu Filologiju 41 (1991), pp. 195–252.

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Demetriades, Vassilis, ‘Some Thoughts on the Origins of the Devshirme’, in Elizabeth Zachariadou (ed.), The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389): Halcyon Days in Crete I: A Symposium Held in Rethymnon (Rethymnon: Crete University Press, 1993), pp. 24–31. Efendić, Fehim, ‘O Islamizaciji’, Gajret (1940–1), pp. 64–78. Feridun Beg, Mecmuʿa-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin (Istanbul: Takvimhane-yi Âmire, 1858), vol 1. Fine, John V. A., Jr, The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1975). Hadžibegić, Hamid, ‘Bosanska Kanun Nama iz 1565 Godine’, Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja u Sarajevu 3 (1948), pp. 201–22. Hadžijahić, Muhamed, ‘O Jednom Manje Poznatom Domacem Vrelu za Proučavanje Crkve Bosanske’, Prilozi – Institut za Istoriju 10, no. 2 (1974), pp. 55–109. Hagen, Gottfried, ‘From Haggadic Exegesis to Myth: Popular Stories of the Prophets in Islam’, in Roberta S. Sabbath (ed.), Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 301–16. Handžić, Adem, Dva Prva Popisa Zvorničkog Sandžaka iz 1519 i 1533 Godine (Sarajevo: Akademija Nauka i Umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1986). Handžić, Adem, Population of Bosnia in the Ottoman Period: A Historical Overview (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1994). Handžić, Adem, ‘O Janičarskom Zakonu’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 46 (1996–7), pp. 141–50. Handžić, Adem, Opširni Popis Bosanskog Sandžaka iz 1604 Godine (Sarajevo: Bošnjački Institut Zürich Odjel Sarajevo and Orijentalni Institut u Sarajevu, 2000). Handžić, Mehmed, Islamizacija Bosne i Hercegovine i Porijeklo Bosansko-Hercegovačkih Muslimana (Sarajevo: Islamska Dionička Štamparija, 1940). Heyd, Uriel, Ottoman Documents on Palestine 1552–1615 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). Heywood, Colin, ‘Bosnia Under Ottoman Rule, 1463–1800’, in Mark Pinson (ed.), The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 22–53. Husić, Aladin ‘Maglaj u Ranom Osmanskom Periodu (15. i 16. Stoljeće)’, Anali Gazi Husrevbegove Biblioteke 27–8 (2008), pp. 113–34. Ibrahimović, Ramiza, ‘Struktura Vojničke Klase u XV i Početkom XVI Vijeka s Posebnim Osvrtom na Širenje Islama u Bosni’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 41 (1991), pp. 269–82. Imber, Colin, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002). İnalcık, Halil, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1954). İnalcık, Halil, ‘Ispendj̲e’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). Itzkowitz, Norman, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). Kanuni i Kanunname za Bosanki, Hercegovački, Zvornički, Kliški, Crnogorski i Skadarski Sandžak, trans. Hazim Šabanović, Branislav Ðurđev, Nedim Filipović, Hamid Hadžibegić and Muhamed Mujić (Sarajevo: Štamparski Zavod Veselin Mesleša, 1957). Kastritsis, Dimitris, ‘Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşe’ātü’s-Selātīn (“Correspondence of Sultans”) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World’, in Sahar Bazzaz, Yota Batsaki and Dimiter Angelov (eds), Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2013), pp. 91–110. Kiel, Machiel, ‘Ottoman Sources for the Demographic History and the Process of Islamization of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria in the 15th–17th Centuries: Old Sources – New Methodology’, in Markus Köller and Kemal H. Karpat (eds), Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 93–119.

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Kiprovska, Mariya, ‘The Mihaloğlu Family: Gazi Warriors and Patrons of Dervish Hospices’, The Journal of Ottoman Studies 32 (2008), pp. 193–222. Kırmızıaltın, Suphan, ‘Conversion in the Balkans: A Historiographical Survey’, History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007), pp. 646–57. Krstić, Tijana, ‘Conversion and Converts to Islam in Ottoman Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds), Writing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 58–79. Kunt, Metin İ., ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 3 (June 1974), pp. 233–9. Kunt, Metin İ., ‘Transformation of Zimmi into Askeri’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), pp. 55–68. Kunt, Metin İ., The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550–1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Kuripešić, Benedikt, Putopis Kroz Bosnu, Srbiju, Bugarsku i Rumeliju, trans. Ðorđe Pojanović (Belgrade: Svjetlost, 2001). Lopašić, Alexander, ‘Islamization of the Balkans with Special Reference to Bosnia’, Journal of Islamic Studies 5, no. 2 (1994), pp. 163–86. Malcolm, Noel, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Marjanović, Luka, Hrvatske Narodne Pjesme: Junačke Pjesme Muhamedovske (Zagreb: Tiskara Karla Albrechta, 1898), vol. 3. Matkovski, Aleksandar, ‘Prilog Pitanju Devširme’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 14–15 (1964–5), pp. 273–309. Mažuranić, Matija, Pogled u Bosnu ili Kratak Put u Onu Krajinu, Učinjen 1839-40 po Jednom Domorodcu (Zagreb: Zaklada Tiskara Narodnih Novina u Zagrebu, 1938). Ménage, V. L., ‘Sidelights on the Devshirme from Idris and Sa’duddin’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18, no. 1 (1956), pp. 181–3. Ménage, V. L., ‘Devshirme’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). Meric, Rifki Melül, ‘Birkaç Mühim Arşiv Vesikası’, in Ahmed Ateş (ed.), Istanbul Enstitüsü Dergisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbaası, 1957). Minkov, Anton, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Mladenović, Miloš, ‘The Osmanlı Conquest and the Islamization of Bosnia’, Études Slaves et Est-Européennes / Slavic and East European Studies 3, no. 4 (1958–9), pp. 219–26. Moačanin, Nenad, ‘Mass Islamization of Peasants in Bosnia: Demystifications’, in Machiel Kiel and Abdeljelil Temimi (eds), Mélanges prof. Machiel Kiel (Zaghouan: Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l’Information, 1999), pp. 353–8. Mrgić, Jelena, ‘Transition from Late Medieval to Early Ottoman Settlement Pattern: A Case Study of Northern Bosnia’, Südost-Forschungen 65–6 (2006–7), pp. 50–85. Nilević, Boris, ‘Slika Religioznosti Srednjovjekovne Bosne Pred Osmanski Dolazak’, Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiju 41 (1991), pp. 337–46. Pakalin, Mehmed Zeki, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüğü (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basimevi, 1946–56). Palmer, J. A. B., ‘The Origin of the Janissaries’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 35 (1952), pp. 448–81. Peçevi, Ibrahim, Tarih-i Peçevi – Historija 1520-1576 Ibrahima Alajbegović Pećevija, trans. Fehim Nametak (Sarajevo: El-Kalem and Orijentalni Institut, 2000). Piterberg, Gabriel, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). Radushev, Evgeni, ‘Peasant Janissaries?’, Journal of Social History 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 447–67.

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Rycaut, Paul, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire containing the Maxims of the Turkish Polity, the Most Material Points of the Mahometan Religion, Their Sects and Heresies, Their Convents and Religious Votaries, Their Military Discipline: With an Exact Computation of Their Forces Both by Sea and Land: In Three Books (London: n.p., 1686). Shaw, Stanford J., ‘The Ottoman View of the Balkans’, in Charles and Barbara Jelavich (eds), The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics Since the Eighteenth Century (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974), pp. 56–80. Sladović, Eugen, Islamsko Pravu u Bosni i Hercegovini (Belgrade: Izdavačka Knjižarnica Gece Kona, 1926). Šabanović, Hazim, Propast Bosanskog Kraljevstva i Osnivanje Bosanskog Sandžaka (Sarajevo: ND NRBiH Djela – Odjeljenje Istoriskofilološih Nauka, 1959). Šabanović, Hazim, ‘Vojno Uređenje Bosne od 1463 Godine do Kraja XVI Stoljeća’, Godišnjak Društva Istoričara Bosne i Hercegovine 11 (1960), pp. 174–223. Tezcan, Baki, ‘The History of a “Primary Source”: The Making of Tûghî’s Chronicle on the Regicide of Osman II’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 1 (2009), pp. 41–62. Tezcan, Baki, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Truhelka, Ćiro, O Porijeklu Bosanskih Muslimana (Sarajevo: Nova Tiskara, 1934). Tursun Beg, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Halil İnalcık and Rhoads Murphey (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978). Uzunçarşılı, İsmail Hakkı, Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocakları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kumumu Basimevi, 1943). Velikonja, Mitja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003). Wittek, Paul, ‘Devshirme and Shari‘a’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, no. 2 (1955), pp. 271–8. Zhelyazkova, Antonina, ‘Islamization in the Balkans as a Historiographical Problem: The Southeast-European Perspective’, in Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 223–66.

15 FROM SHAHĀ DA TO ʿAQĪ DA: CONVERSION TO ISLAM, CATECHISATION AND SUNNITISATION IN SIXTEENTHCENTURY OTTOMAN RUMELI Tijana Krstić

I

n a recent article, Derin Terzioğlu introduced a heretofore unknown seventeenthcentury catechetical work in Ottoman Turkish by a certain Nushi al-Nasıhi. Hailing most probably from the Ottoman European domains (Rumeli) and writing in roughly the 1630s, Nushi lamented the state of basic religious instruction in the empire and blamed the woes of the Ottoman state on insufficient knowledge of faith and on laxity in the observance of religious laws. He went on to outline a detailed plan of how the condition should be remedied: the authorities should send out town criers to all neighbourhoods and announce that from that point on everyone over the age of seven regardless of their social status would be examined on their knowledge of ‘faith and Islam and ablution and ritual prayer’ (īmāndan ve İslāmdan ve ābdest ve namāzdan suʾāl idüp).1 He further enjoined that those who fail to show satisfactory knowledge should be ‘publicly scolded, administered discretionary punishment or evicted from the neighbourhood’.2 The effect of this expulsion of ‘heretics’, he suggested, would also be the conversion of non-Muslims, who would flock to the true faith upon this evidence of the Muslims’ commitment to it.3 Nushi al-Nasıhi was not writing in the early days of Islam’s spread in Rumeli; rather, his work dates to a different phase in the process of Islam’s establishment in the Ottoman Empire, a phase that scholars have recently begun to refer to as ‘Sunnitisation’ and/or ‘confessionalisation’.4 This phase seems to begin in the early sixteenth century and continues throughout the seventeenth, and is characterised by a greater concern within the Ottoman Muslim community about Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy according to the Hanafi legal tradition. In recent years, scholars have begun to point to the processes related to Ottoman state-building and the fashioning of an imperial ideology as central to this development. The rise of the rival Shiʿa Safavid Empire and the theological and political challenge this posed has been cited as one of the key reasons behind the growing attention, beginning in the early sixteenth century, given to defining and policing the boundaries of a Sunni orthodoxy.5 At the same time, by the early 1500s the processes of urbanisation, bureaucratisation and institutionalisation launched in the 1450s resulted in a cadre of religious scholars (ulama) well 296

from

SHAHĀDA

to ʿAQĪDA

297

integrated with the Ottoman establishment, whose self-confidence grew in direct relation to the empire’s increasing demand for textually grounded and law-centred interpretations of religion. Already prior to the Safavid challenge, the ulama had begun to covet and promote their own greater role in defining the boundaries of Sunni belief and unbelief.6 The convergence of these factors appears to be central to the growing ‘Sunna-mindedness’ (as Terzioğlu terms it) in the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the sixteenth century, but the various phases, aspects, agents and documentary evidence of Ottoman Sunnitisation between the 1500s and 1700s are yet to be comprehensively explored and explained.7 At the same time, by the mid-sixteenth century, the early phase of conversion to Islam in Rumeli, which began in the mid-fourteenth century and lasted until the early sixteenth, and during which the majority of converts appear to have come from local Christian elites and military households or were recruits into Ottoman military and administrative ranks through the devşirme system, gave way to a process that affected a wider social base.8 The Ottoman Muslim community graduated from the epoch of what Richard Bulliet and Anton Minkov have termed the ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ to that of the ‘early majority’,9 or, as this study will suggest, from the period when a simple profession of faith (shahāda) was sufficient to be considered a Muslim to the era in which a more thorough knowledge of the tenets of faith (ʿaqīda) was expected from each believer. The goal of the present chapter is to address this shift through the prism of the Ottoman catechetical or ʿaqāʾid literature, which sheds light on the changing religious climate and strategies of religious instruction in the empire starting in the early sixteenth century. The discussion will build on recent studies of various Ottoman narrative and legal genres, such as self-narratives of conversion to Islam, catechisms (ʿilm-i hāl), theological treatises and fetāvā literature, in which one can detect the increased concern with the issues of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 At the centre of the discussion will be another unknown Ottoman catechetical work titled (where a title is available) the Cevahirü’l-İslam, which, judging from numerous surviving manuscript copies, appears to have been one of the most popular texts for teaching children and converts the articles of faith and basics of religious practice since the sixteenth century. As this discussion will suggest, if there was a catechetical text on which all Muslims above the age of seven could be conveniently examined, following Nushi al-Nasıhi’s proposal, the Cevahirü’l-İslam would have been the most suitable candidate, not least because of its question-and-answer format.

Catechisation and Conversion in Ottoman Rumeli, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century In the opening of his seminal study on early Muslim credal literature, A. J. Wensinck writes: A creed may take various forms: it may consist only of a few words or may be a whole treatise; it may be a doxology, a short phrase, or a work on dogmatics. This is as true of Islam as of Christianity; moreover, in both religions the short formula is anterior to the creed which in its turn is anterior to the treatise in dogmatics.11

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Wensinck then goes on to contrast the simple confession of faith (shahāda) with the formulation of creed or articles of faith (ʿaqīda, pl. ʿaqāʾid), arguing that, in the earliest decades of Islam, it was really only the formula ‘There is no god but God; Muhammad is his Messenger’ – and even this developed only progressively – that constituted the totality of what converts to Islam needed to know about their new religion.12 As studies of early Muslim narratives of conversion also suggest, the key aspect of becoming Muslim was the act of submission (Ar. aslama) to Muhammad’s political and military leadership (particularly the acceptance of fiscal duties) rather than adoption of an elaborate doxology.13 The main productive force behind the earliest ʿaqāʾid literature were the early sectarian disputations in Islam that forced individuals, schools or sects to formulate their own positions on matters of doctrine, beginning with the appearance of the Kharijites. Texts that fit this genre can vary greatly in length, from simple enumerations of articles of faith to more elaborate theological treatises; in general, however, the goal of such texts is the formulation of the doctrine rather than an intellectual discussion of it or argumentation about it (which belongs more to the domain of kalām, or ‘theology’), although there are certainly overlaps and intersections. Importantly, there is no credal statement that is accepted by all Muslims, not even all Sunnis.14 By the time the Ottomans appeared on the stage of history, numerous examples existed of creeds authored by individuals belonging to different legal and theological schools of Islam.15 However, on the basis of what can be gleaned from the sources, the early process of conversion to Islam in Ottoman Anatolia and Rumeli was not unlike that described by the early Islamic sources, in that it primarily entailed a submission to the Ottoman political power rather than to a well-explained belief system. In fact, many of the military recruits to the Ottoman cause kept their Christian religion, while the evolution of new converts into believers – and Turkish speakers – transpired over time, sometimes even over several generations.16 One reason for this, besides the fact that conquering and winning over followers in predominantly Christian lands dictated a certain pragmatism when it came to matters of religion, was also that the infrastructure of Islamic learning in Ottoman Rumeli, and the empire in general, was at an embryonic stage in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. A corollary of this was that before the early fifteenth century there hardly existed any credal literature in Turkish or other languages understood by the majority of the new converts that would help them to make the shift from, so to speak, the shahāda to the ʿaqīda stage. In those conditions, similar to other situations where Islam sought to establish itself in non-Arabic-speaking territories, preaching in Turkish by various Sufi shaykhs, itinerant preachers and storytellers was initially a major source of religious knowledge.17 Although there are some examples from the fourteenth century, it was really only in the early 1400s that the agents of Islamisation in Ottoman Anatolia and Rumeli began to produce new texts in simple Turkish intended for the instruction of children and novices.18 These texts ranged from hagiographies and popular stories, bearing a strong imprint of the Sufi worldview, to heretofore largely unexplored catechetical literature that was often ‘tradaptation’, to use Peter Burke’s term, of the texts originally composed in Arabic and Persian. However, in the early fifteenth century, we see the appearance of works concerned with religious instruction written

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in Turkish that drew on older works, but whose exposition and emphasis catered more to the specific socio-religious conditions faced by the expanding Ottoman polity. Such works were, for instance, Kutbeddin İzniki’s Mukaddime (c. 1403), Yazıcızade Mehmed’s Muhammediye (1449), and his brother Yazıcızade Ahmed’s Envarü’l-Aşikin (1449), all of which were specifically concerned with raising the level of religious instruction among Muslims – many of whom were new converts – in the Ottoman domains.19 Scholars (myself included) have been using the term ʿilm-i hāl to refer to early Ottoman texts intended for imparting the basics of religious instruction; however, given that the research into Ottoman catechetical literature is still in its infancy, it is difficult to say precisely what exactly the features of an ʿilm-i hāl are as opposed to ʿaqāʾid texts in general, and whether fifteenth-century Muslims in Anatolia and Rumeli even conceived of such a genre per se, since the first explicit mention of the term ʿilm-i hāl seems to date to the sixteenth century.20 In its early phase of development in the fifteenth century, the Ottoman catechetical or ʿaqāʾid literature encompassed a variety of texts in both prose and verse aiming to teach the basics of Islamic faith and worship. Many of these early Ottoman texts combined the exposition of the articles of faith (and, in some cases, Sufi tenets) with the basics of Hanafi law, and thus often doubled as both ʿaqāʾid and fiqh primers, which is by no means a universal feature of the earlier ʿaqāʾid literature and may represent a particularly Ottoman approach to the genre.21 In addition to enumerating the articles of faith (typically, belief in the unity of God, in his angels, his books, his messengers, his predetermination of both good and evil, and the Day of Judgement), early Ottoman ʿaqāʾid texts put particular emphasis on correct performance of the ritual ablution (ābdest) and prayer (namāz), and devoted substantial attention to eschatology.22 Thus, although İzniki’s Mukaddime is closer in terms of style and content to later Ottoman texts that have been labelled in the secondary literature as ʿilm-i hāls (with Birgivi’s Vasiyetname or Risale-i Birgivi, written in 960/1562–3, being the paradigmatic example), it shares many of its sources,23 Sufi inclinations and concerns with eschatology with Yazıcızade Mehmed’s Muhammediye. At first glance, this work in verse centring on the Prophet may not conform to what we think of today as a religious primer, but in terms of authorial intent it certainly belongs to the corpus of early Ottoman catechetical literature. It would appear that these sources, along with hagiographical literature and other Sufi texts in both Turkish translation and Arabic and Persian, continued to be central to the education of converts to Islam throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. This is suggested by the personal testimony of an early sixteenth-century convert from Translyvania, Murad b. ʿAbdullah, who in a polemical treatise he wrote in the 1550s cites various hagiographical and catechetical works central to his becoming a Muslim in the late 1520s and 1530s. Among these he mentions Yazıcızade Mehmed’s Muhammediye, İzniki’s Mukaddime, Kısas-ı enbiya, Tezkiretü’l-evliya, Rumi’s Mathnawi, al-Ghazali’s Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din, Lamiʾi Çelebi’s İbretname, and Ibn ʿArabi’s al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya.24 However, inspired by the new socio-religious climate, a whole new corpus of catechetical literature emerges by the second half of the sixteenth century. Recent research has pointed to the fact that this new literature shows a marked departure

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in terms of emphasis and tenor from the earlier texts. For example, while İzniki’s Mukaddime exudes the notion of a new and expanding Islamic polity looking outwards, pays special attention to converts and allows for some leeway in practice, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ʿaqāʾid works, such as Birgivi’s Vasiyetname and the Kitab-ı Ustüvani, look inwards, focusing on the problems of an established Islamic society with many rivalling registers of piety, struggling to impose order on the diversity of practice. They seek to instruct Muslims on correct belief and practice of Islam, and delineate the boundaries of the Sunni community. They also show a tendency towards social disciplining and providing rules not only for worship and belief but also for proper speech and conduct.25 Recent research indicates that the standard bearers of this new concern with building a Sunni confessional community were the members of the ulama, and especially a number of high-ranking Hanafi jurists (muftis) close to the Ottoman establishment such as Molla ʿArab (d. 1495/6), Sarı Gürz Hamza Efendi (d. 1521), Zenbilli ʿAli Cemali (d. 1526), Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534) and Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), most of whom served as the chief jurisprudent of the empire at some point in their careers. Consequently, the tenor of the new concerns with orthodoxy and orthopraxy – as well as the claim that religious professionals, such as muftis and imams, were central to both – is first registered in the legal genres such as fetāvā (legal opinions) and various risāles (treatises) in the domains of fiqh and kalām authored by the Ottoman literati.26 By the mid-sixteenth century, various Ottoman agents of confession building, both religious specialists of various ranks and administrators, began to pay more attention to how the new religio-political agenda was disseminated to the wider public, and to the methods by which a Sunni confessional community should be constituted and its purity maintained. This development, in addition to other factors driving the phenomenon of Sunnitisation discussed above, emanated from the dynamics of Sultan Süleyman’s reign (1520–66) when the empire’s ideologues, led by the chief jurisprudent Ebussuud Efendi (appointed to this post in 1545), refashioned it as the caliphate and the sultan as a universal caliph whose duty was to defend the holy law and enforce orthodoxy and orthopraxy.27 But in order to convincingly project a universal religious authority, it was imperative to find a way to instil a sense of community into an empire that by the 1540s had come to include, in addition to numerous non-Muslims, various Arabic-, Persian-, Turkish-, Greek- and Slavic-speaking Muslim populations which often had little in common besides the central tenets of Islamic belief and worship. The answer from Süleyman and his advisers was the implementation of a uniform imperial sultanic law and the building of an unprecedented number of imperial mosques and mescids (also spurred by the desire to draw a contrast with the Safavids, who had shunned the Friday prayer), as both visual symbols of imperial and Sunni Muslim identity and spaces for the local re-enactment of the ‘imagined community’, especially in urban environments.28 Regular performance of and attendance at congregational prayers throughout the imperial domains became the paradigmatic expression of this newly constituted community. As Gülrü Necipoğlu has demonstrated, the boom in construction of Friday mosques and mescids coincided with attempts to establish and stabilise local mosque congregations. To this effect, attendance at Friday prayers was to be monitored and, where necessary due to resistance from the local population or individuals, coerced by the prayer enforcers (namāzcı)

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appointed by the local judge (kādı). As fetvās of Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi suggest, those who failed to attend or denied the necessity of performing the communal prayers were labelled infidels.29 The extent to which this drive to impose compliance with a newly (re)articulated Sunni Hanafi orthodoxy and orthopraxy was successful is a matter for further research and debate. However, as Necipoğlu’s research indicates, there was a deliberate policy emanating from the empire’s leadership that religious services and places of worship should be available and religious messages legible and comprehensible to the widest possible Muslim audience.30 We see a sort of programmatic statement to this effect in a catechetical work titled the Tuhfetü’t-Talibin by Lütfi Pasha, a prominent Ottoman statesman (c. 1488–1563, grand vizier 1539–41) and one of the most vocal promoters of Sunnitisation in the 1540s and 1550s.31 In this fiqh compendium written in simple Turkish and designed for teachers and students alike, Lütfi Pasha puts particular emphasis on the elements of belief and worship, mosque attendance and performance of prayers. Supporting his argument with the Prophet’s saying that ‘seeking knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim man and woman’ and that ‘people should be addressed in the language they can understand’, Lütfi Pasha states that jurisprudents should issue their opinions, teachers explain their lectures, interpreters of the Quran explain the Quran and preachers deliver their sermons in Turkish, so that people can understand them and be edified.32 In the second half of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century, the corpus of catechetical literature exponentially grew as a number of ‘Sunna-minded’ authors began to assert their specific ideas about orthodoxy and orthopraxy as well as strategies for achieving them, resulting in a new variety of instructional texts of different length, format, emphasis and method of exposition. Until now, the best known among these new catechetical texts has been Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s Vasiyetname, which was, judging from the number of surviving copies, by far the most popular Ottoman ʿaqāʾid work that influenced many others subsequently produced.33 However, my research suggests that in addition to this and other texts that by the late seventeenth century seem to constitute the canon of Ottoman ʿaqāʾid literature – such as the Risale-i Rumi (Ahmed) Efendi (by Ahmed Rumi Akhisari, d. 1632) and Risale-i Kadızade (by Kadızade Mehmed, d. 1635), all of which are short- or mid-length narratives – another type of short ʿaqāʾid work in question-and-answer format achieved enormous popularity.

A Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Question-and-Answer ʿAqāʾid Work and its Intertextual Context Although we are only familiarising ourselves with the variety of the Ottoman ʿaqāʾid literature, there is an anonymous text (sometimes) titled the Cevahirü’l-İslam that can be tentatively dated to the second half of the sixteenth century (with 991/1583–4 as terminus ante quem) which seems to stand out in this textscape.34 On the face of it, it is an unremarkable work: it is only several folios long and consists of forty-something short questions and as many succinct answers about the nature of faith and practice of Islam, with questions beginning with eğer sorsalar (if they ask you) and answers with eyit (answer [them]). In Turkish manuscript libraries alone, it exists in over fifty

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copies, which suggests that it was a very popular ʿaqāʾid work, most likely because of its question-and-answer format. This format in itself was not a rarity in Islamic religious literature, and several possible influences come to mind. One is the hadith literature in which the Prophet answers the questions of his followers. The second is the fatāwā literature where jurists answer the questions of the faithful. The third are various Sufi genres in which the disciple asks questions of his master (sohbetnāmes, dream interpretations, malfuzāt and so on). There are also other Ottoman texts of catechetical character in the question-and-answer format, most notably the popular work titled Kırk Suʾal (Forty Questions) by Mevla Furati or Fıraki Abdurrahman Çelebi (d. c. 1580), a Zeyniyye Sufi shaykh from Kütahya, inspired by the wellknown exchange between the Prophet and the Jewish delegation led by ʿAbdallah b. Selam, who posed Muhammad a series of questions about Islam before submitting to him.35 However, this text bears no structural or content resemblance to our anonymous work. A much closer ‘cousin’ to this text is another question-and-answer catechetical work, authored by Lütfi Pasha and titled the Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap (The Questionand-Answer Treatise).36 Originally a devşirme recruit (most likely from Shkodra in Albania), and thus a convert himself, after a successful political career Lütfi Pasha turned to writing and the study of Islamic law and theology.37 He wrote several catechetical works: three texts of different lengths in Turkish (including the Tuhfetü’tTalibin mentioned above), and a voluminous one in Arabic, which he listed in the preface to his Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (The Chronicle of the House of Osman).38 Based on the date of his Tevarih, it would appear that Lütfi Pasha wrote the Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap prior to 1553. In the brief preface to this work he identifies himself, Lütfi b. Abdü’l-Muʿin, as the author, and introduces the questions to follow as something that every believer should know.39 The structure of his catechism and the Cevahirü’l-İslam is identical: they both consist of (roughly) forty very short questions that start with ‘If they ask you . . .’ and succinct answers that start with ‘Answer them . . .’ Several of the questions and answers in the beginning of the catechisms are the same; however, on closer inspection, the differences between the two texts outnumber the similarities. First, in its earliest surviving copies, the Cevahirü’l-İslam does not have an introduction or a named author, and starts with questions directly. Second, the questions and answers in the two catechisms are for the most part different (as will be discussed below). Third, there is a difference in the identity of the questioner and responder. In Lütfi Pasha’s text, the responder seems to be the imam and the questioner(s) his flock.40 However, in contrast to both the Risale and other relevant Muslim genres, which envision an authority figure in the role of the responder, in the Cevahirü’l-İslam the roles are reversed – the questioner is a teacher (an imam, parent or other) while the responder is a student or novice. The Cevahirü’l-İslam and Lütfi Pasha’s Risale are not the first Muslim catechetical texts to adopt the structure of succinct questions and answers. It is possible that they, or another unidentified source they were using, were inspired by a very important and yet unstudied early example of ʿaqāʾid literature authored by the Hanafi jurist Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandi (d. 983), who was immensely influential in the development of the Ottoman catechetical literature.41 Although it is rarely mentioned in the discussions of early Islamic credal literature, this ʿaqāʾid text, titled the Bayan ʿAqidat

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al-Usul, appears to have been a much more significant tool of Islamisation than previously recognised. A. T. W. Juynboll published it in 1881 upon realisation that it was one of the most important – if not the most important – Islamic catechisms in Malaysia and Indonesia, to which local Muslims referred simply as Samarqandi.42 It is structured in the same ‘If they ask you’/‘Answer them’ format, and focuses exclusively on faith (īmān), with a teacher questioning a novice. It opens with, ‘If they ask you: “What is faith?” Answer them: “Faith is belief in God, his angels, his books, his messengers, his predetermination of good and evil, and the Day of Judgement.”’ Subsequent questions (eighteen in total) deal with each of these articles of faith in detail, without going into the issues of practice of Islam or reflecting on the relationship between īmān and islām.43 In contrast, both the Cevahirü’l-İslam and Lütfi Pasha’s Risale pose questions and offer answers on the topic of īmān, islām, ābdest and namāz, enumerating religious duties, and describing and explaining their correct practice. Interestingly, although there are numerous manuscripts of Samarqandi’s other works in Ottoman libraries, as well as numerous manuscripts of other medieval Islamic creeds in Arabic copied both before and during the Ottoman period, so far I have been able to identify only one copy of Samarqandi’s catechism. It is catalogued as the Risaletü’l-Esʾile ve’l-Ecvibe el-İʿtikadiyye (The Treatise of Questions and Answers about Creed) and exists in a mecmūʿa that is copied after 1470, most probably in the sixteenth century.44 This suggests that the text in Arabic was not popular in the Ottoman Empire, but also, seemingly, that the text was not widely copied in the Arabicspeaking Muslim world either. Despite this, it is possible that Lütfi Pasha, who was familiar with Samarqandi’s opus and based one of his other catechetical works, the Kitab Tenbihü’l-ʿAkılin ve Tenkidü’l Gafilin, on Samarqandi’s Tanbih al-Ghafilin, was aware of this text and adopted its structure, although not its contents, and adapted it for his own purposes. In terms of other sources, both Lütfi Pasha’s Risale and the Cevahirü’l-Ι̇ṡ lam seem to draw on a fiqh work dealing with the performance and validity of the prayer (salāt). Although there were such works prior to the sixteenth century, not least of all Samarqandi’s own very popular al-Muqaddima [aṣ-ṣalāt], short works on prayer in Turkish also began to proliferate in the sixteenth century under the generic name of Risaletü’s-Salat, reflecting the general interest in and concern with this central aspect of being a Muslim. It is impossible to say conclusively whether the Cevahirü’l-İslam came into existence before or after Lütfi Pasha’s work, and whether one derives from the other or they share a common source. Despite important structural similarities and several shared questions, originally these were two independent works with different tenor and emphasis. At the same time, however, the texts’ audiences and copyists clearly made the link between them, as in some of the seventeenth-century manuscripts the two texts are merged, with editors picking and choosing various sections from both, thus giving rise to other, hybrid versions.45 In this process of merging of the two textual traditions, it seems that the Cevahirü’l-İslam won the battle of titles, as copyists evidently preferred it to the Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap, even when the manuscript contains the preface naming Lütfi Pasha as the author.46 It also won the popularity contest, as it exists in dozens of copies in Ottoman manuscript collections worldwide, unlike the Risale of which only a few complete copies seem to survive. As this short manuscript history suggests, the two texts clearly have to be considered together.

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‘What Every Believer Should Know’ The two texts open in a similar fashion, but not identically. The Cevahirü’l-İslam begins like this: If they ask you: ‘Are you a Muslim?’ Answer them: ‘Elhamdülillāh, I am a Muslim.’ If they ask you: ‘What is the meaning of Elhamdülillāh?’ Answer them: ‘To praise and give thanks to Allah.’ If they ask you: ‘What do you understand Allah to be?’ Answer them: ‘He is without beginning or end, he does not resemble anything, and he does not have anything. He is eternal and independent of cause, time and place.’47 Lütfi Pasha’s Risale’s opening question is ‘If they ask you: “Whose servant (kul) are you?” Answer them that you are the servant of God.’ Then the text switches to the same question as the opening of the Cevahirü’l-İslam, but only to go off in a different direction again with the third query: ‘If they ask you: “Since when are you Muslim?” Answer them: “Since Qālū Belā,”’ after which he proceeds to explain the meaning of this Quranic reference.48 After this, the texts briefly come together for four common questions that seek to define the believer beyond the label of ‘Muslim’. If they ask: ‘Whose offspring (zürriyet) are you?’ Answer: ‘I am the offspring of the Prophet Adam.’ If they ask: ‘Of whose people (millet) are you?’ Answer: ‘I am of the Prophet Abraham’s people.’ If they ask you: ‘Of whose community (ümmet) are you?’ Answer: ‘I am of the Prophet Muhammad’s community.’ If they ask you: ‘Whose doctrine (mezhep) do you follow?’ Answer: ‘I follow the Great Imam Abu Hanifa’s doctrine.’ In this way, our Muslim disciple is very precisely identified as a descendant of Adam and Abraham, a member of Muhammad’s community and a Hanafi. As recent research on Ottoman Sunnitisation suggests, adherence to the Hanafi doctrine or school of law was particularly central to the Ottomans’ confessional and imperial identity as it was articulated in the first half of the sixteenth century.49 Faithful to his reputed interest in Hanafi law, Lütfi Pasha’s catechism exhibits an exacting commitment to the legal principles of religious practice. Thus, after enumerating six articles of faith (the same as Samarqandi) and stating that they must be known by heart and articulated by tongue, Lütfi Pasha states that a person who says that he or she does not know them is (or becomes, if he or she is already a Muslim) an unbeliever (kāfir). Such a person must (newly) profess their faith by saying the shahāda, must be taught the basics of faith and, if they are married, his or her marriage must be renewed.50 This stipulation of the renewal of faith and marriage appears to have been a legal innovation developed by the Ottoman Hanafi jurists, most probably in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and is very common in the opinions (fetāvā) issued by the Ottoman Hanafi jurists. According to Guy Burak, this innovation not only departed from the

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earlier Hanafi tradition, but was not accepted at the time by scholars from the other schools of law or by Hanafi jurists who were not closely integrated into the Ottoman establishment. It represents a prime example of how the Ottoman ulama close to the government asserted their own authority in the debate on the boundaries of belief and unbelief that intensified during the age of Sunnitisation in the Ottoman Empire.51 Thus, according to Lütfi Pasha, only those whose shahāda is complemented by ʿaqīda are to be considered true Muslims and believers. Interestingly, although the Cevahirü’l-İslam also emphasises that the articles of faith must be known by heart and articulated by tongue, its definition of īmān is much more ‘popular’ in flavour and heavier on eschatological elements than Lütfi Pasha’s: it lists them as belief in the unity of God, the reality of the Prophets, Heaven and Hell, the Bridge (as-Sirāt)52 and the Trumpet (as-Sūr),53 the Reckoning (Hisāb) and the Balance (Terāzi), the Torments of the Grave (Kabr Azabı), and the Saints.54 Furthermore, it seeks to visually illustrate the importance of various aspects of faith by developing an anthropo-arboreal metaphor and defining through question after question faith’s head (shahāda), soul (five daily prayers), heart (the Quran), word (the mention of God), light, leaves, bark, root, and so on. The Cevahirü’l-İslam does not refer to the necessity of the renewal of faith and marriage for the ignorant ones, but it refers to a Hanafi jurist Şemsü’l-Eimme55 who declared that every man and woman should be taught the basics of faith, and that if a woman’s husband fails to teach her, she is entitled to seek instruction with a faqīh without her husband’s permission, which is a precept featured in other Ottoman catechisms as well.56 However, it appears that in some manuscripts this section is further elaborated, stating that the prayers of those who do not know the articles of faith will not be heard and that neither their fast nor their marriage is legitimate. Furthermore, it states that it is every man’s duty to teach his wife and children the basics of faith and Islam. A punishment in hell is reserved for those who neglect to educate their daughters, sisters and wives in matters of faith.57 Nushi al-Nasıhi, the author mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, also reflects on the duties of the heads of households in religious instruction of their dependants, seeing the households as the basic building blocks of a pious community in pursuit of salvation.58 After the section on the articles of faith and their enforcement, the Cevahirü’l-İslam and Lütfi Pasha’s catechism continue to diverge in tone, and the difference in their intended audiences becomes more apparent. While Lütfi Pasha switches to a detailed and systematic explanation of the ritual ablutions and prayer, the Cevahirü’l-İslam continues with a medley of questions about angels, divine books, conditions of Islam (it lists twelve of them), the nature and number of religious duties (farz), the number of prayers and the technicalities of performing ritual ablutions and prayers. Interestingly, the Cevahirü’l-İslam shows great concern with the things that invalidate the prayers and ablutions, of which the believer should beware – something we do not see in Lütfi Pasha’s text. The endings of the two Ottoman catechisms gesture towards their different intended audiences: while Lütfi Pasha’s text simply ends after the exhaustive instructions, the Cevahirü’l-İslam concludes in the manner of other widely popular Ottoman texts, by promising particular spiritual privileges for those intimately familiar with its contents. Specifically, it states that God will halve the number of sins and give endless blessings to the person who performs his or her prayers, knows the answers to the questions in the catechism and is sincere in his or her religion (dīninde dürüst olursa).59

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Interestingly, in some later manuscripts of both works, the text is followed (after temme’l-kitāb) by an additional four questions, which are not found in the oldest versions, but were evidently added later and then copied together with the rest of the text by subsequent copyists, thus becoming part of the work(s).60 These four questions are said to have been formulated by Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafi school of law, and it is emphasised that the answers to them must be known by anyone aspiring to the post of an imam. This section reads: The Great Imam [Abu Hanifa] said: ‘Those who are imams are [to be] asked four questions. If they can answer them, it is permissible for them to hold this position; if they cannot answer, they are ineligible.’ The first question is: ‘Do you perform these prayers for yourself or for the congregation?’ Answer them: ‘I am performing them for myself, but I also intend them for the congregation.’ The second question is: ‘The congregation follows [conforms to] you, but whom do you follow [conform to]?’ Answer: ‘I follow the Quran.’ The third question is: ‘You are our prayer leader, but who is yours?’ Answer them: ‘Muhammad Mustafa.’ The fourth question is: ‘Our prayers are completed with you, but with whom are your prayers completed?’ Answer them: ‘My prayers are completed with the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) custom.’61 In terms of tone, these questions seem to be a better fit for Lütfi Pasha’s Risale, which by the virtue of its disciplined and systematic exposition, fiqh-mindedness and authoritative tone appears to be a more likely candidate for an imam’s manual than the Cevahirü’l-İslam. However, this seems to have been a seventeenth-century addition to the text that by this time in many manuscript copies displayed hybrid features of both the Risale and the Cevahirü’l-İslam. The fact that the Risale/Cevahirü’l-İslam appears most often in the miscellanies that also contain other key Ottoman ʿaqāʾid texts mentioned above suggests that it became part of the ʿaqāʾid canon by the mid-1600s.62 As such, it was evidently considered useful not just by individuals at large, but by imams themselves for refreshing their own knowledge and imparting the essentials of belief and practice to their congregations. From the perspective of the converts to Islam, the Cevahirü’l-İslam appears to have been an essential text as well – in fact, one of the earliest versions of the work, dated c. 1588, is found in the miscellany (mecmūʿa) of a Slavic-/Hungarian-/German-speaking Protestant who embraced Islam somewhere in the Ottoman–Hungarian borderlands in the mid-sixteenth century.63 The linguistic and orthographic features of this copy suggest that the Cevahirü’l-İslam was typically transmitted orally, as many of the suffixes are those of spoken Turkish. Furthermore, there are many mistakes in the ligatures between the letters, indicating that the author, still not proficient in writing in Arabic script, was either not careful enough while copying the text or he was recording it from memory. The evidence of the text’s ubiquity and status as one of the most recognisable – if not the most recognisable – Ottoman ʿaqāʾid texts is also found tucked away in

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one of Antoine Galland’s (1646–1715) private (and heretofore unpublished) notebooks dating to his stay in Istanbul in 1672–3. In his notebook, Galland translates, apparently for his own eyes only, the Cevahirü’l-İslam (including the four questions for imams!) into French, referring to it simply as ‘Catechisme Turc’.64 Galland’s usage of the word ‘catechism’ to describe the Cevahirü’l-İslam raises an important question about our analytical terminology for studying texts like these and the ‘translatability’ of such texts in terms of content and intention across religious boundaries. However, this is a question for a different study in the context of a larger enquiry into the place of Ottoman Sunnitisation in an early modern age of confession-building that appears to have spanned Europe and parts of the Middle East.65 Research into the motivation for the production and usage of Ottoman catechetical literature, its role in the process of Islamisation and education of Muslims (including converts) in the Ottoman Empire, and both its indebtedness to and departure from older Muslim ʿaqāʾid literature is central to elucidating the dynamic and rationale of Ottoman Sunnitisation. In order to advance this research agenda, it is essential that we expand our familiarity with the variety of primary sources and provide a close and contextualised reading of them. The simplicity of the Cevahirü’l-İslam’s content as well as its format and manuscript history suggest that it was one of the central texts for making Muslims in the Ottoman Empire aware of their imān, islām and Sunni Hanafi identity, and it is thus a major source for the study of conversion, catechisation and Sunnitisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Notes 1. Note: the terms and passages in Ottoman Turkish are transliterated according to the rules of Modern Turkish, marking the long vowels and the letters ʿayn and hamza, except for personal names and titles of the works, which, due to publisher’s style, are transliterated without any accents. Terms in Arabic are transliterated according to the IJMES transliteration system. I would like to thank Derin Terzioğlu, Brett Wilson and Tolga Esmer for their helpful suggestions while writing and revising this article, and Ahmet Bilaloğlu for his help with obtaining some of the primary sources used in the chapter. 2. Derin Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization’, Past and Present 220 (August 2013), p. 99. For the particular section in Nushi al-Nasıhi’s text, see his Mebhas-ı İman, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Yazma Bağışlar 5563, f. 75b. I thank Derin Terzioğlu for sharing her copy of the manuscript with me. 3. Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism’, p. 107. 4. See Tijana Krstić, ‘Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 35–63; Derin Terzioğlu, ‘Sunna-Minded Sufi Preachers in Service of the Ottoman State: The Nasīhatnāme of Hasan Addressed to Murad IV’, Archivum Ottomanicum 27 (2010), pp. 243–59; Derin Terzioğlu, ‘Sufis in the Age of State-Building and Confessionalization’, in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 86–99; Guy Burak, ‘Faith, Law and Empire in the Ottoman “Age of Confessionalization” (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries): The Case of “Renewal of Faith”’, Mediterranean Historical Review 28, no. 1 (2013), pp. 1–23; Derin Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: A Historiographical Discussion’, Turcica 44 (2012–13), pp. 301–38.

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5. See, for instance, Nabil Al-Tikriti, ‘Kalam in the Service of the State: Apostasy and the Defining of Ottoman Islamic Identity’, in H. Karateke and M. Reinkowski (eds), Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 131–50; Marcus Dressler, ‘Inventing Orthodoxy: Competing Claims for Authority and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Safavid Conflict’, in H. Karateke and M. Reinkowski (eds), Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 151–76. 6. On this issue, see in particular Burak, ‘Faith, Law and Empire’, and Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization’. On the process of institutionalisation of the ulama, see Snježana Buzov, ‘The Lawgiver and His Lawmakers: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture’, doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 2005; Abdurrahman Atcıl, ‘The Formation of the Ottoman Learned Class and Legal Scholarship (1300-1600)’, doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 2010. 7. This is the goal of the team project I am heading together with Derin Terzioğlu, called ‘The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Centuries’ (OTTOCONFESSION), which is funded by the European Research Council and will run from 2015 to 2020. This study reflects the early stages of my research. 8. Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004) pp. 28–63. 9. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979); Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans, p. 63. 10. See Al-Tikriti, ‘Kalam in the Service of the State’; Krstić, ‘Illuminated by the Light of Islam’; Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism’; Burak, ‘Faith, Law and Empire’. 11. A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 1. 12. Ibid., pp. 8–16. 13. See Richard W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion Stories in Early Islam’, in. Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 9 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 123–33; Giovanna Calasso, ‘Récits de conversions, zèle dévotionnel et instruction religieuse dans les biographes des “gens de Baṣra” du Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt d’Ibn Saʿd’, in Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam mediterrannéen / Islamic Conversions: Religious Identities in Mediterranean Islam (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), pp. 19–48. 14. Montgomery W. Watt, ‘ʿAḳīda’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960– 2005); Jon Hoover, ‘Creed’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2007–). 15. For a selection of the most important Islamic creeds, see Montgomery W. Watt, Islamic Creeds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). 16. Halil İnalcık, ‘Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı Imparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de Hiristiyan Sipahiler ve Menşeleri’, in Halil İnalcık, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1954), pp. 137–84; Heath W. Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Melek Delilbaşı, ‘Christian Sipahis in the Tırhala Taxation Registers (15th and 16th Centuries)’, in A. Anatastasopoulos (ed.), Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire (Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2005), pp. 87–114. For devşirme recruits, the process of conversion to Islam and learning of Turkish was, typically, much faster. 17. On narrative and interpretative communities in fifteenth-century Ottoman Rumeli, see Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 26–50.

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18. For a preliminary review of the development of the ʿilm-i hāl literature in Ottoman Turkish, as well as on the evolution of the term ʿilm-i hāl itself, see Hatice Kelepetin Arpaguş, ‘Bir Telif Türü Olarak İlmihal Tarihî Geçmişi ve Fonksiyonu’, Marmara Üniversitesi İlâhiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 22 (2001–2), pp. 25–56. 19. See Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, pp. 29-35. 20. Hatice Kelepetin, ‘İlmihal’, Turkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 22, pp. 139– 41. The earliest work that bears this title appears to be Mızraklı İlmihal, most probably a sixteenth-century work. However, it is only much later, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that this term comes into a common usage among the Ottomans. For instance, writing in the 1630s, Nushi el-Nasıhi himself provides a list of texts on which he based his Mebhas-ı İman, which includes Birgivi’s Vasiyetname and Risale-i Rūmi Efendi, but describes these books, as well as his own, only as ʿakāʾid-i dīniye ve iʿtikādāt-ı islāmiye makbūl ve mergūb olan kitāplar (accepted and desirable books on articles of faith and tenets of Islam) (61a). In the absence of a more detailed understanding of the evolution of the term ʿilm-i hāl and its usage, and in order to underscore the continuity with the older ʿaqāʾid literature projected by the authors themselves, in this chapter I will use the phrase ‘ʿaqāʾid literature’. However, this is not to detract from the evident difference between the Ottoman and medieval Islamic catechetical literature. 21. See Kelepetin Arpaguş, ‘Bir Telif Türü Olarak İlmihal’, and Mediha Aynacı, ‘Osmanlı Kuruluș Dönemi Türkçe İlmihal Eserleri Çerçevesinde İlmihallerin Fıkhî Yönden Değerlendirilmesi’, doctoral thesis, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2009. 22. Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, pp. 34–7. 23. Most importantly, al-Ghazali’s (d. 1111) Iḥyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din, Ibn Arabi’s (d. 1240) alFutuhat al-Makkiyya and various fiqh and ʿaqāʾid works by Abu al-Layth as-Samarqandi (d. 983). 24. Murad b. Abdullah, Kitab Tesviyetü’t-Teveccüh, British Library, MS Add 19894, ff. 27b, 36b, 39b, 46b, 81a, 107b, 128b, 138a. 25. Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, pp. 31–2; Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Hāl Meets Catechism’. 26. See Al-Tikriti, ‘Kalam in the Service of the State’; Burak, ‘Faith, Law and Empire’; also see Elke Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik gegen die Safawiden im 16: Jahrhundert nach arabischen Handschriften (Freiburg im Breisgau: Schwarz, 1970). 27. Colin Imber, Ebu’s-su‘ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Gülrü Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan (London: Reaktion, 2005), p. 48. 28. Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, p. 48; on this process of constituting a community of believers through law, see Buzov, ‘The Lawgiver and His Lawmakers’, pp. 135–89. 29. Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan, pp. 48–9. 30. See, for instance, Gülrü Necipoğlu’s study on ‘The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An Interpretation’, Muqarnas 3 (1985), pp. 92–117 (especially the section on mosque inscriptions, pp. 107–11). 31. I am preparing a separate study on Lütfi Pasha as an agent of confession-building in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. 32. Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Fatih 1507, f. 3a. 33. For a detailed discussion of another very popular text of this genre from the 1540s, Abdurrahman b. Yusuf Aksarayi’s İmadü’l-İslam, see Hatice Kelepetin Arpaguş, Osmanlı ve Geleneksel Islam (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2014), pp. 65–112. 34. The earliest copy I was able to find so far is dated 991/1583–4 and is located in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (see Wilhem Pertsch, Verzeichniss der Türkischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin [Berlin: A. Asher, 1889], entry nos 3, 6 [Ms. Or. 4, 151]). The second oldest copy seems to be in the Österreichischer National Bibliothek in Vienna (A. F. 437 [282], ff. 22a–28b), which dates to 1588–9 (see G. Flügel,

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36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

islamisation Arabischen, Persischen, und Türkischen Handschriften der Kaiserlich-Königlich Hofbibliothek zu Wien, vol. 3, no. 2006 [Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1867]). I am using the copy from Vienna, which does not have a title. On related texts in Arabic and Persian, known as the Book of Thousand Questions, and their role in Islamisation of South and Southeast Asia, see Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Lütfi Paşa, Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap [catalogued as: Sual ve Cevablı İlmihal], Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378 (the folios are unnumbered and, although the catalogue says the work is located between folios 64 and 73, according to the existing pagination it is between 71b and 79b). Another copy is in the same library (catalogued as: Sual ve Cevab Risalesi), Reşid Efendi 1215, ff. 271b–276b. Neither copy is dated. Colin Imber, ‘Luṭfī Pas̲h̲a’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). He wrote Kitab Zübdetü’l Mesayil fi’l-İtikadat ve’l-ʿIbadat in Arabic and three works in Turkish: Kitab Tenbihü’l-ʿAkılin ve Tekidü’l-Gafilin, Kitab Tühfetü’t-Talibin and Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap. See Lütfi Paşa, Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (Istanbul: Matbaʿa-yi ʿAmire, 1922), p. 4. Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378, f. 71b. This is suggested by a series of questions on f 73a. On Samarqandi, see Ahmad Pakatchi and Azar Rabbani, ‘Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī’, Encyclopaedia Islamica, ed. W. Madelung and F. Daftary (Brill Online, 2015), http://referenceworks.brillonline.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-islamica/abu-allayth-al-samarqandi-COM_0099 (accessed 9 September 2015). On his impact on early Ottoman catechetical literature, see Kelepetin Arpaguş, ‘Bir Telif Türü Olarak İlmihal’, and Aynacı, ‘Osmanlı Kuruluș Dönemi’. A. W. T. Juynboll published the text in both Arabic (‘Samarkandi’s Catechismus: Opnieuw Besproken’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 29, no. 1 [1881], pp. 267–74.) and with an interlinear translation into Javanese (as ‘Een Moslimsche Catechismus in het Arabisch met eene Javaansche Interlineaire Vertaling in Pegonschrift uitgegeven en in het Nederlandsch vertaald’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van NederlandschIndië 29, no. 2 [1881], pp. 215–27, 229–31). See also Michael Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 33–4. Juynboll, ‘Samarkandi’s Catechismus’. I thank Sona Grigoryan for reading the Arabic text with me. On the relationship between īmān and islām see Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, pp. 36–57. Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Ayasofya 2300/1. A version of Cevahirü’l-İslam, under the title Mesail-i Şerʿiyye, was published in German translation as Gesetzfragen by Heinrich Friedrich von Diez in his Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien (Berlin: In Commission der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1811), pp. 230–8. This version mostly follows the Cevahirü’l-İslam textual family, but includes several questions that appear in the Risale, plus the four additional questions the knowledge of which, according to Abu Hanifa, qualifies one for the post of imam. The author did not specify the manuscript that served as the basis of his translation. For another example of blending of the two texts, see British Library, Or. 1165, ff. 58b–61b. This manuscript is dated 1092/1681. The undated manuscript of the Risale-i Sual ve Cevab in Süleymaniye Library, Kılıç Ali Pasha 378, which contains the preface identifying Lütfi Pasha as the author, is named in the mecmūʿa table of contents as Cevahirü’l- İslam. My translation; Österreichischer Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, A. F. 437 (282), ff. 22a–22b. Quran 7: 172. Süleymaniye Library, MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378, ff. 72a.

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49. See Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 50. Süleymaniye Library, Kılıç Ali Paşa 378, ff. 74b. 51. For this argument, see Burak, ‘Faith, Law and Empire’. 52. The hair-narrow bridge that every person must pass on the Day of Judgement to enter paradise. 53. The trumpet into which Angel Israfil will blow on the Day of Judgement. 54. Early Islamic creeds have smaller or greater emphasis on the eschatological elements in which one must believe. However, few omit to mention the books and angels. It is a curious omission, but the books and angels are mentioned in the following two questions. 55. It is a reference either to ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Ahmad al-Hulwani (d. 1056–8) of Bukhara, a great Hanafi jurist who had the title Shams al-Aʾimma (splendour of religious authorities), or to his pupil, Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Abi Sahl Abu Bakr al-Sarakhsi (d. c. 1096), who inherited the title after his master’s death. See Rumee Ahmed, Narratives of Islamic Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 162. 56. On the references to women’s instruction in other Ottoman ʿilm-i hāls, see Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism’, p. 90. 57. von Diez, Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien, p. 234. 58. Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism’, pp. 98–9. 59. Österreichischer Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, A. F. 437 (282), f. 28b. 60. For instance, the copy of the Risale at Süleymaniye Library, MS Reşid Efendi 1215, does not have these additional questions, while MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378 does have them. The same questions appear in some seventeenth-century manuscripts of the Cevahirü’l-İslam (see, for instance, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS Supplement Turc 1209, ff. 41r–51v, which dates to 1081/1670–1), although they are not featured in the two sixteenth-century versions of the text that I have consulted. 61. Süleymaniye Library, MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378, f. 80a: ‘İmām-i Āʿzam hazretleri eydür: Imām olan kişiye dört suāl iderler. Eğer cevāp virürse imāmeti cāizdür. Ve eğer cevāp virmez ise, imāmeti cāiz değildür. Evvel suāl budur ki: bu namāzı senün içün mi kılursun yohsa cemāʿat içün mi, diseler? El cevāp vir kim: benüm içün kılaram, amma cemāʿat içün dahī niyyet iderem, deye. İkinci suāl oldur ki, cemāʿat sana uyar, sen kime uyarsın? Cevāp vir kim, ben Kurʾān’a uyaram, deye. Üçüncü suāl oldur ki, bizim [sic] imāmımuz sensin, senün imamun kimdür? Cevāp vir kim, Muhammad Mustafā’dur, deye. Dördüncü suāl oldur ki, bizüm namāzımuz seninle tamām olur, senün namāzun kimünle tamām olur? Cevāp vir kim, benüm namazum Peygamber ʿaleyhi’s-selāmun sünnetiyle tamām olur. Temme.’ 62. Mecmūʿas containing Birgivi’s Vasiyetname, Risale-i Rumi Efendi, Risale-i Kadızade and Cevahirü’l-İslam, by themselves or in addition to some other texts, abound. For instance, see MSS British Library, Or. 1165; Bibliotheque Nationale, Supplement Turc 479; Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, B. or.177; Süleymaniye Library, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1407; Laleli 02463, etc. 63. Österreichischer Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, A. F. 437 (282), ff. 22a–28b. For a detailed table of contents of this miscellany and its authorship, see Eugen Mittwoch and J. H. Mordtman, ‘Die Wiener Sammelhandschrift’, in F. Babinger et al. (eds), Literaturdenkmäler aus Ungarns Türkenzeit (Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1927), esp. pp. 76–87. 64. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS NAF 1845, ff. 14r–16v. For manuscripts Galland collected during his stay in Istanbul, see Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son séjour à Constantinople: 1672–1673 ([Reprod.]) publ. et annot. par Charles Schefer (Paris: Leroux 1881). 65. I am currently working on a different article that puts Ottoman catechisms in general, and the Cevahirü’l-İslam in particular, in a comparative and ‘entangled’ early modern perspective.

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Imber, Colin, Ebu’s-Su‘ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). İnalcık, Halil, ‘Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı Imparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de Hiristiyan Sipahiler ve Menşeleri’, in Halil İnalcık, Fatih Devri Üzerinde Tetkikler ve Vesikalar (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1954), pp. 137–84. Juynboll, A. W. T., ‘Een Moslimsche Catechismus in het Arabisch met eene Javaansche Interlineaire Vertaling in Pegonschrift uitgegeven en in het Nederlandsch vertaald’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 29, no. 2 (1881), pp. 215–27; 229–31. Juynboll, A. W. T., ‘Samarkandi’s Catechismus: Opnieuw Besproken’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 29, no. 1 (1881), pp. 267–74. Kelepetin, Hatice, ‘İlmihal’, Turkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 22, pp. 139–41. Kelepetin Arpaguş, Hatice, ‘Bir Telif Türü Olarak İlmihal Tarihî Geçmişi ve Fonksiyonu’, Marmara Üniversitesi İlâhiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 22 (2001–2), pp. 25–56. Kelepetin Arpaguş, Hatice, Osmanlı ve Geleneksel Islam (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2014). Krstić, Tijana, ‘Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 35–63. Krstić, Tijana, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Laffan, Michael, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Lowry, Heath W., The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Lütfi Paşa, Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap [catalogued as: Sual ve Cevablı İlmihal], Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 378, ff. 71b–79b. Lütfi Paşa, Sual ve Cevab Risalesi, Süleymaniye Library, MS Reşid Efendi 1215, ff. 271b–276b. Lütfi Paşa, Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (Istanbul: Matbaʿa-yi ʿAmire, 1922). Mesail-i şerʿiyye (Gesetzfragen), ed. and trans. Heinrich Friedrich von Diez in Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien (Berlin: In Commission der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1811), pp. 230–8. Minkov, Anton, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Mittwoch, Eugen, and J. H. Mordtman, ‘Die Wiener Sammelhandschrift’, in F. Babinger, R. Gragger, E. Mittwoch and J. H. Mordtman (eds), Literaturdenkmäler aus Ungarns Türkenzeit (Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1927), pp. 70–87. Murad b. Abdullah, Kitāb Tesviyetü’t-Teveccüh, British Library, London, MS Add 19894. Necipoğlu, Gülrü, The Age of Sinan (London: Reaktion, 2005). Necipoğlu, Gülrü, ‘The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: An Interpretation’, Muqarnas 3 (1985), pp. 92–117. Nushi al-Nasıhi, Mebhas-ı İman, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Yazma Bağışlar 5563. Pakatchi, Ahmad, and Azar Rabbani, ‘Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī’, Encyclopaedia Islamica, ed. W. Madelung and F. Daftary (Brill Online, 2015), http://referenceworks.brillonline.com. proxy.uchicago.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-islamica/abu-al-layth-al-samarqandi-COM_0099 (accessed 9 September 2015). Pertsch, Wilhem, Verzeichniss der Türkischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin: A. Asher, 1889). Ricci, Ronit, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). al-Samarqandi, Abu al-Layth, Risalat al-Asʾila wa’l-Ajwiba al-Iʿtiqadiyya, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, MS Ayasofya 2300.

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Terzioğlu, Derin, ‘Sunna-Minded Sufi Preachers in Service of the Ottoman State: The Nasīhatnāme of Hasan Addressed to Murad IV’, Archivum Ottomanicum 27 (2010), pp. 243–59. Terzioğlu, Derin, ‘Sufis in the Age of State-Building and Confessionalization’, in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 86–99. Terzioğlu, Derin, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: A Historiographical Discussion’, Turcica 44 (2012–13), pp. 301–38. Terzioğlu, Derin, ‘Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization’, Past and Present 220 (August 2013), pp. 79–114. Watt, Montgomery W., ‘ʿAḳīda’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005). Watt, Montgomery W., Islamic Creeds (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). Wensinck, A. J., The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).

Part VI

Central Asia

16 ISLAMISATION ON THE IRANIAN PERIPHERY: NASIR-I KHUSRAW AND ISMAILISM IN BADAKHSHAN Daniel Beben

I

t has long been recognised in the scholarship on Islamisation that Muslim governors and administrators in Iran and Central Asia under the early caliphate, with few exceptions, displayed little interest in instigating mass conversion to Islam. As research by Wilferd Madelung, Patricia Crone and others has demonstrated, the cause of mass conversion was taken up more directly by the early Islamic sectarian movements, who sought out new converts to their causes among non-Arab populations and who often combined their religious appeal with various political objectives in opposition to the caliphate.1 The competitive nature of these movements contributed in no small part to rapid Islamisation in the Iranian world from approximately the mid-second century of the Hijra onwards. Yet while many of these movements disappear from the sources in subsequent centuries, the populations among which they once held sway, by and large, retained an attachment to Islam. In this chapter, I propose to tackle a number of methodological concerns regarding the study of Islamic sectarian movements as agents of religious conversion as well as the evaluation of their long-term relevance and consequences for the broader process of Islamisation.2 I examine this question through a case study of the Shiʿi Ismaili community of the highland Badakhshan region of Central Asia, a historical province encompassing the mountainous districts of present-day north-eastern Afghanistan and eastern Tajikistan, along with bordering areas of northern Pakistan and northwestern China (Figure 16.1). I focus particularly on the role of the eleventh-century Persian poet, philosopher and Ismaili missionary Nasir-i Khusraw, who is widely credited today with the introduction of Ismaili Shiism to this region. Through an analysis of a range of sources examining the legacy of Nasir-i Khusraw, as well as the broader array of literature on conversion within the Ismaili tradition, I argue that the idealised conception of religious conversion derived from this literature is untenable as a historical explanation. In its place, I propose a new framework for understanding the long-term significance of Ismaili and other ‘sectarian’ missionary activity, which measures their impact not merely through the ‘success’ of their particular communal interpretation of Islam, but rather through their contribution to the broader process 317

Figure 16.1 Central Asia. Reproduced by kind permission of Scott C. Levi and Ron Sela (eds), Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). © Ron Sela.

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of Islamisation. In pursuing this argument, I stress a fundamental distinction between ‘conversion’ as a more immediate and individual shift in religious adherence and ‘Islamisation’ as a broader and more gradual process of social change. While the main significance of Nasir-i Khusraw’s career has been most commonly assigned to the former category, rather I find that it is the latter category, namely his contribution to the process of Islamisation, which should rightly be considered his most notable legacy in Central Asia.

Sources for the Study of Conversion in the Ismaili Tradition Scholarship on Ismaili history has rightly emphasised the centrality of missionary activity in the development and propagation of the tradition. From an early period, and especially under the leadership of the Fatimid imam-caliphs in Egypt in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Ismailis pursued a vigorous agenda of expansion and propagation of the tradition, pursuing converts from among both Muslim and nonMuslim populations. This effort was carried out under the guidance of what was, at least in theory, a centrally controlled and hierarchical missionary institution known as the daʿwa, or ‘summons’.3 In the early Fatimid era, the Ismaili daʿwa obtained success in such far-flung regions as Yemen, the Sind region of the Indian subcontinent, the Caucasus, as well as, at least for a short while, Samanid Central Asia. Yet while the inner workings of the Fatimid-era daʿwa and its theoretical elaborations have been the subject of some attention in scholarship, our understanding of the broader historical process of conversion within the Ismaili tradition remains regretfully underdeveloped. Our understanding in this regard is hampered in large measure by the nature of our sources. Until fairly recently, scholars were almost entirely dependent on heresiographical literature for reconstructing the history of sectarian movements and groups such as the Ismailis.4 By their very nature, such texts displayed an acute awareness of distinctions between Islamic communities. Furthermore, great attention is given in these sources to the role of individual agents and doctrines, while providing at best an unclear or exaggerated account of the geographical distribution and prevalence of the groups under consideration. Consequently, while the heresiographical sources may provide some filtered indication of the beliefs and doctrines of a various group, they remain insufficient for understanding the true extent or social prevalence of these communities. Historical chronicles, for their part, generally speak of the Ismailis and similar groups only once they have reached a critical mass and become an irritation to the ruling elite, often giving little indication of the internal workings of these communities or how they came to exist in the first place. Ismaili sources, on the other hand, present their own set of problems and challenges. While the Ismaili tradition has left a rich body of doctrinal and theological writings, these sources generally present only limited and largely incidental references to the historical development of the community. Above all, the bulk of the communal lore regarding the conversion and foundation of the community is found within the context of hagiographical accounts of its missionaries (dāʿīs). Below I will explore further the question of conversion as it is presented in the hagiographical accounts of the two leading dāʿīs of the Persian Ismaili tradition, namely Nasir-i Khusraw and Hasan-i Sabbah. Yet despite the prevalence of these works within the literary tradition of the

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Ismailis, on account of their ‘legendary’ character their study has remained largely neglected within the scholarship of Ismaili studies. In the absence of more ‘reliable’ internal Ismaili sources concerning the historical spread of the community, scholars have come to rely upon another body of work for clues to the function of the daʿwa. Among the aforementioned body of doctrinal writings is a distinct genre of works dealing with conversion and serving as manuals for the conduct of the Ismaili daʿwa. One of the earliest texts dealing with the topic of conversion within the Ismaili tradition is the Kitab al-ʿAlim wa’l-Ghulam (The Book of the Master and the Disciple) of Jaʿfar b. Mansur al-Yaman (d. before 957), son of the renowned dāʿī Ibn Hawshab ‘Mansur al-Yaman’, who is credited with the introduction of the Fatimid daʿwa to Yemen. The Kitab al-ʿAlim wa’l-Ghulam presents a paradigmatic model of conversion within the Ismaili tradition as illustrated through a series of extended Socratic dialogues between spiritual seekers and their instructors.5 The model of conversion that emerges from this text is one entailing an extensive process of personal search, individual instruction and mentorship, as well as gradated levels of initiation. This same model of individual conversion is presented in an early eleventh-century daʿwa manual composed by the Iranian dāʿī Ahmad b. Ibrahim Naysaburi. The emphasis of this work is on the duties and obligations of the dāʿī, who is expected to be pious, humble, educated in a vast array of sciences and disciplines, skilled in the management of money, proficient in the etiquette of debate and diplomacy, and of noble lineage. As to the process of the initiation of a novice (mustajīb) into the secrets of the faith, the author writes: That he knows the objective of the novice and has investigated his purpose in entering the religion, and what caused it, is indispensable. If his goal was other than God, he should not be administered the oath of covenant. If his objective was God and religion, let the daʿi first break him down and extirpate those notions he previously upheld, his prior beliefs having then become so thoroughly destroyed he no longer has an argument in their favor . . . Shower him with arguments, as the sacrificial animal is not slaughtered until it has been watered. Then, when he has been broken down and wants to take the oath, the rule is to take it of him after he has fasted for three days . . . Thereafter, if the covenant and the pledge is sure, he begins to educate the novice with the sciences, to ground him firmly in the fundamentals in their proper order, not to overly burden him at the state and thus cause him to mix them up . . . The daʿi should know that, if once having taken the noble oath from him, the daʿi subsequently does not educate him and firmly fix the fundamental principles in him, that daʿi is acting miserly with the knowledge that is due him.6 The process of conversion described in these works is intensely personal and extraordinarily labour-intensive, hardly suitable to the type of mass or community-level conversion that would explain the extensive and enduring presence of Ismaili communities found in Badakhshan or in other areas today. Another body of material that has been taken as a source for understanding the phenomenon of conversion to Ismailism are the biographical and autobiographical

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narratives of Ismaili converts. Among this group are included the two most renowned dāʿīs of the Persian Ismaili tradition, Nasir-i Khusraw and Hasan-i Sabbah, both of whom found their way to Ismailism after having been born and raised in different Muslim traditions.7 While the original autobiography of Hasan-i Sabbah does not survive, sources quoting from it preserve an account of his conversion at the hands of an otherwise unknown dāʿī named Amira Darrab:8 I held to the faith of my forefathers, the faith of the Ithnaʿashari Shiʿa. In Rayy there was an individual named Amira Darrab, who was of the faith of the Batinis [Ismailis] of Egypt. We constantly used to debate with one another. He used to denigrate my faith, but I would not submit. However, those words took root in my heart. At that time, a frightful illness took over and I thought to myself: ‘That is the true faith, and because of my great stubbornness I did not acknowledge it. If, heaven forbid, the promised hour should arrive, I would have died without attaining the truth’.9 Following his initiation, Hasan’s training was continued by ʿAbd al-Malik b. ʿAttash, the head of the Fatimid daʿwa in Iran, who later brought Hasan to Cairo. Hasan later returned to his homeland and in turn became the head of the Ismaili daʿwa in Iran. Nasir-i Khusraw, for his part, describes his conversion in two sources: his travelogue (the Safar-nama) and in his so-called ‘Confessional Ode’. His Safar-nama in fact mentions nothing directly of a conversion, but rather describes only the ‘midlife crisis’ he encountered in the year 437/1045, on account of which he pledged to forswear drinking and to set out on the hajj.10 In addition, there is considerable reason to question whether or not this portion of the Safar-nama is original to the text or was included in the course of a later editing process, which appears to have largely effaced any evident Ismaili elements from the text.11 The main source, therefore, for understanding Nasir-i Khusraw’s conversion is his famous qasida known commonly as the ‘Confessional Ode’.12 In common with the account of Hasan-i Sabbah’s conversion, the ‘Confessional Ode’ relates Nasir-i Khusraw’s conversion as the outcome of an extended process of personal search emerging from a deep spiritual yearning. The text tells of Nasir’s travelling from city to city, speaking with sages of every faith and sect in search of religious truth, and culminates with his pledge of allegiance at the hand of his tutor, the renowned Iranian dāʿī Muʾayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi. Hence, the conversion narratives associated with both Hasan-i Sabbah and Nasir-i Khusraw present a model of conversion that broadly accords with the individualist paradigm presented in the daʿwa manuals. In modern scholarship on Ismailism, the conversion narratives of these eminent converts have often been called upon, either explicitly or implicitly, to serve as a paradigmatic model of conversion more broadly within the Ismaili tradition, with little attention paid to the question of narrative agendas or audience in these works.13

Ismailism and Islamisation: Frameworks of Study As I have outlined above, the emphasis placed in the Ismaili studies literature on the agency of individual dāʿīs and the centrality of personal conviction in the process of conversion follows in large measure from an uncritical approach to this body of source

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material. But it also accords with a more long-standing trend in Western scholarship, dating back to the nineteenth century, which placed strong emphasis on the role of individual preachers and missionaries as agents of Islamisation. This emphasis emerges from a broader and well-worn conception in Western approaches to religion of how conversion ought to have occurred: as a product of direct contact with the book and the messengers of the book. This framework for understanding religious conversion entered into academic discourse within the Anglo-German tradition of nineteenthcentury historiography which, being rooted in a Protestant context and background, placed central emphasis on the role of personal faith and conviction, as well as direct intellectual engagement with scripture.14 The extrapolation of this conception of conversion to the Islamic world was reflected already over a century ago in Thomas Arnold’s survey of conversion to Islam, revealingly titled The Preaching of Islam.15 In one sense, Arnold’s work, with its emphasis on the spread of Islam by popular exhortation, represented a major development from the notion of ‘conversion by the sword’, which still dominates many popular Western understandings of Islamisation. A problem still remains, however, in that both paradigms (conversion by the sword versus preaching) take the process of conversion to be an essentially immediate and decisive event. Given the nature and problems of our source material outlined above, it must be admitted at the outset that a reconstruction of anything beyond the broadest outlines of the actual process of conversion to Ismailism in Badakhshan, as with elsewhere, remains a near impossibility. Yet when examined in light of recent developments in scholarship on conversion within the Islamic tradition, this enquiry may at the very least provide some insight into the question of how this process did not happen, as well as some possible hints at how it likely did happen. The emphasis on the role of the individual dāʿī is, without a doubt, a necessary component of the explanation for the historical process of conversion to Ismailism. Yet it remains insufficient for understanding the diffusion of Ismaili affiliation beyond the individual level, to the communal or societal level. The importance of this is clearly evident when examining the social reality of Ismailism today. Like Muslim communities the world over, adherence to Ismailism is found to be deeply embedded and intertwined within social groups, communal structures and ethnic identities. This is particularly evident in Badakhshan, where Ismailism over the course of centuries has become nearly synonymous with a Pamiri ethnic identity, to the extent that there is almost a complete overlap today between the prevalence of Ismailism and the linguistic community of Pamiri language speakers in the region. It is impossible to imagine that such a situation could have emerged simply through a series of individual conversion experiences; rather, to explain this phenomenon one must look towards a model of conversion as a process of social and cultural change, entailing a broader array of factors and agents. Among the most fruitful lines of enquiry in the historical study of religious conversion, which has been particularly developed in recent years within the historiography of medieval Christianity, is one that has sought to de-emphasise entirely the role of individual agents, focusing instead on conversion as a complex and lengthy process of cultural shift. In particular, I would like to call attention here to recent research on conversion to Christianity in Scandinavia, a region whose

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peripheral position within Christian Europe invites comparison with the position of Badakhshan within the Islamicate world. In a recent study of the conversion of Scandinavia, Anders Winroth describes the process of a Christianisation there as a complex process of cultural, economic and political exchange, in which local rulers and chieftains accepted Christianity as a means of boosting their own political and economic positions.16 In this context, acceptance of Christianity was driven not only by the persuasive arguments of missionaries, but also by the prestige of Christian literary culture and economy.17 A comparable model has been proposed by Richard Eaton to account for the Islamisation of the frontier regions of India through a process he terms ‘accretion and reform’, or the ‘process whereby preliterate peoples on the ecological and political frontier of an expanding agrarian society became absorbed into the religious ideology of that society’.18 This framework likewise provides an insightful paradigm for understanding how the process of conversion to Islam may have unfolded in the Badakhshan region. Within this process, consideration must be given to the attraction of Islam not only from a strictly ‘religious’ perspective, but also as a cultural, economic and civilisational force. In addition, a number of studies have highlighted the role of merchants, trade and patterns of economic exchange in the acculturation of frontier communities to Islam.19 Above all, consideration should be given to the prestige of Persian literary culture, which often arrived as a companion to Islamisation. It is within this context that we might see the greatest significance to Nasir-i Khusraw’s role in the Islamisation of Badakhshan, not merely as a preacher of a particular sectarian interpretation of Islam, but, more importantly, as a purveyor of Persianate high culture. Nasir’s own writings make it clear that it was his mastery of the literary sciences that drew the attention of his patron in Badakhshan.20 He alludes repeatedly in his poetry to the respect he earned there on account of his learning.21 Nasir is noteworthy for being one of the earliest authors to conduct Islamic Neoplatonist philosophy in the Persian language, but he is also notable for being the first individual known by name to have composed writings in any language within Badakhshan. He is, therefore, an important figure for the process of Islamisation in Badakhshan and for the related process of the spread of Persianate high culture in the region. Beyond these considerations, there remains the question of the much more mundane and largely unquantifiable motivations that drove conversion at the local level. One critical study in this regard, which has inexplicably remained largely overlooked in the field of Ismaili studies, is an anthropological study by Robert Canfield exploring religious identities among the Shiʿi Hazarahs of the Hindu Kush region, among whose number are included both Ismaili and Ithnaʿashari communities.22 In this work, Canfield explored the multidirectional phenomenon of conversion and reaffiliation between these two communities. Canfield finds that conversion in this context emerges primarily as a result of intermarriage and economic considerations, as well as an opportunity to escape internecine conflicts within a convert’s own community. Yet instances of conversion based purely on belief or personal conviction find little record in Canfield’s account. While recognising that it is impossible to base assumptions regarding the wider phenomenon of conversion on a single case study, Canfield’s survey nonetheless provides a plausible paradigm to explain instances of religious conversion and communal reaffiliation in other historical contexts. Taken

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together, these considerations suggest that the paradigm of conversion found in the Ismaili sources presents an idealised model that may indeed have been applicable in a number of individual cases, but which is far from sufficient to explain the broader phenomenon of conversion to Ismailism or its long-term implications for the process of Islamisation.

Conversion to Ismailism in Central Asia The enduring establishment of an Ismaili presence in the Badakhshan region was preceded by an earlier, and largely failed, effort launched by the Ismaili daʿwa in Central Asia in the Samanid era of the tenth century. The focus on individual conversion found in the early daʿwa manuals in fact appears to have largely defined this earlier phase of Ismaili activity in Central Asia, in which conversion efforts were targeted chiefly at the Samanid political elite. The elite emphasis of the daʿwa in this period explains both the prominence of the Ismailis in the Samanid-era sources as well as their lack of long-term success, and hence serves as an illustration of why this model of conversion cannot account for the later establishment of an enduring Ismaili presence in Badakhshan.23 From the start, the Ismaili daʿwa in Central Asia, focused primarily on the conversion of figures within the Samanid court, was intended to build strategic depth for the Fatimid struggle against the Abbasid caliphate in the Near East. The Ismailis achieved particular success during the reign of the Samanid amir Nasr II b. Ahmad (r. 914–43), eventually leading, according to some sources, to the conversion of the amir himself.24 This fluorescence of the Ismaili daʿwa in Central Asia proved to be short-lived. A violent repression of the Ismailis was led by Nasr’s son, Nuh, who forced his father to abdicate and reprimanded him for permitting the sect to flourish in his realm. A brief reappearance of the Ismaili daʿwa under Nuh’s son, Mansur I (r. 961–76), was met with another violent repression, led by his governor of Khurasan, Abu’l-Hasan Muhammad Simjuri. Following these assaults, according to Nizam al-Mulk, ‘there remained not a single Batini [Ismaili] in all of Khurasan and Central Asia. This group (madhhab) disappeared entirely from the earth and not a single of its members remained.’25 It would appear that Nizam al-Mulk’s boasting here was no mere hyperbole, as from the late tenth century onwards the sources reveal no evidence for Ismaili activity in Central Asia until the career of Nasir-i Khusraw nearly a century later. This hostility towards Ismailism was perpetuated under Mansur’s son, Nuh II, who, among other measures, patronised a Persian translation of the Hanafi tract al-Sawad al-Aʿzam of Abu’l-Qasim Ishaq Samarqandi, which sought to defend the creed of the Sunni ‘majority’ against the Ismailis and other perceived heresies.26 Following the collapse of the Samanid state, Fatimid missionary efforts shifted westwards to the Buyid territories of Iraq and western Iran, where the daʿwa was spearheaded by such prominent figures as Muʾayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1078) and Hamid al-Din Kirmani (d. after 1020). Generally speaking, the early efforts to propagate the Ismaili daʿwa among political elites in Central Asia in the tenth century appear to have had little long-term impact, aside perhaps from a hardening of anti-Ismaili views among the Sunni scholars of the region. The modern Ismaili presence in Central Asia, centred in the Badakhshan region, owes its origins to a later period, bearing no connection with the earlier daʿwa efforts of the Samanid era.

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Following the collapse of the effort to convert the Samanid elite, as well as the collapse of the Samanid state itself, the Ismaili daʿwa in Central Asia appears to have fallen silent for nearly a century. The next major phase in the history of Ismailism in Central Asia is associated with the career of Nasir-i Khusraw. Born in the Balkh region in c. 1004, Nasir came to the Fatimid capital of Cairo in 1045 following his conversion, as outlined above. After seven years, he returned from Egypt to his native Balkh region in 1052, this time as a proponent of the Ismaili daʿwa. While the details of his career at this stage are obscure, it would appear that at some point over the next two decades he encountered fierce opposition to his daʿwa activities in Khurasan and was consequently forced into exile further east in the region of Badakhshan, where he was given refuge by a local ruler in the remote province of Yumgan. The region of Badakhshan down to the arrival of Nasir-i Khusraw there in the mid-eleventh century had remained largely on the frontier of Islamicate society. While the Arabic geographical sources indicate that the region came under Muslim rule by the late eighth century, they provide little concrete information on the region aside from an account of its trade routes.27 Among the very few pieces of evidence for a Muslim presence in Badakhshan in this period is a collection of paper fragments discovered by a Soviet archaeological expedition to the Bazardarah valley in the eastern Pamirs in 1966, dating from the ninth to the eleventh century and written in both Arabic and Persian, which testifies to the presence of a Muslim merchant community in the region in this period.28 The author of the Hudud al-ʿAlam, writing in 982, provides the most thorough account of the Badakhshan region prior to the arrival of Nasir-i Khusraw. He describes the mountainous territories in and around Badakhshan as being populated largely by non-Muslims (gabrakān), with Tibetan and Muslim traders living in the area as well.29 Among the notices provided in the text is a description of a large ‘idol-temple’ (but-khāna) in the town of Khamdadh in the Wakhan region; this same structure was also noted three centuries earlier by the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, who described it as a Buddhist monastery featuring an adorned statue of the Buddha.30 The reference in the Hudud al-ʿAlam to an evidently prospering Buddhist community in the heart of Badakhshan in the late tenth century accords with other evidence pointing to the persistence of active Buddhist communities in Central Asia well into the Islamic era.31 The geographer Ibn Hawqal, writing around 988, describes the territories of Wakhan and Shughnan within the region of Badakhshan as the ‘realm of unbelief’ (dār al-kufr).32 Hence, despite the scarcity of the sources, it seems evident that, by the beginning of Nasir-i Khusraw’s career, Badakhshan was still in the early stages of Islamisation, although parts of it had been nominally under Muslim rule for nearly three centuries.

Nasir-i Khusraw and the ‘Problem’ of Ismailism on the Periphery Nasir-i Khusraw’s own works leave little doubt of his strong intentions to propagate the Ismaili daʿwa in the name of the Fatimid imam of his time, Mustansir bi’llah.33 Yet his effort to implant Ismailism into the Badakhshan region would appear by

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all accounts to have been a largely abortive one. While he undoubtedly obtained a number of converts to the Fatimid cause during his lifetime, including the Amir of Yumgan, there is no record in the sources of an Ismaili community in the region that sustained past his own lifetime. In fact, neither Ismaili nor non-Ismaili sources make any reference to an Ismaili presence in Badakhshan before the fifteenth century, by which time the region had undergone a massive shift in the extent of its Islamisation and in its cultural and political position within the Islamic world.34 When Ismailism does make an appearance in Badakhshan, it is within the context not of the Fatimid Ismaili daʿwa propounded by Nasir-i Khusraw, but rather the Nizari or ‘New’ Ismaili daʿwa linked with Hasan-i Sabbah. Rashid al-Din, in his account of Hasan-i Sabbah, explicitly mentions that, while Hasan was preceded in his mission by Nasir-i Khusraw, ‘no success came to him’.35 Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that the earliest establishment of Nizari Ismailism in Badakhshan was rooted in large measure on the arrival there of Nizaris from surrounding areas of the Islamic world, predominately Iran, many no doubt seeking refuge from the persecutions unleashed under the Mongols. While a complete discussion of the actual process of the spread of Ismailism in Badakhshan cannot be offered here, it suffices to mention that both the manuscript record as well as oral histories preserved among Ismailis of the region point to a significant migration of Ismailis from various localities in Iran to Badakhshan in the wake of the Mongol conquests. It was only gradually that in subsequent centuries the Ismaili tradition came to enjoy a wider following among local populations in Badakhshan. As I have outlined elsewhere, the earliest layer of Ismaili literature from Badakhshan displays little interest in the career of Nasir-i Khusraw.36 Yet Nasir-i Khusraw himself was not forgotten in Badakhshan; far from it. In the centuries following his death in the late eleventh century, a wide array of reports and legends began to circulate concerning him, first in oral tradition and then in textual form beginning in the thirteenth century. What is most remarkable about this body of legendary biographical material is that it demonstrated an almost complete effacement of Nasir’s status as an Ismaili dāʿī, and instead reshaped his biography as one of a Sufi ascetic and holy man. In particular, Nasir’s shrine in Yumgan became the recipient of patronage by Sunni rulers as early as the fourteenth century, who lauded Nasir as a saint and as a fellow Sunni in their endowments.37 Hence, while it is evident that Nasir-i Khusraw had an enormous impact upon the religious and cultural history of Badakhshan, it is not clear that this impact was felt primarily through his propagation of Ismailism in the region; rather, his broader legacy in the region should be seen as akin to that of a ‘patron saint’, whose arrival and burial in the region sanctified the land of Badakhshan as sacred space. The subsequent ‘adoption’ of Nasir-i Khusraw as the founding figure of the Badakhshani Ismaili community emerges not from a direct historical connection between this community and his career, but rather appears to have emerged as part of a later effort by Ismaili authors of the region to nativise the tradition within the local religious environment. There is also a broader question that should be taken into consideration here: in what sense can we speak of the proliferation of a discrete ‘Ismaili’ identity in a context such as eleventh-century Badakhshan? To put the question more generally, do such intra-communal or ‘sectarian’ Islamic identities have any cogency in a

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predominately non-Muslim or newly Islamising environment? To a significant degree, our ability to answer such questions is hampered by the nature of our source material. As noted above, our information on Badakhshan in the early Islamic period is limited almost entirely to the slim notices given in geographical sources, which provide only the roughest outline of the confessional situation to be found in the region. Non-Muslim sources that might offer insight into perceptions by outsiders of Muslim sectarian identities are relatively rare for Central Asia in general, and virtually non-existent for Badakhshan. The earliest such record available for the period following the career of Nasir-i Khusraw is the travel account of Marco Polo, who passed through the Wakhan Corridor around 1274 on his journey to China. Polo is renowned for his accounts of the Ismailis in the Near East and his work played a major role in introducing the legends of the ‘Assassins’ to medieval European readers.38 Given his clear fascination with the Ismailis, one may expect him to have reported on even a hint of members of this sect living in Central Asia. Yet he reports only that Badakhshan is ‘inhabited by people who worship Mahommet and have a peculiar language’, with no mention of the dreaded Assassins residing in the region.39 His mention of the ‘peculiar language’ of the inhabitants suggests that he is most likely referring to the same Pamiri peoples who in later centuries would be unmistakably identified as Ismailis. The lack of attention given in the sources to sectarian distinctions may itself point to a certain reality of religious life on the Islamic periphery, in which such intracommunal distinctions lose their cogency in the face of contact with the other. Not unexpectedly, the writings produced by religious communities, with rare exceptions, frequently display a lack of concern for internal differences within other religious traditions, instead ascribing to them an essentially monolithic reality. In the context of a frontier zone such as pre-Mongol Badakhshan, in which Muslims interacted with non-Muslims far from the watchful eye of formal religious institutions and other centres of power, it is not difficult to imagine that such perceptions may have become reified to a degree, in which intra-communal distinctions became less vital than the broader distinction of Muslim versus non-Muslim. Furthermore, we face the broader question of how a self-conscious ‘Ismaili’ or ‘Shiʿi’ identity could be fully realised in a predominately non-Muslim or newly Islamising environment. Ismailism, like all Shiʿi traditions, is at heart an interpretation of Islam, distinguished from other interpretations primarily by the question of religious authority within the Muslim community. But this is a distinction that becomes relevant largely in engagement with other interpretations of Islam. So what might it mean for a Muslim in a context such as eleventh-century Badakhshan to identify himself or herself as an ‘Ismaili’? I argue that it would mean, first and foremost, to be a Muslim. While this assertion may appear tautological at first glance, it holds significant implications for understanding the long-term consequences of religious conversions attributed to agents of Ismailism. While the introduction of Ismailism into Badakhshan has generally been considered the primary legacy of Nasiri Khusraw in the region, I contest that it would be more proper to speak of Nasir as an agent not only of ‘Ismailisation’, but also more broadly, and more importantly, of Islamisation. By use of the term ‘agent’ here I do not mean in the narrow sense of the direct propagation of Islam, but rather in the broader sense of ‘opening up’ the

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Badakhshan region to Islam and the cultural force of Persianate Islamic civilisation. Hence Nasir-i Khusraw’s most important contribution to the Islamisation of Badakhshan should be seen not in the ephemeral realm of individual conversions, but rather in his role as a facilitator of the long-term process of acculturation that marked the course of Islamisation in the region. The fruition of this process of acculturation and Islamisation also enabled the emergence, in later centuries, of a distinct Ismaili identity in the Badakhshan region. Notably, it is only in the Timurid era, by which time the region had become decisively integrated into the broader religious and cultural framework of Persianate Islamic society, that the sources first take note of the presence of Ismailis in Badakhshan, who are portrayed as instigators of a series of uprisings against Timurid rule.40 At first glance, these revolts may appear simply as acts of resistance on the part of mountain communities to the tax collectors and forces of cultural assimilation of the agrarian-based Timurid state. Yet what is noteworthy about the accounts of these revolts is the fact of their expression within the idiom of the Islamic tradition. Accordingly, the flourishing of a ‘heretical’ variant of Islam in the Badakhshan region in the form of Ismailism may itself be seen as an outcome of the Islamisation of that society. Hence, while Nasir-i Khusraw may have offered only a relatively minor direct contribution to the spread of Ismailism in Badakhshan, his contribution to the process of Islamisation, in the long term, proved to be far more decisive for the later success of the Ismaili tradition in its establishment in the region. The fate of Nasir-i Khusraw’s legacy in Badakhshan bears comparison with those of Ismaili dāʿīs in other areas, who have similarly seen their legacies diffused among a wider array of interpretations of Islam. In particular, we may point to the example of several renowned dāʿīs within the South Asian Ismaili tradition, such as Pir Sadr al-Din and Pir Shams al-Din, who are widely credited with the conversion of many Hindus to Ismailism within the Sind region of South Asia.41 While the sources are clear that both figures, like Nasir-i Khusraw, were commissioned as Ismaili dāʿīs by the imams, in the centuries following their deaths their legacies came to enjoy wide followings among Sunni and Ithnaʿashari communities as well; their shrines, like that of Nasir-i Khusraw, remain in the keeping of non-Ismailis to this day. Rather than examining such interpretations as ‘deviations’ from the original significance of these figures, it would be more productive to view the development of their legacies within the context of their role in the broader process of Islamisation. The nature of the communal memory associated with these individuals provides the clearest indication of how their significance was understood within the communities targeted by their conversion efforts – as bearers not of one particular interpretation of Islam, but rather of Islam itself. Consequently, the legacies of these individuals present a case study for what might be seen, under comparative examination, as a broader trend within the historical trajectories of Islamising figures associated with other ‘sectarian’ traditions in the Muslim world. A closer examination of these legacies and their evolution over time, as opposed to the more limited scope of the successes attributed to the particular traditions they represented, may provide firmer ground for an assessment of their long-term significance for the history of Islamisation.

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Notes 1. Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Wilferd Madelung, Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (Albany, NY: Persian Heritage Foundation, 1988). Among the more general treatments of conversion in early Islamic Iran and Central Asia, see Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Jamsheed K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Devin DeWeese, Islamisation and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Sarah Bowen Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2. I employ the term ‘sectarian’ here to refer to those groups that were generally cast outside of the framework of the Sunni-Jamaʿi ‘consensus’ in the heresiographical literature of the Abbasid era. For a review of recent scholarship on sectarianism in the Islamic tradition, see Zulfikar Hirji, ‘Debating Islam from Within: Muslim Constructions of the Internal Other,’ in Zulfikar Hirji (ed.), Diversity and Pluralism in Islam: Historical and Contemporary Discourses amongst Muslims (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1–30. 3. For overviews of the Fatimid-era daʿwa, see Farhad Daftary, ‘The Ismaili Daʿwa outside the Fatimid Dawla,’ in Marianne Barrucand (ed.), L’Égypte fatimide: Son art et son histoire (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 29–43; Farhad Daftary, ‘Ismaili Daʿwa under the Fatimids’, in Urbain Vermeulen and K. D’Hulster (eds), Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk Eras, vol. 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), pp. 73–90. Far less attention has been paid to the development of the Ismaili daʿwa in the post-Fatimid and post-Mongol eras. The most complete survey of the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century is given in Shafique N. Virani, The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, a Search for Salvation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. For a survey of the historiography of Ismaili studies, see Farhad Daftary, The Ismaʿilis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–33. 5. For the text see Jaʿfar b. Mansur al-Yaman, Kitab al-ʿAlim wa’l-Ghulam, ed. and trans. James Winston Morris as The Master and the Disciple: An Early Islamic Spiritual Dialogue (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001). 6. Ahmad b. Ibrahim Naysaburi, al-Risala al-Mujaza al-Kafiya fi Adab al-Duʿat, ed. and trans. Verena Klemm and Paul E. Walker as A Code of Conduct: A Treatise on the Etiquette of the Fatimid Ismaili Mission (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 46–8 (Arabic text); pp. 60–2 (English trans.). 7. The sources largely concur that Hasan-i Sabbah was of a Twelver Shiʿi background. In the case of Nasir-i Khusraw, there is no direct evidence to attest to his original religious identity. While Ivanow and other scholars speculated that he too may have been of a Twelver Shiʿi background (largely based on the assumption that the presence of pre-existing Shiʿi sympathies would have facilitated the later adoption of Ismailism), there is no evidence for this in his writings. To the contrary, the fact that Nasir held a position in the Ghaznavid court in Marv suggests it is unlikely that he had a Shiʿi background. 8. Accounts of Hasan-i Sabbah’s conversion are found in the following sources: ʿAtaʾ Malik Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, ed. ʿAllama Muhammad Qazwini and Sayyid Shahrukh Musawiyan (Tehran: Dastan, 2006), pp. 735–7; Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Qismat-i Ismaʿiliyan va Fatimiyan va Nizariyan wa Daʿiyan wa Rafiqan, ed. Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh and Muhammad Mudarrasi Zanjani (Tehran: Intisharat-i ʿIlmi wa Farhangi,

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

islamisation 2009), pp. 76–7; Abu’l-Qasim Kashani, Zubdat al-Tavarikh: Tarikh-i Ismaʿiliyya wa Nizariyya wa Malahida, ed. Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh (Tabriz: Danishkadah-i Adabiyat-i Tabriz, 1964), pp. 120–2; Hamdullah Mustawfi Qazwini, Tarikh-i Guzida, ed. ʿAbd alHusayn Nawaʾi (Tehran: Amir-i Kabir, 1983), p. 518. Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, p. 736. Nasir-i Khusraw, Safar-nama, ed. Muhammad Dabir Siyaqi, trans. W. M. Thackston as Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2001), pp. 1–3. On this see Daniel Beben, ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nasir-i Khusraw: Memory and Textualization in Early Modern Persian Ismailism’, doctoral thesis, Indiana University, 2015, pp. 154–7. For the full text of the qasida, see Nasir-i Khusraw, Diwan-i Ashʿar, ed. Mujtaba Minuwi and Mahdi Muhaqqiq, 8th edn (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tihran, 2010), pp. 505–15, no. 242. For translations and analyses of the ode, see Alice Hunsberger, Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveler and Philosopher (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 55–69; Wladimir Ivanow, Problems in Nasir-i Khusraw’s Biography (Bombay: Ismaili Society, 1956), pp. 22–36; Nasir-i Khusraw, Forty Poems from the Divan, trans. Peter Lamborn Wilson and Gholam Reza Aavani (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977), pp. 4–9; Gholam-Reza Mirshahi, ‘The “Confessional Ode” of Nasir-i Khusrav and His Conversion to Ismailism’, master’s thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1989. On the role of authorial agenda in conversion narratives, see Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For a historiographical survey of this topic, see James Muldoon, ‘Introduction: The Conversion of Europe’, in James Muldoon (ed.), Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 1–10. Thomas W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1896). Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). Similar arguments have been advanced regarding religious conversion among the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia; see Anatoly M. Khazanov, ‘The Spread of World Religions in Medieval Nomadic Societies of the Eurasian Steppes’, in Michael Gervers and Wayne Schlepp (eds), Nomadic Diplomacy, Destruction and Religion from the Pacific to the Adriatic (Toronto: Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, 1994), pp. 11–33. Richard M. Eaton, ‘Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India’, in Richard C. Martin (ed.) Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), p. 111. For an illustration of this process see his The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). See also Chapter 19 by Richard Eaton in this volume. On the role of merchants in Islamisation in Central Asia, see Reuven Amitai, ‘Towards a Pre-History of the Islamization of the Turks: A Re-reading of Ibn Faḍlān’s Riḥla’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 277–98; Patrick A. Hatcher, ‘Peddling Islam: The Merchant in Early Conversion Narratives of the Central Asian Turks’, in Michael Gervers et al. (eds), Traders and Trade Routes of Central and Inner Asia: The ‘Silk Road’ Then and Now (Toronto: Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 2007), pp. 31–44. For example, see Nasir’s comments in his Jamiʿ al-Hikmatayn, a work dedicated to Nasir’s patron, ʿAli b. Asad al-Harith, who commissioned Nasir to compose the work as a commentary on the qasida of an obscure Persian author named Abu’l-Haytham Ahmad Jurjani;

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

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see Nasir-i Khusraw, Kitab-i Jamiʿ al-Hikmatayn, trans. Eric Ormsby as Between Reason and Revelation: Twin Wisdoms Reconciled (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 32–3. For an example, see Nasir-i Khusraw, Forty Poems from the Divan, pp. 106–7. Robert L. Canfield, Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1973). On the early history of the Ismaili daʿwa in Central Asia, see Yahia Baiza, ‘The Shiʿa Ismaili Daʿwat in Khurasan: From its Early Beginning to the Ghaznawid Era’, Journal of Shiʿa Islamic Studies 8, no. 1 (2015), pp. 37–59; Samuel M. Stern, ‘The Early Ismaili Missionaries in North-West Persia and in Khurasan and Transoxania’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23, no. 1 (1960), pp. 56–90. On Ismailism in the Samanid court, see Patricia Crone and Luke Treadwell, ‘A New Text on Ismailism at the Samanid Court’, in Chase Robinson (ed.), Texts, Documents, and Artefacts: Islamic Studies in Honor of D. S. Richards (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 37–67; W. L. Treadwell, ‘The Political History of the Samanid State’, doctoral thesis, Oxford University, 1991, pp. 186–210. Nizam al-Mulk, Siyar al-Muluk, ed. Hubert Darke (Tehran: Bungah-i Tarjuma wa Nashr-i Kitab, 1978), p. 305. On this work, see Wilferd Madelung, ‘Abu’l-Qasem Eshaq Samarqandi’, Encyclopaedia Iranica 1 (1983), pp. 358–9; Ulrich Rudolph, Al-Maturidi and the Development of Sunni Theology in Samarqand, trans. Rodrigo Adem (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 97–121. On the ‘anti-heresy’ agenda of Samanid literary production, see also Elton L. Daniel, ‘The Samanid “Translations” of Tabari’, in Hugh Kennedy (ed.), Al-Tabari: A Medieval Muslim Historian and His Work (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2008), pp. 263–97; Julie Scott Meisami, ‘Why Write History in Persian? Historical Writing in the Samanid Period’, in Carole Hillenbrand (ed.) Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth, vol. 2: The Sultan’s Turret: Studies in Persian and Turkish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 348–74; cf. A. C. S. Peacock, Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Balʿamī’s ‘Tārīkhnāma’ (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 103–36. On Badakhshan in the early Arabic geographical sources, see Vasilii V. Barthold et al., ‘Badakhshan’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), pp. 851–5. O. F. Akimushkin, ‘Fragmenty dokumentov s vostochnogo Pamira’, in Pis’mennye Pamiatniki Vostoka: istoriko-filologicheskie issledovaniia. Ezhegodnik 1972 (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 130–6. Hudud al-ʿAlam: ‘The Regions of the World’: A Persian Geography, 372 A.H.–982 A.D., trans. Vladimir Minorsky, 2nd edn (London: Luzac, 1970), pp. 120–1. Xuanzang, The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, trans. Li Rongxi (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), pp. 364–6. The ruins of this structure were later noted by Auriel Stein in his visit in 1915, who recognised them as belonging to the vihara described by Xuanzang; see Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-Su and Eastern Iran, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), vol. 2, p. 866. Richard W. Bulliet, ‘Naw Bahar and the Survival of Iranian Buddhism’, Iran 14 (1976), pp. 140–5. Active patronage of Buddhist institutions in the Hindu Kush region is recorded as late as the tenth century; see Deborah Klimburg-Salter, ‘Buddhist Paintings in the Hindu Kush ca. VIIth to Xth Centuries: Reflections on the Co-existence of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Artistic Cultures during the Early Centuries of the Islamic Era’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 131–59. Abuʾl-Qasim ibn Hawqal, Kitab al-Masalik wa’l-Mamalik, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1873), p. 349.

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33. See Beben, ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nasir-i Khusraw’, pp. 74–99. 34. The Russian scholar Wladimir Ivanow was the first to speculate that the present-day Ismaili community of Badakhshan may not be directly traceable to Nasir-i Khusraw; see Ivanow, Problems in Nasir-i Khusraw’s Biography, pp. 40–8. For a review of the sources on this question see Beben, ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nasir-i Khusraw’, pp. 233–50. 35. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Qismat-i Ismaʿiliyan, p. 76. 36. Beben, ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nasir-i Khusraw’, pp. 114–19. 37. For the texts of these endowments, see Khalilullah Khalili, ‘Yumgan wa Wathaʾiq-i Tarikhi darbara-i Nasir-i Khusraw’, Yaghma 20 (1967), pp. 438–42, 472–6; reprinted in his Yumgan: Mazar-i Nasir-i Khusraw dar Badakhshan, ed. ‘Inayatullah Shahrani (Delhi: Department of Persian, Delhi University, 2000). 38. For his account of the Ismailis, see Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, trans. Henry Yule, 3rd edn, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), vol. 1, pp. 139–48. On his contribution to medieval European legends on the Ismailis, see Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 108–18. 39. Polo, Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. 1, p. 157. 40. Beben, ‘The Legendary Biographies of Nasir-i Khusraw’, pp. 250–5. 41. On these figures, see Ali S. Asani, Ecstasy and Enlightenment: The Ismaili Devotional Literature of South Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Tazim R. Kassam, Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismāʿīlī Muslim Saint, Pīr Shams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Azim Nanji, The Nizari Ismaili Tradition in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1978).

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Crone, Patricia, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Crone, Patricia, and Luke Treadwell, ‘A New Text on Ismailism at the Samanid Court’, in Chase Robinson (ed.), Texts, Documents, and Artefacts: Islamic Studies in Honor of D. S. Richards (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 37–67. Daftary, Farhad, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). Daftary, Farhad, ‘The Ismaili Daʿwa outside the Fatimid Dawla’, in Marianne Barrucand (ed.), L’Égypte fatimide: Son art et son histoire (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 29–43. Daftary, Farhad, ‘Ismaili Daʿwa under the Fatimids’, in Urbain Vermeulen and K. D’Hulster (eds), Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk Eras, vol. 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), pp. 73–90. Daftary, Farhad, The Ismaʿilis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Daniel, Elton L., ‘The Samanid “Translations” of Tabari’, in Hugh Kennedy (ed.), Al-Tabari: A Medieval Muslim Historian and His Work (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2008), pp. 263–97. DeWeese, Devin, Islamisation and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Eaton, Richard M., ‘Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India’, in Richard C. Martin (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 106–24. Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Hatcher, Patrick A., ‘Peddling Islam: The Merchant in Early Conversion Narratives of the Central Asian Turks’, in Michael Gervers, Uradyn Erden Bulag and Gillian Long (eds), Traders and Trade Routes of Central and Inner Asia: The ‘Silk Road’ Then and Now (Toronto: Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 2007), pp. 31–44. Hirji, Zulfikar, ‘Debating Islam from Within: Muslim Constructions of the Internal Other’, in Zulfikar Hirji (ed.), Diversity and Pluralism in Islam: Historical and Contemporary Discourses amongst Muslims (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1–30. Hudud al-ʿAlam: ‘The Regions of the World’: A Persian Geography, 372 A.H.–982 A.D., trans. Vladimir Minorsky, 2nd edn (London: Luzac, 1970). Hunsberger, Alice, Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveler and Philosopher (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). Ibn Hawqal, Abu’l-Qasim, Kitab al-Masalik wa’l-Mamalik, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1873). Ivanow, Wladimir, Problems in Nasir-i Khusraw’s Biography (Bombay: Ismaili Society, 1956). Juvayni, ʿAtaʾ Malik, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, ed. ʿAllama Muhammad Qazwini and Sayyid Shahrukh Musawiyan (Tehran: Dastan, 2006). Kashani, Abu’l-Qasim, Zubdat al-Tavarikh: Tarikh-i Ismaʿiliyya wa Nizariyya wa Malahida, ed. Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh (Tabriz: Danishkadah-i Adabiyat-i Tabriz, 1964). Kassam, Tazim R., Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismāʿīlī Muslim Saint, Pīr Shams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). Khalili, Khalilullah, ‘Yumgan wa Wathaʾiq-i Tarikhi darbara-i Nasir-i Khusraw’, Yaghma 20 (1967), pp. 438–42, 472–6. Khalili, Khalilullah, Yumgan: Mazar-i Nasir-i Khusraw dar Badakhshan, ed. ʿInayatullah Shahrani (Delhi: Department of Persian, Delhi University, 2000). Khazanov, Anatoly M., ‘The Spread of World Religions in Medieval Nomadic Societies of the Eurasian Steppes’, in Michael Gervers and Wayne Schlepp (eds), Nomadic Diplomacy,

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Destruction and Religion from the Pacific to the Adriatic (Toronto: Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, 1994), pp. 11–33. Klimburg-Salter, Deborah, ‘Buddhist Paintings in the Hindu Kush ca. VIIth to Xth Centuries: Reflections on the Co-existence of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Artistic Cultures during the Early Centuries of the Islamic Era’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 131–59. Madelung, Wilferd, ‘Abu’l-Qasem Eshaq Samarqandi’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 1 (1983), pp. 358–9. Madelung, Wilferd, Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (Albany, NY: Persian Heritage Foundation, 1988). Meisami, Julie Scott, ‘Why Write History in Persian? Historical Writing in the Samanid Period’, in Carole Hillenbrand (ed.), Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth, vol. 2: The Sultan’s Turret: Studies in Persian and Turkish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 348–74. Mirshahi, Gholam-Reza, ‘The “Confessional Ode” of Nasir-i Khusrav and His Conversion to Ismailism’, master’s thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1989. Muldoon, James, ‘Introduction: The Conversion of Europe’, in James Muldoon (ed.), Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 1–10. Nanji, Azim, The Nizari Ismaili Tradition in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1978). Nasir-i Khusraw, Forty Poems from the Divan, trans. Peter Lamborn Wilson and Gholam Reza Aavani (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977). Nasir-i Khusraw, Safar-nama, ed. Muhammad Dabir Siyaqi, trans. W. M. Thackston as Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2001). Nasir-i Khusraw, Diwan-i Ashʿar, ed. Mujtaba Minuvi and Mahdi Muhaqqiq, 8th edn (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tihran, 2010). Nasir-i Khusraw, Kitab-i Jamiʿ al-Hikmatayn, trans. Eric Ormsby as Between Reason and Revelation: Twin Wisdoms Reconciled (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). Naysaburi, Ahmad b. Ibrahim, al-Risala al-Mujaza al-Kafiya fi Adab al-Duʿat, ed. and trans. Verena Klemm and Paul E. Walker as A Code of Conduct: A Treatise on the Etiquette of the Fatimid Ismaili Mission (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). Nizam al-Mulk, Siyar al-Muluk, ed. Hubert Darke (Tehran: Bungah-i Tarjumah wa Nashr-i Kitab, 1978). Peacock, A. C. S., Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Balʿamī’s ‘Tārīkhnāma’ (London: Routledge, 2007). Polo, Marco, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, trans. Henry Yule, 3rd edn, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1903). Qazwini, Hamdullah Mustawfi, Tarikh-i Guzida, ed. ʿAbd al-Husayn Nawaʾi (Tehran: Amir-i Kabir, 1983). Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh: Qismat-i Isma‘iliyan wa Fatimiyan wa Nizariyan va Daʿiyan wa Rafiqan, ed. Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh and Muhammad Mudarrasi Zanjani (Tehran: Intisharat-i ʿIlmi va Farhangi, 2009). Rudolph, Ulrich, Al-Maturidi and the Development of Sunni Theology in Samarqand, trans. Rodrigo Adem (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Savant, Sarah Bowen, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Stein, Aurel, Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-Su and Eastern Iran, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928).

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Stern, Samuel M., ‘The Early Ismaili Missionaries in North-West Persia and in Khurasan and Transoxania’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23, no. 1 (1960), pp. 56–90. Szpiech, Ryan, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Treadwell, W. L., ‘The Political History of the Samanid State’, doctoral thesis, Oxford University, 1991. Virani, Shafique N., The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, a Search for Salvation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Winroth, Anders, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). Xuanzang, The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, trans. Li Rongxi (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996). al-Yaman, Jaʿfar b. Mansur, Kitab al-ʿAlim wa’l-Ghulam, ed. and trans. James Winston Morris as The Master and the Disciple: An Early Islamic Spiritual Dialogue (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001).

17 KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT: RETHINKING THE ROLE OF SUFIS IN THE ISLAMISATION OF THE TURKS OF CENTRAL ASIA Devin DeWeese

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he figure of Ahmad Yasavi has taken on iconic status as a saint particularly associated with the Turks, and with their Islamisation; the notion that he was somehow instrumental in the spread of Islam among the nomadic Turks of Central Asia is one of the standard assumptions about his historical and religious role to be found in most of the longer or shorter accounts of him in the secondary literature. The notion of Yasavi as an Islamising saint rests on several foundations. In the first place, that reputation is now entrenched ‘on-site’, so to speak, namely at his shrine in southern Kazakhstan. To some extent this reflects a standard ‘latter-day’ motif in hagiological traditions, particularly in the post-Soviet world, where virtually any and every shrine may be linked with a saint who tends to be identified as a bringer of Islam, in part as a result of the loss of any awareness of the historical role or legacy of the saint in question. ‘Who was such-and-such a saint, buried here?’ ‘He brought Islam here’ is now the default answer. In Ahmad Yasavi’s case, however, there are broader, if no less shallow, foundations for his status as Islamiser-in-chief for the Turks, and most of them were articulated in the century-old work of the Turkish scholar Mehmed Fuad Köprülü.1 Recently, Reuven Amitai has rightly called attention to the role of Köprülü, along with that of the Russian Orientalist Vasilii Vladimirovich Bartol’d, in formulating the notion that Sufis were the chief bearers of Islam to the Turkic nomads of Central and Inner Asia;2 their separate efforts indeed helped cement in both Soviet and Turkish scholarship – and for many decades few other academic communities took an interest in Islamic Central Asia – the related propositions that (1) Islam was brought to the nomadic Turks of Central and Inner Asia chiefly by Sufi shaykhs, and therefore (2) the Islam received by those Turks was substandard, defective and, in some formulations, barely related at all to ‘real’ Islam, which both Bartol’d and Köprülü understood to be the product of the urban doctors of the law and of Arabic and Persian (rather than Turkic) linguistic and cultural environments. Köprulü’s chief contribution, in keeping with his focus on the religious prehistory of the Turks who eventually came to Anatolia, was to stress three aspects of the developing 336

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‘theory’ of Islamisation in Central Asia that came to dominate Turkish scholarship, but may also be seen in Soviet and Central Asian scholarship.3 These three basic claims about how and why Yasavi and the Yasavi Sufi tradition were successful in Islamising the Turks have had a special impact on scholarship. The first claim rests on Ahmad Yasavi’s modern-day reputation as a Sufi poet, who supposedly wrote religious or mystical verse in Turkic. In all likelihood, the poetry ascribed to him was produced much later than when he most likely lived, and in any case cannot be linked to him historically, but this has not prevented a host of claims about the purpose behind ‘Yasavi’s’ verse. The idea is that Yasavi wrote Turkic mystical poetry in order to convert the non-Muslim Turkic nomads to Islam; that is, his verse was missionary poetry and conversion to Islam, in this scenario, happened ‘by the book’. The notion of difficult Muslim religious and mystical teachings, full of Arabic and Persian terminology, being versified in order to be recited to non-Muslim Turkic nomads and thereby to change their minds and make them Muslims is on its face ridiculous, and has been ‘called out’ in other contexts,4 but this idea remains particularly strong as an ‘explanation’ for Islamisation among the Turks of Central Asia. More broadly, the notion of ‘conversion by the book’ rests on other assumptions about how conversion happens (for instance, on expectations rooted in Protestant missionary efforts aimed at bringing the Bible to the unconverted world) and ultimately reflects the idea that Islamisation, and religious conversion more broadly, must be primarily or exclusively a mental process, with Islamisation conceived of as the adoption of intellectual propositions, overlooking the profound ritual and social components of religion and religious change. Ironically, however, given its implicit ‘intellectualisation’ of the process of conversion, Köprülü’s claim that ‘Yasavi’s’ poetry was intended for use in proselytisation was qualified by his second claim, which also became embedded in scholarship about Sufism and Islamisation: Islamisation, in this view, consisted of teaching the unconverted Turks about Islam; but, in the formulation of Köprülü and his followers (and also in that of those who continued Bartol’d’s insistence that the nomads would not readily ‘receive’ Islam from the doctors of the law, but needed the rustic Sufis to deliver it to them), what the Sufis taught the Turks about Islam had to be dumbed down in order for the nomads to understand it. Sufism, in this view, was ‘lax’ in terms of legal and ritual observance, and was ‘permeable’ to extra-Islamic ‘doctrinal’ and ritual features, thus appealing to nomads, as nomads (or to Turks, as Turks) on both counts. This claim naturally depends on a host of assumptions about Sufis, and about the intellectual capacities of nomads, that are in themselves misguided, but the assumption that Sufis were necessarily more amenable to simplifying their teaching about Islam than the jurists would have been is also a standard feature of many brief summaries of the role of the Yasavi Sufis in Islamising the Turks, and indeed in summaries of the religious history of Central Asia. The third of Köprülü’s claims about the role of the Yasavi tradition in ‘selling’ Islam to the nomads is also reflected in Bartol’d’s ideas about the ‘personnel’ most suitable for delivering Islam to the Turks, but Köprülü’s formulation was more explicit: he insisted that dervishes of the Yasavi ‘order’ were not merely devoted to ‘heterodox’ forms of Islam, and to antinomian displays of religious fervour, but were in fact virtually indistinguishable in their appearance and demeanour from the ‘shamans’ to

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whom, in Köprülü’s vision of Turkic religious history, the nomadic tribes of Yasavi’s era were devoted. In other words, the Turkic nomads of Central Asia were receptive to Sufis as bearers of Islam because the Sufis looked and acted like the ‘tribal shamans’ who (presumably) presided over the religious life of the pagan Turks. This is in line with Köprülü’s views regarding the ‘heterodox’ orientation – conceived, again, in primarily doctrinal terms – of the Yasavi tradition. It is again a narrative fraught with misguided assumptions (beginning with several about the so-called ‘shamans’ of the Turks), but it too has become part of the stock account of Central Asia’s religious history (and of the basic explanation of why Islam there is not quite really Islam). The irony here is especially strong, insofar as Köprülü was in many respects the founder of modern Turkish ‘nationalist’ scholarship; taken together, these views are in fact quite unflattering to the Turkic nomads, who are taken to be so dense and stupid that they were easily lulled into adopting Islam by Sufis who looked enough like shamans that the dim-witted nomads could not tell the difference, and who recited to the nomads not-very-good Turkic poetry filled with Arabic and Persian terminology of Islamic doctrine and practice that the nomads could hardly have understood. These views and assumptions are still very much with us in the literature, despite their obvious flaws; they reflect the legacy of mostly discredited assumptions and approaches regarding religious life current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the works of Bartol’d and Köprülü appeared, and they have persisted more for ideological and political reasons than for reasons of intellectual soundness or explanatory power. They overlook, to begin with, the intellectual traditions of Sufism; they overlook the broader pattern of an ‘inclusive’ approach to membership in the Muslim community that distinguished Islam in Central Asia even before the emergence of Sufi traditions; they overlook the close association between the Sufis and the ulama through most of Central Asian history; they overlook the inevitably wide spectrum of approaches to the sharia in particular Sufi traditions active in the region, as well as the ‘rigorist’ approach of some major Sufi groups in the region; and they essentialise supposed ethnic or ‘ecological’ preferences in terms of religious attitudes and behaviour (‘Turkic Sufism’ or ‘Qïrghïz Islam’ is full of pre-Islamic survivals, Islam sits lightly upon nomads, and so on). With regard to specific correctives about the role of Sufis in the process of Islamisation, several recent studies, by Jürgen Paul, Deborah Tor and Reuven Amitai,5 have undercut the general notion of Sufis as Islamisers in the pre-Mongol period; Paul, in particular, argued effectively and at length that there is simply no basis for such an understanding of Islamisation in the pre-Mongol era, or, for that matter, of Sufism in that era. The particular assertions of Köprülü, however, regarding the ways in which Ahmad Yasavi supposedly shaped the Islamisation of the Turks have yet to be discarded, and indeed they still shape the understanding of Yasavi’s historical role found in the secondary literature. One response to Köprülü’s claims must involve rethinking our understanding of Islamisation, whether in the pre-Mongol or post-Mongol eras, as a basis for questioning whether the images of Yasavi the missionary poet, of Yasavi the simplifier of Muslim dogma or of Yasavi the quasishaman actually make any sense at all in the context of religious encounter and change. Another response must reassess more basic elements in what Köprülü and

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his followers assumed about when Ahmad Yasavi lived, and about the social and political environment in which he lived. In particular, the assumption that Yasavi died in 1166–7, and therefore lived chiefly in the era of Seljuq domination in Central Asia, has skewed the chronological parameters of Yasavi’s supposed ‘missionary’ activity, linking him with an earlier phase of Islamisation among the Turks of Central Asia – not the earliest phase, to be sure, but certainly in the era before the Mongol conquest. For a host of reasons that cannot be addressed here, however, the date typically assigned to Yasavi’s death is clearly too early, perhaps by as much as half a century, and situating him in a more appropriate chronological framework means also situating him in the political context of the expanding state of the Khwarazmshahs, and perhaps in that of the Mongol conquest of Central Asia, but certainly not that of the Seljuq period in the region. It stands to reason, then, that any early reputational link to Islamisation on Yasavi’s part would have to reflect traditions first circulated in the thirteenth century, not in the twelfth. This is significant, I would argue, because it moves Ahmad Yasavi – and, especially, the formulators and transmitters of the hagiological stories focused on him – firmly into the Mongol era. A related assumption underlying the notion of ‘Yasavi the Islamiser’ reflects a broad lack of familiarity with the social and political environment of the region in which Ahmad Yasavi lived, namely the middle Syr Darya valley; though the region was indeed something of a frontier with the steppe region inhabited by nomadic Turks – earlier the Qarluqs and related peoples, later the Qïpchaqs, but only rarely the Oghuz, and never, once again, the Seljuqs – it was a predominantly urban region marked by commercial towns in which Islam had been relatively firmly established by the tenth century at the latest. Towns of this region are well represented among the nisbas of prominent jurists, both Hanafi and Shafiʿi, active during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, belying the supposition that Yasavi’s native region – whenever he lived – was unacquainted with the intellectual and institutional foundations of urban Muslim culture. What little we do know of Yasavi’s life and Sufi career thus places him not among the nomadic Turks of the steppe, but among settled Turks inhabiting the mercantile towns of the Syr Darya valley; indeed, early traditions about Ahmad Yasavi’s immediate successors link them not with nomadic lifestyles of the steppe, but with urban crafts and sedentary occupations. They also show Yasavi himself as a typical ‘mainstream’ Sufi leader of this era, managing a Sufi hostel or khānqāh (another urban institution) and training his community of disciples in a predominantly, and long-standing, Muslim environment.6 Whatever Trimingham’s characterisation of the Yasavi Sufi tradition, in his classic but flawed study of the Sufi orders, as ‘a ṭarīqa of wanderers’ might have meant, in terms of a conceptualisation of Sufi history, it was not based on any actual evidence about Yasavi or his early followers and reflected the sort of cluelessness about Yasavi’s Central Asian environment that characterises much of the literature that champions the role of Yasavi in the Islamisation of the Turks. In short, the notion that Ahmad Yasavi was involved in Islamisation among the nomads, in the steppe, reflects neither the likely historical era in which he lived nor the likely sociopolitical context in which he was active; in fact, that notion more likely

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reflects stereotypical assumptions about Sufis, and about nomads, as well as anachronistic projections based on the devotion of later nomads – the Qazaqs – not to Ahmad Yasavi the Sufi shaykh (like humans and dinosaurs, the Qazaqs did not ‘overlap’ with Ahmad Yasavi), but to the shrine of Ahmad Yasavi.7 At this point, we might ask whether there is any aspect of Ahmad Yasavi’s reputation as an Islamiser that might be preserved; though my aim is not to save something of that image, which I would argue has been quite poorly drawn, I believe there are some aspects of the Yasavi tradition that do reflect an involvement in Islamisation of sorts – not in the way Islamisation has tended to be viewed, but in ways that point towards a better understanding of Islamisation as a historical process. I have elsewhere discussed the involvement of Sufi shaykhs of the Yasavi tradition, active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the formation of social bonds with nomadic Turkic communities in Central Asia,8 and I would argue that important correctives to our understanding of both Islamisation and Sufi history may be derived from focusing on the social development through which such communities became formal disciples of Sufi leaders, mostly within hereditary lineages, linked with the Yasavi tradition; but here I would stress another kind of process, one for which that social development no doubt provided the context. I have in mind several sets of narratives that suggest Ahmad Yasavi’s portrayal as an Islamising saint, evoking motifs and narrative structures common in other conversion narratives of the Mongol era; they are, of course, just narratives, and we should not take them as accounts of what happened, and thereby misconstrue them as ‘evidence’ of Ahmad Yasavi’s historical role in bringing Islam to the rulers or peoples mentioned in the accounts. At the same time, as products of the Mongol era, these narratives remind us of a significant difference between the period that produced them and the pre-Mongol period for which we may now discard any notion that Sufis were the key bearers of Islam to the Turks, to the nomads, or in general. With the Mongol era, that is, there is a noticeable change in the rhetoric and ‘poetics’ of Islamisation, reflecting changes in the organisational structure and appeal of Sufi communities: figures linked with ‘Sufism’ became the quintessential ‘holy men’ suitable for the role of bringing Islam to powerful infidels, in narrative traditions, and it became advantageous, in the Mongol era and later, to claim credit for guiding particular rulers to Islam (a phenomenon that shaped later versions of conversion tales set in pre-Mongol times as well). The latter issues must be kept in mind in evaluating the narrative traditions themselves; we must refine our understanding of how Sufis might have been involved in Islamisation in and after the Mongol era, and the narratives may help us do this if properly handled, but not even narrative traditions circulated in the pre-Mongol era portray Sufis as Islamisers. We thus face different issues when attempting to evaluate the role of Sufis in Islamisation in these two periods. With regard to Ahmad Yasavi, it is largely because of the scarcity among narrative traditions focused on him of the kinds of stories typically associated with Sufi shaykhs – stories of his guidance of disciples, of issues that arose in khānqāh life, of rivalries with other shaykhs, and so on – that the stories signalling his identification as an Islamising saint form such a substantial component of his saintly persona. The narrative cycles in question, reflected in a wide range of hagiographical sources and also often in more recent ethnographically recorded oral tradition,

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may be grouped into three broad frameworks.9 Here it is not possible to fully unpack the narratives, but I will briefly outline the basic stories and suggest some conclusions. The first is a series of stories, which I have reviewed elsewhere,10 involving Ahmad Yasavi’s enclosure in a subterranean seclusionary retreat in which he (sometimes with his disciples) endures intense heat, performs the Sufi dhikr (invocation), sweats profusely and not only remains unharmed, but ‘breaks out’ of the enclosure to demonstrate his sanctity and power, sometimes in the presence of a ruler, sometimes for a still wider audience (the accounts involving a ruler show Ahmad Yasavi thereby gaining the devotion of ‘Qazan Khan’, whose name is most likely not an echo of the Islamising Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan, but rather an echo of the heroic figure of Salur Qazan, hero of the Oghuz epic tales linked with the figure of Dede Qorqut). As suggested in the earlier study, the imagery of the fiery hot enclosure is central here, and closely resembles the imagery more fully and directly evoked in connection with the Islamising saint Baba Tükles, credited with the conversion to Islam of Özbek Khan, ruler of the Golden Horde.11 According to a narrative first recorded in the sixteenth century, this saint was enclosed within a fiery oven pit, but was spared from the flames to emerge, drenched with sweat, and confirm the power of Islam to an infidel khan and his subjects. While he was confined within the oven chamber, the sound of his dhikr could be heard outside, and even the manipulation of cups described in the account of Baba Tükles, involving a drink made of honey, is dimly reflected in the element of the khum-i ʿishq (lit. the ‘wine vat of mystical love’) found in the stories about Yasavi – a miraculous drinking vessel variously described as containing the sweat of dhikr-performing Sufis, as quenching the thirst of the same Sufis and as ‘congealing’ from fire itself, and then passing miraculously to Yasavi and to one of his disciples. The imagery is masked in Yasavi’s case by the fragmentation of the narrative as a whole, in the various sources in which the elements of the story are recorded and by the ‘spiritualising’ Sufi interpretations applied to the dramatic imagery, piecemeal and as a whole, in the hagiographical sources.12 Despite this fragmentation and the interpretative intervention by the later hagiographers, however, these stories taken together clearly suggest that the figure of Ahmad Yasavi was infused with the motifs and frameworks associated in the Mongol era with other saints credited with Islamisation. This reminds us, in turn, that among the constituencies that preserved and adapted the memory of Ahmad Yasavi’s saintly persona were communities involved in Mongol-era Islamisation in some way, whether as agents or representatives of Islamisation, or as groups ‘targeted’ for Islamisation, but in either case commemorating the success of the process using the rhetorical language of the Sufi conversion narrative. Moreover, the demonstration of the saint’s power in the presence of a ruler, noted above as part of the cycle involving the ‘fire pit’, figures prominently in a second narrative, itself likely a composite, in which Ahmad Yasavi as a child feeds a multitude with a single piece of bread, conjures and then allays a storm, and moves a mountain, all to demonstrate his power in the presence of a ruler and all following the failure of the saints first convened by the ruler to accomplish the moving of the mountain. I have not discussed this narrative in any depth elsewhere, so it may be worth closer consideration here.

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The story is found only in two works by Hazini, a Yasavi shaykh originally from the region of Hisar, in present-day Tajikistan, who moved to Istanbul and wrote several important sources on Yasavi traditions during the second half of the sixteenth century; the narrative finds no echo in the early seventeenth-century Lamahat min Nafahat al-Quds, the most important Yasavi hagiography, nor in any other source I have found. The versions given in Hazini’s works differ somewhat, suggesting his own developing appreciation for the story, but suggesting also that his approach to ‘spiritualising’ the narrative and clothing it in specifically Sufi garb shifted as well, in the process concealing some important and likely original elements in the tale. In the later of Hazini’s works to include this story – his Ottoman Turkish Cevahirü’lEbrar13 dated 1002/1593–4, better known because of its use already by Köprülü – we are told that a ruler named Yasavi (!) held sway over Mawarannahr, spending his winters in Samarqand and his summers in the mountains (ṭāğistān) of Turkistan. One summer, he sought to hunt near one of the mountains there called ‘Qarachuq’,14 but could not due to the impassable terrain; wishing that ‘the mountain of Qarachuq might become a broad, expansive plain’ (ḳarāçuḳ ṭāğı daşt-u-hāmūn ola), he summoned the saints of his realm to have them remove the mountain altogether, through their prayers. When the saints gathered and failed to achieve the ruler’s aim, they realised that ‘Khwaja Ahmad, the son of Shaykh Ibrahim, the ʿAlid’ (ʿalavī-zāda, no doubt alluding to his descent from Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya15), had not been invited because he was still young; they summoned him from Sayram and so Khwaja Ahmad went to Yasï to ‘the assembly of the saints of God’, presenting as his offering a single piece of bread (bir dāne atmek) that he had brought wrapped up in a meal-cloth left to him by his father. He reserved to himself, however, the right to divide up the bread, and when he did so it proved sufficient for all those present. The assembled 99,000 saints of God, together with the ruler and his troops, acknowledged the boy’s greatness, and implored him to accomplish the original task of the gathering: to remove the mountain. At that point, Khwaja Ahmad, wearing his father’s khirqa (Sufi cloak), entered a contemplative state and at once a great storm arose, flooding the land with rain. The assembled shaykhs, floating on their prayer rugs, cried out for help. When Ahmad thereupon removed his khirqa from his head, the storm stopped at once and, as the sun came out, everyone saw that the Qarachuq mountain had disappeared. In its place, the account continues, is the village of Qarachuq, ‘which was the dwelling place and homeland of most of his descendants and posterity (awlād wa dharīyāt)’. The ‘ruler Yasavi’, meanwhile, sought the young saint’s aid in ensuring that his name would last until the Day of Resurrection; Ahmad agreed, affirming that, ‘Whoever in the world loves me, let him make mention of me through your name.’ And for that reason, the saint came to be known as Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi. The version given in the earlier of Hazini’s two works that present this story – the Persian Jamiʿ al-Murshidin16 dated 972/1564–5 – begins by affirming that ‘a ruler named “Yasavi”, based in Samarqand, once went to hunt in Turkistan’; he had never hunted before at ‘a mountain near the town of Yasi, called Qarachuq ṭāqï’ (qarīb bi-shahr-i Yasī kūhī būd kih ānrā Qarāchūq ṭāqī mīguftand), and sought advice from one of his viziers, explaining that past rulers had all left monuments and that he wished his legacy to be the removal of ‘this mountain of Qarachuq’ and its replacement by a hunting ground (shikār-gāh). In this version, it is the vizier, asked to find

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a way to accomplish this task, who advises ‘the ruler Yasavi’ to gather the saints and make use of their power to remove the mountain. The ruler approved, and assembled in his presence ‘the officers of the court of lawfulness and the wise men of the palace of obedience’ (chāwūshān-i dargāh-i ḥalāl wa bā-hūshān-i bārgāh-i imtithāl) as well as the recluses (khalwatīyān wa ʿuzlatīyān). All the assembled saints tried to accomplish their task, but to no effect, ‘until they brought the holy Sultan Khwaja Ahmad’, to whom all the other saints appealed even though he had not yet reached maturity. Yasavi had with him a small barley loaf and managed to divide it equally among the 99,000 assembled saints. After this miracle, the account explains (as in the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar) how Ahmad entered a contemplative state while wearing the khirqa of his father, Ibrahim Ata, producing a heavy rainstorm that subsided when he raised his head from the khirqa; when he did so, the storm was calmed, the sun was shining and the mountain was gone without a trace. Seeing this wonder, the ruler fell at Ahmad’s feet ‘and repented’; the assembled saints ‘all entered his silsila (chain of initiatic transmission)’ and, from then on, Ahmad became known as ‘the chief of 99,000 saints’. The ruler, meanwhile, asked Ahmad to perform a wonder that would link him with the saint forever, whereupon ‘Ahmad declared, “My name is Ahmad, and his name is Yasavi; whoever loves me will say my name with his name attached, so that he may attain his goal of kinship.” For that reason, they call him “Ahmad Yasavi”.’ The account from the Jamiʿ al-Murshidin is thus more or less the same as that given in the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar, but two elements in the story were changed, slightly, during the thirty years that separated the two works. One is the result of the chief miracle. In the later work, the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar, there is no mention, even, that the ruler and the saints were impressed by the feat they had sought in the first place; the miracle leads to the ‘clearing’ of a place for the settlement in which Yasavi’s descendants would dwell, and it yields also, implicitly, the ruler’s desire to have his name preserved by being linked with the prodigious saint. In the earlier work, by contrast, the miracle yields the ruler’s ‘repentance’ and the collective entry into Ahmad Yasavi’s silsila by the assembled ‘saints’; it seems likely that even this presentation reflects Hazini’s interpretation, in line with Sufi terminology, of an ‘original’ narrative in which the miraculous demonstration of power in removing the mountain of Qarachuq prompted the ruler’s conversion, rather than ‘repentance’ (as with the demonstration of power in the presence of the ruler ‘Qazan’ noted above), and the communal conversion via ‘discipleship’ not of a group of less powerful ‘saints’, but of the ruler’s non-Muslim subjects. The other element revealing a slight shift between the two works is the reason for the ruler’s wish to move the mountain. In the later source, his wish to hunt at the site is mentioned, but seems incidental; however, in the earlier work, the ruler is specifically said to seek the transformation of Qarachuq into a hunting ground (shikār-gāh). If we keep in mind that, in Central Asia by the sixteenth century, the chief meaning attached to the old term for a sacred, reserved space used for royal burials or other rituals – qoruq – was simply a hunting ground reserved for royal use, it is likely that Hazini misunderstood the role and significance of the qoruq in the version of the story he received, and so interpreted it simply as a royal hunting ground. His earlier rendering of the story may thus be taken as signalling the circulation of a still-earlier

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version in which – as in the case of the conversion narrative involving Baba Tükles – the challenge, ‘contest’ and miraculous display of power through which Ahmad Yasavi induced the conversion of this ruler and his subjects were set in the ritually charged sacred space of the qoruq.17 To be sure, the imagery is again masked, somewhat, by the improbable purpose of telling the story in its hagiographical context – it supposedly explains how Ahmad Yasavi came to be known by that name, which he took from the ruler whose name was Yasavi (though it also serves as an etiological legend for the town of Qarachuq, ‘founded’ through a saint’s miraculous prowess) – but it suggests not only the kind of ‘contest’ of saintly powers, in a ruler’s presence, that figures in conversion narrative, but an adaptation of ‘weather magic’ as well, as a demonstration of a saint’s, and a religion’s, power. Given the miraculous deeds themselves, the setting and the transformation at the end, with the ruler ‘repenting’ and the ‘failed saints’ joining Yasavi’s community, it seems likely that the narrative antecedents of this tale involved a narrative of Islamisation with a familiar pattern, as the saint in the story receives the submission of a king and his people following a display of superior power. A third narrative complex – involving Ahmad Yasavi and the Dog-Men – is far more extensive, in terms of the venues in which it has been recorded and in terms of the number of versions available; it is preserved in hagiographical works dating from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also in oral tradition recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among diverse tribal and village communities today classed as Türkmens, Uzbeks, Qazaqs and Qaraqalpaqs. It is also, I would argue, among the narrative cycles noted here, the most powerful reminder of the ways in which Sufis may indeed have been involved in the process of Islamisation in the Mongol era, not as ‘preachers’ of Islamic doctrine or writers of ‘missionary’ poetry or counterparts to shamans, as in Köprülü’s assumptions, and not as wielders of miraculous transformative powers as in some of the narratives themselves, but as purveyors of a social idiom of reconciliation and assimilation, and as embodiments of that idiom in concrete communal terms. There is unfortunately insufficient space for an exposition and analysis of the full range of variants, recorded in written sources or by ethnographers; I have outlined several versions of this narrative complex, however, in an earlier article,18 with attention to the major variants and to the echoes, in the narratives, of motifs and imagery known from Inner Asian hero stories linked with Oghuz Turkic traditions. My focus there, however, was on features in various versions of the story that seem to signal phases of oral and written transmission, and although it may suffice to refer the reader to that earlier study for most references, it is important for present purposes to contextualise the narratives in the framework of Islamisation during the Mongol era. The stories comprising this narrative complex are noteworthy for several reasons: first, they link the origin of the community in question with the life of Ahmad Yasavi, but they do so by stressing the communal ancestors’ conflict with the saint; second, they clearly reflect patterns and mythic structures used to narrate sacred origins evident in pre-Islamic times, among many Inner Asian peoples, but have adapted them to Muslim contexts; and, third, they have typically been studied in isolation from one another by ethnographers and historians, not only preventing a broader appreciation

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of the patterns they illustrate, but also fostering some curious misinterpretations that reveal the predilections of some modern historiographies.19 This narrative complex, focused on the conflicts between Ahmad Yasavi and a particular community living near him, includes two basic sets of stories, sometimes found independently and sometimes found together. One set of narratives focuses on the hostile community’s staged accusation that Ahmad Yasavi stole an animal from them: the community’s leaders place the animal’s carcass in Yasavi’s khānqāh (or some other structure belonging to him), but, when they come to investigate, Yasavi addresses them as dogs, and they thus turn into dogs. In some versions of this basic narrative, the rest of the community is also transformed into dogs, but reverts to human form when they acknowledge their offence and Yasavi reconciles with them; in other versions, the rest of the hostile community is spared the actual canine transformation but is nevertheless profoundly transformed by it, whether through migration – as the still-canine leaders turn on the community and chase it to a new homeland – or through vicarious chastisement – as the community watches its now-canine leaders devour one another – or through a physical marking – as the community is ‘cursed’ to bear canine tails ever afterwards as a sign of its hostilities with the saint. In all cases, the saint’s ‘victory’ over the community, marked by the canine transformation of at least some of its members, is understood as the formative moment in the community’s history. The other set of narratives ostensibly involves the same community, which murders Ahmad Yasavi’s only son; instead of seeking vengeance, however, the saint reconciles with the murderous community. He becomes, in effect, their spiritual counsellor, and in some versions he establishes marital ties with them, giving his daughter in marriage to the killer. Here too the saint’s enemies become his disciples, in effect, or even his kinsmen, and their initially hostile involvement with the saint is what brings about their transformation. These two sets of stories – often combined, as noted – may be understood to reflect two strategies for marking and memorialising the Islamisation of the offending community, transformed by their encounter with Ahmad Yasavi. Significantly, both sets of stories evoke imagery and motifs found in legends of origin and hero tales among non-Muslim peoples brought into contact with the Muslim world, specifically with communities of dervishes claiming the legacy of Ahmad Yasavi. The image of the canine transformation naturally evokes stories of canine or lupine ancestry among Inner Asian peoples, but the imagery of the murdered son likewise echoes stories drawn from Turkic lore circulating in the Mongol era.20 These evocations suggest that the Sufi purveyors of these stories were engaged in ‘reclassification’ as a strategy of Islamisation; that is, they were taking elements of the indigenous lore of non-Muslim communities and infusing it with meaning in a Muslim context, with the encounter with a saint marking the hinge of the transformation. If the elements of Inner Asian tradition and narrative patterns reflected in the sources noted here, all focused on the Oghuz, suggest some of the possible building blocks of the narratives about Ahmad Yasavi and the Dog-Men, and if the dozens of ethnographic recordings of versions of the story attest to its ongoing usefulness and meaningfulness as a way of recounting communal origins, what do the earlier hagiographical recordings of the narrative, or of its fragments, reveal? As in the case of the other narrative cycles discussed here, the stories of the butchered ox and the murdered

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son have been overlaid with Sufi interpretations to some extent, but here the narrative logic is both more dramatic and more difficult to mask. The stories are themselves, I would argue, artefacts of the period of Islamisation, and they speak directly – if in ‘mythic’ hagiographical language – to the social environment we must envision when we try to take stock of what Islamisation entailed. That is, as the stories depict Ahmad Yasavi grieving for his son but then establishing marital ties with his son’s killers, they provide a religious idiom by which to show enemies, responsible for bringing death and destruction in the most intimate terms, in effect becoming kinsmen in the most intimate terms; in this way, they both encapsulate and narrate the assimilative social process of Islamisation in the Mongol era and suggest the role that Sufi groups might have played in that process. In one of the earliest echoes of the story of the murdered son, already recorded in the fourteenth century – still in the midst of the process of Islamisation in Mongol-ruled Central Asia – Yasavi is made to pray on behalf of the killers and to explain that returning evil for evil is the path of the sharia, while returning good for evil is the way of the Sufi ṭarīqa;21 it is difficult not to see here the distinctive inclusive and assimilationist ground being claimed on behalf of the Yasavi Sufi community in a narrative context that elsewhere inspired stories filled with similarly distinctive metaphors of social reconciliation and kinship. Indeed, a key feature linking these stories is a complex of conflict, sacrifice and reconciliation combined with elements of exchange, transformation and a sacrificial meal. In the story of the stolen ox, the ox itself is a sacrificial victim brought to Yasavi, but consumed by the killers, and the canine transformation marks the beginning of the community’s repaired relationship with the saint; the sacrificial motif is presaged by Yasavi’s comment, in one version, when he dismisses the calumnies of the hostile tribe by saying, ‘Let them eat my flesh if they want.’22 In the story of the murdered son, the slain boy is the victim, brought to Yasavi, his severed head spoken of as a melon ready to eat; yet the culprits reconcile with the saint and are indeed bound to him more strongly, as he forms marital bonds with them. Moreover, in both stories the offending ‘tribe’ is both enemy and ancestor: in the stolen ox story, a descent group is formed through the miracle worked by Yasavi, who is thus genealogically linked with the outcome of the conflict; in the murdered son story, more obviously, the killers are enemies who are then made relatives through gift exchange and marital ties, with Yasavi again implicated genealogically in the communal consequences of the conflict. At the same time, focusing on the distinctive ‘miracle’ featured in these narratives – the canine transformation – also suggests the ‘interpretative’ role of Sufis during the Mongol era in reframing an earlier stratum of communal legends of origin. Indeed it seems likely that Ahmad Yasavi’s appearance in the story itself reflects a key stage in the narrative’s Islamisation. That is, we might suppose that a particular Islamising community familiar with legends of origin asserting canine ancestry used the saint as the pivotal agent for ‘explaining’ the ancestor’s canine character. The implicit reversal of the story’s mythic logic may be significant as well, in the context of the displacement or overturning of previous symbolic or ritual patterns that is often evident in tales of Islamisation: in the hypothetical pre-Islamic tale, the ancestors are conceived of as dogs or wolves, whose descendants implicitly turn into human beings, but this development is turned around in Yasavi’s transformation of a community’s human antecedents into dogs (in some versions, moreover, that transformation is only partial or temporary).

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The insertion of the saint’s role here is quite simple, of course, but it has far-reaching consequences (for both content and structure), and may indeed help us understand that the narratives of Yasavi and the Dog-Men were shaped not merely by elements of a pre-Islamic communal legend of origin, but by the evocation of those elements within an updated framework in order to supply a story of Islamisation. Indeed, the key equation in this process identifies ‘Islamic origins’ with ‘communal origins’ and casts the saint – instead of the ancestor – as the key player. From this perspective, we may envision a threefold process in which a pagan tale of communal origins is mined for narrative elements to recount the community’s adoption of Islam, with the latter then marking the beginnings of a ‘new’ Islamised community and thus reverting to a tale of communal origins (in which the community’s Muslim character is assumed). The essential change in structure, of course, occurs at the time of the tale’s initial Islamisation. It is perhaps the curious aftermath of the story, in its earliest recordings, that most strongly suggests an original focus on Islamisation; indeed, the aftermath – in which the hostile people repent and Yasavi is reconciled with them (even to the point of establishing marital ties with them) – seems to make much more sense if we interpret the whole tale as one in which Islamisation is being substituted for an original focus on communal origins. The saint, we may understand, did not simply chastise a hostile community for offending him, but turned it from a group of pagan ‘doubters’ and enemies into a Muslim community; the ‘conversion’ is effected by the canine transformation, which not only constitutes, as a miracle, the decisive proof that induces the people’s adoption of Islam (and their submission to the saint), but ‘marks’ them as well, assuring that their descendants bear a sign not of their canine ‘origin’, but of the canine episode that was the key to their Islamisation.23

Conclusion The narrative complexes briefly reviewed here suggest one of the ways in which Sufis, and those of the Yasavi tradition in particular, may be understood to have played a role in the process of Islamisation during the Mongol era. There were other ways, as well, beyond the roles of the Sufi preacher or poetical proselytiser still often imagined: Sufis served as prominent ‘reclassifiers’, identifying or asserting correspondences between Mongol and Turkic genealogical and historical traditions; they were purveyors of specialised knowledge in the occult sciences; they embodied sacred ancestry in ways amenable to kinship traditions in Mongol and Turkic societies; they formed corporate structures with substantial economic and political influence; they were closely linked with shrine traditions that mediated between Muslim and Mongol societies; and they served as sources of social cohesion in the context of the disruptions of nomadic tribal and social structures entailed by Mongol empire-building and military organisation, offering social bonds (framable in familial terms but also in terms of the bonds of master and disciple) and mediating other social, political and economic connections. In connection with all of these, however, Sufis served as developers and purveyors of narratives of Islamisation that featured Sufis in leading roles. The narratives, we should understand, do not tell about Islamisation as much as they embody it themselves, adapting earlier narrative structures and themes into a Muslim framework and providing a model whereby conquering enemies could be envisioned as becoming

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neighbours and kinsmen. This, after all, is how Ahmad Yasavi and the later representatives of the Yasavi Sufi tradition may be understood to have been active in Islamisation among the Turks of Central Asia: they framed the narratives about him to reflect their experience on the social ‘front lines’ of Islamisation.

Notes 1. Köprülü’s contributions to the study of the Yasavi tradition begin with his Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar, first published in Istanbul in 1918; see now the English translation: Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, ed. and trans. Gary Leiser and Robert Dankoff (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. Reuven Amitai, ‘Towards a Pre-History of the Islamization of the Turks: A Re-reading of Ibn Faḍlān’s Riḥla,’ in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 277–96 (esp. pp. 281–3). 3. For a broader discussion of Köprülü’s views on Ahmad Yasavi and the Yasavi Sufi tradition, see my Foreword to Köprülü, Early Mystics, pp. viii–xxvii. 4. See, for instance, the comments regarding ‘Sufi missionaries’ in the Indian context, in Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 157–60. 5. Jürgen Paul, ‘Islamizing Sufis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 297–317; D. G. Tor, ‘The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Era and the Reshaping of the Muslim World’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009), pp. 279–99; Amitai, ‘Towards a Pre-History’. 6. See my discussion in ‘Aḥmad Yasavī in the Work of Burhān al-Dīn Qïlïch: The Earliest Reference to a Famously Obscure Central Asian Sufi Saint’, Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 67, no. 3 (2013), pp. 837–79. 7. The ethnonym ‘Qazaq’ refers to the titular nationality of the country known as Kazakhstan, a name that reflects a Russian alteration of the native ethnonym (to distinguish it, in Cyrillic script, from the Russian term kazak, used to refer to the people known in English as Cossacks); the name of the country is now enshrined in international usage (though as transcribed from the country’s official language it would be ‘Qazaqstan’, leading to a shortlived post-independence attempt to promote the official form ‘Kazakstan’), but there is little reason to refer to the people using the Russianized form ‘Kazakh’. The form ‘Qazaq’ reflects the Arabic-script spelling of the term (often as qazāq) in historical sources, the modern pronunciation in the Qazaq language and the standard transcription of the name from literary Qazaq. On the role of the Yasavi Sufi tradition, and Ahmad Yasavi’s shrine, among the Qazaqs, see my ‘The Yasavī Presence in the Dasht-i Qïpchaq from the 16th to 18th Century’, in Niccolò Pianciola and Paolo Sartori (eds), Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe, 18th–Early 20th Centuries, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 844 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013), pp. 27–67. 8. See my ‘Yasavī Šayḫs in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Communal Sufi Affiliations in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, in La civiltà timuride come fenomeno internazionale, ed. Michele Bernardini (= Oriente Moderno [Rome], n.s., 15 [76], no. 2 [1996]), pp. 173–88; reprinted in Devin DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Variorum Collected Studies VII (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 9. In fact, a fourth narrative complex featuring Aḥmad Yasavi also suggests its likely formulation and circulation in the context of Islamisation in Central Asia, with some versions

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

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seemingly evoking the ritual displacement or reclassification of Inner Asian funerary practices involving the sacrifice of horses; this complex, however, appears to have been articulated chiefly in Naqshbandi sources and in the context of Naqshbandi–Yasavi rivalry, and the other distinctive problems it presents – and the wide range of narrative motifs and variants included in it – preclude its consideration here. Devin DeWeese, ‘Sacred Places and “Public” Narratives: The Shrine of Aḥmad Yasavī in Hagiographical Traditions of the Yasavī Sufi Order, 16th–17th Centuries’, Muslim World 90, nos 3–4 (2000), pp. 353–76; reprinted in DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Variorum Collected Studies X (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). See my Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Elements of this narrative complex appear in two works by Hazini, the leading Yasavi hagiographer of the second half of the sixteenth century, and in the major hagiographical source on the Yasavi tradition, the Lamahat min Nafahat al-Quds by ʿAlim Shaykh ʿAliyabadi, completed in 1035/1626. The ‘spiritualization’ of the imagery, with interpretations using familiar Sufi technical terminology, appears much stronger in Hazini’s works than in the Lamahat; see DeWeese, ‘Sacred Places,’ pp. 362–6. Hazini, Cevâhiru’l-Ebrâr min Emvâc-ı Bihâr (Yesevî Menâkıbnamesi), ed. Cihan Okuyucu (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi, 1995), pp. 41–3; MS Istanbul University, T3893, ff. 66–70. The toponym ‘Qarachuq’ has referred, since at least the eleventh century, to the mountains to the north of the middle Syr Darya, in the south of present-day Kazakhstan, known now as the Qaratau. On this element of Yasavi lore, see Devin DeWeese et al., Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, vol. 1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries/Islamizatsiia i sakral’nye rodoslovnye v Tsentral’noi Azii: Nasledie Iskhak Baba v narrativnoi i genealogicheskoi traditsiiakh, tom 1: Otkrytie puti dlia islama: rasskaz ob Iskhak Babe, XIV–XIX vv., with an appendix by Alfrid Bustanov (Almaty: Daik Press, 2013). Hazini, Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orient. Oct. 2847, ff. 70a–71b; see the description of the manuscript in Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. 14, part 1: Persische Handschriften, ed. Wilhelm Eilers, descr. Wilhelm Heinz (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968), pp. 274–5, no. 352. See my discussion of the qoruq’s role in Islamisation narratives in Islamization and Native Religion, chs 3 and 4. Devin DeWeese, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men: Narratives of Hero and Saint at the Frontier of Orality and Textuality’, in Judith Pfeiffer and Manfred Kropp (eds), Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Istanbul, March 28-30, 2001, Beiruter Texte und Studien 111 (Beirut: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2007), pp. 147–73. Most discussions of these narratives were offered by Soviet historians familiar with the oral recordings of the tales and with some of the echoes of Oghuz traditions noted here; predictably, given Soviet academic predispositions, these scholars sought in the narratives not religious language reflecting historical circumstances, but straightforward historical evidence on the migrations of particular peoples during the presumed lifetime of Ahmad Yasavi. One Soviet researcher insisted that ‘probably these legends reflect events connected with the Seljuq and Qarakhitay migrations’ (A. Dzhikiev, ‘Narodnye predaniia o proiskhozhdenii turkmen’, in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie po ètnogenezu turkmenskogo naroda: Tezisy dokladov i nauchnykh soveshchanii, 23-25 febralia 1967 goda [Ashkhabad: Akademiia nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, Institut istorii im. Sh. Batyrova, 1967], pp. 16–17); elsewhere the same scholar insisted that the stories reflect the period when the Türkmens

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20.

21. 22. 23.

islamisation lived along the Syr Darya (A. Dzhikiev, ‘Materialy po ètnografii mangyshlakskikh turkmen’, in Trudy Instituta istorii, arkheologii i ètnografii Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, vol. 7, Seriia ètnograficheskaia [Ashkhabad: Izd-vo Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, 1963], pp. 192–202), while another simply stressed that the similarity of the legends recorded among the Türkmens and Qaraqalpaqs demonstrated the close contacts and kinship between these peoples (L. S. Tolstova, Karakalpaki za predelami Khorezmskogo oazisa v XIX–nachale XX veka [Nukus and Tashkent: Karakalpakskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1963], p. 183 n. 1). In other cases, Soviet researchers stressed the stories of conflict between the groups who transmitted these stories and Ahmad Yasavi, a ‘religious’ figure, as evidence of popular hostility towards the Muslim clergy and as historical evidence that particular pagan Turkic communities fought against ‘Muslim missionaries’ (see A. Dzhikiev, Ètnograficheskii ocherk naseleniia Iugo-Vostochnogo Turkmenistana (konets XIX–nachalo XX v.) [Ashkhabad: Ylym, 1972], pp. 44–50); K. Niiazklychev, ‘Nekotorye voprosy ètnicheskoi istorii turkmen-chovdurov’, Voprosy ètnografii turkmen (Sbornik statei prepodavatelei TGU) (Ashkhabad: Ministerstvo Vyschego i Srednego Spetsial’nogo Obrazovaniia Turkmenskoi SSR, Turkmenskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet im. A. M. Gor’kogo, 1980), pp. 17–28 (esp. pp. 22–3), saw the story as evidence that some groups among the Türkmens were ‘unhappy with their oppression by the Muslim clergy’. The closest parallels, briefly, include Rashid al-Din’s account of Oghuz Khan’s campaign into the land of Qïl Baraq, ruled by It Baraq, where the men resembled dogs (a story echoed, and applied to the Mongols, in a Latin source from the mid-thirteenth century); the account of the Oghuz hero Salur Qazan’s hostilities with the tribe of the It [Dog] Bechene, recorded in the seventeenth-century Shajara-yi Tarakima of the Khwarazmian khan Abu’l-Ghazi; the tale of the pillaging of the home of the same Salur Qazan in the famous collection of Oghuz epic tales, recorded most likely in the fifteenth century, known as the Book of Dede Qorqut; and another story, recorded by Rashid al-Din, about a descendant of Oghuz Khan with special powers and a sacred dog. See my discussion in ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men’, pp. 152–3. See DeWeese, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men’, p. 161. Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, ff. 76a–77a. This interpretation may also help us understand why the ‘mark’ assigned to the community could be recalled without shame, despite the circumstances that produced it; it became a sign of their Islamisation and reconciliation with Yasavi, not of their initial crimes. We should not lose sight of the fact that the canine transformation in the story evokes a particularly disgusting image in a Muslim context, and that the story indeed hinges on a sense of disgust: the hostile tribe reveals its bestial character as the prelude to its ‘redemption’ and Islamisation.

Bibliography Amitai, Reuven, ‘Towards a Pre-History of the Islamization of the Turks: A Re-reading of Ibn Faḍlān’s Riḥla’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 277–96. DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). DeWeese, Devin, ‘Sacred Places and “Public” Narratives: The Shrine of Aḥmad Yasavī in Hagiographical Traditions of the Yasavī Sufi Order, 16th–17th Centuries’, Muslim World 90, nos 3–4 (2000), pp. 353–76; reprinted in DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Variorum Collected Studies X (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

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DeWeese, Devin, Foreword to Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, ed. and trans. Gary Leiser and Robert Dankoff (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. viii–xxvii. DeWeese, Devin, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men: Narratives of Hero and Saint at the Frontier of Orality and Textuality’, in Judith Pfeiffer and Manfred Kropp (eds), Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Istanbul, March 28-30, 2001, Beiruter Texte und Studien 111 (Beirut: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), pp. 147–73. DeWeese, Devin, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Variorum Collected Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). DeWeese, Devin, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī in the Work of Burhān al-Dīn Qïlïch: The Earliest Reference to a Famously Obscure Central Asian Sufi Saint’, Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 67, no. 3 (2013), pp. 837–79. DeWeese, Devin, ‘The Yasavī Presence in the Dasht-i Qïpchaq from the 16th to 18th Century’, in Niccolò Pianciola and Paolo Sartori (eds), Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe, 18th-Early 20th Centuries, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 844 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013), pp. 27–67. DeWeese, Devin, ‘Yasavī Šayḫs in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Communal Sufi Affiliations in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, in La civiltà timuride come fenomeno internazionale, ed. Michele Bernardini (= Oriente Moderno [Rome], n.s., 15 [76], no. 2 [1996]), pp. 173–88; reprinted in Devin DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Variorum Collected Studies VII (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). DeWeese, Devin, Ashirbek Muminov, Durbek Rahimjanov and Shavasil Ziyadov, Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, vol. 1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries / Islamizatsiia i sakral’nye rodoslovnye v Tsentral’noi Azii: Nasledie Iskhak Baba v narrativnoi i genealogicheskoi traditsiiakh, tom 1: Otkrytie puti dlia islama: rasskaz ob Iskhak Babe, XIV–XIX vv., with an appendix by Alfrid Bustanov (Almaty: Daik Press, 2013). Dzhikiev, A., Ètnograficheskii ocherk naseleniia Iugo-Vostochnogo Turkmenistana (konets XIX–nachalo XX v.) (Ashkhabad: Ylym, 1972). Dzhikiev, A., ‘Materialy po ètnografii mangyshlakskikh turkmen’, in Trudy Instituta istorii, arkheologii i ètnografii Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, vol. 7, Seriia ètnograficheskaia (Ashkhabad: Izd-vo Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, 1963), pp. 192–202. Dzhikiev, A., ‘Narodnye predaniia o proiskhozhdenii turkmen’, in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie po ètnogenezu turkmenskogo naroda: Tezisy dokladov i nauchnykh soveshchanii, 23-25 febralia 1967 goda (Ashkhabad: Akademiia nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, Institut istorii im. Sh. Batyrova, 1967), pp. 16–17. Ernst, Carl W., Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Hazini, Cevâhiru’l-Ebrâr min emvâc-ı bihâr (Yesevî Menâkıbnamesi), ed. Cihan Okuyucu (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi, 1995); MS Istanbul University, T3893. Hazini, Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orient. Oct. 2847; described in Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. 14, part 1: Persische Handschriften, ed. Wilhelm Eilers, descr. Wilhelm Heinz (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968), pp. 274–5, no. 352. Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, ed. and trans. Gary Leiser and Robert Dankoff (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Niiazklychev, K., ‘Nekotorye voprosy ètnicheskoi istorii turkmen-chovdurov’, Voprosy ètnografii turkmen (Sbornik statei prepodavatelei TGU) (Ashkhabad: Ministerstvo Vyschego i Srednego Spetsial’nogo Obrazovaniia Turkmenskoi SSR, Turkmenskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet im. A. M. Gor’kogo, 1980), pp. 17–28.

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Paul, Jürgen, ‘Islamizing Sufis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 297–317. Tolstova, L. S., Karakalpaki za predelami Khorezmskogo oazisa v XIX–nachale XX veka (Nukus and Tashkent: Karakalpakskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1963). Tor, D. G., ‘The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Era and the Reshaping of the Muslim World’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 72, no. 2 (2009), pp. 279–99.

18 THE ROLE OF THE DOMESTIC SPHERE IN THE ISLAMISATION OF THE MONGOLS* Bruno De Nicola

As for his [Chinggis Khan’s] children and grandchildren, several of them have chosen a religion according to their inclination, some adopting Islam, others embracing Christianity, others selecting idolatry and others again cleaving to the ancient canon of their fathers and forefathers and inclining in no direction; but these are now a minority.1 The Islamisation of the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exhibits some distinctive features compared with the adoption of Islam by other groups. Unlike the cases of the Christian communities of the Middle East during the initial Islamic conquest or the Zoroastrians of Iran, in which the native populations adopted the religion of their conquerors, for the Mongols in the Middle East and Central Asia, conversion followed the opposite trajectory: the conquerors adopted Islam from the native peoples.2 Thus the historical context within which the Mongols (or rather, some Mongols) adopted Islam was more akin to the Germanic peoples who adopted Christianity in the fifth century, or to the Hungarians in the ninth century, rather than to most populations that historically adopted Islam. This difference represents a shift in the power relationship between the converter and the convert that needs to be taken into account when approaching the Islamisation of the Mongols.3 As a consequence, the process of Islamisation undergone by the Mongols has mostly been studied by looking at power relations between the ruling class and its subject elites. Hence the majority of studies has focused on the conversion of the Mongol khans in an attempt to explain when, how and especially why specific rulers converted to Islam.4 While this research has provided a fundamental theoretical background for approaching the topic of conversion and Islamisation among the Mongols, the large

* The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 208476, ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’.

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number of studies on the conversion of the Mongol rulers contrasts with the relatively little attention paid to the conversion of other groups of people active in the sociopolitical life of the empire. This overemphasis on the conversion of Mongol rulers and elites generally restricts the analysis of conversion to the court, the army or the religious classes, ignoring the interaction of Mongol princes with members of their domestic circles, who also participated in their adoption of Islam.5 This chapter aims to look at some of the evidence suggesting that, apart from the main channels of conversion already identified by scholars, there were additional, alternative channels by which the Mongols became acquainted with religions in general and Islam in particular. These channels can be defined as those belonging to the domestic sphere, understood as areas of social interaction limited to the inner family circles of the Mongol nobility. Here we will argue that the domestic sphere, which has been less explored by scholars, may have influenced young princes and future rulers and facilitated their adoption of a religion different from their own. This essay first explores the different patterns of conversion among the rulers, as seen by existing scholarship, in order to contextualise the adoption of Islam by the Mongols. The second part focuses on a few aspects of the domestic sphere at the Mongol court in an attempt to identify alternative channels of religious conversion or assimilation, paying special attention to the role of mothers in the religion of young Mongol royalty, to the role played by different tutors and nurses in the religious affiliation of future monarchs, and to the particular phenomenon of Muslim women marrying Mongol princes. Overall, we hope to demonstrate that religious conversion might have been facilitated not only by processes of political, economic or cultural assimilation, as suggested by scholarship in the field, but also through closer contact between members of the Mongol royal family with Muslims in their daily lives.

Approaches to the Conversion of Mongol Rulers Over the last couple of decades, different attempts have been made to explain the conversion of the Mongols to Islam, central among which has been the question of whether the conversion of certain Mongol rulers was the culmination of a process of acculturation, which had slowly, but steadily, converted the majority of the Mongols to Islam, or whether the conversions were simply motivated by political gain. Alan Strathern has pointed out that one reason was connected to ‘the tantalising possibilities of material advantage’ that the new religion had to offer in a given time and place.6 These opportunities could be manifested in economic terms (trading privileges), political gains or military support, among others. For example, Mongol Muslim rulers emerged as a phenomenon only a few years before the fragmentation of the ‘united’ Mongol Empire, becoming widespread only after the death of Möngke Khan in 1259.7 The rivalry that appeared in this period of fragmentation between the different Mongol-controlled territories certainly played a role in prompting some rulers to convert, or at least to externalise their newly acquired Muslim faith, in order to obtain some political and military advantage.8 Following this approach, some scholars, based on the evidence of the medieval chronicler Juzjani, interpret the early adherence to Islam of Berke Khan (r. 1257–66), ruler of the Golden Horde and the first Mongol Muslim to rule over any territory, as

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an act of political pragmatism.9 In this view, behind his conversion were his enmity towards the still-pagan Mongol rulers of Iran on the one hand and the possibility of an alliance with the Mamluks of Egypt on the other.10 Similarly, such a pragmatic motivation for adopting Islam has also been attributed to the conversions of both Ahmad Tegüder (r. 1282–4) and Ghazan Khan (d. 1304) in Iran. In the case of the former, his conversion may have offered a way of ending a long-lasting conflict with the Mamluks,11 and, as for the latter, his adoption of Islam in the middle of a succession struggle with Baidu (d. 1294) has been seen as a way of attracting the support of sections of the Mongol military that were already Muslim in the late thirteenth century.12 However, the inter-Mongol rivalry appears to have been only part of a more complex process which included other socio-economic aspects beyond just gaining a timely political advantage. The conversion of Berke Khan did not provide an enduring precedent for rulers of the Golden Horde and, as with the short-lived reigns of Mubarak Shah (d. 1266) in the Chaghataid khanate and Ahmad Tegüder in Iran, he failed to secure a Muslim succession in his territory.13 The failure to establish a succession of Muslim khans in the early decades of Mongol rule is generally attributed to the reluctance of some of the Mongol nobility to abandon their previous religious affiliations, whether shamanist, Buddhist or Christian.14 In this connection we must consider the nobility’s most important institution: the army. As the empire expanded, the Mongol military underwent changes in its ethnic composition,15 progressively incorporating Turkish populations that were already Muslim before the Mongols’ arrival.16 For example, the Mongol army was nurtured by defecting Khwarazmian soldiers, Muslim Qïpchaq tribes from southern Russia and the different Turkish populations that had lived in the Middle East from the time of the Seljuq migrations of the twelfth century.17 The proximity between growing numbers of Turco-Muslim troops and the Mongol military officials made the gradual appearance of the first Mongol Muslims in the army unavoidable, especially after the establishment of the Golden Horde from the 1240s and the conquest of Iran by Hülegü Khan in 1258.18 From 1260 onwards, these two regions were the furthest from the Mongol Empire’s centre of power, which had moved from its capital in Qaraqorum (Mongolia) to northern China after Khubilai Khan (d. 1294) defeated his brother Arïq Böke during the Mongol civil war ending in 1264. This event had made the western khanates even more dependent on local Turko-Muslim populations to maintain soldier numbers in the army. 19 Mongol military commanders (noyans) kept the high-ranking positions, but it appears that the ethnic origin of the soldiers was mostly made up of Central Asian Turks. Although the army’s high command remained exclusively Mongol in ethnicity, these noyans also began to convert to Islam in the second half of the thirteenth century. The conversion of the noyans as described in the sources can be summarised with the example of the Mongol Muslim commander Nawruz (d. 1297), who played a fundamental role in securing Ghazan Khan’s seizure of the Ilkhanid throne in 1295.20 As Reuven Amitai argues, the conversion of Ghazan may not have been sincere enough in the eyes of some Muslims in the Ilkhanate, but his adoption of Islam was the result of a process of Islamisation that had already occurred within the army and expanded into the Mongol military nobility.21 The sources present in similar terms the conversion (albeit to Shiʿa Islam) of Sultan Öljeitü (r. 1304–17), which was facilitated by Tarmtaz, a Mongol amir who had embraced Islam some time before his master.22 This

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interpretation suggests, therefore, that the incorporation of Islamised Turks into the army had influenced Mongol commanders to embrace Islam in a process that seemed to speed up from the 1280s. These newly converted Mongol noyans were already politically influential, but now they added to their role as kingmakers their capacity to persuade some rulers, such as Ghazan and Öljeitü, to adopt Islam. In Mongol-dominated China, Islam also penetrated, albeit with less success, into the royal family.23 Although not a ruler in his own right, Ananda (d. 1307), grandson of Khubilai Khan, embraced Islam during adulthood and ruled over the Anxi Principality, an area populated by the Tangut people in the late thirteenth century with a majority Buddhist population.24 His conversion attracted a good deal of attention among Persian historians such as Rashid al-Din (d. 1317), who claimed that Ananda not only converted to Islam against the will of his grandfather and emperor, but also made 150,000 soldiers of his army embrace the Muslim faith with him.25 However, despite the important role that the army had in Mongol China, Ananda appears to have been an isolated case. The abundant Muslim soldiers present in Yuan China did not convert a large number of Chinggisid noyans to Islam, as had happened in Iran and the Golden Horde.26 In this case, it seems evident that to an extent the crucial factor was not pressure from the Muslim soldiers below in converting their Mongol superiors, but rather the broader cultural environment in which the conquerors found themselves. This broader context might be precisely what prevented the conversion to Islam of the Mongol military elite in China, whereas it contributed to a more receptive position in areas like Iran or the Russian steppes, where Muslim populations were in the majority. The Mongols were certainly not a tabula rasa waiting to be converted to Islam. Indeed the Ilkhans’ close relationship to Buddhism, as well as the recent appearance of interesting new data provided by archaeological sites, calls for a more comprehensive study on the role of Buddhism in Mongol Iran.27 However, in the changing dynamics of religious affiliation and cultural identity, the above-mentioned incorporation of TurcoMuslims into the Mongol army might have been accompanied by cultural influence from Persian elites and state officials, bringing the Mongol rulers closer to Islam.28 In fact, Charles Melville has noted that certain elements of pre-Islamic Persian culture became part of Ilkhanid kingship.29 For example, the old Sasanian fortress at Takht-i Sulayman in north-western Iran was rebuilt as a palace by the Ilkhan Abaqa in around 1275.30 Similarly, the famous Persian epic poem, the Shahnama of Firdawsi, acquired great popularity in Ilkhanid Iran, with manuscripts of this work being patronised and Ilkhanid historiographies incorporating passages in their descriptions of the Mongols.31 Hence, through this ‘Persianisation’ process, Islam could have found another channel through which to infiltrate into the Mongol royal family in Iran, making the conversion of the Mongols part of a more general process of acculturation between the nobilities of both the conquerors and the conquered peoples.32 However, this approach has recently met with some scepticism with regard to how much Persianisation actually reached the Mongols themselves.33 In addition to the above-mentioned ‘channels’ through which Islam might have entered their lives, contemporary sources mention that at the moment of conversion, in almost every case, Mongol rulers were accompanied by famous Sufis. These individuals would guide and facilitate the acceptance of Islam by the Mongol lords and were generally present when rulers made the final step towards conversion. Juzjani and Jamal Qarshi mentioned that the Sufi Sayf al-Din Bakharzi played a fundamental role in

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Berke’s conversion to Islam in the Golden Horde.34 Similarly, in Central Asia, regarding the conversion of the khan Tarmashirin to Islam, the scarce sources available also mention a Sufi master called Yahya Abu al-Mafakhir al-Din Bakharzi (a grandson of Sayf al-Din) as being instrumental in his conversion.35 In the Ilkhanate, the situation was similar. Rashid al-Din critically noted how Ahmad Tegüder, the first Muslim Ilkhan, had a greater interest in spending time with Sufi masters than in government.36 The proximity with Sufi masters also appears in Banakati, who, following the account of Rashid al-Din, described the relevant role played by Sadr al-Din Hamawi (fl. thirteenth century) in Ghazan Khan’s ceremony of conversion to Islam in 1295.37 Yet the argument for Sufis having a pivotal role in the Islamisation of the Mongols has been reassessed in recent years.38 A closer look at the context in which the sources were written suggests that the accounts should be considered carefully. Devin DeWeese’s study of the conversion of Özbek Khan in the Golden Horde has shown that the role of the Sufi Baba Tükles (d. fourteenth century) is emphasised by the sources, for their own purposes, in their own, later, times with versions of the same conversion narratives copied and reproduced in the years, decades and centuries after the event.39 In other words, while contemporary accounts such as those of Rashid al-Din and Juzjani mentioned, and often criticised, the role of Sufis in the Islamisation of the Mongols, Sufi hagiographic accounts tended to exaggerate the position of the Sufi master, mixing history and myth.40 Nonetheless, Sufis should not be removed from the picture of the Islamisation of the Mongols; some of them were close to the Mongol royal family and so could be considered yet another channel by which Islam entered the religious milieu of Mongol rulers. All these different approaches contribute to a multidirectional framework for understanding the conversion of the Mongol rulers and the Islamisation of the Mongols in general. They all identify different channels by which Islam might have entered the Mongol court(s), whether from a top-down or a bottom-up perspective. Yet in addition to these simultaneous processes of political convenience, military transformation, cultural assimilation and personal interaction with religious personalities that occurred in the Mongol Empire, other, less apparent, channels for Islam’s penetration existed. In the coming section, we consider an area of religious assimilation different from the above, an area belonging to the household: the private lives and personal contacts that happened in the domestic sphere.

Religious Interaction in the Domestic Sphere: A View from the Ilkhanate The domestic life of the Mongol Empire was organised mostly around the ordo, the nomadic encampment from which the empire was ruled and from where also grew the new generation of Mongol elites. The raising and early education of young Mongol princes and princesses after the conquest of Chinggis Khan seems to have been a collective endeavour in which different people actively participated. As we will see, apart from the biological mother of the child, nurses, tutors, stepmothers and members of religious organisations such as priests, monks and shaykhs all interacted with the young Mongol nobility in the social environment provided by the Mongol ordos.41 But, even in these circumstances, it was expected that in the early years of the child’s life the mother would play a fundamental role in its development. The Ilkhanate provides a

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good case study to consider the extent to which these women might have tried to influence the religious confession of their children and future rulers of Iran. For the majority of them, we have reliable information on the religious affiliation of the Mongol princesses (khātūn, pl. khawātīn) and we know what happened to the religious affiliation of their children once they had become adults. Looking at this data makes for an interesting exercise in exploring the mostly unknown relationship between mothers and sons in religious terms. To begin with some precedents for the role of mothers in the Ilkhanate, anecdotes recorded in the Secret History of the Mongols convey a narrative in which Mongol mothers were the backbone behind the success of future Mongol rulers, through heroic acts on behalf of their sons and through providing wise counsel.42 After Chinggis Khan’s death, some Persian sources highlight the role of Sorghaghtani Beki in the education of the four sons she had with her husband Tolui, son of Chinggis Khan.43 According to Juvayni, she took care of ‘the management and education of all her sons’ when her husband passed away in 1232.44 This statement is confirmed by the Christian monk Bar Hebraeus, who added that ‘she was Christian sincere and true like [Queen] Helena’.45 We need to bear in mind that she lived in a period that preceded the conquest of Iran by Hülegü (d. 1265) and died before any Chinggisid had officially converted to Islam. Consequently, as we will see below, her concerns with the religious exposure of her sons were circumscribed to those religions with which the Mongols had most contact in this period: Christianity and Buddhism. Despite her occasional patronage of Islamic personalities and institutions, she seems to have kept her sons from having a personal involvement with Islam when they were still young.46 However, when the Mongols conquered and settled in the Middle East after the conquest of Hülegü in the 1250s, they faced a new reality in which the majority of the population was Muslim. A quick comparative survey of the religious affiliations of Mongol women and those of their sons reveals some relevant tendencies in the relationship between mothers, sons and religion. Throughout the thirteenth century, Mongol women would constantly try to pass on to their children their own religious sympathies. However, out of the eight rulers of the Ilkhanate between 1260 and 1335, four were raised in a different religion from the one they professed in adulthood, showing a progressive change in the religion of the new generation raised in Iran from that of their progenitors. Both Hülegü (r. 1260–5) and Abaqa (r. 1265–82) were born and raised in Mongolia and closely connected to Buddhism while favouring Christian communities in the Middle East on different occasions.47 We know little about Abaqa’s mother, Yesünjin Khatun, yet she is known for being an influential woman who did not come to Iran during Hülegü’s campaigns but a few years later. In her case, like her son, it seems that she remained shamanist with possible sympathies to Buddhism.48 So, for the first two Ilkhans, there seems to have been an apparent continuity between the religious affiliation of the mothers and their sons. However, in post-Abaqa Iran, this correlation between the religion of the mothers and sons breaks down. Ahmad Tegüder, Abaqa’s brother and successor, broke this pattern. At birth, he was baptised as a Nestorian Christian by his mother, Qutui, who also accompanied him to Iran after the Mongol conquest and during his brother’s reign.49 Qutui was close to Christians during her time in Iran and is highly respected in the Eastern Christian sources.50 She was instrumental during Ahmad Tegüder’s reign, with some sources claiming she was the de facto ruler of Iran.51 Although not specifically mentioned in

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the sources, the close relationship between mother and son, and the commitment to Christianity of the former, suggests an active role of the mother in the early baptism of the child.52 This was not an isolated case; the commitment of a number of Mongol khawātīn to Christianity and their baptism of young Mongol princes is present in the available sources. For example, the eighth Ilkhan, Öljeitü, was already born in Iran in 1281 and baptised as a Catholic by the will of his mother, Örüg Khatun.53 This lady was in communication with Pope Nicholas IV during the reign of her husband, Arghun (r. 1284–91).54 In honour of the Pope, the khātūn gave the name Nicholas to Öljeitü at the age of eight.55 However, these two future Ilkhans would not maintain the religion passed on by their mothers. Tegüder seemed to have begun periodically visiting various Sufi shaykhs once he had arrived in Iran, until allegedly members of the Ahmadiyya-Rifaʿiyya Sufi order converted him to Islam when he was still only a boy.56 In the same way, Öljeitü’s Christianity was short-lived and he ‘subsequently turned towards Buddhism, Hanafism, Shafi‘ism, Twelver Shi‘ism, and finally, according to some sources, reverted to Sunnism again’.57 It needs to be remembered that there is a gap of approximately twenty years between the reigns of the ‘baptised Muslim Ilkhans’ Tegüder and Öljeitü. Between them, the remaining Ilkhans provide a variety of case studies with regard to the adherence to the religion of their mothers. In the case of Arghun, he was the son of a concubine about whom we know nothing other than her name and we have no mention of any involvement on her part in Arghun’s religious education.58 It is uncertain if her status as a concubine accorded her a lesser role in the religious education of her noble son, but certainly it explains the little amount of information that we have on her. Although there were different attempts by the Pope to convert him to Christianity, Arghun seems to have remained a committed Buddhist throughout his life.59 This commitment to Buddhism might explain the religious environment in which both of his successors grew up. In accordance with this, neither his young brother, Geikhatu (r. 1291–5), nor his son, Ghazan Khan (r. 1295–1304), retained the religious affiliation of their mothers. The former was born of Nuqdan Khatun, a Christian woman of the Tatar people, whose affiliation appears clearly stated in a letter sent by the Pope to her as one of Abaqa’s Christian wives.60 As for the latter, he was born of the union of Arghun and Qultaq Egächi, a woman belonging to the Dorban people.61 The religious education of these two Ilkhans appears to have been carried out separate from their mothers and placed in the hands of tutors and nurses who transmitted Buddhist beliefs to the young princes. The practice of allocating teachers or tutors to the new generation of Mongols in Iran appears to have gained momentum in the late thirteenth century, since the same pattern was to be followed by Ilkhan Abu Saʿid (r. 1316–35), the only Ilkhanid ruler to be born of a Muslim woman and raised as a Muslim, remaining so throughout his life. The domestic sphere of the Mongol Empire was wider than the parents of the young Mongols. As the empire grew, so did the amount of people in contact with the new generation of Chinggisids. Many of them belonged to other ‘tribes’, but people belonging to those cultures were now also under Mongol domination. In some cases, the early post-Chinggisid nobility understood the benefits of trusting the early care and education of their children to some of these foreigners who were progressively being incorporated into the empire. Going back to the time of Sorghaghtani Beki, some Persian sources claim that it was Chinggis Khan himself who suggested his daughter-in-law assign a nurse to his son Khubilai when he was a baby because of his

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ruddy complexion.62 The nurse, called Saruq, was supposed to have been chosen personally by Sorghaghtani from the Naiman people when the nurse was seven months’ pregnant.63 The religious implication of the nurse’s selection resides in the fact that many of the Naiman population were known for being either Nestorian Christians, like Sorghaghtani Beki, or Buddhists like the majority of the population of northern China, where Sorghaghtani had her appanages.64 This has been interpreted as a sign of Sorghaghtani Beki’s agency in selecting a nurse with a religious background that would benefit her son’s future aspiration to rule in the region.65 In addition, the story continues by adding that, when the nurse’s son was born and required the care of his mother, Khubilai was entrusted to a woman of the Tangut people, a group mainly of Buddhist affiliation and intermarried with the Kerait tribe of Sorghaghtani Beki.66 Khubilai’s second nurse is credited with having a great influence on the life of the future Chinese emperor, to the extent that after her death ‘he constantly remembered her and used to give alms for the sake of her soul’.67 Similarly, the next generation of Mongols of the Yuan dynasty were also entrusted to the care of nurses and tutors. The above-mentioned Ananda, grandson of Khubilai, was left under the care of a Muslim couple of Central Asian origin at a young age.68 According to Rashid al-Din, it was under the influence of his tutors, but especially the woman Zulaikha, that ‘Islam took firm root in his heart. He learnt the Qur’an and writes the Tazik script (Persian) extremely well, and his time is always devoted to acts of devotion and worship.’69 While being the only Muslim Chinggisid in the Yuan court justifies the inclusion of an account of Ananda’s life in Persian sources, the special attention paid by Rashid al-Din to Ananda’s conversion needs to be seen in connection with contemporary events in the life of the Ilkhanate as well as in China. On the one hand, a recent study based on Chinese sources has suggested that Ananda’s adherence to Islam might have been not only a response to the influence of this nurse, as suggested by Rashid al-Din, but also motivated by the possibility of obtaining the support of a politically and influential Muslim community that lived in Ananda’s appanage.70 In fact, Chinese sources mention at least one other nurse that nurtured Ananda of Sino-Jurchen origin. She, like Zulaikha, belonged to one of the influential families in Ananda’s territories, with family members being part of the imperial administration. The high status of these ladies suggests that, at least from the perspective of Chinese sources, it was this influence rather than the religion that was the most relevant factor in the selection of nurses and tutors in China.71 On the other hand, the direct impact of these women and men on the life of a young prince should certainly not be underestimated. Chinese sources do not contradict Rashid al-Din on the role of Zulaikha, but the Persian vizier does omit all references to Ananda’s second nurse. Certainly, the account of the Muslim nurse facilitating the conversion of a Mongol prince in China served to construct Rashid al-Din’s own narrative of events that were taking place in Iran. There is an obvious parallelism made in Rashid al-Din’s chronicle between Ananda’s conversion to Islam and that of his patron, Ghazan Khan, that cannot be overlooked: Ananda’s conversion serves as an illustrative story of a committed Muslim in a land of Buddhists, whereas Rashid al-Din’s patron was born and raised as a Buddhist in Iran and had converted to Islam.72 Rashid al-Din’s accounts of nurses and tutors in the lives of the Mongols in China were told from afar and a posteriori, but similar cases of this domestic relationship between nurses and young Mongol nobles are also documented as having been rather

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common practice among the Mongols in the Middle East. Even during the time of Hülegü, the influence of these tutors in transmitting religious values was also echoed in Rashid al-Din’s account. Taghai Temür, one of Hülegü’s sons-in-law by his daughter Taraqai Khatun, was entrusted to a Muslim tutor who did not only provide religious education but was responsible for renaming Taghai as Musa when the young Mongol converted to Islam.73 Despite this early conversion, which occurred more or less at the same time as that of Ahmad Tegüder mentioned above, Buddhism played an important role in the lives of the Mongol youths in Iran. As we have seen, we know little about the religious environment in which Arghun was raised. However, we do know that monks were brought by order of Abaqa from Kashmir and Tibet to instruct young Mongol princes in Buddhist teachings.74 This commitment to Buddhism helps to put into context the religious education received by two of his successors: his brother Geikhatu and his son Ghazan. It is remarkable that neither of the two princes was raised by their own mothers and that they were nurtured by different women who became very influential in their lives. While Ghazan was nursed by a certain woman called Moghalchin of apparent Chinese/Buddhist origin,75 Geikhatu’s care was entrusted to Boraqchin Egachi, a woman who would have an active political role during the reign of her protégée.76 Buddhism seems to have been an influential part of the religious identity of both princes. Even the Muslim historian Rashid al-Din mentions in his account that Ghazan had two Buddhist monks at his disposal and that he had mastered the teachings of the Buddha.77 On the other hand, Geikhatu received the Tibetan name of Irinjin Dorji (Jewel Diamond) from a Buddhist monk while still in childhood.78 In having to cope with the early proximity to Buddhism of his newly converted patron, Ghazan Khan, Rashid al-Din introduces an interesting story to his narrative of Ghazan’s childhood. He claims that the milk of Ghazan’s Chinese/Buddhist nurse provoked diarrhoea in the child and, for that reason, it was decided that a new nurse of the Suldus people, who already had a son called Hasan, would be in charge of nursing Ghazan.79 A clear allegory of the rejection of ‘Chinese/Buddhist’ milk from the body of a baby destined to become Muslim is presented as an augury of Ghazan’s future conversion to Islam. Yet simultaneously the anecdote reinforces the role of these nurses in the early development of the young Mongol princes and how important their religious affiliation could have been in influencing them. The same process was followed by the Muslim-born Ilkhan Abu Saʿid, who was sent at a young age to the ordo of one of his father’s amirs, the Uyghur Amir Sevinj.80 He was given to a female nurse to be nourished, but we do not have her name or religious affiliation from the post Rashid al-Din sources. It appears that, by the fourteenth century, the religious affiliation of nurses and tutors became less diverse and more focused around Muslim individuals. Finally, Abu Saʿid also followed the same tradition of entrusting the young Mongol nobility (whether men or women) to nurses and tutors. Because he had no male descendants, we are told in the sources that the last Ilkhan of Iran sent his daughter, and only heir, to be fostered in the ordo of the powerful amir Rashid al-Dawla.81 A final element worth mentioning with regard to the domestic sphere of Mongol Iran is in the marriage between the Chinggisid Mongol family ruling Iran and Muslim women belonging to powerful local dynasties. One of the distinctive characteristics of the religious affiliation of Mongol women is that, unlike the men of the royal family, a good number of them were openly Nestorian Christians or Buddhists at the time when the Mongol Empire had begun to expand its territorial domains.82 This tendency would

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slowly but steadily change among the women of the Ilkhanate until we encounter a majority of Muslim Mongol women by the second decade of the fourteenth century.83 Yet different elements such as political alliances, economic interests or family affinities also played a role, together with religion, in the selection of women entering the Chinggisid household. A precedent is once again presented in the life of Sorghaghtani Beki, who undertook an active selection process to decide who could be suitable daughters-in-law. Like the other Mongol women described above, she is credited with having personally transmitted the Yasa (orders or decrees) of Chinggis Khan to her sons and introduced them into Mongol shamanism.84 She followed the tradition of caring about the education of her offspring by providing a Buddhist nurse for her son Khubilai and also a Chinese tutor to learn the Chinese classics, and, according to some sources, she influenced the positive attitude towards Christianity and Buddhism held by her youngest son, Arïq Böke.85 But, in addition to these attitudes shared with the other Mongol women described above, she was also involved personally in the selection of her daughters-inlaw. Her eldest son, Möngke, married two Nestorian Christian women who, according to William of Rubruck, were active in their interaction with Christian priests in Qaraqorum.86 She also secured the union between Khubilai and Chabui, who was a fervent Buddhist and a key element in the subsequent development of Buddhism in Mongol China. Finally, Sorghaghtani encouraged the marriage of her third son, Hülegü, to Doquz Khatun, who has generally been seen as a key figure in the short-lived Christian renaissance of the early Ilkhanate.87 Mongol traditional marriage practice favoured the marriage of a man to a woman from a different tribe, which in Iran was extended to women belonging to dynasties subject and allied to the Ilkhanate.88 Many Mongol Christian women belonging to different Mongolian ‘tribes’ came to Iran with the establishment of the Ilkhanate, becoming politically influential at court, allegedly having tent-churches in their ordos and favouring their Christian subjects.89 In addition, other, non-Mongol, Christian women acquired a degree of influence at court. An example is Despina Khatun, a Byzantine princess married to the Ilkhan Abaqa, who is credited in Eastern Christian sources with playing an active role in promoting Christianity in Iran before returning to Constantinople in the late thirteenth century to rebuild the still-standing Church of St Mary of the Mongols.90 However, in parallel to the influence of these Christian women, a continuous process of integration of local Turko-Muslim women into the Ilkhanid court occurred in the second half of the thirteenth century. This assimilation of Muslim women into the royal family in Iran not only brought Islam closer to the Ilkhans, but also placed Muslim women in powerful political positions with the capacity to influence court politics from a Muslim perspective. For example, in early 1273, the influential son of Hülegü, Möngke Timür (d. 1282), married Abesh Khatun, a woman of the Salghurid dynasty of Fars who became ruler of the region in her own right in the early 1280s.91 Similarly, the powerful Muslim ruler of Kerman, Terken Khatun (r. 1258–82), did not hesitate in marrying her Muslim daughter Padshah Khatun to the pagan Ilkhan Abaqa, apparently between 1271 and 1272.92 Neither Möngke Timür nor Abaqa converted to Islam, nor were their wives forced to abandon their faith.93 On the contrary, they received high positions at court and, in the case of Padshah Khatun, went on to marry Geikhatu in the ‘Mongol fashion’ when Abaqa had passed away, and moved with him to Anatolia in 1284.94 In the early fourteenth century, the already Muslim Öljeitü

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Ilkhan continued to incorporate Muslim women into the Mongol court. With clear political intentions, he married Dunya Khatun, the daughter of the Ayyubid prince of Mardin.95 Beyond courtly life, it is safe to suggest that many other Muslim women also married lower-ranking Mongols in Iran, Russia and Central Asia, but that these have escaped the historical records. However, these few cases show a pattern of intermarriage that began in at least the early 1270s and had become standard by the 1280s, coinciding with the appearance of the first Mongol converts to Islam documented in Western Asia. If the incorporation of these women might have facilitated the introduction of Islam to the Mongol court, we can observe a contemporary phenomenon of the initial manifestations of Islamic faith among Mongol women in the Ilkhanate. Ahmad Tegüder married two Mongol women whose fathers were Muslim and belonged to the Mongol military elite. One was Baytegin, daughter of Agha Husayn, and the other was Tödägü, the daughter of the convert Musa Kerugen.96 Despite this, we have no evidence to assert that these two women were Muslims themselves, since, for example, they never changed their Mongolian names, nor do we have any further information about their activities.97 However, they are a good example of the elusive nature of the sources with regard to the confessions of Mongol women. They both could have been Muslim converts, as they were raised in households that had adopted Islam when they were children, and yet we cannot confirm their religious affiliation. Further, the fifth Ilkhan, Geikhatu, had a Mongol wife from the Jalayir tribe called Aisha Khatun, the daughter of one of his generals in Anatolia called Toghu.98 In this case, her name denotes a closer commitment to Islam but, once again, we lack any further references to her in the sources.99 Some cosmetic changes occurred once Ghazan had officially converted to Islam in 1295. Unlike his uncle Geikhatu before him, he married now in the ‘Muslim fashion’ to his wife Bulughan Khatun, but none of his wives was openly Muslim.100 Neither among the early Ilkhans nor in the case of those who ruled after Ghazan’s conversion was Islam apparently a determining factor in the marriages. In fact, the marriages seem in all cases to have solidified political support from Mongol noyans, subject dynasties or other external allies such as Byzantium.101 A more widespread religious transformation is observed after Ghazan’s conversion and during the fourteenth century when all the influential Mongol women in the Ilkhanate were Muslims or, at least, it is assumed they were.102 We know that Christian women living at the court tried to bring Mongol members of the royal family to their own religion. Marco Polo and Bar Hebraeus both suggest that Despina Khatun tried to convert her third husband, Baidu – the short-lived Ilkhan to whom she was married after Geikhatu died in 1291 – to Christianity.103 A number of cases of women directly influencing the faith of men in the Mongol Empire have also been documented for other religions. In the early days of the empire, Güchlüg, a Christian Naiman lord exiled in the Qarakhitay kingdom in Central Asia, married a stepdaughter of the Khitaid emperor.104 The story, narrated by Juvayni, Rashid alDin and William of Rubruck, claims that his wife directly forced him to convert to Buddhism.105 The story is not apparently about conversion to Islam, but the fact that it resonates in later accounts such as that of Ghiyath al-Din Khwandamir (d. 1534) or the Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haydar (d. 1551) suggests a possible reading of the anecdote beyond its simple assessment of the facts.106 The inclusion of the story in all of these Persian sources might be an indication of a common practice

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across the empire (albeit camouflaged as a conversion to Buddhism), where women played a role in the conversion of their husbands either directly or indirectly. Although the conversion in this case was to Buddhism, the agent of conversion (in this case the woman) might serve as a recognisable practice to illustrate Güchlüg’s conversion for Persian readers. Openly admitting the conversion to Islam of a man under the direct influence of his wife would be the same as admitting the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man and, in turn, the violation of Islamic law. So, we could suggest that perhaps Persian historians might have omitted this direct influence of Muslim women over non-Muslim men from the narrative, but documented the existence of this practice via the stories of non-Muslims mentioned above. Nonetheless, even if these Muslim women did not directly influence the conversions of their husbands, their incorporation at court certainly opened up another conduit through which the Chinggisid men were exposed to Islam, which was moving progressively closer to the royal family, and made it appear a less alien religion when the Mongol rulers openly converted on a larger scale at the turn of the fourteenth century.

Conclusion The Islamisation of the Mongols occurred over the course of around one century. From the beginning of Chinggis Khan’s conquests in the 1220s, the western territories of the Mongol Empire eventually became Muslim dynasties. It remains under debate the level of commitment to the new faith of some of the newly converted Mongols and to what extent religious syncretism among these nomads influenced the (self-)identification of the Mongols as Muslims or not. Yet, despite the implicit subjectivity in trying to assess ‘degrees of Islamisation’, it seems clear that, to use DeWeese’s terminology, the bearers or ‘vectors’ of Islamisation and the factors facilitating religious change were multi-causal. If we consider the moment when Mongol rulers converted to Islam, we can observe that a consistent chronology of conversion marked the appearance of incipient Mongol Muslim rulers some twenty years after the conquest of Islamic lands in Iran, Central Asia and Russia. The process started with some isolated early (too early, perhaps) conversions to Islam, followed by an obscure transition period in the last few decades of the thirteenth century, culminating in a majority Mongol population being openly Muslim by the early fourteenth century. This chronology suggests the formation of a progressive division of those Mongols living in Islamic lands, with some factions converting and embracing Islam and others still holding on to traditional Mongol values. This division certainly spread into the politics of each region and Mongol rulers used their conversion (or lack of it) for political benefit when the situation was appropriate. This does not mean that their conversions were not sincere, but that they became the visible ‘figureheads’ of the political aspirations of certain powerful groups in the Mongol domains. These groups converted through different channels, such as the proximity of the army to Turkic populations which were already Muslim, by processes of acculturation to the Persianate societies they ruled or even by the proximity of Sufi dervishes that wandered in the Mongol camps. Perhaps we should stop trying to find a single ‘vehicle’ for Mongol Islamisation and consider them all as parts of the same simultaneous process. In this approach, aspects connected to the domestic sphere of Mongol life should also be considered. The early exposure of the young Mongol nobility to religion was

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a collective effort where mothers, nurses and tutors introduced the next generation of Mongol rulers to different Eurasian religions such as shamanism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam. As for the specific case of the Mongols of Iran, the young Mongols kept the same collective approach to religion, but the wider cultural and political circumstances of a majority Muslim-populated territory conditioned the religious path of a new generation of Mongols raised in Iran. Islam became part of the Mongol court by political, military and economic channels, but also by the work of the Muslim tutors, Sufi shaykhs and Muslim women who were progressively incorporated into the Mongol court. The contribution of this domestic channel of Islamisation still needs further research, but it has opened up the field to an even wider spectrum of possibilities in trying to obtain a better picture of the Islamisation of the Mongol Empire.

Notes 1. ʿAlaʾ al-Din ʿAta Malik Juvayni, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, trans. John A. Boyle, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 26. 2. An interesting precedent is the non-conversion of the Qarakhitai rulers (r. 1124–1218) in Central Asia before the Mongols; they remained Buddhist despite Muslims being the majority of their subjects. See Michal Biran, ‘True to Their Ways: Why the Qara Khitai Did Not Convert to Islam’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Mongols, Turks and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 175–200. 3. See Anatoly M. Khazanov, ‘Muhammad and Jenghiz Khan Compared: The Religious Factor in World Empire Building’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3 (July 1993): pp. 461–79. 4. A good overview and theoretical approach to the Islamisation of the Mongol Empire is provided by Devin DeWeese, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, in Nicola Di Cosmo et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 120–34. 5. Some works refer to the role of the military in the conversion. See, for example, Charles Melville, ‘Padshah-i Islam: The Conversion of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan’, Pembroke Papers 1 (1990), pp. 159–77; Reuven Amitai, Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol Ilkhanate (1260–1335) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Jean Aubin, Émirs mongols et vizirs persans dans les remous de l’acculturation (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 1995). 6. See Alan Strathern, ‘Global Patterns of Ruler Conversion to Islam and the Logic of Empirical Religiosity’, Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 22. 7. On the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, see Peter Jackson, ‘The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire’, Central Asiatic Journal 22 (1978), pp. 186–244. 8. See Peter Jackson’s analysis of the Mongols’ use of religious tolerance as a tool for political gain in ‘The Mongols and the Faith of the Others’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Mongols, Turks and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 245–90. 9. Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, Tabaḳat-i Naṣiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindustan, from A.H. 194 (810 A.D.), to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam, trans. H. G. Raverty (London: n.p., 1881), pp. 1003–4, 1284–5; Jean Richard, ‘La conversion de Berke et les debuts de l’islamisation de la Horde d’Or’, Revue des Études Islamiques 35 (1967), pp. 173–84. 10. A discussion on the different views of Berke’s conversion in medieval sources can be found in István Vásáry, ‘History and Legend in Berke Khan’s Conversion to Islam’, in Denis Sinor (ed.), Aspects of Altaic Civilization, vol. 3 (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 231–9.

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11. Amitai has softened this argument by claiming that Tegüder’s conversion might have served as a strategy to deprive the Mamluks of using Islam as a source of legitimacy over the Ilkhanate. See Amitai, Holy War, pp. 51–2. 12. Melville, ‘Padshah-i Islam’, pp. 171–2. 13. On the short reign of Mubarak Shah and on his mother’s regency in Central Asia, see Bruno De Nicola, ‘The Queen of the Chaghataids: Orghina Khatun and the Rule of Central Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, no. 1 (2016), pp. 107–20. 14. See Reuven Amitai-Preiss, ‘Ghazan, Islam and Mongol Tradition: A View from the Mamluk Sultanate’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 59, no. 1 (1996), p. 9. 15. Although it perhaps did not change much in its military strategies. See Reuven Amitai, ‘Continuity and Change in the Mongol Army of the Ilkhanate’, in Bruno De Nicola and Charles Melville (eds), The Mongols’ Middle East: Continuity and Transformation in Ilkhanid Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 16. Amitai, Holy War, p. 64. 17. George Lane, Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule in Thirteenth Century Iran (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 107; Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), p. 47. Other Qipchaqs were not incorporated but dispersed into other territories such as India, Egypt or Hungary by the Mongol conquest. See Sunil Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 55–6. 18. Some early examples of Mongol Muslims are documented in the sources, although we have mostly inferred their religious affiliation from the fact that they used Muslim names. See, for example, the case of Musa Kerugen, maternal grandson of Chinggis, converted by a Danishmand. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, ed. Muhammad Rawshan and Mustafá Musavi, 4 vols (Tehran: Nashr-i Alburz, 1994), vol. 2, p. 971; Rashid al-Din, Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s ‘Jamiʿuʾt-Tawarikh’, published as Compendium of Chronicles, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, 3 vols (Boston, MA: Harvard University, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998–9), vol. 2, p. 476. For a study on the variation of names among the Mongols, see Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapprochement”: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Brill: Leiden, 2006), pp. 369–89. 19. One of those uncommon occasions of recorded trips of Mongol nobles from Mongolia to Iran in post-Ilkhanid times is the arrival of Qutui Khatun, wife of Hülegü, in Iran with most of her family circa 1268 to be welcomed by her husband’s successor Abaqa Ilkhan (r. 1265–82). See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1064; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 519. 20. A descendant of the powerful Mongol amir Arghun Aqa, he was the Mongol commander of Khurasan who was instrumental in bringing Ghazan to Islam in 1295 (Melville, ‘Padishah-i Islam’, p. 171). On Arghun Aqa, see George Lane, ‘Arghun Aqa: Mongol Bureaucrat’, Iranian Studies 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): pp. 459–82; Michael Hope, ‘The “Nawruz King”: The Rebellion of Amir Nawruz in Khurasan (688–694/1289–94) and its Implications for the Ilkhan Polity at the End of the Thirteenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 3 (July 2015), pp. 1–23. 21. Amitai-Preiss, ‘Ghazan, Islam and Mongol Tradition’, p. 9. 22. Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Conversion Versions: Sultan Öljeytü’s Conversion to Shi‘ism (709/1309) in Muslim Narrative Sources’, Mongolian Studies 22 (1999), p. 40. 23. See the case of Khubilai’s finance minister, Ahmad Fanakati (d. 1282), in Herbert Franke, ‘Ahmed: Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Chinas unter Qubilai,’ Oriens 1 (1948), pp. 222–36; Morris Rossabi, ‘The Muslims in the Early Yüan Dynasty’, in John Langlois (ed.), China under Mongol Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 278–82. 24. He had an influential position at the court, which put him in the middle of the succession struggle after the death of Khubilai Khan’s son Möngke Timür in 1307. See Hsiao

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

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Ch’i-Ch’ing, ‘Mid-Yüan Politics’, in Herbert Franke and Denis Crispin Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 505–7. Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, pp. 950–1; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 2, p. 465. Apparently, Qublai was reluctant to appoint Muslims to the high ranks of the Yuan army. See Rossabi, ‘The Muslims in the Early Yuan Dynasty’, p. 277. For an account of the interaction between Buddhism and Islam among the Mongols, see Mostafa Vaziri, Buddhism in Iran: An Anthropological Approach to Traces and Influences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 111–34; Arezou Azad, ‘Three Rock-Cut Cave Sites in Iran and their Ilkhanid Buddhist Aspects Reconsidered’, in Anna Akasoy et al. (eds), Islam and Tibet: Interactions Along the Musk Routes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 209–30; Yuka Kadoi, ‘Buddhism in Iran under the Mongols: An Art-Historical Analysis’, in Tomasz Gacek and Jadwiga Pstrusińska (eds), Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 171–80. Aubin, Émirs mongols. Charles Melville, ‘History and Myth: The Persianisation of Ghazan Khan’, in Éva M. Jeremiás (ed.), Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries (Piliscsaba, Hungary: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2003), pp. 133–60. Some scholars have seen this as an attempt to connect the new Ilkhanid dynasty with the Sasanian past in the eyes of the Persian elite, while others have suggested that the location had more to do with the proximity to the rich pastures in the surrounding areas. See Dietrich Huff, ‘The Ilkhanid Palace at Takht-i Sulayman’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 94–110. Charles Melville, ‘Between Firdausi and Rashid al-Din: Persian Verse Chronicles of the Mongol Period’, Studia Islamica 104–5 (2007): pp. 45–65; Melville, ‘History and Myth’, pp. 133–60. Also, the popularisation of the term Īrān zamīn (land of Iran), referring to the geographical area of the Ilkhanate with similar borders of the pre-Arab conquest Sasanian Iran, has been seen as more evidence of an ongoing process of the Persianisation of Ilkhanid society. An example of this attempt to acculturate the Mongols can be seen in some Persian historiography of the fourteenth century that had made important efforts in trying to incorporate the Mongols into the dynastic history of Iran. See Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropological History (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 27. Amitai, Holy War, p. 103. Reuven Amitai also suggests that in the diplomacy with the Mamluks, while there was a growing Islamic vocabulary used by the Ilkhans in addressing the sultans, no signs of the term ‘Iran’ or Īrān zamīn appeared in Mongol foreign relations. Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 84; Devin DeWeese, ‘The Eclipse of the Kubraviya in Central Asia’, Iranian Studies 21, nos 1–2 (1988): p. 80. Michal Biran, ‘The Chaghadaids and Islam: The Conversion of Tarmashirin Khan (1331–34)’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2002), p. 746. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, pp. 1129–30; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 551. Melville, ‘Padshah-i Islam’, p. 160; Devin DeWeese, ‘Cultural Transmission and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: Notes from the Biographical Dictionary of Ibn al-Fuwaṭi’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Chinggis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 20. Encouraged by this proximity between Mongol khans and Sufi masters, some scholars have tried to look for similarities in rituals and performance between medieval Sufis and Inner

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41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

islamisation Asian shamans to explain this close relationship. See Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Influence du chamanisme turco-mongol sur les ordres mystiques musulmans (Istanbul: Zellitch Frères, 1929); this approach has been refuted by Reuven Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Ilkhanate’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999): pp. 27–9. See the different transcriptions, translations and commentaries in the different versions of the conversion of Berke Khan in DeWeese, Islamization, pp. 533–73. See, for example, the alleged conversion of Geikhatu by Sultan Walad, son of Jalal alDin Rumi, in Shams al-Din Ahmad Aflaki, Manaqib al-ʿArifin, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, 2 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1959–61), vol 2, pp. 612–13; The Feats of the Knowers of God: Manaqeb al-ʿArefin, trans. John O’Kane (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 420–1. This account has been disregarded as false, but interpreted in the context of inner Sufi rivalries in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolia for Mongol favour. See A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court in Mongol Anatolia: Politics and Patronage in the Works of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sulṭan Walad’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 213. Bruno De Nicola, ‘Ruling from Tents: The Existence and Structure of Women’s Ordos in Ilkhanid Iran’, in Robert Hillenbrand et al. (eds), Ferdowsi, The Mongols and Iranian History: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 126–36. See the nomadic folklore fable of the arrow shaft attributed to the mythical Mongol woman Alan Qo’a; see Anon., The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteen Century, trans. Igor de Rachewiltz, 2 vols (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), §19. On the history of the fable among pastoral societies of Inner Asia, see Pavel Poucha, Die geheime Geschichte der Mongolen als Geschichtsquelle und Literaturdenkmal; ein Beitrag zu ihrer Erklärung (Prague: Verlag der Tschechoslowakischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956), pp. 45–6, quoted in The Secret History of the Mongols, p. 262. See also the role of Chinggis Khan’s mother Hö’elün in The Secret History of the Mongols, §74–§75; Bruno De Nicola, ‘Las mujeres mongolas en los siglos XII y XIII: Un análisis sobre el rol de la madre y la esposa de Chinggis Khan’, Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 27–8 (2008), pp. 37–64; A. Sárközi, ‘Love and Friendship in the Secret History of the Mongols’, in Larry V. Clark and Paul Alexander Draghi (eds), Aspects of Altaic Civilization (Bloomington: Asian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, 1978), pp. 145–54. She was the mother of the Great Khan Möngke (r. 1250–9), and Great Khan and Yuan emperor Qublia (r. 1260–94), Hülegü Ilkhan (1260–5) and Arïq Böke. Alaʾ al-Din ʿAtta Malik Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, ed. Muḥammad Qazvini, 3 vols (London: Luzac, 1912–37), vol. 3, p. 6; Juvayni, Genghis Khan, vol. 2, p. 551. Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography of Gregory Abû’l-Faraj 1225–1286, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus, Being the First Part of His Political History of the World, trans. Ernest A. Wallis Budge, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. 2, p. 398. Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 823; Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John A. Boyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 200; see also Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, vol. 3, pp. 8–9, and Genghis Khan, vol. 2, pp. 400, 552–3; Bruno De Nicola, ‘Patrons or Murids?: Mongol Women and Shaykhs in Ilkhanid Iran and Anatolia’, Iran 52 (2014), pp. 143–56. He was born in 1234 under the reign of Ögetei Khan. See Henry Hoyle Howorth, History of the Mongols: From the 9th to the 19th Century, 4 vols (London: Longmans, 1876–1927), vol. 3, p. 219. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 965; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 2, p. 472.

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49. Ghiyath al-Din Khwandamir, Tarikh-i Habib al-Siyar fi Akhbar Afrad Bashar, 4 vols (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Khayyam, 1954), vol. 3, p. 103, and Habibu’s-siyar, Tome Three: The Reign of the Mongol and the Turk, trans. Wheeler M. Thackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 58; Banakati, Tarikh, p. 412; Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1064; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 519. 50. Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography, vol. 2, p. 460. 51. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, pp. 1129–30/Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 551; On her active role in the political life of the Ilkhanate, see also Qutb al-Din Shirazi, Akhbar-i Mughulan (650-683) dar Anbana-yi Mulla Qutb: Az Majmuʿa-yi Khattiyi Muwarrakh-i 685, Kitabkhana-yi Ayat Allah al-ʿUzma Marʿashi Najafi (Qum) (Qom: Kitabkhana-yi Buzurg-i Hadrat Ayat Allah al-ʿUzzma Marʿashi Najafi, 2010), pp. 46; 64. 52. Frère Hayton, The Flower of Histories of the East, trans. Robert Bedrosian. Available at: http://rbedrosian.com/hetumint.htm (accessed 31 January 2016), ch. 23; Alessandro Bausani, ‘Religion under the Mongols’, in John A. Boyle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 541. 53. Hafiz-i Abru, Chronique des rois mongols en Iran, ed. and trans. Khanbaba Bayani, 2 vols (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1936), pp. 2–3 n. 1; Laurence Lockhart, ‘The Relations between Edward I and Edward II of England and the Mongol Il-Khans of Persia’, Iran 6 (1968), p. 25; Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China (London: Religious Tract Society, 1928), pp. 45–6. 54. James D. Ryan, ‘Christian Wives of Mongol Khans: Tartar Queens and Missionary Expectations in Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, no. 3 (1998): pp. 417–18; Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia: The Tartar Dominion (1265–1502) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), vol. 3, p. 46. 55. Denise Aigle, ‘The Letters of Eljigidei, Hülegü and Abaqa: Mongol Overtures or Christian Ventriloquism?’, Inner Asia 7, no. 2 (2005), p. 157; Ryan, ‘Christian Wives’, p. 416. 56. Amitai observes that this account is mentioned in a Mamluk source by al-Dhahabi. See Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans’, p. 30. 57. Pfeiffer, ‘Conversion Versions’, p. 37. 58. Her name was Qaitmish Egachi. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, pp. 1056, 1152; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, pp. 516, 561. 59. On the attempts to convert Arghun, see Ryan, ‘Christian Wives’, p. 417; Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1162; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 567; Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1356; Compendium of Chronicles, p. 676; Bausani, ‘Religion’, pp. 540–1. 60. Ryan, ‘Christian Wives’, p. 417. 61. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1206; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 589. Her name also appears as Qulnaq Khatun in Banakati, Tarikh, p. 450. 62. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 864; The Successors, p. 241. 63. On the Naiman people, see among others Howorth, History of the Mongols, p. 283. 64. Christopher Atwood, ‘Validation by Holiness or Sovereignty: Religious Toleration as Political Theology in the Mongol World Empire of the Thirteenth Century’, The International History Review 26, no. 2 (June 2004), p. 244. 65. Morris Rossabi, ‘Khubilai Khan and the Women in His Family’, in Wolfgang Bauer (ed.), Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festschrift fur Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979), pp. 161–2. 66. See Ruth W. Dunnell, ‘The Hsi Hsia’, in Herbert Franke and Denis Crispin Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 206. 67. According to Rashid al-Din, ‘he [Khubilai] constantly remembered her and used to give alms for the sake of her soul’. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 865; The Successors, p. 241.

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68. Specifically, the wife of Mihtar Hasan Aqtachi. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 951; The Successors, p. 323. 69. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 951; The Successors, pp. 323–4. 70. Ruth W. Dunnell ‘The Anxi Principality: [Un]making a Muslim Mongol Prince in Northwest China during the Yuan Dynasty’, Central Asiatic Journal 57, Special Tangut Edition (2014), pp. 190–1. 71. Dunnell, ‘The Anxi Principality’, p. 193. 72. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 951; The Successors, p. 324. 73. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 971; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 2, p. 476. 74. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1332; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 664. 75. This is inferred in the allusion by Rashid al-Din to Moghalchin being married to a Chinese man. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1207; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 590. 76. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1195; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 582. She was the trustee of Sadr al-Din Zanjani, one of the people responsible for the introduction of paper money (ch’ao) in Iran. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1197; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 583. 77. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, pp. 1253–4; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, pp. 619–20. 78. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1189; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 579. 79. Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1207; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 590. 80. Fifth amir of Öljeitü and the grandson of Bekheshi bin Sarija. See Abu’l-Qasim ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAli Kashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, ed. Mahin Hambly (Tehran: Shirkat Intisharat-i ʿIlmi wa Farhangi, 2005), p. 9. 81. Kashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, p. 8. 82. See De Nicola, ‘Patrons’, pp. 144–6. 83. On women in the late Ilkhanid period and their religious affiliation see De Nicola, ‘Patrons’, pp. 143–56; Hend Gilli-Elewy, ‘On Women, Power, and Politics During the Last Phase of the Ilkhanate’, Arabica 59 (2012), pp. 709–23; Charles Melville, The Fall of Amir Chupan and the Decline of the Ilkhanate, 1327–37: A Decade of Discord in Mongol Iran (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1999). 84. Rossabi, ‘Khubilai Khan’, p. 161. 85. M. Matsuo Otagi, 忽必烈汗 [Fubirai Kan] (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1941), pp. 78–9, quoted in Rossabi, ‘Khubilai Khan’, p. 162. 86. One of them was Oghul Qoymish Khatun and the other Qutuqtay Khatun (The Cotota Caten in Rubruck). See, respectively, Rashid al-Din, The Successors, p. 198 n. 8, and Christopher Dawson (ed. and trans.), The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), pp. 161–2. 87. Aptin Khanbaghi, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 59–62. 88. Chinggisid Mongols were married extensively to women from the Kereit, the Naiman and the Oyrat tribes, all of which are well documented as having Nestorian Christian majority populations since the twelfth century. See Erica Hunter, ‘The Conversion of the Kerait to Christianity in a.d. 1007’, Zentralasiatische Studien 22 (1989–91), pp. 142–63. 89. See Ryan, ‘Christian Wives’, pp. 411–21.

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90. Known in Byzantium as Maria Palaiologina, she was the daughter of Michael VIII Palaiologos. See Judith Herrin, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 313–14. She is also mentioned as the wife of Geikhatu in Kashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, p. 8. 91. Denise Aigle, Le Fārs sous la domination mongole: Politique et fiscalité, XIIIe–XIVe s. (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2005), pp. 131–2; Bertold Spuler, ‘Abeš Ḵatun’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 1, no. 2 (1983), p. 210. On the marriage, see Kashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, p. 113. 92. Ann K. S. Lambton, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History (Albany, NY: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), p. 281; Anon., Tarikh-i Shahi, pp. 139–40; Bahriye Üçok, Femmes turques souveraines et régentes dans les états islamiques, trans. Ayşe Çamali (Ankara: Direction Générale de la Presse et de l’Information, n. d.), p. 73. 93. Abaqa also had a concubine called Shirin, who might also have been Muslim. See Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, vol. 2, p. 1065; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 515. 94. See Hamd Allah Mustawfi Qazwini, The Ta’ríkh-i-Guzída: or ‘Select History’ of Hamdu’lláh Mustawfí-i-Qazwíní ed. and trans. Edward G. Browne, 2 vols (Leiden and London: Brill, 1910–13), vol. 2, p. 133. 95. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, A.D. 1325–1354, ed. Charles Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–94), vol. 2, pp. 142–5. 96. Rashid al-Din, Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 547. 97. For the possible correlation between name-changing and conversion, see Richard W. Bulliet, ‘The Conversion Curve Revisited’, Chapter 4 in this volume. 98. Rashid al-Din, Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 579. 99. The only mention of her appears in Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh; she left Anatolia and arrived in Iran in 1293. See Rashid al-Din, Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 583. 100. See Charles Melville, ‘Boloḡan Ḵatun’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 4, pp. 338–9. 101. Abaqa married the daughter of Michael VIII Paleologo Despina Khatun. See Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978), p. 222; Aigle, ‘The Letters’, p. 157. Also, Öljeitu married the daughter of Amir Irinjin, Qutlughshah Khatun, a famous Mongol Christian princess. See Kashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, p. 42. 102. For example, Baghdad Khatun, the daughter of Amir Chupan and wife of the last Ilkhan Abu Saʿid (r. 1316–35), or Sati Beg (r. 1339) were openly Muslims. 103. Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, trans. Henry Yule, 2 vols (London: J. Murray, 1903), vol. 2, p. 476; Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography, vol. 2, p. 505. 104. On the fate of Güchlüg among the Qarakhitai, see Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75–84. 105. Juvayni, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, vol. 1, pp. 48, 52–3; Genghis Khan, vol. 1, pp. 64, 70; Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, vol. 1, p. 464; Compendium of Chronicles, vol. 1, p. 230; Dawson, The Mongol Mission, p. 122. 106. Khwandamir reversed the story and suggested the unrealistic scenario in which Güshlüg converted the Qarakhitaid princess to Christianity; see Khwandamir, Tarikh, vol. 3, p. 26, and Habibu’s-siyar, p. 14; Mirza Muhammad Haydar, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia: Being the ‘Tarikh-i-Rashidi’ of Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, ed. N. Elias, trans. by E. D. Ross (London: Praeger, 1970), p. 290.

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Browne, Edward G., A Literary History of Persia: The Tartar Dominion (1265–1502) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). Ch’i-Ch’ing, Hsiao, ‘Mid-Yüan Politics’, in Herbert Franke and Denis Crispin Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 490–560. Dawson, Christopher (ed. and trans.), The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955). De Nicola, Bruno, ‘Las mujeres mongolas en los siglos XII y XIII: Un análisis sobre el rol de la madre y la esposa de Chinggis Khan’, Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia 27–8 (2008), pp. 37–64. De Nicola, Bruno, ‘Ruling from Tents: The Existence and Structure of Women’s Ordos in Ilkhanid Iran’, in Robert Hillenbrand, A .C. S. Peacock and Firuza Abdullaeva (eds), Ferdowsi, The Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 126–36. De Nicola, Bruno, ‘Patrons or Murīds?: Mongol Women and Shaykhs in Ilkhanid Iran and Anatolia’, Iran 52 (2014), pp. 143–56. De Nicola, Bruno, ‘The Queen of the Chaghataids: Orghina Khatun and the Rule of Central Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, nos 1–2 (2016), pp 107–20. DeWeese, Devin, ‘The Eclipse of the Kubraviya in Central Asia’, Iranian Studies 21, nos 1–2 (1988), pp. 45–83. DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). DeWeese, Devin, ‘Cultural Transmission and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: Notes from the Biographical Dictionary of Ibn al-Fuwaṭi’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Chinggis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 11–29. DeWeese, Devin, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’, in Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 120–34. Dunnell, Ruth W., ‘The Hsi Hsia’, in Herbert Franke and Denis Crispin Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 154–214. Dunnell, Ruth W., ‘The Anxi Principality: [Un]making a Muslim Mongol Prince in Northwest China during the Yuan Dynasty’, Central Asiatic Journal 57, Special Tangut Edition (2014), pp. 185–200. Gilli-Elewy, Hend, ‘On Women, Power, and Politics During the Last Phase of the Ilkhanate’, Arabica 59 (2012), pp. 709–23. Hafiz-i Abru, Chronique des rois mongols en Iran, ed. and trans. Khanbaba Bayani, 2 vols (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1936). Haydar, Mirza Muhammad, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia: Being the ‘Tarikh-iRashidi’ of Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, ed. N. Elias, trans. E. D. Ross (London: Praeger, 1970). Hayton, Frère, The Flower of Histories of the East, trans. Robert Bedrosian. Available at: http:// rbedrosian.com/hetumint.htm (accessed 31 January 2016). Herrin, Judith, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Hope, Michael, ‘The “Nawruz King”: The Rebellion of Amir Nawruz in Khurasan (688– 694/1289–94) and its Implications for the Ilkhan Polity at the End of the Thirteenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 3 (July 2015), pp. 451–73.

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Howorth, Henry Hoyle, History of the Mongols: From the 9th to the 19th Century, 4 vols (London: Longmans, 1876–1927). Huff, Dietrich, ‘The Ilkhanid Palace at Takht-i Sulayman’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 94–110. Hunter, Erica, ‘The Conversion of the Kerait to Christianity in a.d. 1007’, Zentralasiatische Studien 22 (1989–91), pp. 142–63. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, A.D. 1325–1354, ed. Charles Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–94). Jackson, Peter, ‘The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire’, Central Asiatic Journal 22 (1978), pp. 186–244. Jackson, Peter, ‘The Mongols and the Faith of the Others’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Mongols, Turks and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 245–90. Juvayni, ʿAlaʾ al-Din ʿAta Malik, Tarikh-i Jahan-Gusha, ed. Muhammad Qazwini, 3 vols (London: Luzac, 1912–37); trans. as J. A. Boyle, Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958). Juzjani, Minhaj Siraj, Tabaḳat-i Naṣiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindustan, from A.H. 194 (810 A.D.), to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam, trans. H. G. Raverty (London: n.p., 1881). Kadoi, Yuka, ‘Buddhism in Iran under the Mongols: An Art-Historical Analysis’, in Tomasz Gacek and Jadwiga Pstrusińska (eds), Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 171–80. Kashani, Abu’l-Qasim ʿAbdallah ibn ʿAli, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, ed. Mahin Hambly (Tehran: Shirkat Intisharat-i ʿIlmi va Farhangi, 2005). Khanbaghi, Aptin, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). Khazanov, Anatoly M., ‘Muhammad and Jenghiz Khan Compared: The Religious Factor in World Empire Building’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3 (July 1993), pp. 461–79. Khwandamir, Ghiyath al-Din, Tarikh-i Habib al-Siyar fi Akhbar Afrad Bashar, 4 vols (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Khayyam, 1954). Khwandamir, Ghiyath al-Din, Habibu’s-siyar, Tome Three: The Reign of the Mongol and the Turk, trans. Wheeler M. Thackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Köprülü, Mehmet Fuat, Influence du chamanisme turco-mongol sur les ordres mystiques musulmans (Istanbul: Zellitch Frères, 1929). Kumar, Sunil, ‘The Ignored Elites: Turks, Mongols and a Persian Secretarial Class in the Early Delhi Sultanate’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2009), pp. 55–6. Lambton, Ann K. S., Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History (Albany, NY: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988). Lane, George, ‘Arghun Aqa: Mongol Bureaucrat’, Iranian Studies 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), pp. 459–82. Lane, George, Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule in Thirteenth Century Iran (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004). Lockhart, Laurence, ‘The Relations between Edward I and Edward II of England and the Mongol Il-Khans of Persia’, Iran 6 (1968), pp. 23–31. May, Timothy, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). Melville, Charles, ‘Padshah-i Islam: The Conversion of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan’, Pembroke Papers 1 (1990), pp. 159–77. Melville, Charles, The Fall of Amir Chupan and the Decline of the Ilkhanate, 1327–37: A Decade of Discord in Mongol Iran (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1999).

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Melville, Charles, ‘History and Myth: The Persianisation of Ghazan Khan’, in Éva M. Jeremiás (ed.), Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries (Piliscsaba, Hungary: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2003), pp. 133–60. Melville, Charles, ‘Between Firdausi and Rashid al-Din: Persian Verse Chronicles of the Mongol Period’, Studia Islamica 104–5 (2007), pp. 45–65. Melville, Charles, ‘Boloḡan Ḵatun’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 4, pp. 338–9. Peacock, A. C. S., ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court in Mongol Anatolia: Politics and Patronage in the Works of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sulṭan Walad’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 206–26. Pfeiffer, Judith, ‘Conversion Versions: Sultan Öljeytü’s Conversion to Shi‘ism (709/1309) in Muslim Narrative Sources’, Mongolian Studies 22 (1999), pp. 35–67. Pfeiffer, Judith, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapprochement”: Conversion to Islam among the Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan (Brill: Leiden, 2006), pp. 369–89. Polo, Marco, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, trans. Henry Yule, 2 vols (London: J. Murray, 1903). Poucha, Pavel, Die geheime Geschichte der Mongolen als Geschichtsquelle und Literaturdenkmal; ein Beitrag zu ihrer Erklärung (Prague: Verlag der Tschechoslowakischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956). Qazwini, Hamd Allah Mustawfi, The Ta’ríkh-i-Guzída: or ‘Select History’ of Hamdu’lláh Mustawfí-i-Qazwíní, ed. and trans. Edward G. Browne, 2 vols (Leiden and London: Brill, 1910–13). Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John A. Boyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). Rashid al-Din, Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, ed. Muhammad Rawshan and Mustafá Musavi, 4 vols (Tehran: Nashr-i Alburz, 1994). Rashid al-Din, Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s ‘Jamiʿuʾt-Tawarikh’, published as Compendium of Chronicles, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, 3 vols (Boston, MA: Harvard University, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998–9). Richard, Jean, ‘La conversion de Berke et les debuts de l’islamisation de la Horde d’Or’, Revue des Études Islamiques 35 (1967), pp. 173–84. Rossabi, Morris, ‘Khubilai Khan and the Women in His Family’, in Wolfgang Bauer (ed.), Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festschrift fur Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1979), pp. 153–80. Rossabi, Morris, ‘The Muslims in the Early Yuan Dynasty’, in John D. Langlois (ed.), China under Mongol Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 257–95. Ryan, James D., ‘Christian Wives of Mongol Khans: Tartar Queens and Missionary Expectations in Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 8, no. 3 (1998), pp. 411–21. Sárközi, A., ‘Love and Friendship in the Secret History of the Mongols’, in Larry V. Clark and Paul Alexander Draghi (eds), Aspects of Altaic Civilization (Bloomington: Asian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, 1978), pp. 145–54. Setton, Kenneth M., The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978). Shirazi, Qutb al-Din, Akhbar-i Mughulan (650-683) dar Anbana-yi Mulla Qutb: Az Majmuʿa-yi Khatti-yi Muwarrakh-i 685, Kitabkhana-yi Ayat Allah al-ʿUzma Marʿashi Najafi (Qum) (Qom: Kitabkhana-yi Buzurg-i Hadrat Ayat Allah al-ʿUzzma Marʿashi Najafi, 2010). Spuler, Bertold, ‘Abeš Ḵatun’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 1, no. 2 (1983), p. 210. Üçok, Bahriye, Femmes turques souveraines et régentes dans les états islamiques, trans. Ayşe Çamali (Ankara: Direction Générale de la Presse et de l’Information, n. d.).

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Part VII

South Asia

19 RECONSIDERING ‘CONVERSION TO ISLAM’ IN INDIAN HISTORY* Richard M. Eaton

I

nasmuch as about a third of the world’s Muslims reside in South Asia, the question of how and why this came about should be high on our collective agenda. To explain this, however, we need to clear the air of a number of common misconceptions, beginning with ‘conversion’, a term that has greatly distorted our understanding of South Asia’s religious history. The verb ‘to convert’, which literally means to ‘turn around’ or ‘turn over’, implies not only a suddenness of religious change, but a complete rejection of a former cultural identity and the deliberate adoption of a new one. Such a view of religious change seems to be a product of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worldwide Protestant missionary movement, in which conversion was understood as darkness replaced by light, and error by truth. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Orientalists like T. W. Arnold in his Preaching of Islam explained the growth of India’s Muslim population in terms of the activities of Muslim ‘missionaries’ – whom he identified with Sufi shaykhs – ‘preaching’ a socially egalitarian creed to lower-caste populations that sought escape from oppression by high-caste Hindus.1 The projection of such a modern Protestant model onto India’s past, however, does considerable violence to that past. For one thing, it is not sustained by evidence. Nothing in precolonial sources indicates a sudden or sweeping ‘turning around’ towards Islam among Indian communities. Rather, one finds a slow, almost glacial, process of religious evolution that was so gradual in pace as to go largely unnoticed by either inside or outside observers.2 A second problem is that models of ‘conversion’ in India typically see Islam as a monolithic, fully formed, pure essence that was carried to India by some mediating agency – typically Arnold’s Sufi ‘missionaries’ – while the Indian ‘convert’ is understood as a passive recipient of a foreign creed. Furthermore, because the spatial and cultural distance between Arabia and South Asia is great, the

* Note: Some material in this essay is derived from R. M. Eaton, ‘Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim “Conversion” in Punjab and Bengal, 1300–1700’, Medieval History Journal 12, no. 2 (2009), pp. 191–220.

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Indian ‘soil’ was deemed to be too poor to sustain a healthy transplant. Thus the Islam that emerged in India was judged to be a debased hybrid that would have to await nineteenth-century reform movements to correct itself.3 A third problem is that scholars of religion tend to treat religion as an analytic isolate, overlooking the remarkable extent to which religious systems are embedded in larger historical contexts that include many non-religious factors. For some fresh thinking about the growth of Islam in India, we might begin by considering the distribution of Muslims in South Asia according to the 1931 Census of India, the last reliable census taken of South Asia’s population respecting religion.4 The first thing these data show is that, whereas Indo-Muslim rule was centred on north India’s Greater Delhi region, the largest Muslim communities in South Asia appeared far from there – in the Bengal delta to the east, and the Greater Indus Basin to the west. This fact would undermine any notion that Indians might have converted through military or political coercion. Moreover, while the growth of Islam cannot be correlated with the concentration of Muslim political power, it does correlate with societies having little prior exposure to Brahmanic culture. In Bengal, these communities include the Rajbansi, Pod, Chandal, Kuch and other indigenous groups, and in the Punjab they include various Jat clans. These indigenous groups eventually formed the bulk of the Muslim community in these two regions (Figure 19.1). How did this happen? Clues can be found in the ethnography of ancient India. A Vedic text dating to about 500 bc, the Baudhayana-Dharmasutra, divided the subcontinent into three concentric circles, each one containing distinct socio-cultural communities. The first of these, Aryavarta or the Aryan homeland, corresponded to Upper India, which is represented today by Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and western Uttar Pradesh. Here, according to this text, there lived the ‘purest’ heirs to Brahmanic tradition, people styling themselves as high-born and ritually clean. The second circle contained an outer belt of lands corresponding to modern Malwa, East and Central Bihar, Gujarat, the Deccan and Sind. These areas lay within the pale of Indo-Aryan settlement, but were inhabited by people of ‘mixed origin’ who did not enjoy the same degree of ritual purity as those of the first region. A third concentric circle contained those outer regions located beyond the second circle, areas inhabited by ‘unclean’ tribes that were considered so far beyond the pale that penances were prescribed for those who visited there. Peoples in this third circle included the Arattas of Punjab, the Sauviras of southern Punjab and Sind, the Pundras of north Bengal and the Vangas of central and eastern Bengal.5 In other words, the greatest incidence of Islamisation occurred among peoples who had been least influenced by Brahmanic culture, peoples who were called mlecchas in Sanskrit texts, analogous to ‘barbarians’ for the Greeks. This finding upsets the most common explanation of Islamisation found in social histories of South Asia, whether authored in Pakistan, Bangladesh or India – namely, that the growth of Islam was motivated by a desire for liberation from a Brahmanically defined social order. Such reasoning assumes a rigid Hindu caste system that harshly discriminated against its own lower orders. For centuries, so the argument goes, members of the lower castes suffered under the crushing burden of oppressive and tyrannical high-caste Hindus, especially Brahmans. When Islam ‘arrived’ carrying its allegedly liberating message of social equality, these same oppressed castes, seeking to escape the yoke of Brahmanic oppression and aware of a social equality hitherto denied them, turned to Islam en

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Figure 19.1 Distribution of Muslims in South Asia, 1931. Based on Joseph E. Schwartzberg (ed.), A Historical Atlas of South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), map X.A.4 (a), ‘Muslims, 1931’, p. 94.

masse. In most versions of the theory, as propounded by scholars like Arnold, this liberating message was preached by Sufi shaykhs. However, despite the theory’s wide currency, it is supported neither by contemporary evidence nor by the facts of geography. Ironically, one of the few things that Indian and Pakistani textbooks seem to agree on – that Islam grew in precolonial India through the agency of Sufi saints – is not attested. In the colonial and postcolonial eras, many Muslim communities attributed the conversion of their ancestors to Sufi shaykhs, or in some cases to men who were retroactively given a Sufi identity. District gazetteers compiled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are full of such narratives. Yet there is little evidence that Sufi shaykhs showed any interest in converting non-Muslims to Islam. Most Sufi orders propounded four stages of

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mystical evolution – sharia (Islamic law), ṭarīqa (spiritual path), muʿārafa (true knowledge) and ḥaqīqa (true reality) – and focused on guiding disciples beyond the stage of simply being Muslim, that is, adhering to sharia. Their primary goal was to help people who were already Muslim attain the higher stages of the spiritual quest, not to make new Muslims. As just noted, those areas of India that later on became Muslim-majority regions had not been well integrated into a Brahman-ordered society at the time of their earliest contact with Islam. The 1931 Census of India also indicates that in modern times Brahmans were concentrated in the Aryavarta region of Upper India, a remarkable point of continuity with what the Baudhayana-Dharmasutra had to say about the distribution of clean and impure regions two and a half millennia earlier.6 Yet according to the conventional theory, it was precisely because of Brahmanic oppression that lower castes are said to have turned to Islam. Logically, the question of high-caste or Brahmanic oppression cannot arise in areas where a rigidly discriminatory Hindu social order was weak, as reflected in the low proportion of Brahmans to the total society. Thus the theory that Islamisation was a function of social liberation, like the notion of peaceful preaching by Sufis, or that of political/military coercion, fails to explain it. To understand the growth of Islam in South Asia, one needs to bring multiple disciplines into play: literary history, folklore, economic history, numismatics, riverine ecology and geology, in addition to political history. Let us consider the case of Bengal, one of the areas of greatest Islamisation in South Asia. Indeed, after Arabs, Bengalis comprise the world’s second largest ethnic population of Muslims. What makes the growth of Islam in Bengal unique in South Asia, and in fact the Muslim world, is its association with the clearing of forests and the advent of wet rice cultivation. Bengali literary and folk traditions dating from the sixteenth century are replete with superhuman heroes associated with taming the forest, introducing the techniques of wet rice cultivation and instituting new religious cults.7 Typically, these pioneers combined holy man piety with the organisational skills necessary for the hard work of forest clearing and land reclamation. They were remembered, then, not only for having established mosques and shrines, but also for having mobilised local communities to cut the forests and farm the land. As this happened, those same communities gradually came to venerate these pioneers, most of whom were Muslims. Yet none of this would have been possible had the eastern Bengal delta not been a densely forested region inhabited by preliterate fishermen and hunters, and communities practising slash-and-burn, or jhum, agriculture. Islam in Bengal was thus intimately associated with the cultivation of wet rice, an activity that required the permanent cutting and clearing of thick forests, a sophisticated knowledge of the techniques for draining and embanking fields preparatory to cultivating paddy, abundant labour reserves and social leadership. As it happens, the historical record corroborates the folklore celebrating the careers of the pioneers who initiated such activities. Between roughly 1600 and 1800, the authority of the Mughal Empire steadily diffused from its political heartland in north India across the eastern Bengal delta. Seeking to create stable communities of loyal subjects on their unruly eastern frontier, Mughal provincial officers granted rent-free lands to pioneering developers on the condition that they organise local labour to clear the forests, initiate wet rice cultivation, build religious structures (a mosque, a shrine or a temple) on those lands and pray for the empire’s long life. State officials were indifferent as to whether such pioneers were Muslims, Hindus or even, in some cases, Christians; their primary concern was to create and maintain conditions of social stability and political loyalty, for

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which purpose reliable and enterprising pioneers played a critical role. Since most developers in eastern Bengal happened to be Muslim, though backed by Hindu financiers, more mosques were constructed than temples. And since, prior to the sixteenth century, the bulk of the eastern delta’s forest-dwelling peoples had not already been integrated into Hindu devotional cults or the caste system, these rustic mosques made of simple bamboo and thatching became the institutional nuclei around which new communities of cultivators were integrated into a scripturally based world religion. In Bengal’s active eastern delta, then, Islam became understood as a civilisation-building ideology associated both with settling and cultivating the land, and with constructing a transcendent religious ideology that was consonant with those processes.8 Lying behind these developments were important environmental changes, in particular the shift of the active portion of the delta from west to east, itself a product of the gradual shift of the main channels of the Ganges River from the western to the eastern portion of the delta. Prior to the sixteenth century, the Ganges had flowed into the Bay of Bengal down the western part of the delta, passing by what was to become the great city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). But from the mid-sixteenth century on, owing to the delta’s flat terrain and its history of tectonic activity, the river began abandoning its western channels, migrating through successive channels that lay ever further to the east. By a coincidence of some note, the Ganges River completed its eastward shift into the Padma and Brahmaputra river systems at the very time – the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – that Mughal power was becoming consolidated in the region. Eastern Bengal then became the delta’s most ecologically active sector, where both rice production and population density rose, relative to the more stagnant western delta. In a sense, then, the Mughals rode the back of this eastward movement, symbolised by the planting of their provincial capital in the heart of the ecologically active delta, in Dhaka, presently the capital of Bangladesh. This riverine and ecological shift was accompanied by the settlement of pioneers who had migrated from the relatively less fertile upper or western delta, or even from north India and beyond. This, in turn, led to the incorporation of indigenous communities of fishermen and shifting cultivators into sedentary communities that were focused on the charisma and the organisational abilities of those same pioneers. The eastward shift of the delta’s active portion also contributed to natural population growth in the eastern delta, since the initiation or intensification of wet rice cultivation there dramatically increased local food supplies, as is reflected in Bengal’s phenomenal rice exports in the early modern period.9 Moving more or less in tandem into the eastern delta, Bengal’s agrarian, Islamic and political frontiers tended to merge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This explains why religious texts dating to this period are saturated with an unmistakable frontier ethos. For example, a sixteenth-century Bengali biography of the Prophet Muhammad and other prophets of Islam, the Nabi-Bangsa, characterised the patriarch Abraham as a man who, born and raised in a forest, travelled to Palestine. There he attracted tribes from nearby lands, mobilised local labour to cut down the forest and built a holy place – Jerusalem’s Temple – for offering prayers to God.10 Clearly, the main themes of Abraham’s life as recorded in this epic closely mirrored the careers of the hundreds of Muslim pioneers who, during the sixteenth to eighteenth century, mobilised local clients in the Bengali countryside for just such activities. In this way, we see how religious change – conventionally (but mistakenly) called ‘conversion’ – was inextricably embedded into, and interwoven with, much larger historical processes. It was the eastward shift in the courses of Bengal’s great river systems

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that made eastern Bengal – not the older, moribund western delta – ripe for economic development. In time, those Muslim land developers who had done the hard work of organising local forest communities into gangs to cut the forest and commence agricultural operations, became remembered as Muslim holy men, shaykhs and even Sufis. It was to their agency that people living in the colonial or postcolonial eras attributed the ‘conversion’ of their ancestors. At the other end of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, meanwhile, an equally momentous process was taking place. Indeed, the Islamisation of western Punjab between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries shared some similarities with that of eastern Bengal. Both regions were located along the margins of expanding, Delhi-based empires; both had indigenous populations that were not well incorporated into a Hindu socioreligious world at the time of their earliest contact with Muslims; and both societies experienced a transition to settled agriculture at the time that Islam took hold among common folk. That said, the two cases also differed in important respects. In rural Bengal, the movement had been spearheaded and institutionalised primarily by hundreds of humble, thatched mosques established by forest-clearing pioneers. In the Punjab, that role was played by a smaller number of large state-funded shrine complexes built over the gravesites of prominent Sufi saints. These shrines were often located by or near the great rivers of the Punjab: Taunsa and Makhad on the Indus River; Shah Jiwana and Sial Sharif on the Jhelum River; Uchh, Jalalpur Pirwala, Multan and Chiniot on the Chenab River; Sharaqpur and Lahore on the Ravi River; and Chishtian and Pakpattan on the Sutlej River. A closer look at the last shrine can illustrate how Muslim communities appeared and grew in this part of South Asia. Pakpattan, a major nexus of east–west trade between the Delhi region and Multan, is the site of the shrine of the renowned Chishti mystic Shaykh Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar, who died in 1265. Popularly known as Baba Farid, the shaykh maintained two traditions of Islamic piety. For an elite group of full-time residents at his convent, he gave instructions in the mystical practices of the Chishti order. For ordinary folk, he handed out amulets (taʿwīdh), seen as a protection against evil, a boon for good fortune or an agent to cure illnesses. Contemporary observers noted that huge crowds gathered daily to offer gifts in return for the shaykh’s blessings. In time, his convent became a nexus for the circulation and redistribution of much material wealth in the region. In this way, the spiritual authority of Baba Farid and other great shaykhs of the Punjab – and later, the authority of their shrines – was displaced onto specific tracts of territory, in the same way that a governor’s jurisdiction was limited to certain territory.11 After his death, Baba Farid’s spiritual power, or baraka, was believed to have adhered to his gravesite and soon Pakpattan became a major pilgrimage centre, its affairs administered by a succession of the shaykh’s descendants called dīwāns. The Jawahir-i Faridi, a biography of Baba Farid’s spiritual progeny compiled in 1623, records that the major rituals at the shrine had become fixed within several decades of the shaykh’s death. These included the tying of the turban indicating the formal inheritance of the saint’s spiritual authority, the regularising of ecstatic singing at the shrine, the establishment of a public kitchen and the tradition of the dīwān opening the shrine’s southern door – the so-called bihishti darwāza, or ‘gate of heaven’ – on the occasion of Baba Farid’s annual ʿurs, or death date.12 The fourteenth-century historian and poet Amir Khusraw described this celebration in some detail.13 The shrine soon caught the attention of the court of the Delhi Sultanate (1206– 1526). The fourteenth-century historian Shams-i Siraj ʿAfif recorded that the future

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sultan Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (r. 1321–5) was told by the shrine’s dīwān that he, his son and his nephew were all destined to rule India. These three men did indeed rule over the Delhi Sultanate, comprising the principal sultans of the Tughluq dynasty (1321–98). Ghiyath al-Din’s son, Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq (r. 1325–51), patronised the construction of an imposing structure in the shrine complex. From this point on, the shrine’s dīwāns and the court in Delhi became mutually dependent. Sultan Muhammad managed to enlist one of the shrine’s dīwāns into government service. He also granted endowments to support the shrine’s public kitchen. Sultan Firuz Tughluq (r. 1351–88) not only repaired the tomb of Baba Farid, but granted robes of honour to the shaykh’s descendants and confirmed them in possession of their villages and lands.14 Subsequent rulers went out of their way to patronise the shrine. In October 1398, Timur, amidst his infamous raid of north India, took the time to visit the shrine.15 In 1571, the Mughal emperor Akbar opened his sixteenth regnal year in Pakpattan, where he implored strength at Baba Farid’s shrine.16 In 1629, Shah Jahan issued a farmān (order) confirming those of earlier rulers guaranteeing that specified land revenues be reserved for the shrine’s expenses.17 Who were the rural folk who frequented the shrine of Baba Farid? Beyond the urban settlements lying along the Punjab’s rivers lay vast tracts of sparsely populated land, the so-called barr country situated between the province’s five rivers. Although the barr country’s meagre rainfall hindered agricultural operations, the land was well suited for pastoral nomadism. Bringing their goats and camels down to the rivers in the dry season, pastoralists were in regular contact with urban peoples, on whom they depended for trade. These pastoralists were composed mainly of Jat communities that had been moving north from Sind into the southern Punjab between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Sources dating to the seventh and eighth centuries describe socially marginal pastoralists called ‘Jatts’ who lived in the lower Indus valley and lacked a sense of social hierarchy, suggesting that they had not yet been integrated into Hindu society.18 By the eleventh century, we hear of Jats in the Multan region, though their social standing was still low, as al-Biruni refers to them as ‘cattle-owners, low Sudra people’.19 By the thirteenth century, when Baba Farid was living in Pakpattan, Jat communities had migrated further north and occupied the barr country of the western Punjab.20 In the early sixteenth century, they were reported in the Punjab’s upper Jhelum and Chenab region.21 By the end of that century, they had become the dominant landholders (zamīndār) in fully half of the districts of the Punjab.22 That is, by that time they had become settled cultivators. Over the course of several centuries, then, the Jats had migrated northwards into the Punjab and had evolved from a pastoral to an agrarian people – a change probably assisted by the recent introduction to the Punjab of a revolutionary irrigation device, the Persian wheel.23 Indeed, by the 1650s, the word ‘Jat’ had become virtually synonymous with peasant agriculturalist.24 As the Jats of western Punjab adopted field agriculture, they also gradually acquired a Muslim identity, as also happened in eastern Bengal. Although in recent times more than a dozen Jat clans have claimed Baba Farid himself as the agent of their conversion,25 most of these groups were not yet present in the Punjab in the thirteenth century when Baba Farid was alive. Rather, the agent of religious change seems to have been the shaykh’s shrine, which since 1265 had sustained his baraka through its succession of dīwāns and its rounds of rituals and festivities. As they moved up the Indus valley and settled in the Punjab, Jat clans gradually became integrated into the orbit of the

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shrine’s socio-political influence, for the shrine was very much an intermediate institution, patronising Jat clans while being itself patronised by the court at Delhi. The ties between Jat clans and the shrine’s leaders even extended to marital alliances. Dependent Jat groups gave their daughters to the dīwāns and their immediate family, whereas daughters of the dīwān’s family were kept within the family. The Jawahir-i Faridi not only lists the clans that, as of its composition in 1623, had entered into a bride-giving relationship with the dīwān and his family, it also names the groom and the bride’s father in such alliances. Thus, of thirteen known marriage alliances between the Khokhar Jats and the shrine, seven Khokhar brides were daughters of clan maliks (chiefs). And of these thirteen alliances, three brides went to the dīwāns themselves and six went to the sons of various dīwāns. For the Khokhars, such alliances can be dated back to the mid-fifteenth century, while similar marital alliances with the shrine can be traced for other Jat clans, such as the Bhattis, Hans and Dhudhis.26 As Jat tribes entered into economic, political and marital relations with the shrine of Baba Farid, the pattern of names they gave their children reveals their gradual adoption of an Islamic identity. Richard Bulliet has perceptively suggested that when parents select names for their children, one overriding motivation is the desire to either display or conceal group membership. Parents are generally loath to burden their children with names that will cause them to be ostracised. In other words, naming for many parents is an act that reflects, usually unconsciously, their view of the society around them at that particular point in time.27 The Siyal clan of Jats of Jhang District, according to both the shrine’s hagiographic accounts and the earliest known history of the clan itself, was introduced to Islam by Baba Farid himself, who is said to have converted the clan’s founder, Ray Siyal. After this event, according to these accounts, all Siyals supposedly followed their founder into Islam. But if one applies Bulliet’s reasoning to the fourteen genealogical charts of prominent Siyal families given in that clan’s own chronicle, a very different picture emerges. These charts record twenty generations of leading Siyals from Ray Siyal to the time of the book’s composition in 1862. Knowing as we do the dates of the Siyal chiefs in the ninth and seventeenth generations, we can estimate the approximate date of each generation by using the rule of thumb of three generations per century. This would place Ray Siyal’s life in the early thirteenth century, which makes him roughly contemporary with Baba Farid. As Table 19.1 of Siyal naming patterns indicates, all male given names in the sixth generation remained Punjabi secular names. It was only in the early fifteenth century – nearly two hundred years after Baba Farid’s death – that specifically Muslim names began appearing at all. Gradually, between then and the early seventeenth century, the incidence of Muslim given names edged up from 10.25% of the total to 39.21%, not achieving parity with Punjabi secular names until about the middle of that century. Only in the early eighteenth century did Muslim names became clearly dominant (81.81%), and it was not until the nineteenth century that they achieved totality. The process of Islamisation thus involved an extended period from the sixth to the nineteenth generation, or from the late fourteenth to the early nineteenth century – nearly five hundred years. If these data are indicative of the process experienced by other client-tribes of Baba Farid’s shrine, then we may conclude that Islamisation among Punjabi clans was indeed a very slow process. It was also probably unconscious. Historically, the shrine of Baba Farid thus incorporated local systems of culture into larger such systems, connecting agricultural clans politically with Delhi and religiously with Islam.

c. 1250

c. 1283

c. 1316

c. 1349

c. 1382

c. 1415

c. 1448

Mal Khan, d. 1481

c. 1514

c. 1547

c. 1580

c. 1613

c. 1646

c. 1679

c. 1712

Walidad Khan, d. 1749–50

c. 1782

c. 1815

1862

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

8

10

8

12

22

12

34

51

61

53

51

51

27

39

15

9

11

13

3

1

Total Names Recorded

0

0

3

3

4

5

15

31

42

41

38

45

20

35

15

9

11

13

3

1

Total Number of Punjabi Secular Names

Source: Maulawi Nur Muhammad, Tarikh-i Jhang Siyal (Meerut, 1862), pp. 15–28.

c. 1217

Year

1

Generation

8

10

5

9

18

7

19

20

18

13

13

6

7

4

0

0

0

0

0

0

Number of Muslim Names

Table 19.1 Changes in the names of males of the Siyal clan, c. 1217 to 1862.

100.00

100.00

62.00

75.00

81.81

58.33

55.88

39.21

29.50

24.52

25.49

11.76

25.19

10.25

0

0

0

0

0

0

% of Muslim Names to Total

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Conclusion Think of a pebble dropped in a pond of water, pushing concentric rings that ripple out towards the water’s edge. That image suggests the spatial distribution of the predominantly Hindu, Muslim – and later, Christian28 – communities in South Asia. By the time Muslims first reached the South Asian interior in the eleventh century, Hindu social and religious institutions had already become deeply entrenched in the heart of Upper India, while the indigenous peoples of eastern Bengal and western Punjab had been only lightly influenced by Brahmanical ideology or institutions. Scripturally based religious institutions had yet to take firm hold; Brahman settlements were relatively sparse. Indeed the spatial distribution of South Asia’s dominant religious communities today was already anticipated in early Sanskrit legal texts such as the BaudhayanaDharmasutra discussed at the outset of this essay. It is of course true that some 1,500 years separated the composition of that text from the arrival of Muslim Turks in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. But throughout this period the greater degree of Brahmanisation in Upper India – Aryavarta – in contrast to that in western Punjab and eastern Bengal had remained relatively constant. In the eleventh century, history’s first Indologist, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (d. 1050), described the Jats of the middle Indus valley – ancestors of future Muslims in the Punjab – as ‘cattle-owners, low Sudra people’. That is, they were placed at the lowest rung of the Brahmanically ordered fourfold varna system of social classification. At the other end of the subcontinent, Brahmanical institutions appear to have been progressing even more slowly. In the seventh century ad, the easternmost tracts of Bengal were described as lying ‘outside the pale of human habitation, where there is no distinction between natural and artificial; infested by wild animals and poisonous reptiles, and covered with forest out-growths’.29 And in the late sixteenth century, a Mughal text described the peoples of the hinterland of Chittagong, in the south-eastern corner of the Bengal delta, as possessing a religion ‘different to that of the Hindus and Muhammadans’.30 In such regions where Brahmanical social institutions were persistently weak, a scripturally based tradition such as Islam (and later, Christianity) faced little competition. Also favouring the growth of Islam in these regions was its association with a major socio-economic transformation, namely the transition to, or intensification of, settled agriculture – wheat in the Punjab, wet rice in Bengal. Because this transformation was conceptually linked with the pioneers or the shrines through whose agency it had occurred, communities undergoing the transition gradually integrated Islamic superhuman agencies into their religious cosmologies. They also began giving their children Arabic or Persian names, reflecting their slowly evolving cultural identity. This kind of religious change in Bengal and Punjab was not, however, unique to Islam. In 1898, when the transformation of east Bengal’s forest tracts still lay within living memory, a native of northern Sylhet recalled that, whenever a new village was founded, a temple to the goddess Kali would have been built if the founding landlord had been a Sakta Hindu, while a temple to Vishnu was built if he were a Vaishnava. And, if the village were founded by Muslims, a shrine to some Muslim holy man (pīr) would have been established.31 In other words, grants made out to Hindu colonisers tended to integrate local communities into a Hindu-ordered cultural universe, while grants authorising Muslims to establish mosques or shrines tended to integrate them

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into an Islamic-ordered cultural universe. Facilitating this process was the remarkably fluid socio-cultural environment of east Bengal’s rice frontier, where even the activity of Christian pioneers had demographic consequences. In 1713, the French Jesuit Père Barbier journeyed through Chittagong and into the interior of what is now Noakhali District, where he encountered a community of Christian peasants organised around the authority of a local patriarch. Evidently, the man had managed to forge for himself a clientele from among the local population, in effect functioning as a petty landholder of a local agrarian community, to which he gave both religious and economic leadership.32 Two final points emerge from this discussion. First, for theorising the growth of Islam in Bengal and Punjab that took place in early modern India, rather than use the word ‘conversion’, which inappropriately suggests a sudden and total change, we might speak of ‘creative adaptation’, which suggests both the gradual pace and the interactive nature of the process.33 And second, although scholars habitually see the world through the lens of distinct, isolated disciplines, in the real world, religion, geography, economics, technology and politics are all fused together, each interacting with the others. This was certainly the case in early modern Bengal and Punjab, where specifically religious changes – for example, the inclusion of Quranic agencies in local cosmologies or the adoption of Arabic or Persian personal names – were embedded in larger socio-economic, indeed environmental, transformations. Changes in the religious domain cannot be analytically separated from the larger non-religious historical contexts in which they occur.

Notes 1. T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, 2nd edn (New York: Constable & Co., 1913), pp. 254–93. 2. See Eaton, ‘Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim “Conversion”’, p. 196. 3. J. Chatterji, ‘The Bengali Muslim: A Contradiction in Terms? An Overview of the Debate on Bengali Muslim Identity’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 16, no. 2 (1996), p. 17. 4. J. E. Schwartzberg (ed.), A Historical Atlas of South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), map X.A.4 (a), ‘Muslims, 1931’, p. 94. 5. Baudhayana-Dharmasutra I: 1.9–14, in Georg Buhler (trans.), Sacred Laws of the Aryas as Taught in the Schools of Apastamba, Gautama, Vasishtha, and Baudhayana, part 2: Vasishtha and Baudhayana, Sacred Books of the East 14, ed. F. Max Muller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882) pp. 147–8. 6. Schwartzberg, Historical Atlas, map X.C.2 (b), ‘Brahmans’, p. 107. 7. Mukundaram, Kavikankana Candi, ed. S. Bandyopadhyay and V. Chaudhuri (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1974), pp. 290, 295–6, 299–300, 354–5; L. S. S. O’Malley, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers, Khulna (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1908), pp. 193–4; J. Wise, ‘The Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 63 (1894), p. 40; J. Westland, A Report on the District of Jessore: Its Antiquities, its History, and its Commerce, 2nd edn (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat, 1871), pp. 20–1; J. E. Webster, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetters: Noakhali (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1911), pp. 100–1; J. Wise, ‘Note on Shah Jalal, the Patron Saint of Silhat’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 42, no. 3 (1873), pp. 278–80; S. Sen (ed. and trans.), Sekasubhodaya of Halayudha Misra (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1963), pp. 160–224.

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8. For an elaboration of this argument, see R. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch. 9. 9. See ibid., pp. 194–207. 10. S. Sultan, Nabi-Bangsa, ed. A. Sharif, 2 vols (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 348, 420–1. 11. An early sixteenth-century hagiography records that Baba Farid’s spiritual power protected one ʿAbd Allah Rumi from highway robbers as he travelled from Pakpattan to Multan, for the saint had told the traveller that ‘from here [Pakpattan] to such-and-such a village is in my charge, and from such-and-such a reservoir is the frontier of Shaykh Bahaʾ al-Din Zakariya [the great shaykh of Multan], beyond which is in his charge’. Shaykh Jamalik Kamboh Dihlawi, Siyar al-ʿArifin (Delhi: Matbaʿ Rizvi, 1893), p. 115. 12. A. A. Chishti, Jawahir-i Faridi (Lahore: n.p., 1883–4), pp. 298–300. 13. In 1315, he writes, the shaykh’s fiftieth death anniversary was celebrated by the pilgrimage of pious persons to Baba Farid’s shrine, the recitation of his wonderful deeds and entertainment provided by an ensemble of devotees. Amir Khusrau, Raha al-Muhibbin, Urdu edn (Lahore, 1957), pp. 63–4, cited in M. A. Chaghatai, ‘Pakpattan and Shaykh Farid’, Iqbal Review 9 (1968), p. 131. 14. Zia al-Din Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1862), p. 543, cited in H. A. Rose (ed.), Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province: Based on the Census Report for the Punjab, 1883 (Patiala: Languages Department, Punjab, 1970), vol. 1, p. 495. 15. Emperor Timur, Malfuzat-i Timur, abridged trans. in H. M. Elliot and John Dowson (eds), History of India as Told by its Own Historians, vol. 3 (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1964), p. 421. 16. Abu’l-Fazl ʿAllami, Akbarnama, trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1902–39), vol. 2, pp. 525–56. 17. West Pakistan Board of Revenue, Lahore, file 131/6/24/24. 18. I. Habib, ‘Jatts of Punjab and Sind’, in H. Singh and N. G. Barrier (eds), Punjab Past and Present (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976), p. 94. 19. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, Alberuni’s India, trans. E. Sachau (New Delhi: Chand, 1964), vol. 1, p. 401. 20. Zia al-Din Barani mentioned that Balban, when governor of Lahore, waged campaigns against the ‘Jats, the Khokhars, the Bhattis, the Minas, the Mandahars, and other similar tribes’. Barani, Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, cited in Elliot and Dowson, History of India, p. 109. 21. Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. W. Thackston (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1996), pp. 280, 315. 22. Abu’l-Fazl ʿAllami, Aʾin-i Akbari, trans. H. S. Jarrett, 2nd edn, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1949), pp. 320–5, passim. 23. Habib, ‘Jatts of Punjab and Sind’, p. 98. 24. Nazir Ashraf (ed.), Dabistan-i Madhahib (Calcutta: n.p., 1809), p. 276. The author of this work wrote that in Punjabi ‘Jat’ meant ‘villager’ (dihistānī, rustā’ī). 25. See R. M. Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid in Pakpattan, Punjab’, in R. M. Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 215. 26. Ibid., p. 220. 27. R. W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion to Islam and the Emergence of Muslim Society in Iran’, in N. Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 43. 28. See R. M. Eaton, ‘Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas, 1876-1971’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 21, no 1 (March 1984), pp. 1–44. 29. P. Niyogi, Brahmanic Settlements in Different Subdivisions of Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: R. K. Maitra, 1967), p. 41. 30. Abu’l-Fazl, Aʾin-i Akbari, p. 132.

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31. P. N. Bhattacharjee, ‘Folkcustom and Folklore of the Sylhet District’, Man in India 10, no. 1 (Jan–Mar 1930), p. 133. 32. H. Hosten, ‘The Earliest Recorded Episcopal Visitation of Bengal, 1712–1715’, Bengal Past and Present 6 (July–December 1910), p. 210. That the chieftain had recruited his labour force from among the local population and did not bring it with him from outside Noakhali is suggested by the phrase ‘the labouring folk who are gathered around them (for they have taken arable lands)’. Text: ‘les gens de travail qui se sont rangés auprès d’eux (car ils ont pris des terres à cultiver)’. Charles Le Gobien (ed.), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: J. G. Merigot, 1781), pp. 13, 282–3. 33. I borrow this formulation from my esteemed teacher, John R. W. Smail. See his ‘On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (July 1961), p. 91.

Bibliography Abu’l-Fazl ʿAllami, Akbarnama, trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1902–39). Abu’l-Fazl ʿAllami, Aʾin-i Akbari, trans. H. S. Jarrett, 2nd edn, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1949). Arnold, T. W., The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, 2nd edn (New York: Constable & Co., 1913). Ashraf, N. (ed.), Dabistan-i Madhahib (Calcutta: n.p., 1809). Babur, Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad, Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. W. Thackston (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1996). Bhattacharjee, P. N., ‘Folkcustom and Folklore of the Sylhet District’, Man in India 10, no. 1 (Jan–Mar 1930), pp. 116–49. al-Biruni, Abu Rayhan, Alberuni’s India, trans. E. Sachau (New Delhi: Chand, 1964). Buhler, Georg (trans.), Sacred Laws of the Aryas as Taught in the Schools of Apastamba, Gautama, Vasishtha, and Baudhayana, part 2: Vasishtha and Baudhayana, Sacred Books of the East 14, ed. F. Max Muller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882). Bulliet, R. W., ‘Conversion to Islam and the Emergence of Muslim Society in Iran’, in N. Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 30–51. Chaghatai, M. A., ‘Pakpattan and Shaykh Farid’, Iqbal Review 9 (1968), pp. 116–31. Chatterji, J., ‘The Bengali Muslim: A Contradiction in Terms? An Overview of the Debate on Bengali Muslim Identity’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 16, no. 2 (1996), pp. 16–24. Chishti, A. A., Jawahir-i Faridi (Lahore: n.p., 1883–4). Eaton, R. M., ‘Conversion to Christianity among the Nagas, 1876-1971’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 21, no. 1 (March 1984), pp. 1–44. Eaton, R. M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Eaton, R. M., Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). R. M. Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid in Pakpattan, Punjab’, in R. M. Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Eaton, R. M., ‘Shrines, Cultivators, and Muslim “Conversion” in Punjab and Bengal, 1300–1700’, Medieval History Journal 12, no. 2 (2009), pp. 191–220. Elliot, H. M., and J. Dowson (eds), History of India as Told by its Own Historians, vol. 3 (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1964). Habib, I., ‘Jatts of Punjab and Sind’, in H. Singh and N. G. Barrier (eds), Punjab Past and Present (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976).

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Hosten, H., ‘The Earliest Recorded Episcopal Visitation of Bengal, 1712–1715’, Bengal Past and Present 6 (Jul–Dec 1910), pp. 200–27. Kamboh Dihlawi, Shaykh Jamalik, Siyar al-ʿArifin (Delhi: Matbaʿ Rizvi, 1893). Le Gobien, Charles (ed.), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères (Paris: J. G. Merigot, 1781). Maulawi Nur Muhammad, Tarikh-i Jhang Siyal (Meerut: Ahmadi Printing House, 1863). Mukundaram, Kavikankana Chandi, ed. S. Bandyopadhyay and V. Chaudhuri (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1974). Muller, F. M. (ed.), Sacred Books of the East, vol. 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1882). Niyogi, P., Brahmanic Settlements in Different Subdivisions of Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: R. K. Maitra, 1967). O’Malley, L. S. S., Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers, Khulna (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1908). Rose, H. A. (ed.), Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province: Based on the Census Report for the Punjab, 1883 (Patiala: Languages Department, Punjab, 1970), vol. 1. Schwartzberg, J. E. (ed.), A Historical Atlas of South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Sen, S. (ed. and trans.), Sekasubhodaya of Halayudha Misra (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1963). Singh, H., and N. G. Barrier (eds), Punjab Past and Present (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976). Smail, J. R. W., ‘On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (July 1961), pp. 72–102. Sultan, S., Nabi-Bangsa, ed. A. Sharif, 2 vols (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1978). Webster, J. E., Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetters: Noakhali (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1911). Westland, J., A Report on the District of Jessore: Its Antiquities, its History, and its Commerce, 2nd edn (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat, 1871). Wise, J., ‘Note on Shah Jalal, the Patron Saint of Silhat’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 42, no. 3 (1873), pp. 278–80. Wise, J., ‘The Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 63 (1894),pp. 28–63.

20 CIVILISING THE SAVAGE: MYTH, HISTORY AND PERSIANISATION IN THE EARLY DELHI COURTS OF SOUTH ASIA Blain Auer

T

his chapter explores the success of the Persian language and Persianate courtly culture in South Asia during the important two centuries 1200–1400 in the early Delhi courts. It was at the very end of the twelfth century, in 1192, that Qutb al-Din Aybeg (r. 1206–10), a commander of the Islamic Ghurid empire that originated from northern Afghanistan, captured Delhi, an important city within the realm of the Chauhan kings. Following the death of his Ghurid sultan, Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad b. Sam (r. 1173–1206), the former realms of the Ghurid empire centred in Ghazna were divided up and Qutb al-Din Aybeg took control of Delhi and Lahore, which had served as a southern capital of the Ghaznavid kingdom at the heart of the Punjab region. His successor, Shams al-Din Iltutmish (r. 1211–36), established the Shamsi dynasty, choosing Delhi as his capital. It was the first time in history that an Islamic kingdom with an enduring presence was firmly established in northern India with access throughout the Ganga-Yamuna region, as well as to the south in the Deccan. With it developed a cosmopolitan cultural sphere made up of Central Asian Turkic peoples, Afghan groups, Persians, Arab travellers and emissaries from the Middle East, and Indians from different regions of South Asia. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, with its diverse polity, led to long-lasting political, cultural and social exchanges that transformed life across major regions of the Indian subcontinent far beyond the centuries-old Islamic influence in the Indus valley region. Scholarly debates on this social and cultural transformation have primarily focused on the process of Islamisation, particularly through conversion.1 However, there was an equally consequential transmission of political, social and cultural norms through the process of Persianisation. On a broad scale, this development led to what is now referred to as ‘Persianate culture’, and specifically in the South Asian context as ‘Indo-Persian culture’. Taking inspiration from Sheldon Pollock’s idea of the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, Richard Eaton refers to this development as the ‘Persian cosmopolis’,2 a large social, political and cultural sphere fostered by the power of the Delhi sultans and other rulers, where Persian operated as the lingua franca. As a form of cultural expression, Persianate identity was perpetuated by literate members of the court at Delhi and demonstrated through literature of a historical and 393

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epic nature, either in prose or poetry, that engaged with references to the pre-Islamic Persian past. The use of the Persian language and employment of the Persian imaginary had already exerted great influence on political and cultural expression developed and propagated over the tenth to thirteen century. The pre-Islamic Persian past is best illustrated in a large body of kingly myths describing events from the lives of the Persian heroes and kings such as Jamshid, Anushirvan, Rustam and Bahram Gur. The transmission of the Persian mythic worldview was achieved through the use of a variety of literary techniques and in different genres: advice and etiquette literature, epics, lexicography and poetry. But what is the Persianness of Persianate culture? Does it change over time? How is it created and consciously maintained? The issue of Persianisation through court culture is distinct, but not separate, from the process of Islamisation, which was equally significant to the imperial strategies adopted by the sultans of Delhi. The Delhi sultans firmly based their authority on Islamic modes of representation primarily expressed through Quranic references, examples and sayings from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, appeals to the sharia and retellings of the conquests of the early caliphs. These were extremely important and they operated alongside Persianate modes of political and cultural representation as fundamental to the projection of power and knowledge in South Asia. It is also not always possible to easily separate the two modes of expression since Islamic and Persianate identities developed in tandem over a period of centuries. Deborah Tor notes that one cannot see a simple dichotomy between the Persianate and Islamicate, as to a great extent these two cultural modes of expression went through reciprocal processes of influence which she refers to as the ‘Islamic acculturation of the ancient Iranian kingly heritage’.3 It is possible to identify two core arguments that explain the success of Persianate cultural modes of expression in courtly settings during the medieval period, which also witnessed intensified Arabisation and Islamisation. Some scholars have supported a linguistic argument that emphasises the ‘homioglossic’ quality of the Persian language, that is, the affinity of written and spoken Persian. This important characteristic of the Persian language was enhanced by the efforts of scholars who developed the Persian language through the creation of dictionaries in the Middle Ages, such as the Lughati Furs, considered the oldest known Persian lexicographical work written by ʿAli b. Ahmad Asadi Tusi (1000–73).4 William Hanaway notes the extensive production of Persian dictionaries in subsequent centuries, saying, The formal, written, courtly language of the Persian-using courts, at least up to the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, was created and developed as a result of the dynamic interaction of the work of secretaries and the poets, with an increasingly important contribution from the lexicographers.5 He additionally notes that the process of cultivating the Persian language in the Indian subcontinent, aided by the extensive use and creation of Persian language dictionaries, served to retain the ‘purity’ of the Persian language from borrowings.6 A second line of argument used to explain the success of the Persian language relies on the existence of a predominant cultural disposition towards inclusivity among Persian-speaking communities. Persian served as a lingua franca for a variety of different ethnic and religious communities that retained their own communal religious languages, Arabic and Hebrew for example. John Perry attributes this inclusivity to the presence of a ‘new agnosticism’ in Persian-speaking cultures. He finds

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evidence for this in Persian poetry.7 Other scholars have expressed similar views. Muzaffar Alam, speaking of Mughal contexts, writes: The choice of Persian, as the language of the empire was, in a very large measure, also in consideration of the specific Indian conditions. The non-sectarian and liberal feature of Persian made it an ideal forum through which the Mughals could effectively negotiate the diversities of the Indian society. The culture and ethos of the language matched with their vision of an overarching empire.8 Echoing the view of a Persian ‘new agnosticism’ and ‘non-sectarian’ liberalism, but on a broader scale, is Hamid Dabashi in The World of Persian Literary Humanism.9 He argues for a fourteen-hundred-year legacy of Persian humanism. To my mind, what is missing in the linguistic and culture of humanism arguments for the persistence and expanse of the Persian language is the role of power in relation to language and culture. It seems that one must consider the prominent role played by a civilising and acculturating ethos expressed by Persian literati, the community of highly educated men of letters who actively propagated Persian language and literature. The royal court was comprised of lettered men with skills in poetry, history, law, ethics, politics, accounting, bookkeeping and letter writing. These men were engaged at different levels and through a variety of means with the invention, creation and maintenance of Persianness among diverse ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Persianisation was sustained over time through the institutionalisation of Persianate cultural values and worldviews made possible by the economic power achieved through imperial structures. As described by Hugh Kennedy, ‘The survival of Persian language and culture was the result of the continuation of a self-consciously Iranian elite many of whose members were committed to the maintenance of Iranian traditions.’10 Ann Lambton views the social class of ‘men of the pen’ as the essential element binding the medieval Persian world together across the eleventh to fourteenth centuries.11 These ‘men of the pen’ provided the institutional and administrative basis of empire upon which ‘men of the sword’ could build their military conquests and give lasting significance to their victories. Principal works that preserved the pre-Islamic Persianate heritage, such as the Khwaday-namag, were translated and transmitted into the Arabic literary sphere from the eighth century onwards and served as inspiration and source material for Firdawsi’s new Persian Shahnama (Book of Kings).12 This process of cultural transmission was not limited to the Shahnama, but it was further advanced in many other works that preserved, transmitted and creatively reimagined the Persianate heritage. One important work in this vein is the Darabnama, a prose narrative of the legendary adventures of the Persian king Darab written by Abu Tahir Muhammad b. Hasan b. ʿAli b. Musa Tarsusi (or Tarusi).13 The Darabnama is infused with Alexandrian myths written in the Persian language that found elegant expression in the Iskandarnama of Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209) and were further reimagined in the Delhi Sultanate at the pen of Amir Khusraw (1253–1325), who emulated Nizami in writing his Aʾina-yi Iskandari. In South Asia, and elsewhere, Persianness was transmitted through a constellation of civilising Persian myths frequently derived from the Shahnama. The thirteenth century was a critical period in this transmission. The earliest surviving copies of Shahnama manuscripts date from 1217 and 1276, and the first illustrated versions appear at the turn of the fourteenth century.14 Illustrated copies do not appear in India until the first half of the fifteenth century, although earlier copies likely existed.15 However, the overall influence of

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the Shahnama and the general pervasiveness of the pre-Islamic Persian heritage is evident in thirteenth-century Persian literature produced in South Asia. At the same time, Persian was playing an important role in the Mongols’ sphere of influence.16 Charles Melville has argued in the contexts of the Ilkhanids that the illustrations of the Shahnama epic in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries served to ‘legitimize the new conquest dynasty [of the Ilkhanids] and to assist the acculturation of the Mongols to Iranian traditions’.17 While the understanding of Persianate cultural influence in Ilkhanid and Mongol contexts appears to be on strong footing, the understanding of this important cultural transmission is much less studied in the context of northern India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By contrast, the development of Persianate culture in the Deccan and the Mughal period are better known. Richard Eaton brought to life the social history of the Deccan through the fascinating cross-cultural peregrinations of Rama Raya (1484–1565) to show how elites navigated complex political alliances between Vijayanagara and the Deccan sultanates during the sixteenth century. In this world, he writes, ‘most of the political culture of both Vijayanagara and its northern neighbours was Persian, whether elements of that culture had originated in Iran itself or had been transmitted through Iran en route to India’.18 There is the rich art-historical legacy of Persianate Mughal painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that dwarfs the painting record of the Delhi Sultanate. Scholars of these periods and contexts have benefitted from greater access to the social history of the Mughal period, where examples abound of the lives of court functionaries. The life of one figure in particular has given us greater insight into the cosmopolitan Mughal Persianate sphere and that figure is Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. 1662–3). He was a master of Persian ‘letters’ (inshāʾ) and representative of the Persianised urban elite of his time. Rajeev Kinra notes: It was precisely because of his tremendous success as a litterateur, in particular as a Hindu savant of Persian, that Chandar Bhan is often remembered nowadays as some sort of singular figure. But it is worth remembering that he was not even unique in his own family, much less in Mughal society writ large.19 For the Delhi Sultanate, we do not yet have a comparable social history of the court as it existed for the Mughals. Lacking examples as we do in the biographies of literati from the Delhi Sultanate period, Persianate cultural influence has been studied through architecture. In a study of the Badaʾun congregational mosque, for example, Finbarr Flood notes the critical role migration played in the translation of Persianate architectural forms in the late Khalji and early Tughluq periods.20 Nevertheless, we can begin to glimpse how Persianate cultural myths were at the centre of imperial discourses shaping identity in the Delhi Sultanate by looking more closely at Persian history-writing of the time.

Civilising Myths in the Literature of Persianate Courtly Cultures At the core of the Persianate elite cultural ethos are a series of interrelated civilising myths. The Persian cultural myth par excellence centres on a hero engaged in a battle of the civilised world versus the savage depicted in his combat with demons and wild beasts (Figure 20.1). For example, the legendary Persian king Jamshid is represented as the earliest and most successful civilising Persian ruler. He is thought to have organised society into different professions, he was responsible for great architectural achievements, he instituted the festival of Naw Ruz, he developed the study of medicine, and

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these are just a few of his civilising achievements. He tamed the demonic forces and employed them in his projects. His imagined efforts are so essential to Persianate ruling styles in South Asia that kingship is simply referred to as jamshīdī in the Persian language histories and advice literature. Jamshid is just one of a number of central heroic characters in the Persian cultural myth. Another figure who represents the civilising narrative is the great Persian champion Rustam of the Shahnama (Figure 20.2). As is typical in many heroic cultural myths, Rustam is forced to endure a series of trials that define him as a hero and test his valour. These are known as the ‘seven labours of Rustam’ (haft khwān-i Rustam): to sleep in the wild where his horse Rakhsh is attacked by a lion, to cross a desert, to slay a dragon, to overcome the magic of a demon, to kill the demon chief of the Mazandaran, to save the king Kay Kawus and to slay the white demon. Killing demons and hunting beasts is also the main and legendary preoccupation of Bahram Gur, the Sasanian king (r. 420–38). Famed for his hunting, as his epithet gūr or onager indicates, his exploits were mythologised by Firdawsi in the killing of the Karg (Figure 20. 3), a kind of composite imagined creature symbolising the wild, savage and untamed world mastered by the great Persian kings. The hunting of animals was a major ritual and ceremonial practice in the display of kingship. It was valorised in hunting tales and in paintings that show the hunt as a public spectacle in which members of the royal court stood witness to the heroic deeds of rulers killing the beasts of nature. The hunt was a major subject of Persian poetry and a common epithet used by poets for their patrons was ‘lion hunter’ (shīr shikār) and many such named hunters were favourably compared to Bahram Gur.21 While the civilising Persianate motifs are clearly represented by mythic elements of demons and strange horned beasts, they are also transposed onto figures that represent real communities. To demonstrate the enduring relevance and power of the pre-Islamic Persian kingly ideal and the Persian notion of governance with the emphasis on justice and ethics and the conquest of the savage world, I will give three characteristic examples from the historiography of the Delhi Sultanate. The first example comes from the thirteenth century, the establishment phase of the Delhi Sultanate, and illustrates the power politics of Persian and Turkish identity. The second example also comes from the thirteenth century and it touches on Arab identity and the genealogical connection between ancient Persia and India. The third is taken from the fourteenth century and explores the emerging powers of the Deccan in relation to Delhi. These examples show how Persianate heroic identities were used in the writing of history, itself an exercise in power and imperial craft as histories were patronised by sultans and composed by high-level members of the courtly elite.

Hasan Nizami and the Defeat of the ‘Bloodthirsty’ Turks One of the earliest extant historiographical narratives from the Delhi Sultanate is the Taj al-Maʾathir by Hasan Nizami (fl. 1206).22 Nizami had migrated from Nishapur, first to Ghazna and then to Delhi, during a period of upheaval due to the Mongol conquests, a well-trodden path taken by many Persian-speaking literati during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In Delhi, he obtained court patronage during the reigns of Qutb al-Din Aybeg and then Shams al-Din Iltutmish. His history covers the critical period of the establishment of Delhi as a centre of Islamic authority over

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the course of the reigns of the Ghurid ruler Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad b. Sam, his military lieutenant Qutb al-Din Aybeg ruling from Lahore, and Shams al-Din Iltutmish, who became the first sultan of Delhi. In the Taj al-Maʾathir, Hasan Nizami employs both Islamic and Persianate themes to extol the virtues of the early Delhi sultans. Using Persian motifs, he draws principally from the legends, myths and imagery of the ancient Persian kings. The Taj al-Maʾathir is replete with imagery of the mythical Simurgh and the Huma, or bearded vulture, whose shadow was believed to be an indicator of royalty.23 In praising the virtues of the military heroes of his day, Hasan Nizami invokes the Persian kings of the past. For instance, when referring to Qutb al-Din Aybeg, he says that as a ruler he ‘was endowed with the dignity of Jamshid, possessing the nature of Feridun’.24 In other places, he compares Qutb al-Din Aybeg to Anushirwan and Rustam.25 These Persianate features are contrasted with the negatively portrayed values and warrior comportment of the Turks, the long-standing nemesis in the Persian cultural myth. In Firdawsi’s Shahnama, it is from the time of Rustam that the world is seen as being in the grip of an intractable conflict between the Turanians, essentially the Turkic peoples of Central Asia living beyond the Oxus River, and the Persians. In the Taj al-Maʾathir, Hasan Nizami reiterates this view of the world indicating that the world is fundamentally divided between the civilised and uncivilised forces of the ʿAjam (Persian) and the Turk.26 This is a tailor-made literary trope fitting Nizami’s own historical circumstances. A major factor in the spread of Persian-speaking communities into South Asia was due to the Turkish and Mongol conquests of Abbasid Iraq and Central Asia, which contributed to the migration of the Persian-speaking literati to the court in Delhi. Nizami highlights the Persianate worldview in his description of a critical moment in the transition of power in the Delhi Sultanate. Following the untimely death of Qutb-al-Din Aybeg, a battle of succession broke out between Aram Shah, son of Qutb al-Din Aybeg, and Shams al-Din Iltutmish and his supporters.27 Iltutmish had been a powerful military commander in the service of Qutb al-Din Aybeg. In describing the events of the transition of power, Nizami sets up a civilisational clash between Iltutmish and the forces of Aram Shah. He provides a lengthy description of the laudable qualities of Shams al-Din Iltutmish, who is described as a leader who ‘seized the hilt of the world-conquering sword and the empire-adorning pen’.28 He contrasts Iltutmish, who balances rule between the pen and the sword, with one of Aram Shah’s leading supporters and the head of the guard, who is a ‘Turk’. He is said to rule only ‘with the point of the sword and not with the nib of the pen’.29 Reinforcing a civilised/savage dichotomy, Nizami depicts the supporters of Aram Shah as ‘bloodthirsty Turks’ (turkān-i khūn khwār), who are stupid and ignorant, more of a mob than an organised military unit (Figure 20.4).30 He contrasts this with the members of Iltutmish’s army, who are depicted in the classic fashion of the Persian heroes of legend. His soldiers are said to be like Giv (son of Gudarz) and Bizhan (son of Giv), while Iltutmish himself is alluded to as Suhrab and Rustam.31 His horse is said to possess the qualities of three fabled steeds: Rakhsh or Rustam’s horse (Figure 20.5), the mythic steed Buraq that conveyed the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem on the Night Journey, and Shabdiz, the horse of Khusraw, the last great king of the Sasanian dynasty.32 In victory, Iltutmish is depicted as the ‘Huma of the royal umbrella’.33

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Ultimately, Iltutmish is able to triumph over Aram Shah and his supporters to become the first sultan of Delhi. The irony of this civilisational clash between the Turks and the Persians created by Nizami is striking when one considers the ethnic identity of Iltutmish. Iltutmish belonged to the Ilberi (or Alpri) tribe, a subgroup of the Qarakhitai Turks. It is doubly ironic that in modern scholarship this period in the early formation of the Delhi Sultanate is sometimes referred to as the foundation of Turkish rule in India. Just consider the role played by Nizami, a native of Nishapur, in crafting the narrative of this period. For Nizami, the idea of ‘Turkish’ rule in India was anathema. In real terms, the polity of the Delhi Sultanate was comprised of a complex set of political alliances and different ethnic groups that coalesced into an imperial framework that functioned beyond the constraints of ethnic identities. However, in terms of rhetoric, the efforts to create Delhi as a centre of Islamic and Persianate culture was at least depicted as a power struggle in which Iltutmish’s victory was legitimated in the acculturating Persian myth of the triumph of Persian kings over the diabolic forces of the Turks.

Persian Genealogical History in Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri While a persistent message of the Persian acculturating myth is the victory over the uncivilised Turk, there is a second overarching Shahnama-styled theme crafted along similar ethnic lines, and that is the victory of the Persians over the Arabs. This example is taken from Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani (c. 1193–1260), an influential judge and historian who played a critical role in the early stages of establishing Delhi as a centre of Islamic authority in the Indian subcontinent. Juzjani’s activities at the Ghurid courts went far beyond his writings and he had a long and prestigious career as a courtier to the sultans of Delhi. As the son of an influential judge under the Ghurid sultans ruling from Firuzkuh, he was raised and educated in the royal residence of Mah-i Mulk, daughter of the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad b. Sam (r. 1162–1202). In his early career, as he ascended the ladder of court service, he functioned as envoy to Taj al-Din Yinaltigin. His first visit to the Indian subcontinent was to take up the post of principal at the Firuzi madrasa in Uch in Punjab, sometime around 1226. Thereafter, in 1228 he followed in the service of Shams al-Din Iltutmish and took up residence in Delhi for a time. He was appointed to the post of chief judge at Delhi, first under the reign of Muʿizz al-Din Bahram Shah (r. 1240–2) and then under Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah (r. 1246–66). Juzjani’s political and religious role can be measured by the fact that he delivered at least ninety-five speeches at the royal camp in the year 1232 alone. In 1253, he was accorded the honorific title sadr-i jahān (the foremost of the world). Juzjani’s literary reputation stands on his famed Tabaqat-i Nasiri dedicated to Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah, sultan of Delhi. Juzjani’s history remains the most sweeping historical narrative of the early Sultanate period. It is written in the style of a universal history, in that it encompasses the entirety of Islamic history from the life of the prophet Adam and the Persian kings down to the historian’s present. He devotes an important section of it to the imagined and historical pre-Islamic Persian dynasties, which he divides into five parts: the Bastaniyya dynasty, otherwise known at the Pishdadiyan or the descendants of the first Persian king of legend Gayumart;

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the Kayaniyan dynasty, beginning with the legendary ruler Kay Kavad; the Ashkaniyan dynasty, otherwise known as the Parthian dynasty that ruled Iran between 247 bc and ad 224; the Sasanian dynasty (r. 224–531), which he ends with Kavad (r. 488–531); and finally, the Akasirah, beginning with Khusraw I (r. 531–79), known by the epithet Anushirvan, and ending with Yazdagird III (r. 632–51). Like Hasan Nizami, Juzjani’s work abounds in literary references to Shahnama motifs. In particular, the valorisation of warriors along the lines of the Persian heroes is a major aspect of his history. For instance, the ‘warrior sultan’ (sulṭān-i ghāzī) Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad b. Sam is described as a ‘second Rustam’ during his critical battle with Govinda-Raja of Delhi.34 In a passage describing the exploits of Ulugh Khan – or Ghiyath al-Din Balban, the future sultan of Delhi – on 10 March 1248, during his battle with ‘infidel Hindus’ at Karah, Juzjani praises his military hero as ‘lion-hearted, like Rustam in nature, like Suhrab in battle, and elephant like in person’.35 Again of Ulugh Khan, he writes: ‘His sword reminds [one] of the force of Rustam’s blow, and his arrow the penetration of the arm of Arash.’36 Throughout his history, Juzjani utilises numerous references to other great war heroes of the Persian past such as Bahram Gur, Isfandiyar and Alexander. These features are certainly not unique to Juzjani’s history, but these examples, taken along with those of Hasan Nizami, are characteristic of the ubiquity of the ancient Persian hero to the construction of Persian history writing in the Delhi Sultanate and the identity of the ruling elite. One of Juzjani’s most compelling appropriations of the Persianate heritage, as well as Islamic and Islamising elements, is when he creates a genealogical link between the Persian origin myth of Gayumart and Jamshid and the origin myth of the Shasabaniyya, the family name of the Ghurid rulers that played a major role in establishing Delhi as the centre of empire. He does this by discussing the complex lineages derived from Zahhak, the mythic Arab ruler of Persian legend. Juzjani mentions the variant understandings of Zahhak’s genealogy, noting that some scholars trace his ancestry from Adam through to Noah and his son Sam, while others believe that he was a descendant of a different son of Noah (Figures 20.6 and 20.7).37 The Zahhak origin myth was clearly an important subject for historians and Juzjani mentions that he has consulted the Nisbatnama poem dedicated to the ruler ʿAlaʾ al-Din Jahan-suz (r. 1149–61) and written by Fakhr al-Din Mubarak Shah Marwarudi (d. 1206), a poet and vizier to the Ghurid sultans.38 Juzjani writes that Marwarudi had strung the genealogical pearls of the Sultans of this dynasty on the thread of poetry . . . and affixed the head pearl of that string to the oyster-shell of the illustrious dynasty of Zahhak, the Tazi; and, from the time [of] those Sultans up to the first commencement of the sovereignty of Zahhak, he has mentioned the whole of them, father by father.39 Having established the genealogy of Zahhak, Juzjani reproduces the Shahnamainspired image of Zahhak as a despotic ruler. He claims that the fictitious Arab king was ‘exceedingly malicious and factious, a blood-shedder, and a great tyrant, and a cruel man, whom Shaitan [Satan] has led astray from the right way’.40 Zahhak is said to have been a world conqueror in a manner that had only been achieved previously by Jamshid. He did this through the use of a magical gold cylinder that carried the names

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of the seven climes of the world. By breathing on the cylinder, Zahhak could send pestilence and famine into any regions that rebelled against his authority. Ultimately, the tyranny and oppression of Zahhak, whose reign is said to have lasted a thousand years less a day and a half, is said to have been overcome by Faridun, the great Persian king. According to Juzjani, it was following Faridun’s triumph over Zahhak that he conquered India (Hindustan), thus tying that history to the conquest and expanse of Persianate culture and power into the Indian subcontinent.41 Although Faridun had defeated Zahhak, Bustam Malik, Zahhak’s descendant, was said to be in possession of Hindustan (sind wa hind). When Faridun turned his attention to Hindustan, Bustam Malik quickly realised he did not have the military forces to counter the power of the enemy and he subsequently fled, finding refugee in the regions of Ghur. As Juzjani says, ‘ʿArab tribes akin or related to Zahhak, from all parts around, turned their faces toward the mountain district of Ghur, and took up residence in that country, and the number of those tribes became very great.’42 Juzjani traces that heritage to the establishment of the Ghurid empire and ultimately down to his patron Nasir al-Din, the sultan of Delhi. Thus, through a complex appropriation of ancient Persian legend, Juzjani weaves an imagined genealogy that links ancient Persian kingship and myth into the lineage of his patron. According to Juzjani, the redemption and revival of the heritage derived from Zahhak was only achievable through the eventual conversion of the peoples of Ghur to Islam.43 This is just one of a number of important examples of this type of literary assimilation and cross-pollination of Islamic and Persian royal heritages. For instance, Juzjani attributes the conversion of Shansab, the progenitor of the Shansabani line, to ʿAli b. Abi Talib (c. 600–61), the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad.44 He also states that members of Shansab’s family were clients of ʿAli when he was caliph. This myth parallels the legendary marriage of Husayn b. ʿAli and Shahr-Banu, daughter of the emperor Yazdigird III, as discussed in the Qabusnama written by Kaykavus b. Iskandar (b. c. 1021).45

The Shahnama of the Deccan Court and the Sasanian Rebirth in South Asia The implications of the origin myths of the Shansabani dynasty can be seen to reemerge in the fourteenth century with the creation of a new imperial household in the Deccan, the Bahmani Sultanate. If Faridun was responsible for bringing Hindustan under the sway of Persianate cultural influence by snatching it away from the barbarism of Zahhak, then where are the remains of that civilisational conquest? In other words, how is the civilising Persian narrative remembered and reinvented in the politics of South Asia? This question was at the centre of the major social and political event of the first half of the fourteenth century. It was then that the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad b. Tughluq (r. 1325–51), decided to embark on the ambitious imperial project of shifting his capital from Delhi to Dawlatabad in Central India. This mammoth undertaking was initiated in 1327 and abandoned nearly ten years later in 1335 after its failure. In doing so, Muhammad b. Tughluq had extended his authority and stretched the resources of his empire to a degree that weakened his imperial apparatus. The economic instability that resulted destabilised the relationship between the sultan

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and the core of his provincial military leadership, the ‘centurions’ (amīrān-i sāda) in the Deccan and in Gujarat. In the wake of these events, regional leaders appointed to district posts of the empire were in a stronger position to challenge the sultan’s central authority. Dawlatabad broke into open revolt and the city was taken by Ismaʿil Mukh, a former centurion who declared himself sultan. This situation was only temporary and Muhammad b. Tughluq was able to personally return to Dawlatabad for a time. However, during his absence while attending to the revolt in Gujarat, a military officer in the service of Ismaʿil Mukh posted in Gulbarga named Hasan Gangu, and titled Zafar Khan, laid siege to Dawlatabad once again. He appears to have found widespread support and emerged in the transition of the imperial fortunes of the empire to successfully declare independence from Delhi. In 1347, Hasan Gangu was proclaimed ʿAlaʾ al-Din Bahman Shah (r. 1347–58).46 His reign lasted for eleven years and it laid the foundations for the Bahmani Sultanate (1347–1527). In relation to the northern courts of Delhi, the Bahmani Sultanate was the first southern court to establish an independent flourishing Persianate cultural heritage. Here can be seen competing claims to Persianate identity and the civilisational prowess of the rival courts. Hasan Gangu claimed descent from Bahman son of Isfandiyar, the Kayaniyan king of Persian legend. He adopted the title Bahman Shah to reflect his imagined royal Persian heritage, a title taken by no less than six Sasanian kings. As is told in Firdawsi’s Shahnama, Bahman was the ancient ancestor in a descent that leads to the founding of the Sasanian dynasty. The episodes and adventures of Bahman b. Isfandiyar had been separately memorialised in a work attributed to the author Iranshah b. Abi al-Khayr and titled the Bahmannama.47 Hasan Gangu’s adoption of the pre-Islamic Persian heritage on a personal level does appear to have been unique. It is significant in terms of his imperial political legitimacy, even though we have examples of other sultans of Delhi adopting titles that resonate with pre-Islamic Persian kingship. We also have examples of individuals who proudly claimed descent from preIslamic Persian royalty without laying claim to kingship.48 In addition to the very public way that Hasan Gangu based his authority on the Persian kingly model through descent, there are also important architectural elements that replicated Sasanian royal traditions in the Deccan court. A wing-formed emblem in the Sasanian style was added as a decorative element to the archways of imperial architecture in the early period of the Bahmani Sultanate.49 Taking the historical, architectural and literary evidence together, there appears to have been a large part of the urban population to identify with the Persian heroic and royal past, in some cases through direct descent, but also as an appeal to a political ideal and identity. In this context, it is remarkable to consider the enduring interest of Sasanian styles of political legitimacy as they were used over the centuries. One of the most important members of the literati to reflect this pervasive Persianate cultural influence of this period, in the fledgling Bahmani court in Gulbarga, was ʿAbd al-Malik ʿIsami (fl. 1350). A figure who in many ways parallels Amir Khusraw, the great poet and courtier to the Delhi Sultans, ʿIsami is one of the most important authors to write Persian histories in verse in South Asia. He wrote the Futuh al-Salatin (The Victories of the Sultans), a dynastic history fashioned in the style of Firdawsi’s Shahnama and dedicated to the victories of ʿAlaʾ-al-Din Bahman Shah over the Delhi Sultans. ʿIsami was directly inspired by Firdawsi and describes

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his own personal desire to ‘produce a garden-like book out of the history of the kings of Hindustan’.50 The Futuh al-Salatin covers a period from the reign of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (998–1030) and culminates in 1350. Chronologically, ʿIsami picks up the dynastic narrative of the Shahnama as Mahmud becomes the epitome of Persian kingship and the progenitor of Muslim rule in India. ʿIsami ties his patron Bahman Shah and his own work into a shared history with Mahmud and Firdawsi, telling his patron: ‘The world will drink a toast in your honour and the book will be taken from Hindustan to Ghazni.’51 Being a work that added to the political and cultural legitimacy of the Bahmani court, it demonstrates the critical role that ideals of Persian kingship played in the court, contending as it did with the established power of Delhi.52 In crafting the polemics that separated Delhi from the Deccan, ʿIsami draws deeply from the well of Shahnama heroic motifs to contrast what he saw as the Bahmani virtues of goodness and justice with the tyranny and oppression of the ruling sultan of Delhi, Muhammad b. Tughluq.53 Two examples will serve to demonstrate how ʿIsami used the pre-Islamic Persian past in the political rhetoric of his time. First, ʿIsami relates the events of the rebellion of Bahaʾ al-Din, who had been appointed as governor of Sagar in the Deccan. He had been conferred the title of Garshasp, a legendary Persian hero who is the subject of Asadi Tusi’s Garshaspnama, and was a cousin of Muhammad b. Tughluq. The sultan had commanded his forces, under the leadership of Ahmad b. Ayaz in Gujarat, to set out to quell dissent that had broken out in Maharashtra. In describing the army that was amassed for the purpose, ʿIsami describes it as ‘a rough sea full of crocodiles’.54 This he contrasts with Garshasp, who is referred to as the ‘Rustam of India’ and a brave warrior.55 Eventually, the armies of Muhammad b. Tughluq are able to capture Garshasp. ʿIsami records the gruesome details of Garshasp’s execution. He writes, ‘The emperor ordered that he should be skinned and that his skin be stuffed with chaff and paraded through the country as a warning to all. As for his body, orders were issued that it should be cooked and mixed with the diet of elephants to be consumed by them.’56 From the perspective of the Islamic law of rebellion, it was the case that rebels would have been executed.57 However, Muhammad b. Tughluq’s actions give further weight to ʿIsami’s argument that the sultan represented the savage and uncivilised world and that there was a need for a great Persian hero to emerge to combat those forces of evil. The manner of execution with its visual cruelty and barbarity strengthens the arguments for rebellion and adds to ʿIsami’s rhetoric of a civilisational battle. ʿIsami further reinforces the contrast of a Persian civilised world in battle with animalistic and barbaric forces in his recording of an exchange between Kishli Khan and Muhammad b. Tughluq. In a letter purportedly written by Kishli Khan to the sultan following the entry of Tughluq’s forces into territory under his control, he compares this action to those of the mythic Turanian warrior Afrasiyab and his invasion of Persia. He writes, Your Majesty as a warrior knows well that as long as Rustam was in Iran, there was no fear from the troops of Afrasiyab and no one dared to cross the river. My country is like Iran. You are not stronger than Afrasiyab . . . whose efforts fell through before Rustam’s bravery.58

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ʿIsami goes into great detail concerning the pain and suffering incurred by the population of Delhi that was forced to migrate to Dawlatabad at the command of Muhammad b. Tughluq. Again he establishes a civilised/savage dichotomy, a kind of heaven and hell opposition. He describes Delhi post migration as ‘a paradise bereft of houris [where] houses were reduced to abodes of demons’.59 ʿIsami laments the efforts of Muhammad b. Tughluq to repopulate the city by recruiting villagers, which he says meant that ‘nightingales and parrots were ejected and in their places were installed crows and ravens’.60 ʿIsami frames the whole event in the great civilising narrative of Faridun’s battle against the evil Zahhak, the demon-king. According to legend, Zahhak was born to an Arab ruler named Merdas. Although he was brave and ambitious, he had an evil disposition and was easily led astray. He was led down the path of evil by Satan, who promised Zahhak absolute power over the world. Satan appeared before Zahhak in a variety of disguises and on one occasion he allowed him to kiss his shoulders where two black snakes appeared. If he cut one head off, another would grow in its place (Figure 20.7). In this way, Zahhak became Satan’s tool for the destruction of humankind. ʿIsami appropriates this ancient legend and gives it contemporary significance. He uses the analogy of Zahhak to once again highlight the cruelty of Muhammad b. Tughluq, the sultan of Delhi. In this, he compares the oppressive measures of Tughluq to those of the demon-king Zahhak: When Zahhak committed an atrocity, his name was synonymous with barbarity. Today if such a villain lived, everyone would find him praised.61

Conclusion All of these efforts to revive a pre-Islamic Persian past in South Asia reflect on changing political and social contexts. Early in the thirteenth century, Hasan Nizami legitimated the ascension of Iltutmish to the throne of Delhi as a victory of Persian forces and kingship against the chaotic and savage rule of the ‘Turks’. Also at this early stage of the Delhi Sultanate, Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani integrated the family of the Shansabani rulers in South Asia with the mythic history of Faridun’s conquests over Zahhak, thus situating ‘Hindustan’ into the civilising narrative of the ancient Persian worldview. Finally, in the fourteenth century, in a battle over the extension of the limits of Muhammad b. Tughluq’s empire, ʿAbd al-Malik ʿIsami resurrected the pre-Islamic Persian hero as a means of combating the power and legitimacy of Delhi. All this is testimony to a courtly culture deeply rooted in a Persianate civilising cultural ethos that played a central role in the identity politics of power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These examples give us a window into the manner in which authors writing in the Persian language reinvented a Persianate identity on the basis of ancient Persian heroic myths for the kings of South Asia. The persistence and creative reuse of the Shahnama-styled imaginary was part of the effort to construct a universal ethos that extended across divergent polities in a growing imperial realm. Persian language was a marker of the valued qualities of courage, bravery and justice exemplified by the legendary pre-Islamic Persian kings. The conquest of the civilised over the savage was integral to the projection of imperial legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate and was a major preoccupation of authors in India during the transformative thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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Figure 20.1 Jamshid’s throne carried by Div. Firdawsi, Shahnama. Timurid, Shiraz, c.1435–40. Opaque watercolour, ink and gold on paper. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 22-1948, fol. 11v. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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Figure 20.2 Rustam slays the white Div. Folio from a Shahnama. Sub-imperial Mughal, India, 1608. Opaque watercolour, gold, and ink on paper. Gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation, (M.71.49.3). Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Figure 20.3 Bahram Gur fights the horned wolf. Illustrated folio from a manuscript of the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama, c. 1330–40. Opaque watercolour, gold and silver on paper; folio 41.5 × 30 cm (16 5/16 × 11 13/16 in.). Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, bequest of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1960.190. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Figure 20.4 Rustam kills the Turanian hero Alkus. Shahnama. India, c. 1450. Inventory number 3/1988. The David Collection, Copenhagen. Photograph by Pernille Klemp.

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Figure 20.5 Rakhsh saves Rustam from a lioness. Folio from a Shahnama. Northern India or Deccan, c. 1500. Opaque watercolour, gold and ink on paper. Paul Rodman Mabury Collection (39.12.72). Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Figure 20.6 Zahhak enthroned. Firdawsi, Shahnama. Provincial Turkman: Mazandaran, 8 April 1446. Patron: Amir Muhammad b. Murtaza. Scribe: Fath Allah b. Ahmad Sabzavari. London, British Library, MS Or. 12688, vol. I, f. 22r.

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Figure 20.7 Zahhak pinned to Mountain Damavand. Firdawsi, Shahnama. Timurid, Shiraz, c.1430. Patron: Ibrahim Sultan b. Shahrukh. Illuminator: Nasr al-Sultani. Opaque watercolours, ink and gold on paper. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ouseley Add. 176, f. 30r.

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Notes 1. Scholars generally identify four major causes of Islamisation in South Asia beginning with trade, proselytism, migration and conquest, though there is general disagreement about the relative influence of these factors. For a discussion of the role of Sufi shaykhs in the process of conversion, see Bruce Lawrence, ‘Early Indo-Muslim Saints and Conversion’, in Yohanan Friedmann (ed.), Islam in Asia (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), pp. 109–45. For a view of conquest, see John F. Richards, ‘The Islamic Frontier in the East: Expansion into South Asia’, South Asia 4 (1974), pp. 91–109. Richard Eaton developed an original theory of conversion accounted for by a gradual process of acculturation. See Richard Eaton, ‘Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India’, in R. C. Martin (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Oxford: Oneworld, 1985), pp. 106–23. 2. See Richard Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600, 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 18–27. 3. See Deborah Tor, ‘The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals in the Persianate Fürstenspiegel’, Iran 49 (2011), p. 117. 4. John Perry, ‘New Persian: Expansion, Standardization, and Inclusivity’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 85. 5. William Hanaway, ‘Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 95. 6. Ibid., p. 133. 7. Perry, ‘New Persian: Expansion, Standardization, and Inclusivity’, p. 89. 8. Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (1998), p. 348. 9. Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 10. Hugh Kennedy, ‘Survival of Iranianness’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Rise of Islam, vol. 4: The Idea of Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), p 13. Kennedy points to the continued existence of kingdoms and principalities in places such as Tabaristan, Khwarazm, Khurasan and the Caucasus that maintained relative independence during Arab conquests or existed in a tributary role to Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs while retaining a Sasanian shah styled rule (see ibid., pp. 14–17). Clifford Bosworth discusses the persisting traditions of Sasanian norms of kingship in Clifford Edmund Bosworth, ‘The Persistent Older Heritage in the Medieval Iranian Lands’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Rise of Islam, vol. 4: The Idea of Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 30–43. 11. A. K. S. Lambton, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic, and Social History, 11th–14th Century, Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 297. 12. For references to this transmission, see Ehsan Yarshater, ‘Iranian National History’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, part 1: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 359–62. 13. An important illustrated Mughal manuscript produced in Akbar’s court in the 1580s of the Darabnama is held in the British Library. Muhammad b. Hasan Abu Tahir Tarsusi, Darabnama, British Library, London, MS Or. 4615. 14. For references to the 1217 manuscript, see M. Amin Mahdavi, ‘“Genetically Modified Corpus” or “Critical Edition”? The Shāhnāma Genome Project’, Persica 19 (2003), p. 4. For references to the 1276 manuscript, see Firuza Abdullaeva and Charles Melville, The Persian Book of Kings: Ibrahim Sultan’s ‘Shahnama’, Treasures from the Bodleian Library (Oxford:

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15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Bodleian Library, 2008), p. 34. Oleg Grabar proposes some explanations for the appearance of illuminated Shahnama manuscripts. See Oleg Grabar, ‘Why was the Shahnama Illustrated?’, Iranian Studies 43, no. 1 (2010), pp. 91–6. B. N. Goswamy, A Jainesque Sultanate Shahnama and the Context of Pre-Mughal Painting in India, Rietberg Series on Indian Art (Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1988). See David Morgan, ‘Persian as a Lingua Franca in the Mongol Empire’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 160–70. Charles Melville, ‘The Royal Image in Mongol Iran’, in Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville (eds), Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 344. Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 100. Rajeev Kumar Kinra, ‘Master and Munshī: A Brahman Secretary’s Guide to Mughal Governance’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 47, no. 4 (2010), p. 536. Finbarr Flood, ‘Persianate Trends in Sultanate Architecture: The Great Mosque of Bada’un’, in Bernard O’Kane (ed.), The Iconography of Islamic Art: Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 183. William Hanaway, ‘The Concept of the Hunt in Persian Literature’, Boston Museum Bulletin 69, nos 355–6 (1971), pp. 24–6. The dating of the Taj al-Maʾathir is either c. 1217 or 1229. See Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, On History and Historians of Medieval India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1983), p. 60. However, the second date has come under criticism. See Hasan Nizami, Taj ul Ma’athir: The Crown of Glorious Deeds, trans. Bhagwat Saroop, ed. M. Aslam Khan and Chander Shekar (Delhi: Saud Ahmad Dehlavi, 1998), pp. xxx–xxxi. The Simurgh and the Huma were both mythical birds of good omen. Nizami, Crown of Glorious Deeds, p. 72. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 287. Hasan Nizami, Taj al-Maʾathir, British Library India Office Collection, London, MS Add. 7623, f. 88v. For a discussion of this incident, see Sunil Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate 1192–1286 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 132–3. This is an analysis of the events discussed by Juzjani. See Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, ‘T̤abaḳāt-i Nāṣirī’: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, including Hindustan; from A. H. 194 (810 A.D.) to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam, trans. H. G. Raverty, 2 vols (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 605–6 and 606 n. 3. Nizami, Crown of Glorious Deeds, p. 288. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 292. Nizami, Taj al-Maʾathir, f. 91v. Nizami, Crown of Glorious Deeds, p. 294. Nizami, Taj al-Maʾathir, f. 92v. Nizami, Crown of Glorious Deeds, p. 294. Nizami, Taj al-Maʾathir, f. 93r. Nizami, Crown of Glorious Deeds, p. 299. Juzjani, ‘T̤abaḳāt-i Nāṣirī’: A General History, p. 460. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 681; Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Kabul: Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan, 1342), vol. 1, p. 581. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 721. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 303–4. See also Raverty’s extensive note on the subject. For the sources of Fakhr al-Din Mubarak Shah’s life not to be confused with Fakhr-i Muddabir, see M. S. Khan, ‘The Life and Works of Fakhr-i Mudabbir’, Islamic Culture 51, no. 2 (1977), pp. 127–8.

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39. Juzjani, ‘T̤abaḳāt-i Nāṣirī’: A General History, vol. 1, p. 301. To recover Zahhak’s history, Juzjani also cites from the Tarikh-i Maqdisi, likely by Mutahhar b. Tahir al-Maqdisi or alMuqaddasi, author (fl. c. 966) of Kitab al-Badʾ wa’l-Taʾrikh. To fill in details of the history of Bustam, Juzjani refers to the Muntakhab-i Tarikh-i Nasiri, a historian at the court of Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad b. Sam. See, respectively, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 305, 307. 40. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 304. 41. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 305. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 309. 43. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 309–10. 44. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 302. 45. Discussed in Tor, ‘The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals’, p. 118. For a more in-depth discussion of the Zoroastrian myths that surround Banu Pars/Shahr-Banu, see Mary Boyce, ‘Bībī Shahrbānū and the Lady of Pārs’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30, no. 1 (1967), pp. 30–44. 46. These events are described in ʿAbd al-Malik ʿIsami, ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’; or, ‘Shah Nāmah-i Hind’ of ʿIṣāmī: Translation and Commentary, ed. Agha Mahdi Husain, 3 vols (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 766–73. Also see Ziyaʾ al-Din Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, ed. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1862), pp. 512–15. Barani frames this history in terms of rebellion (fitna). 47. The British Library possesses a copy dating to 1397. Iranshah b. Abi al-Khayr, Bahmannama, British Library, London, MS Or. 2780. 48. Shokoohy gives other relevant examples of individuals living in Delhi who have traced their origins back into the mythic Persian past. Mehrdad Shokoohy, ‘Sasanian Royal Emblems and their Reemergence in the Fourteenth-Century Deccan’, Muqarnas 11 (1994), p. 65. 49. Mehrdad Shokoohy writes in his study of this Sasanian architectural feature found in early Bahmani monuments that ‘so far scholars have offered no explanation for the origin of the motif or its probable connection with the Bahmani’s claim of noble origin’ (ibid.). 50. ʿAbd al-Malik ʿIsami, Futuh al-Salatin, ed. A. S. Usha (Madras: University of Madras, 1948), p. 18. 51. Ibid. 52. For a string of comparisons made between the figure of ʿAlaʾ al-Din Bahman Shah and the great Persian heroes of the past, see ʿIsami, ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’: Translation and Commentary, vol. 1, pp. 14–15. 53. The use of violence issued from the office of the sultan was a concern of Muslim leaders. See Peter Hardy, ‘Force and Violence in Indo-Persian Writing on History and Government in Medieval South Asia’, in Milton Israel and N. K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Professor Aziz Ahmad (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 165–208. The use of violence by Muhammad b. Tughluq in particular was commented on by a number of contemporary authors. For the view of Ibn Battuta, see David Waines, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūṭa on Public Violence in the Delhi Sultanate’, in Arnoud Vrolijk et al. (eds), O ye Gentlemen: Arabic Studies on Science and Literary Culture in Honour of Remke Kruk (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 231–46; David Waines, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūṭa on Shedding of Blood in the Delhi Sultanate’, Al-Masāq 24, no. 3 (2012), pp. 279–92. 54. ʿIsami, ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’: Translation and Commentary, vol. 3, p. 652. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 658–9. 57. For a relevant example of the debates on rebellion and execution in Muhammad b. Tughluq’s court, see Blain Auer, ‘Concepts of Justice and the Catalogue of Punishments under the Sultans of Delhi (7th–8th/13th–14th Centuries)’, in Maribel Fierro and Christian Lange (eds), Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 241–4.

myth, history and persianisation 58. 59. 60. 61.

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ʿIsami, ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’: Translation and Commentary, vol. 3, p. 664. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 680. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 681. ʿIsami, Futuh al-Salatin, p. 450; ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’: Translation and Commentary, vol. 1, p. 681. For further references to Muhammad b. Tughluq and Zahhak in a similar vein, see ibid., vol. 1, p. 15.

Bibliography Abdullaeva, Firuza, and Charles Melville, The Persian Book of Kings: Ibrahim Sultan’s ‘Shahnama’, Treasures from the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2008). Alam, Muzaffar, ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (1998), pp. 317–49. Auer, Blain, ‘Concepts of Justice and the Catalogue of Punishments under the Sultans of Delhi (7th–8th/13th–14th Centuries)’, in Maribel Fierro and Christian Lange (eds), Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline, and the Construction of the Public Sphere, 7th–19th Centuries CE (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 238–55. Barani, Ziyaʾ al-Din, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, ed. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1862). Bosworth, Clifford Edmund, ‘The Persistent Older Heritage in the Medieval Iranian Lands’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Rise of Islam, vol. 4: The Idea of Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 30–43. Boyce, Mary, ‘Bībī Shahrbānū and the Lady of Pārs’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30, no. 1 (1967), pp. 30–44. Dabashi, Hamid, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Eaton, Richard, ‘Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India’, in R. C. Martin (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Oxford: Oneworld, 1985), pp. 106–23. Eaton, Richard, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Eaton, Richard, and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600, 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 18–27. Flood, Finbarr, ‘Persianate Trends in Sultanate Architecture: The Great Mosque of Bada’un’, in Bernard O’Kane (ed.), The Iconography of Islamic Art: Studies in Honour of Robert Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 159–95. Goswamy, B. N., A Jainesque Sultanate Shahnama and the Context of Pre-Mughal Painting in India, Rietberg Series on Indian Art (Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1988). Grabar, Oleg, ‘Why was the Shahnama Illustrated?’, Iranian Studies 43, no. 1 (2010), pp. 91–6. Hanaway, William, ‘The Concept of the Hunt in Persian Literature’, Boston Museum Bulletin 69, nos 355–6 (1971), pp. 21–69. Hanaway, William, ‘Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 95–142. Hardy, Peter, ‘Force and Violence in Indo-Persian Writing on History and Government in Medieval South Asia’, in Milton Israel and N. K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Professor Aziz Ahmad (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 165–208. Iranshah b. Abi al-Khayr, Bahmannama, British Library, London, MS Or. 2780. ʿIsami, ʿAbd al-Malik, Futuh al-Salatin, ed. A. S. Usha (Madras: University of Madras, 1948). ʿIsami, ʿAbd al-Malik, ‘Futūḥu’s Salāṭīn’; or, ‘Shah Nāmah-i Hind’ of ʿIṣāmī: Translation and Commentary, ed. Agha Mahdi Husain, 3 vols (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967). Juzjani, Minhaj-i Siraj, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, ed. ʿAbd al-Hayy Habibi, 2 vols , 2nd edn (Kabul: Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan, 1342).

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Juzjani, Minhaj-i Siraj, ‘T̤abaḳāt-i Nāṣirī’: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia, including Hindustan; from A. H. 194 (810 A.D.) to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam, trans. H. G. Raverty, 2 vols (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1881). Kennedy, Hugh, ‘Survival of Iranianness’, in Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart (eds), The Rise of Islam, vol. 4: The Idea of Iran: (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 13–19. Khan, M. S., ‘The Life and Works of Fakhr-i Mudabbir’, Islamic Culture 51, no. 2 (1977), pp. 127–40. Kinra, Rajeev Kumar, ‘Master and Munshī: A Brahman Secretary’s Guide to Mughal Governance’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 47, no. 4 (2010), pp. 527–61. Kumar, Sunil, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate 1192–1286 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). Lambton, A. K. S., Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic, and Social History, 11th–14th Century, Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). Lawrence, Bruce, ‘Early Indo-Muslim Saints and Conversion’, in Yohanan Friedmann (ed.), Islam in Asia (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), pp. 109–45. Mahdavi, M. Amin, ‘“Genetically Modified Corpus” or “Critical Edition”? The Shāhnāma Genome Project’, Persica 19 (2003), pp. 1–31. Melville, Charles, ‘The Royal Image in Mongol Iran’, in Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville (eds), Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 343–69. Morgan, David, ‘Persian as a Lingua Franca in the Mongol Empire’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 160–70. Nizami, Hasan, Taj al-Maʾathir, British Library India Office Collection, London, MS Add. 7623. Nizami, Hasan, Taj ul Ma’athir: The Crown of Glorious Deeds, trans. Bhagwat Saroop, ed. M. Aslam Khan and Chander Shekar (Delhi: Saud Ahmad Dehlavi, 1998). Nizami, Khaliq Ahmad, On History and Historians of Medieval India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1983). Perry, John, ‘New Persian: Expansion, Standardization, and Inclusivity’, in William Hanaway and Brian Spooner (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 70–94. Richards, John F., ‘The Islamic Frontier in the East: Expansion into South Asia’, South Asia 4 (1974), pp. 91–109. Shokoohy, Mehrdad, ‘Sasanian Royal Emblems and their Reemergence in the Fourteenth-Century Deccan’, Muqarnas 11 (1994), pp. 65–78. Tarsusi, Muhammad b. Hasan Abu Tahir, Darabnama, British Library, London, MS Or. 4615. Tor, Deborah, ‘The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals in the Persianate Fürstenspiegel’, Iran 49 (2011), pp. 115–22. Waines, David, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūṭa on Public Violence in the Delhi Sultanate’, in Arnoud Vrolijk, J. P. Hogendijk and Remke Kruk (eds), O ye Gentlemen: Arabic Studies on Science and Literary Culture in Honour of Remke Kruk (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 231–46. Waines, David, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūṭa on Shedding of Blood in the Delhi Sultanate’, Al-Masāq 24, no. 3 (2012), pp. 279–92. Yarshater, Ehsan, ‘Iranian National History’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, part 1: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 359–477.

Part VIII

Southeast Asia and the Far East

21 CHINA AND THE RISE OF ISLAM ON JAVA Alexander Wain

J

ava is one of Southeast Asia’s great cultural centres (Figure 21.1). Once home to a flourishing Hindu civilisation, from the late fourteenth century onwards, Java’s northern coast began to host increasingly important Muslim communities, all composed of foreigners drawn there by trade. Traditionally, scholarship has argued that, from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, these Muslim traders established themselves as local rulers.1 As a result, small Islamic kingdoms sprang up right across Java’s northern coast, with the most powerful one at Demak (Central Java) (see Figure 21.2). By the time the Portuguese arrived in the early sixteenth century, Demak had begun to challenge Java’s pre-eminent Hindu power, Majapahit. By around 1527, it had successfully overthrown its Hindu rival, establishing itself (and consequently Islam) as Java’s dominant power. Scholars have traditionally identified the origin of the Muslim traders who established these early kingdoms as either Arab or Indian. In the late 1960s, however, an alternative hypothesis began to emerge. In 1968, the Indonesian historian, Slamet Muljana, published his Runtuhnya kerajaan Hindu-Jawa dan timbulnya negara-negara Islam di Nusantara (The Fall of Java’s Hindu Kingdom and the Growth of Maritime Southeast Asia’s Islamic States).2 Later followed by his English-language A Story of Majapahit (1976),3 both texts attempted to reconstruct early Javanese Islamic history in accordance with several oft-overlooked claims in the early indigenous histories – namely, that many key figures from Java’s early Islamic past (including the first sultan of Demak) were neither Arab nor Indian, but Chinese. Prior to Muljana, no one had seen fit to address this issue. Consequently – and despite being based in part on two reputed peranakan (Sino-Malay) texts which have since proven doubtful4 – Muljana’s work uncovered a clear lacuna in modern scholarship. A limited number of articles therefore appeared, all trying to build on his work, to set it on firmer ground. Most notably, in 1984 the prominent Sinologists D. Lombard and C. Salmon published an article reassessing the nature of premodern Southeast Asian trade. This had previously been characterised as Indian

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Figure 21.1 Map of Southeast Asia showing the region’s first Islamic centres and the commonly accepted dates of their conversion. Ocean-dominated, thereby justifying the thesis of Arab and/or Indian involvement in conversion. Lombard and Salmon, however, presented credible evidence in favour of reorienting it towards China; surviving archaeological and literary evidence, they stated, demonstrated that China was actually pre-modern Southeast Asia’s largest

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Figure 21.2 Map of Java showing the main places mentioned.

marketplace. Moreover, the Chinese Yuan and early Ming dynasties (1272–1433) saw China’s Muslim communities dominate its maritime trade. By the late fourteenth century, these Muslims were also migrating into Southeast Asia in large numbers, particularly to Java. These factors, Lombard and Salmon argued, established Chinese Muslims as influential players in the region as a whole – and Java in particular – just as Islamisation was beginning. This influence could have quite plausibly extended into the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the first Javanese Islamic kingdoms began to emerge.5 Subsequent to Lombard and Salmon, several other Sinologists also took up this line of argument. Emerging from the late 1990s onwards, these scholars (most notably R. Ptak6 and G. Wade)7 likewise attempted to demonstrate that, from the fourteenth century onwards, Chinese Muslims were involved in Java’s Islamisation. But despite the inherent importance of their work, they have all suffered from the same limitation: they have not systematically and comprehensively considered all of the early accounts of Java’s conversion, whether indigenous or European. Rather, they have tended to focus on only a small selection of well-known texts (notably the Babad Tanah Jawi, see below), while ignoring the relatively obscure ones. The latter, however, are no less important. The aim of this chapter is to comprehensively outline and reassess all of the earliest surviving accounts of Java’s conversion. Because some of these are not well known, even within the field, and because the nuances between them will prove significant while trying to unravel them, they will first be related in full, in as straightforward a fashion as possible. Then, through a consideration of authorship, including when and why the texts were produced, the chapter will assess the comparative reliability of these narratives. Significantly, it will be suggested that earlier scholarship has privileged the wrong texts while reconstructing early Javanese Islamic history. On that basis, a new picture of Java’s early conversion history will be painted: our study will conclude that the earliest sources hint at a conversion process which began not in late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Demak, but in late fourteenth-century Gresik. Moreover, and linking with Muljana, Lombard et al., it will be shown that Chinese Muslims were indeed central to that process; from the late fourteenth century onwards, they built up

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an important power base at Gresik, from where they were able to threaten Majapahit’s hegemony and spread Islam throughout coastal East Java. By the mid-fifteenth century, one of their number, a Chinese Muslim merchant called either Cu Cu or Jinbun, founded Demak. Under his (and his son’s) leadership, most of the rest of Java was converted to Islam by the end of the same century. In light of this, the current chapter’s contribution is twofold: by focusing primarily on the earliest indigenous texts, it will argue that late fourteenth-century Gresik (and not late fifteenth-century Demak) was Java’s first significant Islamic kingdom;8 second, it will demonstrate that a comprehensive review of Java’s indigenous histories undoubtedly supports the premise that Chinese Muslims were largely responsible for Java’s Islamisation, not just in Gresik, but also further afield.

The Early Sources The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (1513–15) Tomé Pires (c.1465–1524/40) is the only pre eighteenth-century European author who explicitly mentions Java’s conversion. He is, however, inconsistent about which missionaries were involved, making a total of three separate statements. First, he identifies them as Persian, Arab, Gujarati, Bengali and Malay Muslim merchants who had settled along Java’s northern coast approximately seventy years earlier (that is, 1442–5). Gradually acculturating, he claims their descendants had used their trade to induce the rulers (pate) of Java’s northern entrepôts to convert, or else be overthrown.9 Second, and soon after the above, Pires states that Java’s Muslim lords were not indigenous, but the descendants of Chinese, Persian and Indian Muslim merchants.10 Then, third, Pires finally claims that Melaka’s third sultan, Muzaffar Shah (r. 1445–59), sent ambassadors to Java who induced the local rulers to convert.11 Ultimately, Pires does not evaluate these separate claims, or attempt to reconcile them. He does, however, provide a history of each major Javanese entrepôt which, when considered in the context of his statements about conversion (and a range of other sources below), helps unravel his account. Those histories (despite rarely referencing conversion directly) will now be recounted. Demak is the Javanese entrepôt Pires spends most time describing. As Java’s most important early sixteenth-century Islamic kingdom, Pires asserts that Demak was in control of all the others and claimed both Palembang and Jambi (both on Sumatra) as vassals.12 Although Pires provides no precise date for Demak’s conversion, he claims that the ruler while he was writing was the city’s third Muslim lord. The first (who goes unnamed) was either a merchant from Gresik who founded Demak or a slave of Demak’s last pagan lord – Pires did not know which, but claimed the majority favoured the latter tradition. Nonetheless, Pires claims that this individual, through conquest and intermarriage, turned Demak into a powerful kingdom. Upon his death, he was succeeded by his son, Pate Rodim, who continued in the same way. During Pires’s own time, the son of this ruler, also called Pate Rodim (and about thirty years old at the time), was on the throne. He had, however, given himself over to concubines. Nevertheless, the earlier activities of his grandfather and father ensured he remained Java’s chief pate.13

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Despite Demak’s political dominance, Pires claims that the eastern city of Gresik was Java’s pre-eminent commercial power: it was the ‘greatest trading port, the best in all Java’, known locally as ‘the rich man’s port’.14 Numerous foreigners (including the Chinese, South Indians, Gujaratis and Bengalis) visited it. It controlled all of Java’s eastern trade (with the Spice Islands) and ruled Madura. It also had a twin city called Giri separated from it by a river. Although both Gresik and Giri were Islamic by the time Pires visited the island in 1512–15, Pires does not say how or when they converted. However, he does claim that during the mid- to late fifteenth century, Gresik was conquered by a Malay family from Melaka; its present ruler was a fifty-year-old Malay man called Pate Cuçuf (probably Pate Yusuf) whose father, Adam, had settled in Melaka just prior to Cuçuf’s birth (c.1460). There he married the sister of Melaka’s Tun ʿAli, the powerful Sri Nara Diraja. This union produced Cuçuf, while simultaneously linking Adam to Melaka’s ruling family (Sultan Muzaffar Shah’s mother was another of Tun ʿAli’s sisters).15 Soon after Cuçuf’s birth, however, Adam left Melaka for Gresik. There he seized the city and installed himself as ruler. After much time had passed, he summoned Cuçuf to join him; once Adam had died, Cuçuf remained to rule in his stead. Concerning Giri, Pires simply states that it was inland and conducted very little trade. It was ruled by a man called Zeynal, described as the oldest of all Java’s pates. Respected throughout the land, Zeynal had been the elder Pate Rodim’s comrade-inarms. Nothing more, however, is said about either him or Giri, except that Gresik’s Cuçuf was at constant war with them – although why is unclear.16 Aside from Demak and Gresik, Pires attaches particular importance to Cirebon, a city in West Java. This city had reputedly converted forty years before Pires’s visit to Java (that is, in 1472–5) at the hands of Demak’s first ruler. The latter had sent a slave (who goes unnamed, but was originally from Gresik) to conquer and convert it. Afterwards, the slave became Cirebon’s ruler. Although this individual was the second Pate Rodim’s grandfather,17 his relationship to Lebe Uça (possibly Lebai Musa or ʿIsa), Cirebon’s ruler while Pires was writing, is not stated.18 Aside from the above locations, Pires mentions only one more of relevance: Tuban. Pires claims Tuban (Majapahit’s main port) was governed by a Javanese Muslim. Then fifty-five to sixty years of age, this man’s grandfather, Tuban’s last Hindu ruler, had converted the city.19 Although no dates are given, this could potentially push Tuban’s conversion back to the early fifteenth century.

Thomas Stamford Raffles’s The History of Java (1817) After the sixteenth century, nothing of value emerges from the European sources until the account of Java written by Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826). Between 1811 and 1816, Raffles served as the Lieutenant General of Java.20 He took advantage of his position to collect many Javanese traditions, which he subsequently recorded in his 1817 The History of Java. Overall, his conversion account is substantially similar to the Babad Tanah Jawi’s (see the section below). It adds, however, various details not found elsewhere. For example, before describing the Babad Tanah Jawi’s series of events, it recounts two earlier attempts at Islamisation, both connected with Gresik. The first involved a fourteenth-century Arab called Mawlana Ibrahim. A pandita (sage

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or scholar) from Arabia, this individual supposedly established himself at Desa Leran, near Gresik. Joined there by his cousin, the Raja of Cermin (a country in Sabrang, Champa), he built a mosque and began attracting converts. Although the Raja eventually left Desa Leran, Mawlana Ibrahim remained behind; Raffles associates his grave with that of Malik Ibrahim, found in Gresik and dated 1419.21 Turning to the second early Islamisation attempt, at some point after the death of Mawlana Ibrahim, Raffles claims another prominent Muslim arrived on Java: a Cambodian woman called Niai Gedi Pinateh. The wife of a Cambodian minister, she had been banished from her homeland for sorcery. Given her high status, however, the Raja of Majapahit took her in and sent her to live in Gresik. There she became very pious and adopted Sunan Giri, one of the famous Wali Songo (or Nine Saints) of Java, whose father, Shaykh Mawlana Ishaq, had recently died. After this, however, Raffles provides no further detail about Niai Gedi Pinateh’s career, simply commenting that she died forty-five years after Mawlana Ibrahim (c. 1464).22 Raffles does add, however, that: The doctrines of Sheik Maulana Ishak, the father of Susunan Giri and one of the earliest missionaries, were those of Abu Hanafa [sic], which is the same as the Persians are said to profess; but these doctrines have, subsequent to the times of Susunan Giri, been changed to those of Shafiki [i.e. al-Shafiʿi].23 To support this, Raffles points out that a ‘Moharrar of Abu Hanifa’ could still be found circulating on Java. This would be a muḥarrar (compendium) of the Hanafi madhhab. After the above, Raffles follows the Babad Tanah Jawi quite closely, focusing most of his attention on Demak. He traces the latter’s foundation to 1477 and names its founder as Panambahan Jimbun. By the early sixteenth century, Raffles claims Demak’s third ruler, Pangeran Tranggana, had gained control of all Java. Soon afterwards, however, West Java was lost to Cirebon, where a man named either ‘Sheik ibn Mulana’ or ‘Mawlana Ibrahim’ ruled. The latter had previously married Panambahan Jimbun’s daughter, Niai Bintara. From that point on, he became known as Panambahan Makdum Jati and began to spread his influence throughout the western part of the island.24

The Hikayat Hasanuddin (Seventeenth Century) The earliest surviving indigenous text is the Malay-language Hikayat Hasanuddin. The court chronicle of Banten, a West Javanese kingdom, it is also known from a Javanese version, the Sejarah Banten Ranté-Ranté. Written during the seventeenth century, four recensions are currently known to exist: the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Cod. Or. 1711, kept at the University of Leiden; MS Raffles Malay 30, kept at the Royal Asiatic Society in London and dated 30 Ramadan 1230/6 September 1815; MS No. Mal.-Pol. 140 in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, dated 19 February 1892; and the undated Cod. Or. 1746, also kept at the University of Leiden.25 In 1938, J. Edel used Cod. Or. 1711 as the basis for a critical edition; it is his text which is utilised here.

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Like the Suma Oriental, the Hikayat Hasanuddin attributes a large part of Java’s Islamisation to Demak. It traces Demak’s Islamic history, however, to a Chinese Muslim merchant called Cu Cu. In the late fifteenth century, Cu Cu supposedly sailed to Gresik to trade. Later moving to Demak, he settled down and grew very prosperous. He did not, however, use his influence to establish a Muslim kingdom. Rather, that was done by his eldest son after his death, who took over the city and ruled with the title Pangeran Sumangsang. While remaining loyal to Majapahit, he also established close ties to Palembang. When Pangeran Sumangsang in turn passed away, he was succeeded by his own son, Sultan Trenggana (r. 1504–46). According to the Hikayat Hasanuddin, it was this ruler who then overthrew Majapahit, establishing Islam’s supremacy on Java.26 As well as Demak, the Hikayat Hasanuddin also contains some pertinent information about Cirebon. It claims that Cirebon was founded by Demak’s first Muslim ruler (Pangeran Sumangsang). It did not become a major kingdom, however, until it was ruled by Sunan Gunung Jati. One of the Wali Songo, the Hikayat Hasanuddin identifies Sunan Gunung Jati as a religious scholar from Samudera-Pasai who fled his native kingdom after a Portuguese attack, eventually settling in Demak. There he married Sultan Trenggana’s daughter, after which his new father-in-law sent him to complete West Java’s Islamisation. Initially travelling to Banten, Sunan Gunung Jati converted and ruled that city before moving on to Cirebon.27 Before dying in c. 1570 at an advanced age, he succeeded in transforming Cirebon into a major sultanate.28

The Babad Tanah Jawi (1690–1718) Although later in date than the Hikayat Hasanuddin, the Babad Tanah Jawi is Java’s most prominent court chronicle. Produced by the Kingdom of Mataram (c. 1587– 1755), many different versions exist. They are all, however, broadly similar, frequently reproducing large sections word for word. This suggests they all ultimately derive from a common archetype.29 Although it is possible that the latter was started during the reign of Mataram’s Sultan Agung (1613–45),30 its completion is commonly attributed to the Mataram court official, Pangeran Adilangu II, who probably worked on it between 1690 and 1718.31 In terms of published versions of the text, only one currently exists: a greatly condensed version of the 1836 eighteen-volume Surakarta Major Babad (Leiden, Cod. Or. 1786).32 This was first published (in the original Javanese script) in 1874 by J. J. Meinsma. In 1941, however, it was transliterated and republished by W. L. Olthof. This edition has since become the standard version of the text used among historians, and so is also utilised here.33 Given its highly edited form, however, reference is also made to the relevant sections of the Surakarta Major Babad’s full text, where this has since been published by M. C. Ricklefs.34 Equally, where Ricklefs has also published sections of an additional version of the Babad Tanah Jawi, commonly called the Babad Kraton, these will also be considered. The Babad Kraton is currently kept at the British Library (Add. MS 12320) and was written in Jogjakarta in 1777. Attributed to a Raden Tumenggung Djajengrat, son-in-law of Jogjakarta’s Sultan Hamengkubuwana I (1755–92), it is among the most complete

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manuscript versions of the Babad Tanah Jawi currently available. It is also the oldest surviving example.35 Concerning the Babad Tanah Jawi’s conversion account, all the different versions of the text agree: they all trace Java’s conversion to the island’s northern coast and attribute it to the Wali Songo, supposedly active during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.36 As elsewhere, the texts also link this process to Demak. For the Babad Tanah Jawi, Demak’s history starts with Majapahit’s final ruler, identified as ‘Prabu Brawijaya’. He supposedly married a Chinese princess (who is not named), of whom his first wife, a Champan princess, disapproved. Because Prabu Brawijaya was very fond of his first wife, he agreed to banish his new Chinese bride. She was, however, already pregnant; Prabu Brawijaya was therefore unwilling to send her back to China. Instead, he gave her to his son, Arya Damar, the adipati (governor) of Palembang. The latter took her to his city, where she gave birth to a baby boy, Raden Patah. Later, she had another son, this time by Arya Damar, called Raden Husen.37 After Raden Patah reached maturity, the Babad Tanah Jawi claims Arya Damar abdicated in his favour, simultaneously appointing Raden Husen to act as his deputy. Neither brother, however, wished to remain in Palembang; they both wanted to serve Prabu Brawijaya. As such, they departed for Java, landing at Ampel Denta (near Surabaya). There they encountered Sunan Ampel, one of the Wali Songo.38 Under Sunan Ampel’s tutelage, both Raden Patah and Raden Husen decided to convert to Islam, prompting Raden Patah to reconsider serving the pagan Prabu Brawijaya. Instead, he decided to stay in Ampel Denta, where he married Sunan Ampel’s granddaughter, Niai Ageng Maloka. He then travelled west, settling at Bintara, where he established a mosque and pesantren (religious school). Raden Husen, on the other hand, continued on to Majapahit, where he entered court service and became the adipati of Terung.39 After a while, Raden Patah established a large following in Bintara, until finally Prabu Brawijaya began to fear a rebellion. As such, and when he heard of Raden Husen’s relationship to Raden Patah, he immediately dispatched the former to bring his half-brother to court. When Raden Patah duly arrived, Prabu Brawijaya instantly recognised him as his son (a fact he had been hitherto unaware of). Both long versions of the Babad Tanah Jawi then claim that a deep affection sprang up between the two men, cemented by Prabu Brawijaya’s profound respect for Islam.40 As a sign of this favour, Prabu Brawijaya made Raden Patah the adipati of Bintara, upgrading that settlement from ‘the village of Bintara’ (pedukuhan Bintara) to ‘the kingdom of Demak’ (kerajaan Demak). After agreeing that Raden Patah should come back and see his father in a year’s time, Prabu Brawijaya allowed him to return home.41 Shortly after the above episode, news reached Prabu Brawijaya that Sunan Giri, another of the Wali Songo, had begun to extend his influence over East Java, subjugating many local lords. The Babad Tanah Jawi claims Sunan Giri was the descendant of an Arab from Jeddah called Shaykh Wali Lanang. The latter had travelled to Java sometime earlier and, after settling at Ampel Denta, had also studied under Sunan Ampel. Once Shaykh Wali Lanang had left the region, however, Sunan Giri was adopted by Janda Samboja, a former servant of the Raja of Blambangan, and sent to Gresik. There Sunan Giri was raised as a Muslim and, like his father, studied with Sunan Ampel. By the reign of Prabu Brawijaya, he was Gresik’s powerful local ruler; to prevent him rebelling, Prabu Brawijaya was forced to dispatch an army to meet him (supposedly headed by Hayam Wuruk’s prime minister, Gajah Mada, who died

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in c. 1363). This was defeated, however, by Sunan Giri’s magical kris. Nonetheless, Majapahit’s forces soon got another chance: Sunan Giri died shortly after the first attack and was succeeded by his grandson, the pandita of Giri. Majapahit attacked again, this time successfully: Giri was destroyed and the pandita forced to flee.42 The Babad Tanah Jawi claims it took Majapahit three years to deal with Sunan Giri and, in all that time, Raden Patah failed to visit his father. According to the long versions of the Babad Tanah Jawi, this concerned Prabu Brawijaya, who missed his son. He therefore sent Raden Husen to Demak for a second time; when the latter arrived, Raden Patah explained that his reservations about submitting to a pagan ruler had returned. Rather than pay homage to his father, he was thinking about rebelling. After much persuasion, Raden Husen finally agreed to help Raden Patah in this endeavour and, from that point on, the Surakarta Major Babad claims that Muslim rulers from across Java began to assemble in Demak, including the bupati (ruler) of Madura, Arya Teja of Cirebon and the pandita of Giri. The collected armies of these many rulers then marched on Majapahit, taking the city.43 Prabu Brawijaya fled, leaving Raden Patah in possession of both the kingdom and its royal regalia. Raden Patah took the regalia back to Demak and, as the supreme ruler of Java, took the title ‘Senapati Jimbun Ngabdur Rahman Panembahan Palembang Sajidin Panatagama’.44 According to the texts, all this supposedly took place in 1478 and marked the final victory of Islam on Java. From then on, it proceeded to spread unchallenged throughout the island.45

The Purwaka Caruban Nagari (1720) Turning to the Purwaka Caruban Nagari, this is Cirebon’s court chronicle. Dated to 1720, it is attributed to a court official called Pangeran Arya Cerbon.46 The only known manuscript copy is currently preserved at the Kraton Keprabonan, Cirebon.47 Although chiefly concerned with Cirebon itself, this text again privileges Demak in Java’s Islamisation. It calls that kingdom’s first Muslim ruler Jinbun, claiming he was a half-Chinese Muslim born in Gresik. Like in the Babad Tanah Jawi, his father was Majapahit’s final ruler. His mother, however, is identified as a Chinese Muslim girl called Siu Ban Ci. The latter was the daughter of Tan Go Hwat, a Gresik-based merchant and religious scholar with the title Kyai Bantong.48 Turning to the Purwaka Caruban Nagari’s account of Cirebon, unlike other sources, it does not link that city’s foundation to Demak. Rather, it claims that Cirebon began as a small fishing village called Muara Jati. During the fourteenth century, and while under the suzerainty of the Hindu Sunda kingdom, based in west Java, Muara Jati was ruled by a man called Ki Gedeng Alang-alang. Under his leadership, the village began to attract a large amount of Chinese trade. As a result, it grew in wealth and prestige, attracting the attention of Sunda’s ruler; pleased with the village’s progress and continued loyalty, he renamed it Cerbon (Cirebon) and gave Ki Gedeng Alang-alang the title ‘kuwu of Cerbon’.49 The latter individual, however, soon died and was succeeded by his son, Walangsungsang. Under him, Cirebon’s prosperity continued to increase until Walangsungsang became strong enough to declare independence. At that point, he also converted to Islam: two religious teachers, one called Syeh Datu Kahfi and the other Syeh Nurul Jati, had settled on a nearby hill called Amparan Jati (or Gunung Jati); together they instructed Walangsungsang in Islam, persuading him to adopt the faith and thereby initiating Muslim rule in Cirebon. Shortly afterwards, Walangsungsang departed for Mecca.

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Taking his younger sister, Rarasantang, with him, they also visited Egypt. There Rarasantang married a ‘sultan of Egypt’ named Sharif ʿAbd Allah and soon afterwards gave birth to a son, Sharif Hidayat. The latter accompanied his mother and uncle back to Cirebon, where he eventually became ruler (in c. 1470). Upon ascending, he changed his name to Sharif Hidayat Allah and under him Cirebon reached its peak. After he died, he became known as Sunan Gunung Jati.50

Interpreting the Reliability of the Sources The secondary literature has approached the above narratives in a variety of ways. Broadly speaking, the response has been twofold. First, a number of (primarily) Indonesian scholars have fallen into a class of intellectuals who, motivated by Indonesia’s postcolonial nationalism, have privileged the indigenous texts (notably the Babad Tanah Jawi) while dismissing the European ones, usually as the products of oppressive colonial regimes.51 The result has been a reluctance to question the indigenous histories, especially if doing so requires the utilisation of discourses produced outside the region.52 As a recent example of this trend, S. Badio’s popular work has focused almost exclusively on the Babad Tanah Jawi, crafting an almost identical image of Java’s conversion – one which notably fails to mention any non-Southeast Asian source. As such, Badio dates conversion to c. 1478 and attributes it to both the nine (usually Arab) Wali Songo and the first ruler of Demak (identified as a descendant of Majapahit’s ruling house).53 Turning to the second approach, examples of this line of thought, apparent both within the region and outside it, have been more nuanced. Pioneered by H. J. de Graaf, the first Western scholar to comprehensively review Java’s Islamisation, while it has also chosen to rely primarily on the Babad Tanah Jawi, it has sought to modify the latter’s narrative; by considering when and why the Babad Tanah Jawi was written, in addition to how it compares with other sources, both indigenous and European, scholars following this line have suggested some important modifications to the basic Babad Tanah Jawi narrative. Most notably, and specifically following de Graaf, they have shifted conversion into the early sixteenth century: because Pires refers to Majapahit in c. 1512, de Graaf reasoned that the latter’s fall (a key part of the Babad Tanah Jawi’s conversion narrative) could not have occurred in 1478 as stated. Rather, it must have happened after Pires’s visit; along with Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, he suggests 1527 as a date, or during the reign of Demak’s Sultan Trenggana.54 Without doubt, the majority of scholars follow this second approach, offering only minor refinements.55 As mentioned in the introduction, they have commonly identified either Arabs and/or Indians as Java’s first missionaries, all active during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The above review of the sources, however, demonstrates the questionable nature of this conclusion: all the sources clearly hint at some form of earlier Chinese influence, just as Lombard et al. have argued. To date, however, and as again stated in the introduction, only a small group of Sinologists have taken this aspect of the texts into account, and then only imperfectly. But, to determine the exact nature and significance of any Chinese influence, it is first necessary to evaluate the historical reliability of the sources hinting at it. Because all the accounts differ, it is necessary to ask which (if any) can be relied upon before trying to make sense of them. As mentioned, scholarship (including Lombard et al.) has paid most attention to the Babad Tanah Jawi. Certainly, this source is not without merit; many of its narrative’s

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basic elements find confirmation elsewhere. The identification of Demak as the major power behind conversion, for example, finds support in all the sources. So too does the assertion that Demak caused Majapahit’s fall, and that Demak’s founder had Chinese ancestry. This mutual confirmation across numerous different sources suggests these points, at the very least, can be relied upon. Moreover, it is even possible that the Babad Tanah Jawi drew upon an earlier Demak chronicle: in 1612, Mataram’s second ruler, Panembahan Sedaing Krapyak, ordered his officials to put in order a text called the Babad Demak.56 Although the precise nature of this text is unknown, the name suggests a chronicle from Demak itself.57 At the very least, this must have pre-dated 1612, but could even (if produced by the Demak Sultanate) have been written before 1568 (when Pajang appropriated Demak’s regalia, effectively ending the kingdom). Consequently, if arguments about Majapahit’s fall in 1527 are correct, the Babad Demak could have dated to within fifty years of the relevant events. This would make it a potentially significant source, one Mataram knew of and actively preserved. But despite these positives, overall some serious doubts surround the Babad Tanah Jawi’s conversion narrative: not only does it post-date events by several centuries, but it was produced by Central Java’s Mataram kingdom, an area geographically far removed from the relevant coastal settlements. More fundamentally, however, many scholars have argued that the Babad Tanah Jawi was never intended as a history in the modern sense. C. Berg, H. Djajadiningrat and (most recently) G. Wade have all persuasively argued that the vast majority of premodern Javanese historiography was an attempt to impart legitimacy to a ruling house, not relate actual events.58 Indeed, this conclusion is amply supported by the many miraculous stories contained in the Babad Tanah Jawi, many of them linked to either the birth of an important political figure59 or to how they converted.60 These stories, by associating important figures with a sacred past, essentially serve to legitimate those individuals and, by extension, their descendants. Likewise, it may also be significant that the Babad Tanah Jawi constituted part of Mataram’s royal regalia, suggesting an ability to confer power and, therefore, legitimate.61 These legitimating functions, however, immediately cast doubt upon the historical value of the text. It suggests it should not, as has hitherto been the case, be privileged during any reconstruction of Java’s conversion. Consequently, rather than the Babad Tanah Jawi, this chapter intends to utilise Pires’s Suma Oriental and the Hikayat Hasanuddin. Both, it is argued, are far more persuasive historical sources. The Suma Oriental, for example, is not only the earliest text reviewed above,62 but also draws directly from early sixteenth-century Javanese tradition. Moreover, Pires is known to have visited Java during the relevant period: a letter from Ruy de Brito to King Manuel, dated 6 January 1514, claims Pires went to Java on 14 March 1513, accompanying a mission captained by João Lopes de Alvim. He later returned during the same year, on 22 June.63 In the Suma Oriental, Pires claims he used this visit to access (albeit through an interpreter) local histories, both oral and written.64 These he faithfully recorded in the Suma Oriental, therefore making the latter a repository of early sixteenth-century Javanese tradition.65 Turning to the Hikayat Hasanuddin, this seventeenth-century source is significant for two reasons. First, it agrees very well with the earlier Suma Oriental; not only does this reinforce the latter’s claim to be a genuine record of Javanese tradition but, because the Hikayat Hasanuddin is an entirely independent source, it suggests both may record reliable historical information.66 Second, the Hikayat Hasanuddin comes directly from

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the relevant coastal areas of Java. In other words, it constitutes part of the historical traditions those regions have formed about their own role in conversion. It cannot, therefore, be ignored. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the remaining two sources are potentially valuable, too. The eighteenth-century Purwaka Caruban Nagari, for example, despite its late date shares the Hikayat Hasanuddin’s advantage of belonging to the coastal regions involved in conversion. It is, therefore, also worthy of consideration. Turning to Raffles, although he post-dates events by some time, he was an excellent early scholar who made every attempt to access local traditions and record them accurately. Indeed this is amply demonstrated above, where Raffles can be seen faithfully recording the Babad Tanah Jawi’s narrative. Moreover, although the latter is suspect, Raffles includes additional information not found elsewhere regarding Mawlana Ibrahim and Niai Gedi Pinateh. Although the origin of this information is unknown, it apparently preserves another, perhaps equally valuable (although still necessarily late), tradition. It may, then, also be worthy of consideration. Consequently, as we reconstruct Java’s conversion history, although the Suma Oriental and the Hikayat Hasanuddin will occupy centre stage, we will also draw from these other sources, insofar as they are considered reliable and can augment the discussion.

A New Interpretation As mentioned, Pires presents Demak as Java’s pre-eminent Islamic city, an image which appears consistently across all the sources, making it easy to accept. Moreover, according to Pires, Demak’s first Muslim ruler (who goes unnamed) was either a merchant from Gresik or a slave belonging to Demak’s final pagan ruler. Although Pires does not choose between these traditions, the indigenous sources clearly favour the first interpretation: the Hikayat Hasanuddin contains the same claim (although without that this individual ruled Demak), while the Purwaka Caruban Nagari describes Demak’s first Muslim ruler as the grandson of one of Gresik’s most prominent merchants and religious scholars, Tan Go Hwat (who also bore the title Kyai Bantong). In any case, this consistent association of Demak’s first ruler with both Gresik and mercantile activity suggests these points reflect some kind of reality. The indigenous sources, however, also agree on another point: that Demak’s first Muslim ruler was Chinese.67 The Hikayat Hasanudddin, for example, claims he was of pure Chinese ancestry and called Cu Cu, while the Purwaka Caruban Nagari claims he was only half-Chinese and called Jinbun. In the latter case, it was his mother, Siu Ban Ci, the daughter of Tan Go Hwat, who was Chinese. Jinbun’s father, on the other hand, was Majapahit’s final ruler. The last part of this account is clearly a variant of the tradition found in the Babad Tanah Jawi, where Jinbun (or Jimbun) came from Palembang and was the son of a ‘Chinese princess’ and the last ruler of Majapahit. Because the Babad Tanah Jawi is the earlier text, the tradition may originate with it. Significantly, therefore, consideration of the Babad Tanah Jawi’s authorship uncovers a probable motive for its fabrication. As briefly stated, the Babad Tanah Jawi is Mataram’s court chronicle. Between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, Mataram was Java’s pre-eminent sultanate; its rulers controlled much of the island and, in an attempt to gain prestige, consciously tried to position themselves as successors to Demak. It was for this reason that

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Panembahan Sedaing Krapyak ordered the preservation of the Babad Demak, in an attempt to lay claim to Demak’s heritage. But, and as noted by J. Ras, even after the rise of Islam, Javanese culture still invoked Majapahit as the primary means of conferring political legitimacy. The Hindu rulers of that kingdom were still seen as manifestations of the Supreme Being, and therefore as the ideals of kingship. Any Javanese ruler seeking unquestioned loyalty therefore needed to claim Majapahit ancestry.68 In this context, it is unsurprising that the Babad Tanah Jawi attempts to trace Mataram’s ruling house to Majapahit via Demak: its rulers succeeded Demak’s sultans who, in turn, succeeded Majapahit’s rulers.69 It therefore seems that this element of the Babad Tanah Jawi is simply a device to confer legitimacy on Mataram. Indeed, ‘Prabu Brawijaya’, the name given by the Babad Tanah Jawi to Jinbun’s father, is a generic title that could refer to any Majapahit ruler.70 This lack of specificity casts doubt upon whether a real individual is being referred to. At the same time, Pires relates a potentially important tradition: They say that the Javanese used to have affinity with the Chinese, and one king of China sent one of his daughters to Java to marry Batara Raja Çuda [who was then the king of Majapahit], and that he sent her to Java with many people of China, and that he then sent money in the [form of] cash which are now currency, and they say there was a junk load of them, and that the said king was a vassal, not a tributary, of the king of China and that the Javanese killed all the Chinese in Java by treachery. Others say that it was not so, but that one king was never related to or knew the other, and that the Java cash were brought to Java for merchandise, because the Chinese used to trade in Java long before Malacca existed.71 Here, Pires presents another narrative involving a Chinese princess who married a Majapahit ruler – although not the final one and with no apparent link to Demak. Pires, however, was not convinced by it; he therefore recounted another tradition refuting the first. Indeed, that second account is far more realistic: from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Java did indeed use Chinese copper cash as currency, which had originally been brought there for trade.72 By contrast, however, there is no record, whether from this period or any other, of a marriage between the Javanese and Chinese ruling families.73 But all of this notwithstanding, that the Suma Oriental and the later Babad Tanah Jawi share this common theme raises a possibility: that the former’s Chinese princess was a precursor to the latter’s. This is speculative, but if the Babad Tanah Jawi does indeed recycle a version of the tradition preserved in Pires’s earlier text, because Pires considered that narrative doubtful, he provides yet another reason for dismissing it in the later Babad Tanah Jawi. As for the Purwaka Caruban Nagari, this presumably (as the later text) inherited the Babad Tanah Jawi’s version of events. By also including a reference to Gresik and a Chinese trading family, however, it adds new information. The source of that information is unknown but, because it tallies with the Hikayat Hasanuddin’s account, it may represent a more authentic version of events. For all its apparent value as a source, however, the Hikayat Hasanuddin appears to be mistaken when stating that Cu Cu/Jinbun was not Demak’s first ruler. As seen, it claims that Cu Cu/Jinbun’s son, Pangeran Sumangsang, first ruled Demak and that his grandson, Sultan Trenggana (who apparently ruled during Pires’s visit to Java),

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established Demak’s pre-eminence (notably by conquering Majapahit). Although this line is also followed by the secondary literature, the other primary sources – including the Suma Oriental, the Babad Tanah Jawi and (perhaps following the latter) the Purwaka Caruban Nagari – claim that not only was Cu Cu/Jinbun was Demak’s first Muslim ruler, but also the one who established the kingdom’s prosperity. For the last two sources, this included conquering Majapahit. That the Suma Oriental, however, makes this claim is important because the circumstances surrounding that text’s authorship suggest this view is the more accurate. As discussed, Pires experienced early sixteenth-century Java first hand. Significantly, therefore, by 1513 he records Demak as a great power, already in control of Java’s northern coast and southern Sumatra. Only a diminished Majapahit, pushed far into the interior, remained beyond its control. Moreover, Pires is very clear that Demak had occupied this position for some time. Indeed, his description of the island is largely predicated on that fact: he links Cirebon’s mid-fifteenth-century conversion to Demak’s expansion (discussed shortly) and claims that Zeynal of Giri, Java’s oldest pate, had been the comrade-in-arms of Demak’s second ruler. This military role again hints at a fifteenth-century expansion. Ultimately shadows of Demak’s pre-Trenggana rise to power occur throughout Pires’s narrative, implying that Demak’s prosperity was not predicated on Trenggana’s actions, but on that of earlier rulers. Indeed, Pires openly states that he dismisses Trenggana as weak, claiming that the latter only remained chief pate because of the influence built up by his father and grandfather. As such – and given the scenario’s recurrence across several indigenous texts – there would seem little reason to doubt that Cu Cu/Jinbun ruled Demak. Given the arguments by de Graaf and Pigeaud, however, placing Majapahit’s fall in c. 1527, Trenggana probably did conquer the remains of that kingdom. Turning now to Cirebon, Pires also claims that Cu Cu/Jinbun converted this city. Indeed, the Suma Oriental pictures a very close Demak–Cirebon relationship; Cirebon appears to have been Demak’s base in the west, ruled by its chosen man. That both the Hikayat Hasanuddin and Raffles testify to a similar relationship suggests this claim is accurate. But as to how the cities became linked, Pires states that in c. 1473 Cu Cu/ Jinbun sent an unnamed Gresik slave to conquer Cirebon. He then made this slave Cirebon’s first Islamic ruler, with the city remaining a Demak vassal (that is, it is not described as a sultanate). This account, however, differs from the Hikayat Hasanuddin and Purwaka Caruban Nagari. The Hikayat Hasanuddin, for example, speaks of Cu Cu’s son, claiming that he founded (and not just conquered) the city. No Gresik slaves are mentioned, and it is unclear who subsequently ruled the city. The Hikayat Hasanuddin also claims, however, that Cirebon remained insignificant until the arrival of Sunan Gunung Jati; the latter (not mentioned by Pires) is pictured as a religious scholar from Samudera-Pasai who, after fleeing a Portuguese invasion, travelled to Demak. From there he proceeded to conquer and convert Banten, before subsequently establishing the Cirebon Sultanate. The Purwaka Caruban Nagari, on the other hand, makes no mention of Demak at all. It claims that Cirebon began as a small fishing village called Muara Jati, which owing to Chinese trade grew in importance until it was able to declare independence and eventually convert. When evaluating these accounts, it is notable that the Hikayat Hasanuddin’s depiction of Sunan Gunung Jati finds support elsewhere: the Portuguese court historian, João de Barros (1496–1570), in his Decades da Asia (written between 1552 and 1563)

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also speaks about a man from Samudera-Pasai who travelled to Demak. Called Falatehan (perhaps either Fadhillah Khan or Fatahillah), on his return from Mecca he found the Portuguese occupying his homeland (which they did between 1521 and 1524).74 As a result, de Barros claims that Falatehan was unable to return home and instead travelled on to Demak, where he married the ruler’s sister and then proceeded to conquer Banten and nearby Sunda Kelapa (modern-day Jakarta).75 Although de Barros does not mention Cirebon, this account is remarkably similar to that in the Hikayat Hasanuddin. This corroboration suggests both sources contain some basis in fact, with Falatehan and Sunan Gunung Jati perhaps being the same person (although no indigenous source refers to Sunan Gunung Jati as Fadhillah Khan, Fatahillah or anything similar). De Barros’s failure to mention Cirebon, however, probably reflects his time of writing: his Decades were completed in 1563, while the Hikayat Hasanuddin places Sunan Gunung Jati’s death in 1570 and claims Cirebon was the final place he went to. Consequently, de Barros’s silence may simply reflect the fact that he wrote before Falatehan/Sunan Gunung Jati had travelled to Cirebon – or, alternatively, before news of that journey had reached Portugal. But, even if the above means this section of the Hikayat Hasanuddin contains some basis in fact, we cannot accept its narrative in full because, as seen, its description of Demak’s early expansion is flawed; because Cu Cu/Jinbun probably was Demak’s first ruler, and therefore played a more active role in the kingdom’s expansion than the Hikayat Hasanuddin allows for, it cannot be assumed that it was actually Cu Cu/ Jinbun’s son who founded/conquered Cirebon. Moreover, the possibility that Cirebon was insignificant prior to Sunan Gunung Jati’s arrival is also unlikely: although Pires does not testify to a pre 1512–15 Cirebon sultanate, it is clear that the city was regionally important before then. Equally, Cu Cu/Jinbun’s association with Gresik makes it plausible that a slave from Gresik founded Cirebon. Although the Hikayat Hasanuddin’s account of Sunan Gunung Jati (and, by association, the establishment of Cirebon’s sultanate) is probably largely correct, Pires’s description of conversion is to be preferred. Likewise, that Pires speaks of a conquest of Cirebon suggests the Purwaka Caruban Nagari’s account of a pre-existing settlement also bears some weight. The above discussion demonstrates that Demak’s first Muslim ruler was almost certainly a Chinese Muslim merchant called either Cu Cu or Jinbun. Originally from Gresik, and perhaps the son of a merchant and religious scholar called Tan Go Hwat, Cu Cu/Jinbun began the process of building Demak into a great Islamic power. Together with his son, he spread Demak’s influence right across Java and into Sumatra. Although generally vague about dates, the Suma Oriental places Demak’s conquest of Cirebon in c. 1473. This implies that Cu Cu/Jinbun began his activities during the mid-fifteenth century. By 1513, the Suma Oriental claims, Demak had been Islamic for three generations and the entire northern coast had been converted. Moreover, Pires consistently claims that the Javanese entrepôts which paid allegiance to Demak embraced Islam during the lifetime of their current ruler’s grandfather. This again fits with a mid-fifteenth-century Islamic expansion, reinforcing the possibility that these initial Muslim rulers were indeed Cu Cu/Jinbun’s contemporaries. By 1513, therefore, when Cu Cu/Jinbun’s grandson was on the throne, it seems Demak had occupied a pre-eminent position for at least two generations, with Cirebon as a western power base. Taken together, all this implies that a substantial part of Java’s early Islamisation was Chinese-directed and occurred during the fifteenth century. It therefore refutes

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any suggestion of a central role for Arabs and/or Indians, as previously claimed by de Graaf, Pigeaud and others. Moreover, if the sources reviewed here are examined more closely, they may hint at an even earlier period of Islamisation.

Gresik as an Early Islamic Centre That both Cu Cu/Jinbun and Cirebon’s first Muslim ruler came from Gresik opens up an important possibility: that Gresik was an earlier Islamic centre than Demak. Certainly, it indicates that Gresik housed a Muslim population well before Demak’s conversion – a population which, by at least 1513, comprised a well-established and powerful Islamic kingdom. Indeed, Pires’s description paints 1513-era Gresik as Java’s wealthiest entrepôt, in control of all of Java’s eastern trade and nearby Madura. Ruled by a Melakan called Pate Cuçuf (whose father conquered the city during the late fifteenth century), it was not a Demak vassal but an independent rival kingdom with control over its own territory. Equally, although he never explicitly addresses the point, Pires does not give the impression that this powerful sixteenth-century kingdom had embraced Islam recently. Indeed, several other sources support a much earlier Islamic identity. Although a problematic source, the version of the Babad Tanah Jawi utilised here claims that, before Demak’s rise to power under Cu Cu/Jinbun, Gresik posed Islam’s first challenge to Majapahit; Gresik’s local saint, Sunan Giri, had extended his influence over all of Java’s eastern coast and counted many of that region’s cities as his vassals. This narrative could easily be a memory of Gresik as a pre-Demak centre of Islamic authority. Likewise, the non-Babad Tanah Jawi sections of Raffles’s work, all of which relate to the pre-Demak period, associate Java’s first missionaries (Mawlana Ibrahim, his brother and Niai Gedi Pinateh, Sunan Giri’s guardian) with Gresik – although without also speaking of a pre-Demak Islamic kingdom. The source of Raffles’s information on these points, however, is unknown. Ultimately, however, it is a collection of early Chinese sources which provide the most compelling evidence for an early Islamic kingdom at Gresik. Towards the end of the Yuan dynasty, South China experienced a Muslim-led rebellion: the Yuan Shi records that in 1357 two Yuan generals of Persian descent, called A-mi-li-ding (Awhad al-Din) and a Sai-fu-ding (Sayf al-Din), rebelled and took control of the southern port of Quanzhou. This initiated the Hongjin Qiyi, or ‘Red Turban Rebellion’, which proceeded to conquer Quanzhou’s surrounding areas until, by 1362, A-mi-li-ding and Saifu-ding were within reach of the territorial capital, Fuzhou. At this point, however, imperial troops forced them back, eventually defeating them completely in 1366. Nonetheless, immediately after the rebellion, another Yuan general called Chen Youding, assisted by an apparently Persian Shia called Jin Ji, began the methodical extermination of all Quanzhou’s Sunni Muslims.76 Supposedly undertaken to prevent another rebellion, this persecution soon spread to surrounding districts. Although no numbers are given, the sources make it clear that a large-scale (but not exclusively) Muslim exodus into Southeast Asia resulted.77 Although these migrants spread themselves over a wide area, particularly large concentrations formed on Java. Significantly, therefore, the Yingyai Shenglan of Ma Huan (c. 1380–1460), an eyewitness account of the seven famous voyages of Zheng He (conducted between 1402 and 1433), describes Java and its Chinese communities in some detail. It includes a reference to early fifteenth-century

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Gresik: the city is described as home to a thousand Chinese families who had founded the city during the previous century. In light of this, Ma Huan even gives Gresik a Chinese name, Xin Cun (New Village), and claims that its current ruler was a man from Guangdong province.78 Although he does not explicitly identify this man as a Muslim, elsewhere he traces many of Java’s Chinese Muslims to Guangdong.79 At the very least, all this raises the possibility that, by the early fifteenth century, Gresik was a specifically Chinese city ruled by a Muslim. Gresik’s Chinese connection immediately evokes Cu Cu/Jinbun’s supposed Chinese ancestry. By the same token, Raffles links all three of his early Islamic figures to Champa (although while making two of them Arabs). Historically, Champa was an important stopping point on the way to and from China. By 1471, it hosted a significant Muslim community (some members of which were indeed of Arab descent).80 During that period, however, it was also conquered by its Vietnamese neighbours81 who, after experiencing various periods of direct Chinese control (most recently between 1406 and 1428),82 had become heavily Sinicised.83 They later passed this Sinicised culture on to the Chams. Although two distinct cultures, Champa and China were therefore intimately connected; any Champan influence on Java could have carried Chinese overtones. Moreover, Raffles claims that Sunan Giri followed Hanafi law and Chinese Muslims also profess this madhhab. To further support the possibility of an important late fourteenth-century Muslim presence on Java, it is also worth noting several early Muslim gravestones at Tralaya and Trowulan, two important archaeological sites associated with Majapahit. At Trowulan, for example, Majapahit’s former capital, there are two Islamic tombstones, one dated 1368 and the other 1458.84 At nearby Tralaya, however, there are nine. All found near the Kraton (or royal complex), they are dated: 1376, 1380, 1407, 1418, 1427, 1467 (twice), 1469 and 1475.85 Moreover, four feature Majapahit’s royal sun emblem, usually reserved for members of the ruling elite. Consequently, and given their proximity to the Kraton, they may have belonged to high-ranking Majapahit officials.86 Ultimately, however, because none of them bear names, it is impossible to identify precisely who they belonged to. Nevertheless, their existence suggests that, by the late fourteenth century, Islam had already attained an important position on Java. Although this does not necessarily speak to the situation in Gresik – or, for that matter, to issues of Chinese Muslim involvement – it does suggest Islam was already influential. At the very least, this would be consonant with the argument presented here, even if it does not explicitly support it.

Conclusion To sum up, by utilising only the most reliable primary sources (in particular, the Suma Oriental and the Hikayat Hasanuddin) it has been possible to craft a new interpretation of Java’s early conversion history. From hints contained in various sources, it appears that Java’s conversion process did not begin in late fifteenth-century Demak (as has been previously argued), but in late fourteenth-century Gresik. As such, during the latter half of the fourteenth century, large numbers of Chinese Muslims settled throughout Java, but most notably in the east. There they founded Gresik, which, by the beginning of the following century, was an important Islamic centre: Java’s earliest Islamic figures are all associated with it and it seems to have established

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political influence over surrounding areas, threatening Majapahit’s authority. Later in the mid-fifteenth century, a Chinese Muslim merchant travelled from Gresik to Demak. There he founded a sultanate which quickly began to spread Islam across the rest of the island. By 1513, this process (far from just beginning, as some have claimed) was nearly complete: Cu Cu/Jinbun and his descendants had succeeded in conquering most of Java and south Sumatra, establishing Islam’s dominance throughout those areas. Only a greatly reduced Majapahit survived, trapped in the interior, but which was also eventually overcome in c. 1527. In light of all this, our analysis not only confirms the suggestion of earlier scholars that Java’s conversion process be pushed back to the late fourteenth century, but also demonstrates that prior reconstructions of early Javanese Islamic history have, first, wrongly identified Arab and Indian Muslims as the island’s principal missionaries and, second, incorrectly labelled fifteenth-century Demak as Java’s first powerful Islamic kingdom. Rather, a closer examination of the evidence clearly identifies Chinese Muslims and late fourteenth-century Gresik as the first major players in Java’s Islamisation. This realisation, evolved from key European, Southeast Asian and Chinese texts, represents an important step forward in the study of Java’s history.

Notes 1. For example, see H. J. de Graaf and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Islamic States in Java, 1500–1700: Eight Dutch Books and Articles by Dr H. J. de Graaf as Summarized by Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 70 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). 2. Slamet Muljana, Runtuhnya kerajaan Hindu-Jawa dan timbulnya negara-negara Islam di Nusantara (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2012), pp. 86–122. 3. Slamet Muljana, A Story of Majapahit (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1976). 4. The texts in question are the so-called Kronik Tionghua Semarang and Kronik Tionghua Cirebon, frequently referred to in English under the collective title of ‘The Malay Annals of Semarang and Cirebon’. First published in 1964 by the amateur historian M. O. Parlindungan, these texts are two reputedly Chinese-language manuscripts produced on Java during either the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Detailing the history of several fifteenth-century Chinese Muslim communities on the island, all supposedly established by Zheng He, the texts claim they helped spread Islam throughout the island. Because of a highly questionable provenance, however, and several internal features suggestive of modern authorship, neither text can be accepted as reliable. For the most comprehensive outline of the argument against them, see Alexander Wain, ‘The Kronik Tionghua of Semarang and Cirebon: A Note on Provenance and Reliability’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (forthcoming). Parlindungan’s versions of the texts can be found in Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan, Pongkinangolngolan Sinambela gelar Tuanku Rao: Terror Agama Islam Mazhab Hambali di Tanah Batak 1816-1833 (Jakarta: Tandjung Pengharapan, 1964), pp. 650–72. 5. Denys Lombard and Claudine Salmon, ‘Islam et Sinité’, Archipel 30, no. 1 (1985), pp. 73–5. 6. See R. Ptak, ‘Ming Maritime Trade to Southeast Asia, 1368–1567: Visions of a System’, in Claude Guillot et al. (eds), From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, South China and Maritime Asia, vol. 7 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), pp. 157–91; and R. Ptak, ‘Quanzhou: At the Northern Edge of a Southeast Asian “Mediterranean”’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 395–427.

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7. Most recently in Geoff Wade, ‘Southeast Asian Islam and Southern China in the Fourteenth Century’, in Geoff Wade and Li Tana (eds), Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), pp. 125–45. For other scholars who pursue this argument, see N. A. Baloch, The Advent of Islam in Indonesia (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1980), pp. 1–3; Pintsun Chang, ‘The First Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century’, in Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c.1400-1750 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), pp. 13–28; Michael Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 7–8. 8. Although other studies have also suggested a late fourteenth-century beginning for the conversion process, they have not implicated Gresik; see Louis-Charles Damais, ‘Études javanaises: Les tombes musulmans datées de Tralaya’, Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient 48 (1956), pp. 353–415 and Geoff Wade, ‘Early Muslim Expansion in South-East Asia, Eighth to Fifteenth Centuries’, in David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 366–408. 9. Tomé Pires, The ‘Suma Oriental’ of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, ed. Armando Cortesao, 2 vols (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 174, 182. 10. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 182. 11. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 245. 12. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 184–5. 13. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 195. 14. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 192. 15. R. J. Wilkinson, ‘The Malacca Sultanate’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, no. 2 (1935), p. 50. The Sejarah Melayu, or the court chronicle of Melaka, also refers to Pate Adam. Like Pires, it also makes him the son-in-law of the Sri Nara Diraja. It associates him, however, with Surabaya not Gresik. Sejarah Melayu, ed. Cheah Boon Kheng (Kuala Lumpur: The Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2010), pp. 226–7. 16. Pires, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, pp. 193–4. 17. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 183. 18. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 183. 19. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 191. 20. Vladimir Braginksy, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), p. 5. 21. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, 2 vols (London: Black, Parbury and Allen, and John Murray, 1817), vol. 1, p. 113. 22. Raffles, History of Java, vol. 1, p. 115. 23. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 397. 24. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 135–8. 25. Hikajat Hasanoeddin, ed. Jan Edel (Meppel: Drukkerij en Uitgeverszaak b. Ten Brink, 1938), pp. 15–17. 26. Ibid., p.122. See also Adi P. Talango, Sosok-Sosok Hebat di Balik Kerajaan-Kerajaan Jawa: Perjuangan dan Kegigihan Mereka Sumber Inspirasi Kita (Yogyakarta: Flashbooks, 2012), p. 78; Sabjan Badio, Menelusuri Kesultanan di Tanah Jawa (Yogyakarta: Aswaja Pressindo, 2012), pp. 47–8. These two Indonesian sources have a different version of this narrative: they claim that the Hikayat Hasanuddin describes Cu Cu as the son of a Chinese minister. The latter had migrated to Java, where Cu Cu became a Majapahit court official. In this capacity, he helped put down a rebellion in Palembang; as a reward, he was made ruler of

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

islamisation Demak with the title Arya Sumangsang. Where these authors obtained this differing narrative is unclear, but it may represent a variant tradition overlooked by Edel. Hikajat Hasanoeddin, p. 140. Cited in Badio, Kesultanan di Tanah Jawa, pp. 48–50. M. C. Ricklefs, ‘The Evolution of Babad Tanah Jawi Texts: In Response to Day’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 135, no. 4 (1979), p. 448. C. C. Berg, ‘Javanese Historiography: A Synopsis of its Evolution’, in D. G. E. Hall (ed.), Historians of South East Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 18–20. J. J. Ras, ‘The Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi: Origin and Function of the Javanese Court Chronicle’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 143, no. 2 (1987), p. 345. M. C. Ricklefs, ‘A Consideration of Three Versions of the Babad Tanah Djawi, with Excerpts on the Fall of Majapahit’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 35, no. 2 (1972), p. 289. Ibid., p. 288. In ibid. Ibid., pp. 289–90. There is no commonly agreed list of these saints. The most frequently cited names, however, are Mawlana Malik Ibrahim (or Sunan Gresik, d. 1419); Sunan Ampel (or Raden Rahmat, 1401–81, supposedly the son of Sunan Gresik and born in Champa); Sunan Bonang (b. 1465, the son of Sunan Ampel and a resident of Tuban); Sunan Drajat (b. 1470, also the son of Sunan Ampel; he resided in Gresik); Sunan Giri (b. 1442, the son of the aforementioned Mawlana Ishaq); Sunan Kudus (d. 1550); Sunan Kalijaga (b. 1450); Sunan Muria (the son of Kalijaga); and Sunan Gunung Jati (1450–1568). In addition to these, the following names may also appear: Sunan Ngampel-Denta, Sunan Sitijenar, Sunan Walilanang, Sunan Bayat and Sunan Ngudung (see M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200, 3rd edn [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001], pp. 9–10). Babad Tanah Jawi: Mulai dari Nabi Adam sampai Tahun 1647, ed. W. L. Olthof (Yogyakarta: Narasi, 2012), pp. 29–30. Ibid., pp. 30–1. Ibid., pp. 37–9. Ricklefs, ‘Three Versions of the Babad Tanah Djawi’, p. 292. Babad Tanah Jawi, pp. 41–2. Ibid., pp. 51–2. Ibid., pp. 54–5. The Babad Kraton, however, claims Demak acted alone in the conquest of Majapahit (Ricklefs, ‘Three Versions of the Babad Tanah Djawi’, p. 301). This Javanese title translates as ‘General (Senapati) Jimbun ʿAbd al-Rahman, the Lord (Panembahan) of Palembang and Religious Scholar (Sajidin Panatagama)’. Babad Tanah Jawi, p. 56. Mohamad Ramdhany, ‘Studi Analisis Arah Kiblat Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa Cirebon’, doctoral thesis, IAIN Walisongo, 2012, p. 36. Uka Tjandrasasmita, ‘Art de Mojopahit et art du Pasisir’, Archipel 9 (1975), p. 97. Cited in Talango, Kerajaan-Karajaan Jawa, p. 78. Cited in Satyawati Suleiman et al., ‘Latar Belakang Sejarah’, in Paramita R. Abdurachman (ed.), Cerbon (Jakarta: Yayasan Mitra Budaya Indonesia dan Penerbit Sinar Harapan, 1982), p. 28. Suleiman et al., ‘Latar Belakang Sejarah’, pp. 32–3. Bambang Oetomo, ‘Some Remarks on Modern Indonesian Historiography’, in D. G. E. Hall (ed.), Historians of South East Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 73–7. Nicholas Tarling, Historians and Southeast Asian History (Auckland: New Zealand Asia Institute, 2000), pp. 81–2.

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53. Badio, Kesultanan di Tanah Jawa, pp. 5–11. Another good example of a text taking this line is Hafidz Rafi’uddin, Riwayat Kesultanan Banten (Banten: n.p., 2006). 54. See de Graaf and Pigeaud, Islamic States in Java, pp. 3–7. In addition to de Graaf and Pigeaud, an excellent Indonesian example of this type of scholarship is Hoesein Djajadiningrat, Tinjauan Kritis tentang Sajarah Banten: Sumbangan bagi Pengenalan Sifat-sifat Penulisan Sejarah Jawa (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1983). 55. For example, see Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, pp. 5–6. See also M. C. Ricklefs, ‘Islamization in Java: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Ahmad Ibrahim et al. (eds), Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1985), pp. 36–43; and M. C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Norwalk, CT: East Bridge, 2006), pp. 16–21. 56. Ras, ‘Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi’, pp. 351–3. 57. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century, a text bearing this name was discovered in Gresik. Written in Javanese verse, it proved to be a systematic register of all of northern Java’s conversion-era nobility, from Cirebon to Surabaya. It also included an account of the war against Majapahit led by ‘Sunan Demak’. This title implies Demak’s first ruler was once seen as a Muslim religious figure in his own right (see Slamet Riyadi et al., Babad Demak [Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Proyek Penerbitan Buku Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah, 1981]). To date, however, scholarship has almost completely neglected this complex text, including the questions of its precise date, origin and relation to other sources. It therefore requires further study before it can be satisfactorily utilised. See also Suripan Sadi Hutomo, Penelitian Bahasa dan Sastra Babad Demak Pesisiran (Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Penyembangan Bahasa, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1984). 58. See Berg, ‘Javanese Historiography’, pp. 18–20; C. C. Berg, ‘The Javanese Picture of the Past’, in Mohammed Ali Soedjatmoko et al. (eds), An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 87–117; Hoesein Djajadiningrat, ‘Local Traditions and the Study of Indonesian History’, in Mohammed Ali Soedjatmoko et al. (eds), An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 74; Geoff Wade, ‘Southeast Asian Historical Writing’, in Josi Rabasa et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 3: 1400–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 141. 59. For example, see the account of Arya Damar’s birth: his mother was supposedly a giant who lived in the woods and transformed herself into a beautiful woman (Babad Tanah Jawi, pp. 27–8). 60. As in the case of Sunan Kalijaga, who was reputedly converted by Sunan Bonang via magical means (ibid., pp. 35–6). 61. Wade, ‘Southeast Asian Historical Writing’, p. 136. 62. But not the earliest in and of itself – Ma Huan’s Yingyai Shenglan, for example, is earlier (see below). 63. Ronald Bishop Smith, The First Age of the Portuguese Embassies, Navigations and Peregrinations to the Kingdoms and Islands of Southeast Asia (1509–1521) (Bethesda, MD: Decatur Press, 1968), p. 57. 64. Pires, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, p. 199. 65. See J. Noorduyn, ‘Concerning the Reliability of Tomé Pires’s Data on Java’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 132, no. 4 (1976), pp. 467–71. 66. As mentioned, the Hikayat Hasanuddin is the court chronicle of Banten. Pires, however, never visited Banten. Rather, it seems his information came from Tuban, Majapahit’s main port and the only location Pires explicitly mentions visiting. Tuban, however, is located on the eastern side of Java (see Smith, First Age of the Portuguese Embassies, pp. 58–9).

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67. Pires also claims that some of Java’s Muslim lords were Chinese. Although he does not say which, the indigenous sources indicate Demak was probably one of them. 68. Ras, ‘Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi’, pp. 353–4. 69. Sutawijaya (Mataram’s founder) was supposedly the adopted son of Hadiwijaya, the last sultan of Pajang (the kingdom which initially succeeded Demak). The latter was, in turn, son-in-law to Demak’s final sultan who, through Raden Patah, was a descendant of Majapahit’s final ruler (Ras, ‘Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi’, p. 351). 70. H. J. de Graaf and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Chinese Muslims in Java in the 15th and 16th Centuries: The Malay Annals of Semarang and Cerbon, ed. M. C. Ricklefs, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia 12 (Melbourne: Monash University, 1984), pp. 82–3. 71. Pires, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, p. 179. 72. Chinese coins are so common in Southeast Asia’s archaeological record that Richard Pearson, Li Min and Li Guo have argued that they were almost certainly used as currency in a number of different locations, from the Song until the Ming interregnum (i.e. 960 to 1450). See Richard Pearson et al., ‘Port, City, and Hinterlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Quanzhou and its Overseas Trade’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 201. The evidence is particularly strong, however, on Java. Indeed, the Chinese geographer, Zhao Rugua (1170–1228), on the basis of material dating from the eleventh century, refers to Chinese coinage in use there: ‘There is a vast amount of pepper in this foreign country [Java] and the [Chinese] merchant ships, in view of the profit they derive from that trade, are in the habit of smuggling [out of China] copper cash for bartering purposes’ (Chau Ju-kua, Chu-fan-chi, ed. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill [Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1966], p.78). Zhao Rugua claims this smuggling became such a problem that all trade with Java was banned. The problem persisted, however, as attested to by a 1216 High Commission report cited in the Song Shi. As a result, in 1234, any and all trade in copper cash was banned (ibid., pp. 81–2). Again, however, this did not solve the problem: fourteenth-century Javanese inscriptions still expressed values in terms of this currency (Anthony Reid, ‘Flows and Seepages in the Long-term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid [ed.], Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese [Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001], pp. 19–20). 73. See also Pires, Suma Oriental, vol. 1, p. 181. 74. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, p. 34. 75. Cited in ibid., p. 34. 76. Wade, ‘Early Muslim Expansion’, p. 387. 77. Ibid., pp. 386–7. 78. Ma Huan, Yingyai Shenglan: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, ed. Feng Ch’engChün, trans. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 89–90. 79. Ibid., p. 93. 80. Raymond Scupin, ‘Cham Muslims in Thailand’, in Andrew D. W. Forbes (ed.), The Muslims of Thailand, vol. 1: Historical and Cultural Studies (Bihar: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), p. 105. 81. Danny Wong Tze Ken, ‘Vietnam-Champa Relations and the Malay-Islam Regional Network in the 17th-19th Centuries’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 5 (March 2004). 82. Geoff Wade, ‘Engaging the South: Ming China and Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008), pp. 588–9. 83. See also R. C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, vol. 1: Champa, Greater India Society Publication 1 (Lahore: The Punjab Sanskrit Book Depot, 1927); John K. Whitmore, Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371-1421) (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985). 84. S. Robson, ‘Java at the Crossroads: Aspects of Javanese Cultural History in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 137, no. 2 (1981), p. 272.

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85. There is also a much later gravestone which, dated 1611, must post-date the abandonment of the settlement; see Damais, ‘Études javanaises’, p. 411. 86. Ibid., p. 413.

Bibliography Babad Tanah Jawi: Mulai dari Nabi Adam sampai Tahun 1647, ed. W. L. Olthof (Yogyakarta: Narasi, 2012). Badio, Sabjan, Menelusuri Kesultanan di Tanah Jawa (Yogyakarta: Aswaja Pressindo, 2012). Baloch, N. A., The Advent of Islam in Indonesia (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1980). Berg, C. C., ‘Javanese Historiography: A Synopsis of its Evolution’, in D. G. E. Hall (ed.), Historians of South East Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 13–23. Berg, C. C., ‘The Javanese Picture of the Past’, in Mohammed Ali Soedjatmoko, G. J. Resink and G. McT. Kahin (eds), An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 87–117. Braginsky, Vladimir, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004). Chau Ju-kua, Chu-fan-chi, ed. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1966). Damais, Louis-Charles, ‘Études javanaises: Les tombes musulmans datées de Tralaya’, Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 48 (1956), pp. 353–415. Djajadiningrat, Hoesein, ‘Local Traditions and the Study of Indonesian History’, in Mohammed Ali Soedjatmoko, G. J. Resink and G. McT. Kahin (eds), An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 74–85. Djajadiningrat, Hoesein, Tinjauan Kritis tentang Sajarah Banten: Sumbangan bagi Pengenalan Sifat-sifat Penulisan Sejarah Jawa (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1983). de Graaf, H. J., and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Chinese Muslims in Java in the 15th and 16th Centuries: The Malay Annals of Semarang and Cerbon, ed. M. C. Ricklefs, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia 12 (Melbourne: Monash University, 1984). de Graaf, H. J., and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Islamic States in Java, 1500–1700: Eight Dutch Books and Articles by Dr H. J. de Graaf as Summarized by Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 70 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Hikajat Hasanoeddin, ed. Jan Edel (Meppel: Drukkerij en Uitgeverszaak b. Ten Brink, 1938). Hutomo, Suripan Sadi, Penelitian Bahasa dan Sastra Babad Demak Pesisiran (Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Penyembangan Bahasa, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1984). Laffan, Michael, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Lombard, Denys, and Claudine Salmon, ‘Islam et Sinité’, Archipel 30, no. 1 (1985), pp. 73–94. Ma Huan, Yingyai Shenglan: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, ed. Feng Ch’eng-Chün, trans. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Majumdar, R. C., Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, vol. 1: Champa, Greater India Society Publication 1 (Lahore: The Punjab Sanskrit Book Depot, 1927). Muljana, Slamet, A Story of Majapahit (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1976). Muljana, Slamet, Runtuhnya kerajaan Hindu-Jawa dan timbulnya negara-negara Islam di Nusantara (Yogyakarta, LKiS, 2012). Noorduyn, J., ‘Concerning the Reliability of Tomé Pires’s Data on Java’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 132, no. 4 (1976), pp. 467–71. Oetomo, Bambang, ‘Some Remarks on Modern Indonesian Historiography’, in D. G. E. Hall (ed), Historians of South East Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp.73–84.

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Parlindungan, Mangaradja Onggang, Pongkinangolngolan Sinambela gelar Tuanku Rao: Terror Agama Islam Mazhab Hambali di Tanah Batak 1816-1833 (Jakarta: Tandjung Pengharapan, 1964). Pearson, Richard, Li Min and Li Guo, ‘Port, City, and Hinterlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Quanzhou and its Overseas Trade’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000-1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 177–235. Pin-tsun Chang, ‘The First Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century’, in Roderick Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (eds), Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c.1400–1750 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), pp. 13–28. Pires, Tomé, The ‘Suma Oriental’ of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, ed. Armando Cortesao, 2 vols (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005). Ptak, R., ‘Ming Maritime Trade to Southeast Asia, 1368-1567: Visions of a System’, in Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard and R. Ptak (eds), From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, South China and Maritime Asia, vol. 7 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), pp.157–91. Ptak, R., ‘Quanzhou: At the Northern Edge of a Southeast Asian “Mediterranean”’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000-1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 395–427. Raffles, Thomas Stamford, The History of Java, 2 vols (London: Black, Parbury and Allen, and John Murray, 1817). Rafi’uddin, Hafidz, Riwayat Kesulthanan Banten (Banten: n.p., 2006). Ramdhany, Mohamad, ‘Studi Analisis Arah Kiblat Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa Cirebon’, doctoral thesis, IAIN Walisongo, 2012. Ras, J. J., ‘The Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi: Origin and Function of the Javanese Court Chronicle’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 143, no. 2 (1987), pp. 343–56. Reid, Anthony, ‘Flows and Seepages in the Long-term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), pp. 15–49. Ricklefs, M. C., ‘A Consideration of Three Versions of the Babad Tanah Djawi, with Excerpts on the Fall of Majapahit’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 35, no. 2 (1972), pp. 285–315. Ricklefs, M. C., ‘The Evolution of Babad Tanah Jawi Texts: In Response to Day’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 135, no. 4 (1979), pp. 443–54. Ricklefs, M. C., ‘Islamization in Java: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Ahmad Ibrahim, Sharon Siddique and Yasmin Hussain (eds), Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1985), pp. 36–43. Ricklefs, M. C., A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Ricklefs, M. C., Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Norwalk, CT: East Bridge, 2006). Riyadi, Slamet, Gina Suwaji and Dirgo Sabariyanto, Babad Demak (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Proyek Penerbitan Buku Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah, 1981). Robson, S., ‘Java at the Crossroads: Aspects of Javanese Cultural History in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 137, no. 2 (1981), pp. 259–92. Scupin, Raymond, ‘Cham Muslims in Thailand’, in Andrew D. W. Forbes (ed.), The Muslims of Thailand, vol. 1: Historical and Cultural Studies (Bihar: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), pp. 105–9. Sejarah Melayu, ed. Cheah Boon Kheng (Kuala Lumpur: The Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2010).

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Smith, Ronald Bishop, The First Age of the Portuguese Embassies, Navigations and Peregrinations to the Kingdoms and Islands of Southeast Asia (1509–1521) (Bethesda, MD: Decatur Press, 1968). Suleiman, Satyawati, Hasan Muarif Ambary, Onghokham and Paramita R. Abdurachman, ‘Latar Belakang Sejarah’, in Paramita R. Abdurachman (ed.), Cerbon (Jakarta: Yayasan Mitra Budaya Indonesia dan Penerbit Sinar Harapan, 1982), pp. 26–67. Tjandrasasmita, Uka, ‘Art de Mojopahit et art du Pasisir’, Archipel 9 (1975), pp. 93–8. Talango, Adi P., Sosok-Sosok Hebat di Balik Kerajaan-Kerajaan Jawa: Perjuangan dan Kegigihan Mereka Sumber Inspirasi Kita (Yogyakarta: Flashbooks, 2012). Tarling, Nicholas, Historians and Southeast Asian History (Auckland: New Zealand Asia Institute, 2000). Wade, Geoff, ‘Engaging the South: Ming China and Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008), pp. 578–638. Wade, Geoff, ‘Early Muslim Expansion in South-East Asia, Eighth to Fifteenth Centuries’, in David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 3: The Eastern Islamic World Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 366–408. Wade, Geoff, ‘Southeast Asian Historical Writing’, in Josi Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 3: 1400– 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 119–47. Wade, Geoff, ‘Southeast Asian Islam and Southern China in the Fourteenth Century’, in Geoff Wade and Li Tana (eds), Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012), pp. 125–45. Wain, Alexander, ‘The Kronik Tionghua of Semarang and Cirebon: A Note on Provenance and Reliability’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (forthcoming). Whitmore, John K., Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371–1421) (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985). Wilkinson, R. J., ‘The Malacca Sultanate’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, no. 2 (1935), pp. 22–67. Wong Tze Ken, Danny, ‘Vietnam-Champa Relations and the Malay-Islam Regional Network in the 17th–19th Centuries’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 5 (March 2004).

22 THE STORY OF YUSUF AND INDONESIA’S ISLAMISATION: A WORK OF LITERATURE PLUS Edwin P. Wieringa

I

n an overview of traditional Malay literature compiled by Malaysian scholars, it has been suggested that Islamic storytelling about ‘the prophets and other major Muslim figures’ may well have contributed to the spread of Islam throughout the Malay-speaking world: Not everyone can follow the intricacies of theological argument. Most people can enjoy a good tale, well told. The stories were usually about persons who had played a major role in the early history of Islam. The stories were, however, more than mere history. They were literary works in their own right, intended above all to entertain and delight their audiences.1 However, the Malay tales of the prophets and heroes of the faith have hitherto attracted little interest from scholars except for a few philologists, and even they have mostly ignored this kind of literature.2 The topic of my contribution will be the Hikayat Yusuf, or the Joseph story, which is renowned in literatures the world over. Despite this, turning to Vladimir Braginsky’s grandiose overview of traditional Malay literature (for example), the Hikayat Yusuf is mentioned only once as one among many other titles in his section on hagiographic narratives, not warranting further comment.3 This chapter is an attempt to argue that, in the case of the story of the prophet Yusuf in insular Southeast Asia, we are dealing with more than just a narrative. To borrow the felicitous expression of Northrop Frye, it is ‘a work of literature plus’.4 Although entertainment may be good fun, I seriously doubt that this was the chief intention of Islamic narratives about exemplary figures. Nevertheless, the suggestion sounds familiar enough. Known as the ‘Horatian platitude’, the idea that literature, or more specifically poetry, should both instruct and delight is so ubiquitous that it has become a cliché (not that it is necessarily untrue). As Peter Riddell has demonstrated, there is ‘a long tradition of Malay Islamic scholars using narrative as a device in theological exposition’.5 As Riddell puts it, ‘Narrative is considered 444

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as a powerful tool in the process of theologically educating the Muslim masses in Southeast Asia.’6 Yet it seems that readers and listeners of the Joseph story were primarily interested in practical knowledge on the ground, rather than a sophisticated version of Islam worked out by erudite clerics. The recent study by Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli titled Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy has greatly inspired me to reconsider the role of the Joseph story in Southeast Asia. In Kefeli’s view, Islamic narratives of the prophets and saints were of the utmost importance as ‘paradigms of behavior and scripts for conversions for Muslims living in a non-Muslim environment’.7 As Kefeli states, ‘More than political and economic factors, epics, tales of the prophets, poems . . . deeply affected the individual and collective consciousness of Muslims and would-be Muslims.’8 Although Kefeli discusses Islamisation in another time and another place – namely, nineteenth-century Central Asia – her emphasis on the part of the ancient story of Yusuf and thaumaturgical (wonder-working) Islam in the collective conversion process may help us to better understand the turn towards Islam in maritime Southeast Asia. The process of Islamisation in this region is largely unknown, lost in the mists of time. As the historian Merle Ricklefs observes: ‘When, why and how the conversion of Indonesians began has been debated by several scholars, but no definitive conclusions have been possible because the records of Islamisation that survive are so few, and often so uninformative.’9 Conversions of Indonesians on a grand scale, resulting in the establishment of sea-oriented Islamic polities, seem to have begun rather late. The scant evidence suggests that this process, which was closely connected to trade routes, first began in the thirteenth century from a starting point in North Sumatra, only gradually and slowly spreading to East Indonesia in the following centuries. Along the way, the lingua franca of Malay, which functioned as the medium of communication in the archipelago, also became the prestige language of Islam. What was the initial attraction to Islam for Indonesians? Local historiography, which discusses the coming of Islam, tells of ‘the foreign origins of some of the early teachers, of magical events which attended Islamisation, and of the conversion process as something which began with the ruling elite of the area’.10 These legends do not document actual events, and we should be aware that they were invented post eventum, many generations later, in order to serve the interests of the then-ruling Muslim courts: Islamisation is always presented as a top-down process starting with the local ruler, an archetypal man of ‘prowess’ 11 who is the first to adopt Islam, after which the courtiers and subjects most rapidly follow suit. After all, how could a mere commoner be the first to embrace the one true religion, turning hierarchy upside down? Hardly reliable as sources of documentary evidence, these myths may nevertheless give us at least a hint at explaining why this new and foreign religion could attract attention and a following. A common theme in Indonesian elite conversion myths to Islam in both Malay and Javanese, which are the two major literary traditions of Islamised Southeast Asia, is an emphasis on what Ricklefs calls ‘esoteric learning and magical powers’.12 This interest is commonly credited to an essentialised mystical and magical worldview with supposedly ancient roots in a strong indigenous spirit belief system, purportedly shared by all inhabitants of the archipelago. As anyone who

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works in the field of area studies knows, its practitioners are hardwired to identify culture-specific phenomena believed to be typical for a certain region. However, looking beyond the island world at developments in other areas and periods, we may quickly notice that an interest in ‘magic’ is not restricted to Southeast Asia. For example, Kefeli sees Islamisation in nineteenth-century Tatarstan as the product of a global Sufi movement and speaks about the pivotal role of ‘thaumaturgical’ Islam. Kefeli particularly highlights the popularity of the story of Yusuf, which she sees as instrumental in the conversion of ‘animist peoples’.13 Moving closer to our own time, recent polling surveys of Americans show that thaumaturgical religion is not restricted to ‘simpler’ societies: in present-day America, ‘a large majority of religious people believe in the miracle-working, soul-supervising, prayer-answering god of the Bible, rather than the recondite abstractions of academic theologians’.14 The Joseph story is known in various retellings in several Indonesian languages. Moreover, its popularity is such that it has deeply influenced other Indonesian narratives, including, for example, Javanese accounts of the historical figure of a seventeenth-century rebel.15 We also have detailed descriptions of (modern-day) ritual performances of the Joseph stories in Java.16 For example, certain parts of the story are recited in the ceremony for a woman in the seventh month of pregnancy (mitoni), but also in ceremonies upon birth (bayen), the ‘falling off’ of an infant’s umbilical cord (puput pusĕr), circumcision (khitanan), marriage, and also in special exorcist ceremonies to protect threatened persons (ruwatan) and in the traditional annual village event after the harvest season called the ‘cleansing of the village’ (bĕrsih desa).17 According to Anthony Day, ‘In general terms Joseph exemplified for some Javanese audiences a kind of non-court heroism, his Islamic faith, prophetic power, exemplary chastity and devotion to family extolled as proof that any village youth could aspire to fame and fortune.’18 However, there is no direct information whatsoever about the role of the Joseph story in the earliest phase of Indonesia’s Islamisation. Nevertheless, the present essay attempts to argue that it is most likely to have played a role beyond the confines of mere literature. We can glean clues about its function from the earliest extant manuscripts. I therefore begin with discussing the oldest example in Malay, which was copied in 1604. As the situation for Javanese literature is much more informative, my next step will be to look at the paratextual data in the oldest known Javanese rendition, which is also from the early seventeenth century. The thaumaturgical Islam at work among the earliest witnesses evolved into a centuries-old tradition lasting until now. A short case study of a nineteenth-century Javanese Joseph story indicates that one of its main functions was to serve as an ‘amulet’. Intriguingly, nineteenth-century Christian missionaries tried to counter this popular or ‘lived’ Islam by publishing their own version of the Joseph story in faux Islamic style. However, seeking supernatural help in times of trouble and seeking peace of mind through ‘amuletic’ use of the Joseph story should not be dismissed as superstition and considered ‘false’ religion. Perhaps more than any other Islamic narrative, the Joseph story emphasises a behaviour in strict accordance with tawḥīd, that is, the confession of divine unity which entails ‘removing all so-called “gods” from the world; indeed replacing them all with One’.19 As the final section of this essay shows, Indonesian Joseph stories always also had the function of theologically enlightening

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the uneducated. Turning to an Islamic Javanese version in which the narrative is almost overrun by theological comments, it will become clear that thaumaturgical Islam is not just for the simple folk, but is firmly rooted in mainstream theological discourse in the Islamic world. This latter overtly theological text is no less part of a long tradition in Indonesian Joseph stories of asking for guidance to the straight path (Q. 1: 6).

The Oldest Extant Example of the Joseph Story The oldest extant example of the Joseph story in Indonesia is a Malay copy which was finished on 1 October 1604 in Aceh, North Sumatra. It was penned by the Dutch merchant Peter Floris, alias Pieter Willemsz van Elbinck, who was one of the earliest Western students of Malay.20 Kept in Cambridge University Library since 1632, its only scholarly description is hitherto a rather short notice by Phillipus van Ronkel in 1896.21 According to Van Ronkel, ‘The narrative agrees pretty well with that of the Quran, and still more with the Muhammedan legends.’22 However, Van Ronkel thought that there was a new twist in the Malay retelling, which he attributed to a ‘misunderstanding’ of the Quranic text.23 Towards the end of the Quranic version, it is related that, ‘when the bearer of good news came and placed the shirt [of Joseph] onto Jacob’s face, his eyesight returned’ (Q. 12: 96).24 However, in the 1604 Malay rendition, the Arabic term bashīr (bringer of glad tiding, messenger, herald25) is interpreted as a personal name, and we read that Yusuf sends out a servant named Basir to bring his shirt (baju) to his father.26 Basir even becomes the hero in a short intermezzo inserted into the story. The Malay narrator invokes the authority of some scholars (or perhaps of one scholar)27 to relate that Basir was the son of a slave woman who, many years previously, had been separated from her by Yaʿqub (Jacob; Malay: Yaaqub) in order to be sold. Thereupon this woman had prayed in tears to God: ‘O my Lord, o Lord, you should separate Yaʿqub from his beloved, just as I was separated from my child by Yaʿqub.’28 Next a voice from the unseen sounded: ‘O woman, do not worry, be patient, your prayer has been answered by God the Exalted.’29 The voice further promised that she would be reunited with her son before Yaʿqub would be with his. After many years passed, this promise finally came true: on his way to Yaʿqub, Basir met an old woman longing for her long-lost son. Basir asked her whether she knew where the prophet Yaʿqub lived, upon which she queried what he wanted from the latter, ‘because he is old, his eyes are blind, his ears are already deaf, he is ill, pining for his son’.30 When Basir informed her about his task of giving Yusuf’s shirt to Yaʿqub, the woman was in tears, thanking God for keeping His promise. Reunited at last, the mutual joy of mother and son was tremendous. Contrary to Van Ronkel’s assumption that the Malay ‘translator’ had misunderstood the original text and subsequently added the Basir episode in an act of recomposition, the Malay version simply follows the Joseph story as it is spun out according to the post-Quranic Tales of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ).31 The ‘annunciatory role’ of the mise en abyme of Basir is no specifically Malay invention: for example, a fourteenthcentury Turkish version of the Joseph story relates a similar addendum about this messenger (where he is called Beshir).32 The Basir episode fills in the blanks of the Quranic

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telling, providing a reason to a most compelling question left open in God’s revealed word, namely, why is Yaʿqub made to suffer over the purported loss of his son?33 In fact, the 1604 Malay Joseph story is closely related to the Tales of the Prophets, with many episodes almost verbatim the same.34 For example, the wording of Yusuf’s questioning in prison by the archangel Jibril (Gabriel; Malay: Jibrail), repeating the message that help and succour are only to be sought from God, can also be found, with some slight variations, in Malay versions of the Tales of the Prophets:35 Jibril (peace be upon him) came to Yusuf (peace be upon him), and Jibril said: ‘O Yusuf, who took care of you when you were in your mother’s belly?’ Yusuf (peace be upon him) said: ‘God, glory be to him, the Exalted.’ Jibril said: ‘Who took care of you when your brothers were about to kill you?’ Yusuf said: ‘God, glory be to him, the Exalted.’ Jibril said: ‘Who took care of you in the well?’ Yusuf said: ‘God, glory be to him, the Exalted.’ Jibril said: ‘Who took care of you so that you did not succumb to adultery?’ Yusuf said: ‘God, glory be to him, the Exalted.’ Jibril said: ‘If that is so, why do you rely on God’s creatures, passing by your Lord and not asking your Lord?’ Yusuf said (peace be upon him): ‘O my Lord, O my Master, O my God, your slave has gravely sinned, please forgive me.’ Jibril’s constant reminder of God’s omnipotence answered by Yusuf’s refrain of divine glorification touches upon the central religious message of the Joseph story, which Marije Plomp aptly summarises as ‘Surrender yourself to God, under all circumstances, good and bad, for he [sic] is great and powerful.’36 As Abdul Mukti Ali speculates, this message may have played a crucial role in winning the hearts and minds of Indonesian ‘animists’ at the earliest stage of Islamisation: [Islam] teaches that above mankind there is an Almighty Power, whom we come to know by studying the universe; and this Almighty Power who can do good to us or harm us is Allah. This simple belief was not unlike the indigenous belief in a higher spiritual force; it easily penetrated into the hearts of the people and outweighed the influence of Hinduism among them.37 The manifestation of several localisms (also appearing in the Malay Tales of the Prophets) would seem to point to a story which was already known for some time in the region. An oft-quoted example of couleur locale is that the role of the wolf, which is not indigenous in Southeast Asia, is played by a tiger.38 The latter animal is not just more familiar, but also a most feared wild beast in the archipelago.39 Another regional influence can be seen in the clothes which Yusuf is made to wear on the fateful day when the brothers ask their father to let Yusuf go with them. It is told, ‘Yaʿqub summoned his son Yusuf (peace be upon him). He bathed him and made him wear a sarong and a shirt, put a headdress [on his head], used an eyebrow pencil on him, and perfumed him.’40 Intriguingly, at the end of the manuscript, there are two other texts which both belong to the domain of thaumaturgical Islam. First, there are four lines at the end of folio 60v with the following statement on the four elements: ‘Fire with fire is good; water with water is good; wind with wind is good; fire with water is bad; also, water with fire is bad; earth with wind is bad; fire with earth is bad; fire with wind is good; earth with water is good.’41 Tantalisingly brief, this short precept is rooted in medieval Islamic humoral theory and may be connected to rituals of healing during shamanistic performances.42 Second, on folios 61r–61v, there is a short paragraph on omens of

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a garment eaten by mice/rats.43 As Joseph is renowned for seeing hidden meanings behind purportedly divine signs such as dreams and visions, the inclusion of information on magical practices is surely not coincidental.

The Promise of Forgiveness Paratexts of later Malay copies of the Joseph story make it clear that this was not just a story. For example, a manuscript copied in Singapore in 1836 begins as follows:44 In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. We ask assistance from Him. This tells the narrative of God’s prophet Yusuf, the son of God’s prophet Yaʿqub, a most trustworthy story, which was taken by the learned scholars from the excellent Quran. God (glorified and exalted be He) will forgive all sins for about forty years of whosoever recites it or listens to it from the beginning to the end. This promise is repeated at the end of the story:45 Furthermore, God (glorified and exalted be He) will certainly forgive the sins of forty years of whosoever recites this story of Yusuf due to the miraculous blessings of the prophets, God willing; the stories of God’s prophet Yaʿqub and God’s prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon them) have been taken from the excellent Quran by the pundits and scholars. Other Malay copies of the Joseph story make exactly the same claim.46 Now it could be argued that such promises are not entirely unusual in traditional Malay literature. For example, a nineteenth-century manuscript of the Hikayat Semaʾun, which is about an exemplary (fictional) Muslim boy of this name from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, begins as follows:47 In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. We ask assistance from Him. This is a story which tells that the Messenger of God (peace be upon him) said to his Companion, our Lord ʿAli (may God be pleased with him), the following words: ‘O ʿAli, all those from my community, all men and women, if they want to read this story or listen to it, God (glorified and exalted be He) will forgive their sins for forty years. Such is the decree of God the Exalted, you should believe all of this story.’ Furthermore, some Malay stories on the Prophet Muhammad’s life also contain a comparable pseudo-hadith, promising readers and listeners forgiveness of sins. For example, in a nineteenth-century Malay manuscript of the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, the Prophet allegedly said:48 Whoever reads my story of my ascent, or listens to it, or writes it down from start to finish, will attain the favour of Allah the Highest and all his sins will be forgiven by Allah the Highest. He will be much like a tree that has shed all its leaves from its twigs and not one of them will remain. In the same way, all his sins will have dropped from his body. Yet the Joseph story, which is the longest narrative in God’s revealed ‘Word of Truth’, was different. The oldest known Javanese version, which must be based upon a Malay

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prototype, and was recast in the form of narrative poetry (tĕmbang macapat) in 1633, is much bolder, ending with a speech act of the following promise:49 Panĕḍaning kang anulis ing sira Yang Mahamulya muwa i duta di kaot luputakĕna ing tula51 dening apaksa iya carita kinarya kidung pinangka asyaring52 jagat

The writer prays to God the Exalted and to the most valued Messenger50 to be spared of malediction as he was compelled to turn a story into a song, which serves as amulet in this world.

Miwa kang amaca mali kang angrĕngĕ53 apuraha rehing antuk ing tan kaot kudu angripta ĕnggi ta sang anutamĕng sastra amaonana ing tanduk lamon dika suraing basa

Furthermore, the readers and listeners should be merciful as they may stumble upon infelicities. This slavish follower of literary rules just had to come up with a literary work. You may well criticise his actions if you are a language buff.

Karaning paksa angawi

The reason why I was forced to compose poetry was because I heard these words (of the Prophet): ‘Whoever recites this will receive God’s blessing, similar to reciting the Quran: exemption from sorrow, the worries in the heart will disappear.’

dening angrĕngĕ andika54 sing sapa amaca rĕko antuk kanugrahaning Yang sami lan ngaji Kuran luput ing dukacipteku priyatining nala ilang

However, this positive promise is immediately followed by a grim threat about the most negative consequences of dismissing the story as fictional:55 Sing amaidoa iki kang kocap wau punika wong iku dadi ta mangko murud saking gama Islam dadi kapir ta sira tan antuk marga rahayu56 dening maido andika57

Whoever does not believe what has been narrated here, that person now will have abandoned the Islamic religion and will have become an infidel, not receiving the secure path, because of disbelieving the words (of the Prophet).

Wontĕn andikaning pun Nabi kocapa sajĕroning sastra58 tan ingangkĕn dasi mangke vant, tan antuk sapangatingwang59 tĕmbe yomal-kiyamat60 miwa ing dunya puniku tan antuk raseng agama

There is a saying of the Prophet, which is told in religious literature: ‘If you are later not acknowledged as my seryou will not receive my intercession, later on the Day of Judgement, and in this world you will not grasp the essence61 of religion.’

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Almost exactly the same words are still used in an East Javanese palm leaf manuscript written some two hundred years later.62 The eminent Javanologist Theodore Pigeaud described this later manuscript, dated 1804, as having a ‘curious colophon’, apparently unaware that it belonged to a hallowed tradition with a rather long genealogy.63

Seeking the Protection of God The idea that the Joseph story possessed the magic power of an amulet inspired many others to put it to paper. For example, this was the case with an anonymous Javanese man who finished his copy of the Joseph story on Tuesday, at two o’clock of the thirtieth day of the so-called pilgrimage month (Dhu’l-hijja).64 Unfortunately, he did not mention the year, but as his manuscript ended up in the collection of Karl Schoemann (1806–77), who worked in the Dutch East Indies from 1844 to 1851 as tutor to the children of the then governor general, Pigeaud’s suggestion that it was ‘probably’ written in the first half of the nineteenth century is most likely.65 According to Pigeaud, the contents do ‘not wholly conform [to] the standard text’ of the East Javanese Joseph story.66 The manuscript was clearly not to the taste of the learned cataloguer: ‘The spelling and the versification are bad. The style is boorish, showing many superfluous reiterations and stereotyped expressions.’67 It cannot be denied that the manuscript has a rather unsophisticated, if not to say rustic, appearance. Both its beginning and closing folios have decorated frames with floral motives in brownish ink (see Figure 22.1). The story proper is preceded by a relatively long paratext, but this introduction must also have annoyed Pigeaud, who bluntly judged that ‘the scribe makes a show of his piety’.68 But why this show, if ever it was one? The writer calls it ‘the story (caritane) of the Friend of God’ (waliyulah, from Arabic walī Allāh), which he copied in order to be a soothing narrative.69 Pigeaud opines that ‘probably the book was written to be lent out on hire, in order to provide the scribe with some money, which he needed badly’.70 Looking at the physical object, we may notice that ‘many pages are dirty, some are torn’,71 but apart from that there is no real proof that it was a manuscript for lending out. On the contrary, it could be argued that the writer had very private reasons to commit the Joseph story to paper. In the introduction, he describes himself as a ‘pitiful young man’ from Prabalingga (probably Purbalingga in Central Java) who had lost both his parents.72 Intriguingly, he states in the third person that the writer’s ‘place of origin is from the Javanese land’,73 but that he is now ‘in this city of Batavia’.74 Batavia, nowadays Jakarta, may geographically be located on the island of Java, but around the middle of the nineteenth century ‘the capital of the former Dutch Indies was a Dutch town, built by the Dutch and intended to be lived in by the Dutch’.75 Batavia was far removed from Central Java and, as Willem van der Molen notes, ‘the difficult journey – travelling overland took several weeks – made Batavia in the middle of the last century almost seem as if it was in a foreign country’.76 Batavia was ‘the kingdom of the mighty governor-general’.77 The rather lengthy introduction begins, as is usual for Javanese Islamic texts, with the following standard invocation of God: ‘I begin with praise, mentioning the name of God, who is merciful in this world, and loving in the other.’78 As convention further

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Figure 22.1 Decorated opening folios of manuscript Schoem. II 19, presenting a rather rustic appearance. Photograph taken by Dr Munawar Holil. Courtesy Staatsbibliothek at Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage. prescribes, the next stanza continues with praise for the Prophet Muhammad and his family. The next stanzas not only contain ‘the usual apology for ignorance and stupidity, filling several pages’,79 but also repeatedly implore the protection of God. For example, we read: ‘May I be free of all dangers’;80 ‘May I be safe, free of all pains, and [free] of all evil acts’ and ‘free of all evil’, praying to God to ‘show the secure path’.81 Of course, this supplication may be viewed as merely belonging to convention or even more derogatively as a mere ‘show’ of piety, but I am inclined to think that the Joseph story functioned as an amulet for well-being and safeguarding, considering the writer’s personal circumstances as a Javanese young man all alone in a foreign, and hence principally threatening, environment.

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The last six pages (folios 111–13) of the manuscript contain the Kidung Rumĕksa ing Wĕngi (Song Guarding at Night) preceded by a Javanese rendering of the Surat al-Fatiha from the Quran and the Muslim creed (shahāda).82 This further locates the Joseph story into a protective context as the ‘Song Guarding at Night’ is commonly regarded as ‘dedicated to effectuating well-being for people caught up in . . . precarious or problematic affairs’.83 The song asks to be free from all hindrances and disasters, and such phrases as ‘may . . . be free from pains’ (luputa ing lara), ‘free from all disaster’ (luputa bilai kabeh) and free from ‘evil acts’ (pĕnggawe ala) echo the writer’s wishes in the introduction.84

The Bandwagon Effect: Christian Attempts at Appropriating the Joseph Story It is unknown when exactly European Christian missionaries first started to use the Joseph story for attempting to win over Indonesian Muslims to the Christian faith. However, it must have been rather late as proselytisation was not promoted by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and it was only from 1848 onwards that (Protestant) missionaries were officially allowed to spread the Gospel among the Javanese.85 Consequently, we see that in the nineteenth century Christian organisations published several Christian Joseph stories in Malay, Sundanese and Javanese, hoping to supplant the most popular Islamic rival versions.86 The Christian apologetic, antithetical literature tried to approach its targeted readers in an indirect way by appearing in Islamic garb.87 For example, a nineteenth-century Malay manuscript begins with the following opening, which would not immediately arouse the suspicion of a Muslim reader:88 The Story of Yusuf, the son of God’s prophet Yaʿqub, is most beautifully phrased and its name is renowned in all countries since olden days, and it is told by the narrator to make known the divine wisdom (hikmat) and bounty, which God (may He be praised and exalted) shows towards his devout slaves. Yusuf is called the son of ‘God’s prophet (nabi Allah) Yaʿqub’, which is not Christian at all, but on the contrary fully in accordance with Islamic usage. The doxologies in this Christian version are also Islamic, namely, Allah subhanahu wa taala (God, may He be praised and exalted) as in the introduction cited above, but also Allah taala (God the Exalted), and Allah Tuhan sarwa alam (God the Lord of the worlds).89 Its Islamic impression notwithstanding, the plot follows the literary structure of the Book of Genesis and hence, for example, the attempted seduction is made by the nameless ‘wife of Potifar’ (istri Potifar). The mobilisation of the word hikmat in the paratext above is of particular interest. It is, of course, an Arabic loanword (from hikma, meaning ‘wisdom, sagacity, philosophy, maxim, rationale, underlying reason’),90 but it has a special connotation in traditional Malay literature. Wilkinson explains hikmat as ‘practical knowledge (such as enables a man to do the right thing in the right way); a clever way or contrivance; a dodge; a charm’.91 In hikayat literature, it commonly denotes ‘wonder-working magic’.92

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However, in contrast to Indonesian Islamic versions, which suggest that the story of Yusuf may have direct beneficial magical powers upon its audience, the Christian version wants to make it clear that hikmat only occurred in the life of Yusuf due to the latter’s godly life. Calling on its readers to follow Yusuf’s example, the Christian Joseph story belongs to devotional literature designed to remind its audience to lead a God-fearing life. The text closes the story with a poem (syair) of twelve stanzas, in which the readers are explicitly urged to do so. The poem begins as follows:93 Hikayat Yusuf sudahlah tamat yang membaca dia biarlah dapat manfaat supaya amalkan dengan sangat akhirnya tentulah kelak selamat

Terutama daripada segala fakir mengingati yang wajib sekali dibubuhi di hati akan tauhid Yusuf budi pekerti kepada Allah senantiasa ditakuti Pada masa ia kena percobaan hawa nafsunya segera dilawan larilah ia ketakutan sebab takut berdosa kepada Tuhan

The story of Yusuf has ended. May its readers derive profit from it, so that they seriously put it into practice. In the end they will surely be saved later. What we especially should be mindful about, what is required to be kept in our hearts, is Yusuf’s disposition towards tawḥīd, always fearing God. When he was put to the test, he directly opposed his carnal lusts. He fled full of fear, because he was afraid to sin against the Lord.

Intriguingly, the concept of monotheism or tawḥīd, which is Islam’s most fundamental tenet, is emphasised, again creating the impression that the text is Islamic. In the sixth stanza, we furthermore read that Yusuf was ‘richly rewarded by God / because of the tawḥīd in his heart’.94 This should be an example for the readers.95 Even ‘the Prophet’ (Nabi) is cited:96 Sabda Nabi dengarkan lagi Takutkan Allah itu permulaan berdiri Amalkan dia petang dan pagi Supaya namamu jangan menjadi keji

Listen also to the words of the Prophet: ‘Fearing God is the beginning of standing up.’ Practice this night and day, so that your name will not be tainted.

One wonders, however, which prophet is meant here, as the words have a very biblical ring to them, echoing Psalm 111: 10 (‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’) and Proverbs 9: 10 (‘The first step to wisdom is the fear of the Lord’). However,

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it is only in the last lines that the Christian message is more explicitly spelt out. The name given to Jesus is in accordance with Islamic usage, namely ʿIsa, but (contrary to the case of Jacob above) he is not called a prophet (nabi), which Jesus is in Islam. Furthermore, and more revealingly, the words of ʿIsa or Jesus are called firman (from Persian farmān), which is normally the specific term for God’s sayings.97 As Jesus is for Christians none other than God incarnate, the term firman is certainly apt, but at least at this point every Muslim reader would know to have been tricked. The final stanzas are as follows:98 Dan lagipula firman ʿIsa kepada sekalian umatnya senantiasa janganlah hatimu menjadi susah sebab rasa aniaya sedikit masa

And furthermore ʿIsa [Jesus] said incessantly to his followers: ‘Do not let your heart be sorrowful, as the experience of oppression is only short.

Ingatlah kamu segenap waktu Tiada kutinggalkan kamu jadi piatu Aku kan datang akan membantu Serta membuangkan susahmu itu

You must always remember: I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to help [you] and cast away your sorrows.

Segala susah yang amat leta Akan dilenyapkan segala mata

All despicable troubles will be removed and from all eyes God will wipe the tears away and give peace for which there are no words.’

Allah pun kelak menyapu air mata Serta memberi sentausa tiada berkata

Jesus’ words of comfort are a free rendition of John 14: 18 (‘I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you’) and Revelation 7: 17 (‘And God will wipe every tear from their eyes’). The final stanza, which could also be read as a continuation of the Jesus citation, once more urges the readers to realise the imitatio Josephi:99 Sebab itu turutlah olehmu seboleh-bolehnya akan kelakuan Yusuf dengan sempurna supaya kamu pun beroleh dengan tentunya akan segala berkat yang telah dikaruniai [atasnya]

Therefore you should try to emulate the actions of Yusuf most perfectly, so that you may receive all the blessings, which God also gave [to him].

Theological Education Especially in Javanese literature, the Joseph story has inspired many poets. According to Pigeaud, ‘Many Yusup manuscripts contain inserted passages with edifying religious meditations.’100 This phenomenon can already be observed in the earliest

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1633 version, which is full of numerous such short asides, prompting Ben Arps to suggest that ‘this romance was written with instructional, even propagative intentions’.101 The constant reiteration that, once again in Abdul Mukti Ali’s words, ‘above mankind there is an Almighty Power . . . and this Almighty Power who can do good to us or harm us is Allah’ strongly underlines the story’s special status among believers. One example of a heavily glossed Joseph story is a palm leaf manuscript which was written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a certain Nalaputra of Sampang, Madura. It is an extensive version in Javanese Madurese spelling and idiom ‘with moralistic intercalations, complete down to the moving of Joseph’s body to the graveyeard [sic] of prophets at Kudus (Jerusalem) by Musa (Moses)’.102 The manuscript was bought by Pigeaud in 1934, and romanised by his staff for his dictionary project. Unfortunately, the original manuscript is lost, but romanised copies are still available in several research libraries.103 The text begins as follows (canto 1: 1–2; verse form asmarandana): Ngwang teki milu angawi apaksa marna ing gita saking tapsir104 asra105 rĕke ka binasahakĕn Jawa carita Yusup ika linangkara106 karya tĕmbung atĕmbang asmarandana

I will engage in composing poetry, compelled to turn a story into a song, [taken] from the Commentary of Secrets, translated into Javanese. The story of Yusuf is impossible to put into words, using the verse form [called] Gift of Love.

Kang pinityani angawi nugrahanira Hyang Suksma antuka rakmat Hyang Manon sapangat107 Nabi Utusan

The poet prays for the blessing of God the All-Soul, in order to receive the mercy of the All-Seeing [and the] intercession of the Prophetic Messenger. [May the poet] in this world and later be shown the secure path, and be free of all kinds of dangers.

ing donya lan ing jĕma108 tuduhĕn ing marga ayu luputa ing pancabaya

Contrary to the statement in the first stanza, however, the text is not really a Javanese translation in verse of a Quranic commentary, but rather a version of the Joseph story into which much learning has been poured, considerably hampering the flow of the story. The narrator constantly interrupts the narrative to comment upon it, anxious to provide theological education. For example, the classic seduction scene, in which Jalika (Zulaikha) attempts to seduce Yusup (Yusuf), is overloaded with theological comments, leaving no doubt about the despicability of adultery (canto 13: 27–31; verse form durma):109 Risampuni mangkana putri Jalika Thereupon princess Jalika tan kĕna nahĕn brangti could not resist her passions anymore, kalinḍi kasmaran overwhelmed by passionate feelings, sumaput ing wrĕdaya fainting inside.110 atangkĕp lawang sang putri The princess seized the door, sarwya ngunji wat immediately locking it, anggayu asta aglis. quickly reaching for [Yusup’s] hand.

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Marikiya gusti pakanira nyawa tambanĕn unĕng mami deni laraningwang tan lyan na sira tuwan Yusup lingi jro naleki muga Hyang Suksma angraksaa ing kami.

‘Come here, dear lord, treat my longing, which causes such pain. There is no other than you, sir.’ Yusup said in his heart: ‘May the Universal Soul guard us.’

Wontĕn andikanira sang adiduta tigang prakara eki dosa agung ika ḍihin sĕrik111 ing Allah kapinḍo doraka eki yaya lan rina ping tiga jina112 eki.

There is a saying by the Noble Messenger about three things: ‘The major sins are: firstly, offending God; secondly, disobedience against the parents; thirdly, adultery.’

Angandika sira malih adiduta binjing kiyamat malih akumpul ta sira sakweh alaku jina akumpul lan wong kang binjing kaliwat susa sakaṭahing wong eki.

Furthermore, the Noble Messenger said: ‘In the future, at Judgement Day you will all be gathered. All those who have committed adultery will gather with the others who in the future will be in great trouble, all of those people.

Deni ambuni parjini113 wong ajina liwat durganda bacin samya tan kasanḍang sakaṭahing wong ika ameleg ing grananeki samya wistara suminggah ing kirtyeki.

The vulvas of the adulteresses will smell most foul and rotten. None of them will be clothed, all of those people. The smell will stay in their noses Everything will become clearly visible, leaving their deeds uncovered.’

The narrator tells that Yusup was ‘tested by God the Ordainer / to commit adultery’.114 ‘It almost came to sexual intercourse between Yusup and the princess’,115 except that Yusup saw a divine sign (canto 13: 34–8):116 Yen tan mulata Nabi Yusup punika ing tanḍaning Hyang Widi yakti kĕna jina Bagenḍa Yusup ika lawan sira sang suputri deni srĕnggaranira kaliwat brangti.

If the prophet Yusup had not seen a sign of God the Ordainer that this would really be adultery between Lord Yusup and the beautiful princess because of her amorous feelings, her exceeding love.

Sakwehi ahli tapsir paḍa ikhtilap117 ing tanḍaning Hyang Widi

All commentators diverge on the sign of God the Ordainer,

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ingkang prapta ika mring Nabi Yusup ika panḍita satĕnga118 angling paksi kang tĕka mincok ing bauneki.

which appeared to the Prophet Yusup. A number of scholars say that a bird appeared, perching on his shoulder.

Lingira paksi mring Nabi Yusup ika heh Yusup sira kaki aptya laku jina aywa sira kayweka muwah ta sira puniki datan wro sira ing ananingsuneki Mujar satĕnga wong ahlul tapsir muwah tanḍanira Hyang Widi mangke ingkang tĕka atutup nitra karwa putri Jalika inguni Yusup anabda apan karan sang putri, Anutupi sira ing mitrani ḍawak sumahur ta sang putri ingsun liwat wirang tumun120 brahalaningwang Nabi Yusup anabda ris wirang ta sira ing brahalanireki.

The bird spoke to the Prophet Yusup: ‘Hey Yusup, my dear young man, you may wish to commit adultery, but do not do it. Furthermore, do not you know about my situation?’119 Furthermore, some commentators have said that the sign of God the Ordainer, which then appeared, was that princess Jalika at that time closed both her eyes. Yusup said: ‘Why, princess, are you closing your own eyes?’ The princess answered: ‘I am very ashamed to see my idol.’ The Prophet Yusup said softly and calmly: ‘You are ashamed because of your idol.’

The text is slightly damaged here, but it continues with Yusup’s answer that he is ‘ashamed because of God the Universal Soul / and ashamed because of the people’.121 Unfortunately, the rest of the episode, in which the opinions of several (anonymous) commentators are quoted, is also significantly lost due to severe damage. From what can be reconstructed, we read, among others, that some commentators opined that ‘an umbrella shielding the bed’ (papayuning paprĕman) appeared as a divine sign,122 whereas according to other commentators, ‘looking at the princess, Yusup / saw that she was ugly / and foul-smelling’.123 According to yet another interpretation, Yusup saw ‘a big snake / nonpareil; / the snake said: “All those who commit adultery // will be in my stomach later at the Day of Judgement.”’124 This thrilling episode could have been spiced up a little, as has been done, for example, in another Javanese rendition from the end of the nineteenth century.

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Though also formally taking a stance against fornication, this other retelling paints the seduction scene in rather risqué terms, for example, writing that Yusup was close to taking hold of the breasts of the beautiful princess Jalika, only to be taken aback at the very last second by the big snake which warned him.125 However, there is no eroticism in the sterner version by our glossator: Joseph staunchly remains fidelis servus et domitor libidinis (faithful servant and subduer of lust).126

Concluding Remarks: Practical and Theoretical Knowledge At the end of this tour d’horizon, I hope to have illustrated the importance of the Joseph story in Indonesia’s Islamisation. Its earliest extant example, which is a Malay version from 1604 in Aceh, bears testimony to its early acceptance in local culture and its anchorage in thaumaturgical Islam. Later Malay copies from a wide geographical stretch also make explicit statements about a special status for the Joseph story, emphasising its redemptive function. Manuscripts from Javanese literature, already beginning with the oldest known version from 1633, make even bolder claims about the story’s protective force as an amulet for its performers and listeners. The nineteenth-century Javanese manuscript of a Joseph story kept as Schoemann II 19 in Berlin shows us a rustic writer who was much concerned with safeguarding himself against all kinds of bad things in the ‘foreign’ metropole. Based upon late twentieth-century fieldwork in East Java, Arps observes that discussions on the ‘true meaning’ of the text are usually avoided.127 Most importantly, according to Arps, is that the Joseph story is ‘voiced in such a way as to enable the ritual success of the session. There is thus neither the urge, nor indeed the necessity, to comprehend the text completely in all its details.’128 All of this would seem to support Jochem van den Boogert’s recent invitation to rethink Javanese Islam, proposing that Javanese traditions should be regarded as ‘practical knowledge’, by which he means ‘something that needs to be performed, i.e. done, in order to obtain a certain goal or avoid a kind of mishap’.129 Paraphrasing van den Boogert’s hypothesis for our purposes, the actual act of performing is what makes the Joseph story effective and not the ‘belief’ in its contents.130 Van den Boogert’s ‘either-or’ approach is rather reminiscent of the binary thinking of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries who wanted to root out the ‘superstition’ and ‘magic’ they associated with Indonesian Islam. Capitalising on popular traditions of the Indonesian Islamic Joseph story, they wrote a heavily disguised Christian version of this tale in an attempt to stealthily propagate ‘true belief’ and ‘correct faith’ rather than the common Indonesian objective of furthering such concrete results in the here and now as warding off evil. However, I do not think that we should frame the writing, performance and hearing of Indonesian Islamic Joseph stories in a false dichotomy of religious belief versus practical knowledge. Both concepts are inseparably intertwined. The Indonesian Christian Joseph story may emphasise belief in the supreme God, but in fact so do all Indonesian Islamic versions, too. For example, the 1633 Javanese retelling explicitly states: ‘Whoever does not believe / what has been narrated here, / that person now will have / abandoned the Islamic religion / and will have become an infidel, / not receiving the secure path, / because of disbelieving the words (of the Prophet)’ (see above;

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italics added). Thus, religious belief and adherence to Islam is the conditio sine qua non (the necessary condition) for the efficacy of the performance. Only the Muslim true believers will receive God’s blessing, not only in the next world but also in this life with demonstrable results. The history of the Joseph story in Indonesia is a long tradition of Indonesian Muslims who have been writing and reciting it, or just listening to what the Quran (12: 3) calls ‘the best of stories’, all of them hoping and wishing to be shown ‘the secure path, and be free of all kinds of dangers’ (see stanza 2 of Nalaputra’s nineteenth-century version from Madura cited above).

Notes 1. Harun Mat Piah et al., Traditional Malay Literature (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2002), p. 316 (emphasis added). 2. A notable exception is Ali Ahmad, Kisah-Kisah Nabi Yusuf dalam Kesusasteraan Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1999), which not only discusses Joseph stories in traditional Malay literature, but also includes an edition of a 1932 version that was specially created for Raja Yusuf bin Almarhum Raja Yaakob bin Almarhum Sultan Abdul Samad of Selangor. 3. See Vladimir Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), p. 358. 4. Frye’s observation originally applied to the Bible (Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. xv. I found this phrase in Todd Lawson, ‘Typological Figuration and the Meaning of the “Spiritual”: The Qur’anic Story of Joseph’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 132, no. 2 (2012), p. 221. 5. Peter Riddell, Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmission and Responses (London: Hurst, 2001), p. 217. 6. Ibid., p. 226. 7. Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 5. 8. Ibid., p. 116 (emphasis added). 9. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 14. 11. The phrase was coined by O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999), p. 18. See Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 49–51 for a lucid discussion of the idea of persons of prowess as rulers in Southeast Asia, described as ‘those perceived to possess extraordinary qualities and renowned for remarkable achievements’ (ibid., p. 49). They had ‘a reputation for invulnerability, great wisdom, extraordinary courage, and exceptional feats, frequently in battle but also spiritual achievements’ (ibid., p. 49). 12. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, p. 10. For a concise overview of these myths, see Russell Jones, ‘Ten Conversion Myths from Indonesia’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 129–58. A much more extensive discussion is provided by Fritz Schulze, Abstammung und Islamisierung als Motive der Herrschaftslegitimation in der traditionellen malaiischen Geschichtsschreibung (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004).

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13. Kefeli, Becoming Muslim, p. 74. 14. Steven Pinker, ‘The Untenability of Faitheism’, Current Biology 25 (2015), p. 639. 15. See A. Day, ‘Islam and Literature in South-East Asia: Some Pre-Modern, Mainly Javanese Perspectives’, in M. B. Hooker (ed.), Islam in Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 158 with references. For Joseph’s influence upon Malay adventure stories, see Marije Plomp, Never-Never Land Revisited: Malay Adventure Stories, with an Annotated Edition and Translation of the Malay Story of Bahram Syah (Ridderkerk: Ridderprint, 2014; doctoral thesis, University of Leiden). 16. See especially the most informative work by Bernard Arps, Tembang in Two Traditions: Performance and Interpretation of Javanese literature (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992). 17. Titik Pudjiastuti, ‘Serat Yusup: Peranannya dalam Kehidupan Masyarakat Jawa’, Lembaran Sastra 16 (1992), pp. 61–7. 18. Day, ‘Islam and Literature’, p. 158. 19. David B. Burrell CSC, ‘Creation’, in Tim Winter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 141. 20. Stuart Robson, ‘Peter Floris (alias Pieter Willemsz), Merchant and . . . Student of Malay’, Songklanakarin Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities vol. 6, no. 1 (2000), pp. 90–5. 21. Ph.S. van Ronkel, ‘Account of Six Malay Manuscripts of the Cambridge University Library’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 46, no. 1 (1896), pp. 7–8. The manuscript is kept under call number Cambridge Dd.5.37; see M. C. Ricklefs and P Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian languages in British Public Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 111. 22. Van Ronkel, ‘Account of Six Malay Manuscripts’, p. 7. 23. Ibid., p. 7. 24. Interpretation M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an: A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 151. 25. Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (London: Macdonald & Evans; Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980), p. 59. 26. See Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.5.37, f. 54v: ‘Maka Yusuf alaihissalam menyuruhkan Basir membawa bajunya kepada bapanya Yaaqub alaihissalam’ (Yusuf [peace upon him] ordered Basir to take his shirt to his father Yaʿqub [peace be upon him]); and f. 55r: ‘Kemudian daripada itu maka Basir pun keluar dari benua Mesir membawa baju Yusuf alaihissalam kepada bapanya Nabi Yaaqub alaihissalam . . .’ (Thereupon Basir left Egypt to take the shirt of Yusuf [peace be upon him] to his father the Prophet Yaʿqub [peace be upon him]). 27. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.5.37, f. 54v. The Malay text reads: ‘Maka ujar setengah pandita yang membawa baju itu hamba Yusuf alaihissalam bernama Basir . . .’ The word setengah does not only mean ‘a number of’, but also ‘a certain’. See Nico Kaptein, ‘The Word Setengah in Kitab-Malay’, in Connie Baak et al. (eds), Tales from a Concave World: Liber amicorum Bert Voorhoeve (Leiden: Leiden University, 1995), pp. 542–52. 28. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.5.37, f. 55r. The Malay text reads: ‘Ya Tuhanku, ya Rabb, Kauceraikan Yaaqub dengan kekasihnya seperti aku diceraikannya Yaaqub dengan anakku itu.’ 29. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.5.37, f. 55r. The Malay text reads: ‘Maka datang suara suatu pada perempuan itu demikian bunyinya: “Hai perempuan, jangan engkau bercinta, sabarlah engkau telah diperkenankan Allah taala doamu itu.”’ 30. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.5.37, ff. 55v–56r. The Malay text reads: ‘Karena ia tuha, [f. 56r] matanya pun kelam, telinganya pun telah tuli, ia pun sakit bercintakan anaknya.’

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31. See, for example, Hamdan Hassan, Surat al-Anbiya (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1990), pp. 426–8, where it is related that Basir was the son of the wet nurse of Benjamin (Baniamin). Yaʿqub had sold Basir in order that the latter’s mother’s milk would be used only for Benjamin. This edition is based upon Royal Asiatic Society MSS Maxwell 22 and 23, copied in 1294/1877; see Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts, pp. 145–6. In another nineteenth-century Malay manuscript of the Tales of the Prophets, summarised (in Dutch) by D. Gerth van Wijk, ‘De Koranische verhalen in het Maleis,’ Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 35 (1893), p. 323, we also find this episode, but the messenger is alternately called Basir and Basyar. 32. See Bill Hickman, The Story of Joseph: A Fourteenth-Century Turkish Morality Play by Sheyyad Hamza (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014), pp. 106–8. Hickman (ibid., p. 121 n. 60) uses the phrase ‘annunciatory role’. In this Turkish version, Jacob took a concubine when Joseph’s mother died. That woman already had a child named Beshir, whom she was still nursing. Jacob sold Beshir so she would have enough milk for Joseph, see ibid., p. 106. 33. See R. Firestone, ‘Yūsuf’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), p. 353 for other reasons adduced in post-Quranic literature. 34. However, it should be noted that the designation ‘Tales of the Prophets’ is an umbrella term covering different versions. For example, in a version edited by H. Abu Hanifah, Kisasu l-Anbiya (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1996), p. 164, the Basir episode is completely lacking, and we merely find the phrase: ‘Then came Basyir, i.e. the one who brings profit, that is to say, Yahudha brought Yusuf’s shirt to his father Yaʿqub’ (Maka tatkala datanglah Basyir yakni yang membawa kebajikan, yaitu Yahuda membawa baju Yusuf kepada bapaknya Yaaqub). This is in accordance with the commentary of Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) that ‘the bearer of good news was Yahudha, son of Yaʿqub’. 35. The Malay text reads: [f. 33r] ‘Maka Jibrail alaihissalam pun datang kepada Yusuf alaihissalam maka ujar Jibrail: “Ya Yusuf, siapa memeliharakan dikau tatkala engkau dalam perut ibumu?” Maka ujar Yusuf alaihissalam: “Allah subhanahu wa taala.” Maka ujar [f. 33v] Jibrail: “Siapa memeliharakan dikau daripada dibunuh saudaramu?” Maka ujar Yusuf: “Allah subhanahu wa taala.” Maka ujar Jibrail: “Siapa memeliharakan dikau dalam telaga?” Maka ujar Yusuf: “Allah subhanahu wa taala.” Maka ujar Jibrail: “Siapa memeliharakan dikau maka tiada lebih pada zina?” Maka ujar Yusuf alaihissalam: “Allah subhanahu wa taala.” Maka ujar Jibrail: “Jika demikian, betapa engkau bersuasa [read: berkuasa?] pada makhluk Tuhanmu kautinggalkan tiada engkau minta pada Tuhanmu?” Maka ujar Yusuf alaihissalam: “Ya Rabbi, ya Sayyidi, ya Maulai, terlalu besar dosa hambamu, ampun apalah.” Cf. the same episode in Hassan, Surat al-Anbiya, p. 373. 36. Marije Plomp, Never-Never Land Revisited, p. 184. 37. A. Mukti Ali, ‘Islam in Indonesia’, in J. Gonda et al., Religionen (Leiden and Cologne: Brill, 1975), pp. 74–5. 38. See, for example, Firestone, ‘Yūsuf’, p. 353. Also mentioned in John Renard, Islam and Christianity: Theological Themes in Comparative Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), p. 76. 39. Cf. Russell Jones, ‘Harimau’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 126, no. 2 (1970), pp. 260–2; Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 40. Cambridge University Library, Dd.5.37, ff. 4r–4v. The Malay text reads: ‘Yaakub memanggil anaknya Yusuf alaihissalam. Maka dimandikannya dan dikaininya dan bajuinya ditengkulukinya [f. 4v] maka dicelakinya dan diberinya memakai narwastu.’ In Hassan, Surat al-Anbiya, p. 322 we read that Yusuf wears a slightly different local outfit, without

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41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

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headdress, but with a staff and a neck decoration. However, this episode is not included in another nineteenth-century version summarised by Gerth van Wijk in ‘De Koranische verhalen’, p. 309. Translation by van Ronkel, ‘Account of Six Malay Manuscripts’, p. 7. The Malay text reads: ‘Bab jika api sama api baik; air sama air baik; angin sama angin baik; api dengan air jahat; air dengan api pun jahat; bumi dengan angin pun jahat; api dengan bumi pun jahat; api dengan angin baik; bumi dengan air baik; wassalam bilkhair.’ Cf. Carol Laderman, Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1991). Such interpretations of the significance of textiles eaten by rats/mice can normally be found in compilations of notes on dreams, matters of fortune and magic; see Edwin P. Wieringa, Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands, vol. 1 (Leiden: Leiden University Library, 1998), pp. 195 and 206. See also Plomp, Never-Never Land Revisited, p. 155. This manuscript is kept as MS Indo 11 in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. It is described on the website of the Islamic Heritage Project: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/dl/ ihp/008242655. According to the colophon, the manuscript was completed on 27 Shaʿbān 1252 (7 December 1836). The citation is from f. 1v, which is digitised on: http://pds.lib. harvard.edu/pds/view/10652763?n=10&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.25&printThumbnails =no. The Malay text reads: ‘Bismillāhi’l-raḥmāni’l-raḥīm. Wa-bihi nastaʿīnu bi-llāhi ʿalā. Ini mengatakan hikayat Nabi Allah Yusuf anak Nabi Allah Yaaqub dikeluarkan oleh segala ulama yang arif daripada Quran al-azim cetera yang amat sah. Maka barang siapa membaca dia atau yang mendengarkan dia daripada permulaan datang kepada kesudahannya maka diampuni Allah subhanahu wa taala segala dosanya kira-kira empat puluh tahun lamanya.’ Harvard MS Indo 11, f. 72v. The Malay text reads: ‘Syahdan barang siapa membaca hikayat Nabi Allah Yusuf alaihissalam ini kisahnya niscaya empat puluh tahun dosanya diampuni Allah subhanahu wataala dengan berkat mukjizat segala nabi-nabi insya Allah taala di dalam Quran al-azim dikeluarkan oleh segala pendeta ulama hikayat Nabi Allah Yaaqub dan Nabi Allah Ibrahim alaihissalam.’ For example, a Malay manuscript from Perlis dated 1802 (British Library Malay D 4), digitised as: www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=mss_malay_d_4_fs001r. The beginning reads (f. 3v): ‘Bismillāhi’l-raḥmāni’l-raḥīm. Wa-bihi nastaʿīnu bi-llāhi ʿalā. Ini peri mengatakan hikayat Nabi Allah Yusuf anaknya Nabi Allah Yaaqub barang siapa membaca dia atau menengarkan dia daripada permulaannya datang kepada kesudahannya maka diampuni Allah subhanahu wataala segala dosanya empat puluh tahun lamanya.’ And at the end of the narrative (f. 31r): ‘Syahdan barang siapa membaca kisah Nabi Yusuf alaihissalam ini empat puluh tahun diampuni Allah subhanahu wataala dosanya (d.w.a.s.a.ny) berkat insya Allah taala demikianlah kisahnya Nabi Allah Yusuf dan Nabi Allah Yaaqub dan Nabi Allah Ishaq dan Nabi Allah Ibrahim. Tamatlah sudah hikayat Nabi Allah Yusuf.’ Manuscript Schoemann V 20 of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, which is discussed in Edwin P. Wieringa and Th. Hanstein, SchriftSprache: Aksara dan Bahasa, Ausstellungskatalog (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Jakarta: Museum Nasional Indonesia, 2015), p. 54ff. It is digitised as: http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ SBB0001A4BF00000000. The Malay text can be found in Wieringa and Hanstein, SchriftSprache, p. 54 and reads (ff. 2v–3v): ‘Bismillāhi’l-raḥmāni’l-raḥīm. Wa-bihi nastaʿīnu bi-llāhi ʿalā. Ini hikayat daripada peri menyatakan Rasulullah sallahu / alaihi wassalam bersabda kepada sahabat yaitu Baginda ʿAli radi Allahu anhu, demikianlah sabdanya Rasulullah: “Ya ʿAli, barang siapa daripada umatku sekalian laki-laki dan perempuan jikalau / hendak

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49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

islamisation membaca dia atawa menengerken dia ceritera daripada hikayat ini, maka Allah subhanahu wa taala mengampunilah aken dosanya mareka itu empat puluh tahun. Demikianlah perman Allah taʿala percayalah olehmu sekalian daripada ceritera ini.”’ Th.C. van der Meij and N. Lambooij, The Malay Hikayat Miʿrāj Nabi Muḥammad: The Prophet Muḥammad’s Nocturnal Journey to Heaven and Hell (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), p. 113. Canto 16: 179–81 of the Kitab Yusuf, romanised by Titik Pudjiastuti, p. 533. This text, which has been made available in a published text edition as Kitab Yusuf (Jakarta: Proyek Penerbitan Buku Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1981) with an Indonesian translation by Hardjana H. P. (pp. 7–271) and romanisation by Titik Pudjiastuti (pp. 275–541), is quite problematic and unfortunately the manuscript, which belongs to a private collection, is not available for inspection. On its date and provenance, see Bernard Arps, ‘Yusup, Sri Tanjung, and Fragrant Water: The Adoption of a Popular Islamic Poem in Banyuwangi, East Java’, in V. J. H. Houben et al. (eds), Looking in Odd Mirrors: The Java Sea (Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van ZuidoostAzië en Oceanië, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1992), pp. 120–2 and M. C. Ricklefs, The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726–1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), pp. 56–8. I interpret this line as muwah ing duta di kaot, reading di as adi. To be understood as tulah, i.e. ‘curse, malediction’. I interpret asyar as an alternative spelling of asar (see Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, JavaansNederlands Handwoordenboek [Groningen and Batavia (Jakarta): Wolters’ UitgeversMaatschappij, 1938], p. 16 and W. J. S. Poerwadarminta, Baoesastra Djawa [Groningen and Batavia (Jakarta): Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1939], p. 20), which is a variant of angsar, i.e.‘ ‘magic power of amulet’ (Stuart Robson and Singgih Wibisono, JavaneseEnglish Dictionary [Singapore: Periplus, 2002], p. 47). Cf. P. J. Zoetmulder, Old Javanese-English Dictionary (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 1535–6 under rĕŋö. I think that andika refers to the words of the Prophet (hadith) here, cf. note 56 below. Canto 16: 182–3 of the Kitab Yusuf, pp. 533–4. The term refers to ‘the straight path’ of Q. 1: 5. As noted by Bernard Arps, ‘The Song Guarding at Night: Grounds for Cogency in a Javanese Incantation’, in Stephen Headley, Towards an Anthropology of Prayer: Javanese Ethnolinguistic Studies (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), p. 83; rahayu is a synonym of slamĕt, i.e. ‘well, safe and sound, secure’ (see Robson and Wibisono, Javanese-English Dictionary, p. 686). My interpretation is that ‘the words’ (andika) refer to those of the Prophet Muhammad (andikaning pun Nabi) in the next line. This Sanskrit loanword (śāstra) is explained in Zoetmulder, Old Javanese-English Dictionary, p. 1707 as ‘any instrument of teaching, any book or treatise, (esp.) any religious or scientific treatise, any sacred book or composition of divine authority; scripture, science’. The Javanese word sapangat is derived from Arabic shafāʿa (cf. Malay safaat, syafaat, syapaat). Arabists will recognise yawmu’l-qiyāma. The word rasa, i.e. ‘taste, feeling, inner experience, deepest meaning, essence’, which is historically a Sanskrit loanword (Sanskrit rasa) is notoriously difficult to translate. Cf. E. M. Uhlenbeck, ‘The Words Morphologically Related with Javanese Rasa: A Contribution to Javanese Lexicology’, in his Studies in Javanese Morphology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 161–75. For an explanation of the various meanings of rasa in (later) Javanese

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62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

465

Islamic mysticism, see P. J. Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), pp. 182–4. This is manuscript JAV 7 (Cod. Javan. Add. 8), which was written in Rĕmbang in 1804, kept in the Royal Library of Copenhagen and described by Theodore Pigeaud in F. H. van Naerssen et al., Catalogue of Indonesian Manuscripts, Part 2: Old Javanese Charters, Javanese, Malay and Lampung Manuscripts, Mads Lange’s Balinese Letters and Official Letters in Indonesian Languages (Copenhagen: The Royal Library, 1977), pp. 106–9. Pigeaud in Naerssen et al., Catalogue, p. 109. See Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts and Some Codices Written in Related Idioms Spoken in Java and Bali (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1975), p. 132 for the Javanese text of the colophon. Ibid., p. 132. The manuscript is kept in Berlin State Library under call number Schoem. II 19, and described in Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, pp. 131–2. It is digitised as: http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0001A0B700000000. Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, pp. 131–2. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 132. See f. 3b: mila kula anurun / kinarya panglipur driya; also cited in Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, p. 132. Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, p. 132. Ibid., p. 131. The Javanese text can be found in Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, p. 132. See f. 3b: saking nĕgari Jawi pinangkane. See f. 3b: aneng nagara Bĕtawiku. Willem van der Molen, ‘Glory of Batavia: The Image of a Colonial City through the Eyes of a Javanese Nobleman’, in Peter J. M. Nas (ed.), Urban Symbolism (Leiden: Brill, 1993), p. 315. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 327. ‘Ingsun amimiti a- [f. 2b] muja / anĕbut namaning Sukma / kang murah ing dunya rĕke / kang asih ing akerat.’ Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, p. 132. f. 3a: luputa sakehing baya. f. 4a: sĕlamĕta awakingsong / luputa sakehing lara / sakehe pĕnggawe ala; and on f. 4b: luputa ing sarwi ala and furthermore tuḍuhĕna marga ayu. Pigeaud, Javanese and Balinese Manuscripts, p. 132. Arps, ‘The Song Guarding at Night’, p. 79. For the Javanese text, see Arps (‘The Song Guarding at Night’, p. 54), who arrives at some other interpretations of lara (sickness) and pĕnggawe ala (evil witchcraft) which are also possible. The word lara is explained in Robson and Wibisono, Javanese-English Dictionary, p. 427 as (1) to hurt, be painful (part of the body); (2) to be sick; (3) pain; (4) sickness. The word pĕnggawe means ‘deed, action; act or way of making’, but also ‘(evil) action, sorcery’ (see ibid., p. 233); whereas ala means ‘bad, evil, nasty, ugly’ (see ibid., p. 31). Jochem van den Boogert, ‘Rethinking Javanese Islam: Towards New Descriptions of Javanese Traditions’, doctoral thesis, Leiden University, 2015, p. 98. See A. G. Hoekema, Denken in Dynamisch Evenwicht: De Wordingsgeschiedenis van de Nationale Protestanse Theologie in Indonesië (ca. 1860-1960) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1994), pp. 45, 48–9, 70–1. Cf. ibid., p. 71.

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88. The Malay text, as edited in Jumsari Jusuf, Hikayat Nabi Yusuf (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1978), p. 1, reads: ‘Bahwa Hikayat Yusuf, anak Nabi Allah Yakub, terlalu indah-indah segala perkataannya dan termasyhur namanya pada segala negeri dahulu kala dan lagi diceriterakan oleh orang yang empunya ceritera akan menyatakan hikmat dan anugerah Allah subhanahu wa taala atas hambanya yang mukmin.’ This text edition is based upon manuscript W 110, which is kept in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta. It is described in Ph. S. van Ronkel, Catalogus der Maleische handschriften in het Museum van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavia [Jakarta]: Landsdrukkerij, 1909), p. 216 and listed in T. E. Behrend (ed.), Katalog Induk Naskah-Naskah Nusantara, vol. 4: Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor and École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1998), p. 330. 89. The latter expression goes back to Arabic rabb al-ʿālamīn, with which God is directly addressed in the very first verse of the Quran (1: 1). 90. Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, p. 196. For a discussion of this Quranic Arabic term, see Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 15ff. 91. R. J. Wilkinson, A Malay–English Dictionary (Romanised) (London, Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1959), p. 407. 92. Ibid., p. 407. Cf. Edwin Wieringa, ‘Ein malaiischer Codex unicus der Geschichte von Sayf al-Mulūk (BSB München Cod. Malai. 2)’, in Ulrich Marzolph (ed.), Orientalistische Studien zu Sprache und Literatur: Festgabe zum 65. Geburtstag von Werner Diem (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011), p. 367. 93. Jusuf, Hikayat Nabi Yusuf, pp. 38–9. 94. Ibid., p. 38. The Malay text reads: ‘Dibalas Allah dengan kelimpahanNya / sebab tauhid hatinya kepada Tuhan.’ 95. Stanza 7b, Jusuf, Hikayat Nabi Yusuf, p. 38. 96. Stanza 8, Jusuf, Hikayat Nabi Yusuf, p. 39. 97. Cf. Wilkinson, A Malay–English Dictionary, p. 313. 98. Jusuf, Hikayat Nabi Yusuf, p. 39. 99. Ibid., p. 39. 100. Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java: Catalogue Raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections in the Netherlands, vol. 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), p. 99. 101. Arps, ‘Yusup, Srin Tanjung, and Fragrant Water’, p. 119. 102. Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java: Catalogue Raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections in the Netherlands, vol. 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), p. 410. 103. Described under LOr 6693 in Pigeaud, Literature of Java, vol. 2, p. 410. Furthermore, under project number L 360 (call number PB B.38) in T. E. Behrend (ed.), Katalog Induk Naskah-Naskah Nusantara, vol. 1: Museum Sonobudoyo Yogyakarta (Jakarta: Penerbit Djambatan, 1990), p. 425; and under project number CI.119 or call number G 83 in T. E. Behrend and Titik Pudjiastuti (eds), Katalog Induk Naskah-Naskah Nusantara, vol. 3-A: Fakultas Sastra Universitas Indonesia (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia and École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1997), p. 202. 104. i.e. tafsīr. 105. The word asra is not listed in the dictionaries. It may perhaps refer to Sura 103 called al-ʿAṣr, but I fail to see the connection to the Joseph story. My conjecture is that asrar (Arabic asrār) may be meant here, hinting at the classical Quranic commentary by alBaydawi (d. 1286) titled Anwar al-Tanzil wa-Asrar al-Taʾwil (The Rays of the Revelation and the Secrets of the Interpretation). However, although this commentary was known by

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106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126.

467

name in nineteenth-century Java, it was seldom taught; see Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Kitab Kuning: Books in Arabic Script Used in the Pesantren Milieu’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 146, nos 2–3 (1990), p. 253. I interpet linangkara as a variant of lĕngkara, i.e. ‘impossible, improbable’; cf. J. F. C. Gericke and T. Roorda, Javaansch-Nederlandsch Handwoordenboek, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1901), p. 171. i.e. shafāʿa. Read jĕmah. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, pp. 59–60. On the concept of fainting, connected with strong emotions causing the loss of consciousness, see Plomp, Never-Never Land Revisited, who discusses examples from traditional Malay literature. Arabic shirk. Arabic zināʾ. Arabic farj; Malay parji, farji. Canto 13: 32 reads: cinuba den Hyang Widi / aparĕk ing jina. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 60. Canto 13: 33 reads: mih sacumbana / Yusup lawan sang putri. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 60. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 60. Cf. Q. 12: 24: ‘And he would have succumbed to her if he had not seen evidence of his Lord’ (interpretation Abdel Haleem). Arabic ikhtilāf; Malay ikhtilaf. As the text states that theologians differ on what happened, I have opted for a translation along the lines of ‘some say this, others say that’. The word satĕnga (read: satĕngah) can mean ‘a number of’, but it can also be a calque of the Arabic baʿḍ, hence ‘a certain’; cf. note 27 above. It is in the latter sense that, for example, Drewes translates such phrases as angandika satĕngah wong supi and satĕngah wong supi angling as ‘a mystic said’; see G. W. J. Drewes, Directions for Travellers on the Mystic Path: Zakariyyāʾ al-Anṣārī’s ‘Kitāb Fatḥ al-Raḥmān’ and its Indonesian Adaptations (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 58, 66. The bird’s question remains rather elusive as further explanation is lacking here. According to the commentary by al-Tabari (d. 923), a voice warned Yusuf that, if he persisted, he would be like a bird that had lost its feathers and could not fly; see Gayane Karen Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose “Best Story”?’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 4 (1997), p. 492. This must be a variant of tumon (to see, watch, witness). Canto 13: 39 reads: sun puniki / wirang ing Hyang Suksma / lan wirang ing manusya. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 60. Canto 13: 41. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 61. Canto 13: 44 reads: Yusup mulat sang putri / tiningalan ala / tur abacin ambunya. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 61. Canto 13: 45–6 reads: ula gĕng datanpa tanḍing / ujari ula / sakwehi wong jineki // Binjing ing akerat aneng wĕtĕngingwang. Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 6693, p. 61. Manuscript 20.60 M of the Museum Mpu Tantular in Sidoarjo (East Java), ff. 54b–55a. This manuscript is dated 1 Muharram 1314/12 June 1896. This episode is edited (with Indonesian translation) in the 2009 undergraduate thesis by Zuhdiyah Hasun, ‘Kisah Asmara dalam Manuskrip Serat Yusuf tahun 1897 M Koleksi Museum Mpu Tantular Sidoarjo: Studi Karakter Tokoh’, http://digilib.uinsby.ac.id/7835/1/Bab1-5.pdf (accessed 30 October 2016). Latin inscription on a print of the chaste Joseph and Potiphar’s wife made by Sebald Beham in 1544; see Vera Beyer et al., Joseph und Zulaikha: Beziehungsgeschichten zwischen Indien, Persien und Europa (Neu-Isenburg: Edition Minerva, 2014), p. 17.

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127. Arps, Tembang in two Traditions, p. 365. 128. Ibid., p. 383 (italics added). However, this does not imply that the meaning of the text is unimportant to both performers and listeners, but merely that other concerns seem to be given greater weight; cf. van den Boogert, ‘Rethinking Javanese Islam’, p. 209. 129. Ibid., p. 235. 130. Ibid., p. 236.

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Wieringa, Edwin P., and Th. Hanstein, SchriftSprache: Aksara dan Bahasa, Ausstellungskatalog (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Jakarta: Museum Nasional Indonesia, 2015). van Wijk, D. Gerth, ‘De Koranische verhalen in het Maleis’, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 35 (1893). Wilkinson, R. J., A Malay-English Dictionary (Romanised) (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1959). Wolters, O. W., History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999). Zoetmulder, P. J., Old Javanese-English Dictionary (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1982). Zoetmulder, P. J., Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995).

23 PERSIAN KINGS, ARAB CONQUERORS AND MALAY ISLAM: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE PLACE OF MUSLIM EPICS IN THE ISLAMISATION OF THE CHAMS Philipp Bruckmayr

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n 1906 the French ethnographer E. M. Durand noted that the most important work of cosmogony among the Cham people of coastal South Vietnam was the so-called Book of Nosirwan.1 Indeed, local tradition holds that the Cham royal line once began with Po Nosirwan, son of the creator of the universe, Po Aulah (Allah). Correctly identifying Nosirwan with the Sasanian king Khusrau (Pers. Anushirvan), Durand was understandably puzzled by the fact that the last great Sasanian king before the Muslim conquest of Persia2 should end up as mythical progenitor of a partly Brahmanist (Cham Jat) and partly Muslim (Cham Bani) Indochinese people. Yet, by noting that the Persian ruler was also an important figure in classical Malay literature, the French scholar was definitely pointing in the right direction. Indeed, the major Iranian contribution to Muslim culture from the tenth century onwards provided inter alia for the transformation of Anushirvan, a counterpart to the Prophet in Arab lore, into an – admittedly ambivalent – Muslim and Persian cultural hero of romantic tales and epics. As such, his figure and the literary texts transmitting these images also influenced Malay and other Southeast Asian literatures, and thereby evidently left their mark on local Islam and even the religious and social systems of non-Muslim groups such as the Cham Jat. Taking this startling case as a point of departure, the present contribution will highlight the many different roles which Muslim epics and tales have played in the process of Islamisation in Southeast Asia. In doing so, different functions or types of Muslim epics associated with the process of Islamisation will be identified by focusing on the cases of the Chams of Indochina and, to a lesser degree, the Sasaks of Lombok. Two of these will already be fairly familiar to those knowledgeable in the spheres of Muslim heroic tales, and in the Malay hikayat literature and its derivatives and cognates in other Southeast Asian languages in particular. Thus it has on the one hand frequently been noted that hikayat have served to spread knowledge about Islam and its values, and by implication Islam itself. On the other hand, the processes and mechanisms through which Janus-faced epics already prevailing locally before the advent of

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Islamisation were modified in order to make them equally acceptable to local as well as Islamic sensibilities, or rather to changed local sensibilities now including Islamic elements, have already been subject to scholarly scrutiny.3 These two types might be referred to as ‘epics of Islamisation’ and ‘Islamised epics’ respectively, and will be discussed, with a strong focus on the former type, in the first section of this chapter. Much less attention has, however, been given so far to two other types of Muslim tale directly related, and indeed relating, to processes of Islamisation. Scholars have naturally long taken a keen interest in conversion narratives contained in hikayat literature and the chronicles of Southeast Asian sultanates such as the famous Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) and the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (The Story of the Kings of Pasai).4 As these, however, stem from an environment in which Islamisation has undoubtedly been the decisive process, with Islam emerging victorious from a prolonged period of religious contestation, these Islamisation legends hardly represent a problematisation of the process, but rather ‘the canonized expression of the Malay view of . . . Islamisation’.5 In contrast, the second part of this chapter will revolve around epics from a cultural and linguistic environment, in which Islamisation has remained but one alternative in a religious and cultural spectrum never completely dominated by Islamic discourses and Muslim cultural influences. Here then, in these ‘epics about Islamisation’, the latter is remembered as an inherently contentious process rather than as a simple success story. Finally, the third section of this study will lead us directly into the sphere of divergent usages of the term ‘Islamisation’ in scholarly circles. Scholars of Islam in Southeast Asia (and elsewhere outside of the perceived ‘Islamic heartlands’) have routinely treated Islamisation more or less as the historical process giving rise to the emergence of Muslim Southeast Asia, in the sense of either conversion6 or the initial official affirmation of religious belonging to Islam,7 or – in a more nuanced view – as ‘the process by which the religious tradition of Islam becomes a major factor within a culture or ethnic group or region’.8 Particularly recent dynamics of religious change, however, have accounted for the fact that it increasingly surfaces in the second sense of Muslim populations becoming more Islamic or displaying a religiosity ostensibly more clearly recognisable as Islamic. Frede has recently aptly described these phenomena as ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative Islamisation’ respectively.9 It is especially in the qualitative sense that Islamisation is perceived as an ongoing process in the region.10 Strikingly, as will be shown below, this perceived ‘deepening Islamisation’, and the intra-community strife that it has spawned from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, has arguably also contributed considerably to the gradual overall marginalisation of all the aforementioned major types of Islamisation-related texts in certain, if not all, cultures and literatures of Muslim Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the final section of the present contribution will focus on the changing fate of Muslim epics in the face of ongoing qualitative Islamisation. In addition, it will introduce a fourth type of Muslim tale, one which relates specifically to the contested nature of this qualitative Islamisation and its manifestations. As these intra-Islamic dynamics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely connected to the Southeast Asia-wide spread of an Islamic religious and scholarly culture, predicated primarily on usage of the Malay language and its adaptation of the Arabic script (that is, Jawi script), the process in question will be described

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as ‘Jawisation’. More precisely, Jawisation refers to the evolution of large parts of Cham Islam in Cambodia and Vietnam towards specific regional hegemonic discourses of Islamic orthodoxy, a process closely linked to the expansion of a particular form of Islamic education resting on the Malay language, the Jawi script and a new availability of printed materials. In this regard, the gradual eclipsing of Muslim literature in Brahmic Cham script (Akhar Thrah) by a local adaptation of the Arabic script (Cham Jawi) on the one hand and the increasing local prominence of Malay as a literary and scholarly language on the other represent a hallmark of the process of Jawisation and a major turning point in the religious and intellectual history of the Chams.11 Similar dynamics can be identified in the development of Javanese and Sasak Islam during the same period, as strongly localised Islamic traditions and Muslim literatures based on Brahmic Javanese and Sasak scripts became marginalised with the expansion of a qualitative Islamisation predicated on, and privileging, the use of Jawi Malay and Pegon (the Javanese-language version of Jawi), and then Indonesian (a variant of Malay) in religious instruction and literary production.12 Accordingly, the last type of the Muslim epics highlighted in this contribution can be termed ‘epics about Jawisation’ rather than, say, ‘epics about deepening Islamisation’.

Epics of Islamisation: Anushirvan in Cham Kingship and Cosmogony As was noted above, Anushirvan, in his Cham form of Po Nosirwan, fulfils two functions in classical Cham literature and chronicles. On the one hand, he is the eponym of an important work of cosmogony revered by both Brahmanist and Muslim Chams in the lands of the former Cham kingdom of Panduranga in the present-day Binh Thuan and Ninh Thuan provinces of Vietnam.13 In Durand’s words, this book was in his day ‘the foremost treatise of Cham cosmogony, the holy book par excellence of the Brahmanist Chams, placed under the patronage of the Persian king . . . Anushirvan’.14 Despite this particular veneration among the Brahmanist Chams, who represent a twothirds majority among the Chams living in former Panduranga, the work is beset with figures from Islamic mythology and history, Quranic prophets and angels, and with main concepts drawn from Sufi thought also to be found in other Southeast Asian Muslim literatures.15 The latter sphere inter alia includes the notions of tarikat (Ar. ṭarīqa, ‘path’), hakikat (Ar. ḥaqīqa, ‘reality’), ariphuat (Ar. maʿrifa, ‘knowledge’) and sariat (Ar. sharīʿa, ‘law’) associated in the treatise with blood, placenta, lungs and breast respectively.16 Strongly suggestive of the bi-religious nature of Cham culture in Panduranga, which despite clearly defined religious boundaries rests firmly on symbolic dualism and a nuanced formalised system of interreligiosity in the ritual and doctrinal spheres,17 the treatise also contains expositions on the twelve priests necessary for Cham Brahmanist cremations, each of whom is described as representing a specific part of the Prophet Muhammad’s body.18 Yet the figure of Anushirvan not only surfaces in Cham tradition as patron and eponym of the discussed specimen of cosmogony, but likewise holds a paramount place in Cham royal genealogies. Thus as the son of Allah, the creator of the universe, who has been incorporated into the Cham Brahmanist pantheon as Po Aulah, Po

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Nosirwan is identified as the starting point of the Cham royal line in royal chronicles and historical legends.19 It is apparently precisely this genealogical role which accounts for his function as eponym of the aforementioned cosmological text, as well as for his invocation as patron in its initial lines, as he is otherwise devoid of any cosmological function to speak of in the treatise. As far as the reasons for Po Nosirwan’s presence in Cham cosmogony and royal genealogies is concerned, it must be assumed that he had entered the world of the Chams through the vehicle of Malay (or, less likely, Javanese) literature, sometime before the end of the seventeenth century when the Vietnamese takeover of their land and the accompanying confinement of its inhabitants to inland regions largely cut them off from contact with the Malay and Muslim worlds.20 Most probably, he made his entry into the cultural and religious world of the Chams through the vehicle of the Hikayat Amir Hamzah, just as he did among the Malays, Javanese, Sasaks and others. In this major Muslim romance, produced in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and, apart from the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah, one of the most widely distributed texts in classical Malay with adaptations in numerous other languages, Nusyirwan (Anushirvan) plays a prominent, albeit ambivalent, role as master and father-in-law of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza b. ʿAbd al-Muttalib, the hero of the story.21 He also appears, as ‘Raja Nusyirwan Adil, Raja of East and West’, in the Sejarah Melayu (c. 1612) and thus in the genealogy of the sultans of Melaka and Johor. Compared with the Cham genealogies, his role there is, however, comparably modest. Not marked out as son of the creator of the universe, his relevance for the story stems from the fact that he weds one of his daughters to a descendant of Raja Kida Hindi, who had in turn once given his daughter in marriage to Raja Iskandar (Alexander the Great), the proclaimed progenitor of the Melaka royal line, after having been converted to Islam by him.22 A mirror for princes titled Taj al-Salatin, completed in Aceh in 1603 by the obviously Persian-speaking, or at least thoroughly Persian-educated, Bukhari al-Jawhari, contains several exemplary tales about the ‘unbelieving but just king’ (raja yang kafir dan adil) Nusyirwan.23 In very much the same fashion, he is likewise alluded to in the similar but arguably more influential Bustan al-Salatin of the Aceh-based Gujarati-Hadrami scholar Nur al-Din al-Raniri (d. 1658).24 Of these possibilities, the hikayat genre appears to be the most likely source, because in Cham lore we find among Po Nosirwan’s companions the figure of Baginda (Prince) Ali (ʿAli b. Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet and the first Shiʿi Imam), sometimes appearing as his son Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah (Muhammad b. ʿAli al-Hanafiyya, d. 700), and each of whom is, according to different accounts, credited for the conversion of the Chams to Islam.25 Ali also features prominently towards the end of the Hikayat Amir Hamzah, and Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah, besides being the main character of another widely distributed Malay hikayat,26 appears, for example, in Javanese versions of the story of Amir Hamzah (the Serat Menak cycle),27 which serve as basis for the once highly popular wayang kulit (shadow theatre) among the Muslim Sasaks of Lombok (wayang sasak).28 Strikingly, among the Wetu Telu (Three Times) group, which today represents a tiny minority among the 2.6 million Sasak Muslims and still carries on a pre-Jawisation literary tradition in Kawi (Middle Javanese) and Sasak languages and scripts,29

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texts about Amir Hamzah are likewise characteristically of significance in the spheres of ritual and cosmogony. Thus, whereas the vast majority of Sasak Muslims celebrate the mawlid in remembrance of the Prophet, the Wetu Telu celebrations on the occasion are primarily focused on Adam and Eve and, therefore, the creation of the human race.30 Strikingly, ritual readings of texts during Wetu Telu mawlids are not focused on panegyrics on the Prophet, but rather on stories about Amir Hamzah, who is known as Jayaprana among the Sasaks.31 Additionally, as delineated in the Sasak Javanese-language didactic poem Sidekah,32 commemorative feasts among the Sasaks were customarily held not only in honour of ʿAli’s son Husayn (d. 680), but also in remembrance of Wusma (the third caliph ʿUthman b. ʿAffan, d. 656) and Amir Hamzah.33 As far as the Cham Book of Nosirwan is concerned, similar cases of cross-fertilisation of local cosmogonies and stories on the one hand and of Muslim cosmographies, myths and theological terminology on the other have also been noted in the likewise strongly localised Islamic tradition of Central Java. It was noted of this region that ‘Javanese cosmogony and the Muslim cosmography were never completely fused [but rather] preserved side by side’,34 something which is of course even more marked in the case at hand where Muslim nomenclature and discourses were appropriated not only by local Muslims but likewise by an explicitly non-Muslim religious tradition. Another clear example of hikayat influence on cosmogony comes from Lombok. Thus, the tract Mula Ning Manusa (The Origin of Man), a Javanese text of Sasak provenance, makes mention inter alia of Umar Maya (ʿAmr b. ʿUmayya), Amir Hamzah’s inseparable companion, the trickster (ʿayyār).35 It must also be noted in this regard that many of these local hybrid Muslim cosmogonies appropriated mystical teachings on the light of Muhammad and the related Ibn Arabi-influenced emanationist teachings of the seven levels of being (Malay: martabat tujuh). An exemplary specimen of the incorporation of mystical ontology into hikayat literature is the Malay Hikayat Nur Muhammad, which explains the origins of the world in terms of the light of Muhammad, divinely created in the form of a bird. The body parts of the bird are hereby associated with individual figures from early Islamic history with a clear ʿAlidophile slant. Besides ʿAli, his sons, Hasan and Husayn, and his wife, Fatima, we also find (Amir) Hamzah represented as the bird’s breast in the story.36 Apart from the fact that versions of the Hikayat Nur Muhammad also exist in several other Southeast Asian languages, its main motifs were likewise included into other works of the genre. In the Book of Nosirwan, it may be noted, the left and the right nostrils of the human body are said to be the abodes of Hasan and Husayn respectively.37 It has already been noted that hikayat are held to have served as veritable tools of Islamisation in Southeast Asia helping to ‘solve harmoniously the problem of the relation between the Islamic and the pre-Islamic tradition’,38 thereby turning them into ‘epics of Islamisation’. This thesis seems to be strongly supported by the roles of Po Nosirwan, Ali and Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah in Cham cosmogony and genealogical lore, as well as by Amir Hamzah/Jayaprana’s place in the Sasak Wetu Telu tradition in the eastern half of Muslim Southeast Asia. The case of Vietnam’s Brahmanist Chams clearly testifies to the fact that the hikayat could even be successful in channelling Islamic influence into cultural and religious environments that would eventually resist the adoption of the new religion. It will be recalled in this regard that Durand had referred to the Book of Nosirwan as ‘holy’. Three decades later, a French observer of

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Sasak Islam remarked concerning the Serat Menak stories in Lombok that, ‘albeit not being sacred scriptures, these texts are highly revered’.39 Intriguingly, whereas the Malay Hikayat Amir Hamzah relates how Nusyirwan – after having been tricked by Amir Hamzah’s companion Umar Umayyah into eating a stew made out of his vizier Bakhtik – abdicates in favour of his son, Raja Harman Syah (who subsequently converts to Islam, only to turn against his new religion and Amir Hamzah again towards the end of the story40), certain Javanese recensions found in Lombok have Nusyirwan himself converting before his death.41 For the Chams of former Panduranga, however, it was perhaps exactly the liminal character of Po Nosirwan, as patron of a great Muslim hero and converter of many kings who himself remains personally uncommitted to the new religion, which made him a well-suited figure as progenitor of the royal line of a people only partly converted to Islam but nonetheless strongly influenced by it. Just as the story of Iskandar/ Alexander the Great, the progenitor of the Sultans of Melaka and other Malay ruling houses claiming descent from them, has probably nowhere else in the Muslim world been deployed to the same extent in order to establish and convey decidedly Islamic dynastic claims,42 Po Nosirwan’s liminality must have represented an appealing feature in a culture developing bi-religious characteristics, not least due to the local dissemination of Muslim epics and tales. For reasons of comparison, it must additionally be noted that Iskandar, similar to the Cham Po Nosirwan, plays both a cosmogonic as well as a concrete genealogic role in the Tambo Minangkabau (Minangkabau Traditions), whose political mythology spread well beyond the confines of its native Sumatra.43 As one of the children of Adam and Eve, he is chosen by Allah to be lifted up into the skies. Upon his return, Adam’s other children swear him allegiance, whereas one of his sons eventually establishes the Minangkabau kingdom to function as ancestor of the ruling dynasties of Minangkabau and its dependencies in the Straits Area.44

Epics about Islamisation: Between Tension and Harmonisation Among the Chams, however, as a people eventually witnessing the emergence of highly localised Brahmanist and Muslim groups, we also encounter a different kind of epic revolving around Islamisation, namely stories relating instances of intra-community strife and tension as a result of the adoption of Islam by segments of the local population (what I term ‘epics about Islamisation’). Two such tales will be presented in what follows. First, there is the story of Nai Mai Mang Makah (The Princess who came from Mecca).45 Tentatively dated to the late seventeenth to late eighteenth century, it is centred around a princess from Mecca – a mythological site located somewhere in the Malay world (nagar jawa) in the historical imagination of the Pandurangan Chams46 – who comes to Champa to spread Islam, and a Cham prince, who finds himself torn between his love for the princess and that of his country and its traditions. After toying with the idea of embracing Islam, he eventually feels compelled to return to his former ways, saying ‘after entering the mosque, I went back to the temple of divinities’.47 Dismayed, the princess, who had earlier charged her lover with always thinking about his country while forgetting about the Prophet and the holy scripture, thus returns to

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Mecca.48 Whereas the intra-community tension precipitated by the spread of Islam among the Chams is in the tale primarily enacted through the unhappy story of the two lovers, it also contains explicit references to the resulting separation of the community. Accordingly, it is noted that ‘the country of Panduranga is in discord, as its [Brahmanist] Chams and [Muslim Cham] Bani have been separated for years . . . and its small number of people divided and dispersed in every sense’.49 These divisions are moreover identified as the reason for all of the kingdom’s misfortunes.50 The second story, which is preserved in texts on the so-called ‘royal ritual’ (mbuan rija), is of a much more positive nature, albeit consisting of a quite similar setting. Relating the feats of two proselytising princes from Kelantan (Kalatan), who convince the Cham king to adopt measures to defuse the tension between Brahmanist and Muslim Chams, this tale not only reflects the successful harmonisation of Panduranga’s two religious strands through the establishment of a system of interreligiosity, but also appears to echo the Malay Nusyirwan’s legendary role as the unbelieving but just king encountered above. According to this text, many of the main features of the evolved system of equality and interaction binding Panduranga’s two religious communities together were instituted top-down by a Cham king identified with Po Rome (r. 1627–51) after a period of communal strife. These measures included the mutual partaking of priests from both communities in each other’s major festivities (such as the Brahmanist festivity of Po Nagar and the Bani celebrations on 27 Ramadan51), equality in status (including the accordance of the royal and priestly title po [sire] also to Bani religious functionaries52), as well as, most strikingly, the incorporation of Po Aulah into the Cham Brahmanist pantheon of deities (po yang).53 All this had allegedly been put forward by the visiting Muslim princes.54 Whereas the historicity of this account is naturally in doubt, the text represents a remarkable rationalisation for the bi-religious character of Cham culture in former Panduranga, where the quasi-symbiotic coexistence of two separate religious communities, with their clearly defined boundaries and taboos, facilitates their partaking in a shared ritual world and view of history. We may thus, following Talal Asad, speak of a common temporality within ‘heterogeneous time’, as ‘embodied practices rooted in multiple traditions, . . . differences between horizons of expectation and spaces of experience – differences which continuously dislocate the present from the past, the world experienced from the world anticipated, and call for their revision and reconnection’,55 among local Bani and Brahmanist Chams. The latter aspect is best illustrated by the Sakawi calendar, likewise attributed to Po Rome, which represents a dual calendrical system combining a lunisolar calendar originating in earlier Cham usage from the Saka era with a lunar one based on Islamic, particularly octaval, calendars.56 This shared culture and temporality was in the long run not only sustained by practice and a grounded ritual geography of ancestor (muk kei) veneration, but likewise by the existence of shared cultural icons. Due to their completely unequal distribution between the Cham refuges of Phan Rang (in Ninh Thuan) and Phan Ri (in Binh Thuan), architectural vestiges of the past (that is, major temples), albeit featuring prominently in the travel narrative of the two lovers in the Nai Mai Mang Makah, do not appear to have played this role. Rather, the unifying cultural icon was the Cham script (Akhar Thrah),57 in which of course the two stories concerned were also written.

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The specific localised trajectory of Islamisation in Panduranga is also mirrored in another Akhar Thrah text, namely the Akayet Inra Patra,58 the Cham adaptation of the Hikayat Indraputra.59 Itself based on an Indian original, this well-known Malay epic represents an amalgam of Indic and Muslim motifs,60 including ones drawn from the Ramayana. Presumably introduced into Champa in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, the surviving Cham version exhibits much less in the way of Islamic influences than its Malay counterpart. There is no mention of the beautiful divine names (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā) and the reports contained in the Malay version about the Islamic religious studies pursued by the story’s hero are absent here. Moreover, it even contains references to the po yang, the lesser deities of Cham Brahmanism and Bani Islam, but none to Allah.61 Such emphasis on a unifying doctrinal concept was of course well suited to the bi-religious Cham culture of Panduranga. Islamisation could, however, also have other effects on local literary texts. Thus another well-known Cham story titled Akayet Um Mrup, one without any known probable Malay source, has come down to us in distinct Jat and Bani Akhar Thrah versions, which are clearly distinguishable on the basis of their diverging emphases on either Islamic or Brahmanist Cham motifs.62 Evidently, Cham society was historically able to devise different strategies to rationalise and eventually neutralise the contentious nature of Islamisation in (former) Panduranga between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. These strategies are likewise mirrored, and accounted for, in the Akhar Thrah texts presented in this and the preceding section. The process of qualitative Islamisation, which gained momentum from the nineteenth century onwards, would, however, represent a major challenge to these arrangements and effectively largely disconnect the majority of Chams from these religious and textual traditions. Indeed Jawisation – the gravitation of large parts of Southeast Asian Islam towards specific regional hegemonic discourses of Islamic orthodoxy closely linked to the expansion of a particular form of Islamic education resting on the Malay language, the Jawi script, including its local derivatives for various languages, and a new availability of printed materials – would lead to intra-Muslim strife and often also factionalism in various parts of the region, including Java, Lombok and Cambodia, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jawisation and Islamisation: Vernacular Islamic Traditions Contested Whereas the ‘epics of Islamisation’ may indeed have greatly contributed to the spread of Islam in the region in former centuries, the qualitative Islamisation since the nineteenth century has clearly resulted in the overall purging of this kind of epic, and the local cosmogonies and mythical genealogies they inspired, from most local Muslim cultures (somewhat less so in Malaysia, where certain hikayat were heralded as part of the national literary heritage in the course of nationalist projects). Even in Malaysia, however, they became increasingly deprived of the religious significance attached to them and came to be regarded as cultural treasures whose Islamicity was frequently seen as out of step with contemporary religious sensibilities.63 Strikingly, this development seems to have depended less on an ‘Arabisation’ of Southeast Asian Islam, something often taken as a corollary of qualitative Islamisation, but

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rather on the region-wide ascendancy of the Islamic supra-language of Malay and its adaptation of the Arabic script (Jawi), which – along with the resulting Jawisation of numerous literatures hitherto employing primarily, or even exclusively, Brahmic scripts – has both precipitated and symbolised the demise of various vernacular Islamic traditions. The case of Cham literature and the vernacular Islamic tradition is highly instructive in this regard. Thus the Akhar Thrah script was – in the course of the Jawisation process characterised above – eventually discarded for the Jawi script by almost all Chams living outside of former Panduranga (in Cambodia and the Vietnamese Mekong Delta), who nowadays greatly outnumber their counterparts in Binh Thuan and Ninh Thuan.64 Jawisation has thus effectively disconnected the majority of Chams from the whole body of Cham literature we have discussed, as well as from the shared Brahmanist and Bani Cham culture and temporality that it directly relates to. Through this disjuncture, the loss/change of script also had significant consequences as far as local Islamic traditions were concerned. Moreover, as in Lombok, the whole process additionally resulted in pronounced intra-Muslim factionalism and the consequent emergence of more or less stable factional identities. Among the Cham Muslims of Cambodia, these dynamics are sharply brought into focus. In the course of the twentieth century, the community has split into a Jawisation-influenced Muslim mainstream and a ten per cent minority (known as the Kan Imam San or the ‘Community of Imam San’) of self-proclaimed guardians of distinctively Cambodian Cham Islamic tradition. By the early twentieth century, the former had come to effectively privilege Jawi Malay as the language of religious instruction and scholarship, as well as for formal and informal written correspondence between scholars.65 In certain cases, Malay even acquired a ritual role, such as in the emblematic controversy revolving around the correct ritualised expressions to be used during marriage ceremonies, which lasted at least from the 1900s until the 1930s.66 Moreover, the eventually dominant proponents of Jawisation within Cham Islam in Cambodia and adjacent regions of Vietnam adopted their own version of the Jawi script to write the Cham language (Cham Jawi), although this was clearly relegated to a secondary position vis-à-vis Malay as the scholarly and literary language.67 Opposition to these developments went hand in hand with far-reaching changes in religious practice, moving away from Pandurangan Cham Islamic traditions towards those of the Southeast Asian Jawi ecumene and specifically those of the Malay circuit of southern Thailand (Patani) and north-eastern Malaysia (Kelantan), and was eventually channelled into the formation of the Kan Imam San. The paramount role played by script and language choice is most evident in the fact that the latter’s claim to represent distinctive Cham Islamic tradition puts major stress on the preservation of the Akhar Thrah manuscript culture. It is exclusively the Kan Imam San which has preserved highly valued collections of Akhar Thrah manuscripts, including the Book of Nosirwan and the chronicles presenting Po Nosirwan as the starting point of the Cham royal line.68 In contrast, such texts are nowadays entirely unknown among the Muslim mainstream. A brief Jawi history of Champa, most probably produced in southern Thailand (where many Cham scholars studied under Malay teachers) and which was circulating in Cambodia in the 1960s, exhibited a completely different focus. Describing the Chams as a Malay people and

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ending its narrative with the fall of Vijaya to the Vietnamese in 1471,69 and thus before the establishment of the Pandurangan kingship of the chronicles and of local bi-religious Cham culture, it left neither room for mythological history nor for the Pandurangan line of royal pos. Whereas the last repositories of Cham Akhar Thrah texts in the country are found in Kan Imam San (and recent breakaway) villages in central and north-western Cambodia, it was already proving virtually impossible in the 1960s to find any surviving specimens in the Cham stronghold of Kampong Cham province in the east. The province’s Cham villages on the banks of the Mekong had become main centres of Jawisation by the early twentieth century. Mat Sales Haroun of Phum Trea (d. 1950s), one of the region’s most eminent Islamic scholars in the first half of the century and known as Muhammad Salih Kemboja in Peninsular Malaya, had even published a Malay treatise on establishing the qibla and the prayer times, which was received enthusiastically on both sides of the Gulf of Siam.70 Contrastingly, Jaspan only encountered four Akhar Thrah manuscripts during extensive fieldwork in the area in the 1960s. Three of these, including a Sufi treatise still found among the Kan Imam San, were acquired in Phum Trea and taken back to Europe,71 evidently having lost their religious value in their owners’ eyes. Revealingly, the only text not handed over to Jaspan was owned by a local Cham, who claimed royal po descent for himself and vehemently ‘denied any relationship between Cham[s] and Malay[s]’. Moreover, he held the intriguing name Nursawan (a variant of Nosirwan), a rarity given the prevalence of typical ‘Muslim’ names in his surroundings at that time.72 Along similar lines, Kan Imam San leaders have explicitly charged the Cambodian Muslim mainstream with having abandoned Cham ways and adopted ‘the custom of the Jawi’ instead, particularly singling out the adoption of Jawi script and the consequential loss of Akhar Thrah as the clearest indication of this rejection of Cham tradition.73 In accordance with the emerging factional identities, even the eponymous Imam San (d. after 1877), a nineteenth-century Cambodian Sufi saint, is remembered in completely divergent ways among the two groups: either as an ascetic Malay scholar coming to teach and settle among local Chams74 or as a wonder-working Cham who had migrated from Panduranga to Cambodia together with On G’nur Ban, the ancestor of the present leader of the community, in the early nineteenth century.75 Jawisation among the Chams is, however, not exclusively a story of disjuncture and rupture, as a limited number of texts and documents sheds light on transitional stages of the process and their dynamics. Thus, the tale of Sep Sah Sakai (The Curse of Sah Sakai) represents an intriguing example for the Islamisation of a Cham Akhar Thrah story through its transferral into Cham Jawi script. Indeed this romance about the undisclosed love of a Cham princess for a high-court official has undergone a notable degree of Islamisation of its setting in its Jawi version, which was presumably produced in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century – outside of former Panduranga – in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta region,76 whose Muslim population has always entertained close links to their co-religionists in Cambodia. Strikingly, the main character of the Jawi text is, in contrast to the Cham script versions found in the villages of former Panduranga, no longer a Brahmanist but a Muslim Cham. Moreover, his peregrinations take him not only through the Cham lands of Panduranga and Kauthara, but likewise

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to Kelantan and Terengganu,77 places on the Malay Peninsula which developed into major centres of religious learning during the period, serving as nodes of Jawisation for Indochinese Muslims.78 Of interest is also the fate of another Akhar Thrah text transposed into Cham Jawi, the Muk Sruh Palei (The Lady who Guards the Village). This rhymed treatise of moral guidance to girls and young women, which is still kept in Akhar Thrah versions and highly regarded among the Kan Imam San, was presumably put into Jawi in the Mekong Delta sometime between the 1870s and the 1920s.79 In Cambodia, a Cham Jawi version was produced by the eminent Islamic scholar Abu Talep (d. 1976), whose father Hj. Ayyub had migrated to Chroy Metrey in central Cambodia from the Mekong Delta,80 thus further suggesting that the Chams residing in the latter area were probably those most committed to transferring Akhar Thrah texts into Arabic script. As knowledge of Cham script was by the 1930s already virtually non-existent in the scholarly circles linked to Abu Talep, he most likely produced his rendering of the Muk Sruh Palei either on the basis of an earlier Cham Jawi version brought by his father from the Mekong Delta or an oral one. The text itself provides – in both its Akhar Thrah as well as its Jawi expressions – guidance in morals and conduct to young females, which is in many ways in tune with Islamic sensibilities but exhibits only a minimal amount of direct Islamic references.81 For example, it enjoins the performance of pious deeds (amal) and refers to custom (adat) and law (hukum) as confirming each other.82 Despite Abu Talep’s efforts, however, the Muk Sruh Palei lost its prestigious place, which it held and continues to hold among the Chams of former Panduranga and the Kan Imam San, in the Muslim mainstream. When Jaspan met an aged roving Cham raconteur, who claimed Pandurangan origins and whose repertoire prominently included the Muk Sruh Palei, he made two intriguing observations. First, the text appeared to be largely unknown among the Chams of the Jawi-saturated Muslim villages along the Mekong in Kampong Cham province. Second, its antiquated language proved difficult for them to understand.83 In contrast, Baccot noted around the same time that the Muk Sruh Palei was ‘seemingly the best known [book] among the Chams of Au Russey [that is, the centre of the Kan Imam San]’.84 According to Po Dharma, the text is still known by heart by the Chams of former Panduranga,85 further highlighting the divergent fate of the treatise among Akhar Thrah and Jawi users. As Jaspan’s second observation shows, Jawisation not only gradually divorced most Chams from their old textual traditions through the change of script, which rendered Akhar Thrah materials inaccessible and therefore more or less useless. But the growing reliance on Malay literature and discourses, and the accompanying intense contacts with users of Malay language, likewise had linguistic consequences. Presently, the adherents of the Kan Imam San are regarded as a separate dialect group within Western Cham (that is, the Cham spoken in Cambodia and adjacent areas of Vietnam outside of former Panduranga), naturally not least due to its lesser usage of Malay loanwords.86 It is thus not only the adoption of a new script and new Islamic emphases which have disconnected the majority of Chams from the world of Po Nosirwan, but also the resultant divergence of spoken Cham. Languages such as Cham and Sasak did not generally pass what Proudfoot has termed the ‘print threshold’, with the immense increase in available written materials87

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which acted as a chief motor for Jawisation and thus qualitative Islamisation.88 Therefore, their vernacular Islamic literary traditions based on Brahmic scripts could not compete on a technological level with less localised Islamic discourses carried inter alia by Jawi Malay or Pegon Javanese printed books in the long run. Intriguingly, the tensions and divergent ways of religious identity construction precipitated by the process of Jawisation have found expression in a limited number of texts and oral traditions, which could accordingly be described as ‘tales or epics about Jawisation’. In Cambodia, a variant of the story of Imam San has the (Cham) saint originally staying in Chumnik, one of the main centres of Jawi scholarship in Kampong Cham province. It was only after his former disciple, Hj. Solem, had returned from Mecca – a place often associated in Cham tradition with the Malay world rather than Arabia – with diverging views on proper Islamic practice that he felt compelled to settle down in central Cambodia.89 There he would eventually function as emblem of the proclaimed purely Cham (cam sot) Islam of the Kan Imam San. More instructive, however, are a number of Sasak texts about the brothers Nurcahaya and Nursada. In these, the division of Sasak Muslims into followers of the strongly localised Wetu Telu and the dominant Waktu Lima (Five Times), the local products of Jawisation, is clearly rationalised in hikayat form. According to the Babad Sasak (Sasak Chronicle), Pangeran Sungapati, the legendary proselytiser among the Sasaks who – just like Imam San in Cambodia – was only able to attract the majority of local people to his teachings after having magically alleviated local suffering caused by a famine, left his sons Nurcahaya and Nursada behind in Lombok after his mission. Whereas the former adopted the Islam of the Waktu Lima, associated in the story with the Malays, the latter adhered to the Wetu Telu brand, which – according to the Babad – came to prosper locally for having been more suitable to Sasak ways. In another version of the tale (titled Nursada), Nurcahaya casts a couple of inscribed copper plates into the sea before finally also embracing Wetu Telu Islam due to his constant unhappiness. As the copper plates were eventually picked up and brought back to a village by a local Malay, it transpired that the Malays would all become followers of the Waktu Lima.90 The authors of these tales, which most probably date to the nineteenth century, would hardly have anticipated that their texts and the script they employed were to form only part of a quickly receding Javanese and Sasak manuscript culture, and that the Islamic orientation associated by them with foreigners (that is, Malays) would rapidly become the predominant tendency among the Sasaks. Indeed, the Waktu Lima, who had first adopted Islamic texts in Jawi Malay and Pegon Javanese and then increasingly in modern Indonesian, have at times sought to physically destroy old local Sasak and Javanese manuscripts.91 As a result, rumour has it ‘that in certain circles having these texts is considered evidence of being non-Islamic and therefore people are disposing of them’.92 In Cambodia, the Kan Imam San and their manuscript tradition are, contrastingly, since the late 1990s, protected by state recognition.

Conclusion From the preceding discussion, it can be concluded that the role of Muslim epics as instrumental transmitters of Islamic ethics and Muslim views of history and cosmogony, as postulated by a number of scholars, can hardly be doubted. Indeed,

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as was shown, the stories in question even managed to influence the religious and cultural traditions of groups which did not in the end embrace Islam. At the same time, as tools of Islamisation and objects of indigenisation, the hikayat and related genres were not only subject to gradual changes and transmutations of content and nomenclature in accordance with wider social and religious developments on regional and local levels, but eventually also had to bear the brunt of the deepening Islamisation they had helped set in motion. In particular, the kind of perceived qualitative Islamisation associated with the specific trans-Southeast Asian Malay Islamic discourses and modes of religiosity, described as ‘Jawisation’ in this contribution, was to have severely detrimental effects on the fate of the hikayat and the works derived from them as texts of religious and ethical value, as they plainly came to fall out of step with new hegemonic Islamic sensibilities. Concerning Lombok, it has, for instance, been noted that texts traditionally fulfilling ritual functions such as Menak and Yusup (that is, the stories of Amir Hamzah and the prophet Yusuf), have – where they survive – ‘now become completely divorced from the ritual contexts in which they used to be sung’.93 Similarly, Malay epics were certainly not selected for reading in public schools for their somewhat ambivalent religious content and expositions of Islamic values. Sticking with the initial case of the Cham Book of Nosirwan and the genealogical myths placing Po Nosirwan at the beginning of the Cham royal line and presenting Ali or Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah as the Islamisers of the Cham, it is evident that such written traditions are today only still accessible to the minority of Chams still inhabiting the territories of former Panduranga and the small Kan Imam San group of Cambodian Muslims, the local opponents of Jawisation, who are relying exclusively on Cham language and script. Wetu Telu Islam and its manuscript culture – and arguably also the strongly localised Islamic traditions of Java and their literatures – appear to have fared even worse. In the case of orally transmitted material, preservation has, however, perhaps been slightly more successful. Thus, echoes of Cham traditions centred on the hikayat-mediated images of Ali and Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah are still preserved in certain areas in Cambodia and are currently redeployed with intriguing consequences. Thus, unprecedented recent Cham conversions to Shiism in rural Cambodia are tellingly based on claims to sayyid status and an alleged primordial Shiite identity, whereas Cham Shiʿi proselytisation among the Cambodian highland population is resting on a reclaiming of a shared Cham–Highlander past in the lost Cham kingdom, once ruled by the descendants of Nosirwan.94 As Braginsky has noted concerning the importance of studying the images of events (and characters) in literary sources: ‘The “image of the event” becomes entrenched in the memory of the audience and thus determines a social reaction to it. For this reason, the image in question, despite its fictitious nature cannot but present interest to the historian too.’95 While the Southeast Asian images of Anushirvan, Amir Hamzah and Ali may have generally suffered in the last two centuries in comparison with their much larger-than-life status in earlier times, their figures and epic memories still represent cultural threads that may or may not be picked and remodulated once again.

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Notes 1. E. M. Durand, ‘Notes sur les Chams’, Bulletin de l’École Française de l’Extrême-Orient 7 (1907), p. 321. 2. Actually, the Anushirvan of Arabic, Persian and other Muslim literatures seems to represents a conflation of the two Sasanian kings Khusrau Anushirvan (r. 531–79) and Khusrau Aparviz (r. 591–628), whereby the name of the former came to be associated with the historical memory of the latter. Frances W. Pritchett (ed. and trans.), The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 39. Variants of the Cham rendering of Anushirvan include Nursawan, Norsarawan and Nosirivan. Cf. Étienne Aymonier and Antoine Cabaton, Dictionnaire čamfrançais (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906), p. 247. 3. John Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and the Visual Arts (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 14–19; Howard M. Federspiel, Sultans, Shamans & Saints: Islam and Muslims in Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2007), pp. 78–83. 4. Cf., for example, G. E. Marrison, ‘The Coming of Islam to the East Indies’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 24, no. 1 (1951), pp. 28–37. 5. Vladimir Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV, 2004), p. 34. 6. Cf. Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 1–23; S. Q. Fatimi, Islam Comes to Malaysia (Singapore: MSRI, 1963); John R. Bowen, Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 124–7. 7. In a recent study, Boivin describes how the satpanth of Sindh, a group he considers to have hitherto been neither Muslim nor Hindu, became clearly Islamic (that is, Ismaʿili Shiʿi) after having been led through a process of Islamisation by the Agha Khans. Michel Boivin, L’âghâ khan et les khojah: Islam chiite et dynamiques sociales dans le sous-continent indien (1843-1954) (Paris: Karthala, 2013), pp. 145–84. 8. Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image, p. 14. 9. Britta Frede, Die Erneuerung der Tiğānīya in Mauretanien: Popularisierung religiöser Ideen in der Kolonialzeit (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014), p. 260. 10. Syed Naguib al-Attas, Preliminary Statement on a General Theory of the Islamization of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1969); M. C. Ricklefs, Islamisation and its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). 11. Cf. Philipp Bruckmayr, ‘The Contentious Pull of the Malay Logosphere: Jawization and Factionalism among Cambodian Muslims (Late 19th to Early 21st Centuries)’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Vienna, 2014, pp. 23–42; Philipp Bruckmayr, Cambodia’s Muslim Communities and the Malay World: Malay Language, Jawi Script, and Islamic Factionalism from the 19th Century to the Present (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 12. The Sasak case will be discussed in more detail below. For Java, see the excellent studies of M. C. Ricklefs, Islamisation and its Opponents; Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930) (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007). 13. Po Dharma, Le Pānduranga (Campā) 1802–1835: Ses rapports avec le Vietnam, 2 vols (Paris: PEFEO, 1987). 14. Durand, ‘Notes sur les Chams’ (1907), p. 321. 15. Ibid., pp. 325–8 (transcription), pp. 328–39 (translation, including a digression on Cham calendars).

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16. Ibid., pp. 325, 330. Durand’s transcription has been modified to concur with the one employed for a number of recently published Cham manuscripts (some of which will be cited below) and Moussay’s Cham grammar. Gérard Moussay, Grammaire de la langue cam (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2006), pp. 1–20. 17. Philipp Bruckmayr, ‘Between Institutionalized Syncretism and Official Particularism: Religion among the Chams of Vietnam and Cambodia’, in Andreas H. Pries, Laetitia Martzolff, Robert Langer and Claus Ambos (eds), Rituale als Ausdruck von Kulturkontakt: ‘Synkretismus’ zwischen Negation und Neudefinition (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), pp. 39–40; Yashimoto Yasuko, ‘A Study of the Almanac of the Cham in South-Central Vietnam’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), pp. 325–6. 18. Durand, ‘Notes sur les Chams’ (1907), pp. 327, 331–2. 19. Étienne Aymonier, ‘Légendes historiques des chames’, Excursions et Reconnaissances 14 (1890), pp. 183–4; Adolf Bastian, A Journey in Cambodia and Cochin-China (1864) (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2005), p. 145; E. M. Durand, ‘Notes sur les Chams’, Bulletin de l’École Française de l’Extrême-Orient 5 (1905) pp. 369–70. 20. Adrien Launey, Histoire de la mission de Cochinchine 1658-1823, vol. 1: 1658-1728 (Paris: Société des Missions-Étrangères, 1923), p. 244; Po Dharma, ‘Etat des dernières recherches sur la date de l’absorption du Campa par le Vietnam’, in Actes du Séminaire sur le Campa organisé à l’Université de Copenhague, le 23 mai 1987 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1988), pp. 59–70; Po Dharma, ‘Le déclin du Campā entre le XVIe et le XVIIIe siècle’, in Le Campā et le monde malais: actes de la Conférence internationale sur le Campā et le monde malais organisée à l’Université de Californie, Berkeley 30-31 août 1990 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1991), pp. 47–64. 21. A. Samad Ahmad (ed), Hikayat Amir Hamzah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Kementerian Pelajaran Malaysia, 1987). Cf. P. S. van Ronkel, De roman van Amir Hamzah (Leiden: Brill, 1895); Braginsky, Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature, pp. 178–80. 22. C. C. Brown, ‘Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, a Translation of Raffles Ms. 18’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, nos 2–3 (1953 for 1952), p. 16. 23. P. P. Rooda van Eysinga (ed. and trans.), Tadj oes-salatin: De kroon aller koningen (Batavia [Jakarta]: Lands Drukkerij, 1827), pp. 95–9, 121–4, 204. 24. Nur al-Din Muhammad b. ʿAli al-Raniri, Kitab Bustan al-Salatin, 2 vols (Singapore: R. J. Wilkinson, 1899–1900), vol. 1, p. 24. 25. Bastian, Journey in Cambodia, p. 145; Antoine Cabaton, ‘Les chams musulmans de l’Indochine française’, Revue du Monde Musulman 2 (1907), pp. 173–4; William Collins, ‘The Muslims of Cambodia’, in Hean Sokhom (ed.), Ethnic Groups in Cambodia (Phnom Penh: Center for Advanced Study, 2009), pp. 71–2. 26. L. F. Brakel (ed. and trans.), The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: A Medieval MuslimMalay Romance, 2 vols (The Hague: KITLV, 1975–7). Cf. Ismail Hamid, The Malay Islamic Hikayat (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1983), pp. 150–1; Braginsky, Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature, pp. 180–3. 27. The Javanese menak undoubtedly sprang from the Malay hikayat. See van Ronkel, De roman, pp. 181–222. In addition, also a Buginese-Makassarese version of Hikayat Amir Hamzah contains a section on Muhammad Ali Hanafiyyah. Ibid., p. 248. 28. R. M. Ng. Poerbatjaraka, Menak: Beschrijving der Handschriften (Bandoeng: Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1940), p. 5; Geoffrey E. Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature of Lombok (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1999), pp. 15, 30–8, 44, 47–8; David D. Harnish, ‘Tensions between Adat (Custom) and Agama (Religion) in the Music of Lombok’, in David D. Harnish and Anne K. Rasmussen (eds),

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29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 89–91. Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature; Peter K. Austin, ‘Reading the Lontars: Endangered Literature Practices of Lombok, Eastern Indonesia’, Language Documentation and Description 8 (2010), pp. 27–48. Erni Budiwanti, Islam Sasak: Wetu Telu versus Waktu Lima (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2000), pp. 177–82. Personal communication with Erin Budiwanti, Vienna, 14 August 2015. Derived from the Arabic ṣadaqa, this term denotes not only alms (as its Malay and modern Indonesian equivalent sedekah), but also commemorative meals. Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature, p. 65. Stephen C. Headley, Durga’s Mosque: Cosmology, Conversion and Community in Central Javanese Islam (Singapore: ISEAS, 2004), pp. 401–21 (quotation from p. 413). Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature, p. 63. Edwin Wieringa, ‘Does Traditional Islamic Malay Literature Contain Shiʽitic Elements?’, Studia Islamika 3 (1996), pp. 99–100. Durand, ‘Notes sur les Chams’ (1907), pp. 327, 338. Braginsky, Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature, p. 180. G.-H. Bousquet, ‘Recherches sur les deux sectes musulmanes (“Waktou Telous” et “Waktou Lima”) de Lombok’, Revue des Études Islamiques 13 (1939), pp. 165–6. Ahmad, Hikayat Amir Hamzah, pp. 550–2, 559–60, 699–703. After taking leave from Amir Hamzah following his adoption of Islam, Harman Syah is presciently (but vainly) admonished by the former ‘not to change his Islamic religion and forget about Allah’. Ibid., p. 560. Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature, p. 32. Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image, p. 91. Vladimir Braginsky, ‘Imagining Kings of Rum and Their Heirs: The Dynastic Space of the Malay World’, Indonesia and the Malay World 41 (2013), pp. 380–7. Ibid., pp. 391–2. Po Dharma, G. Moussay and Abdul Karim (eds and trans.), Nai Mai Mang Makah: Tuan Putri Dari Kelantan (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian Dan Pelancongan Malaysia and EFEO, 2000). Ibid., p. 19 n. 20. The editors of the text, however, specifically identify Cham ‘Makah’ with Kelantan on the Malay Peninsula, something of which the present author remains unconvinced. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., pp. 62, 71. Ibid., p. 72. Cabaton, ‘Les chams musulmans’, p. 149; Ba Trung Phu, ‘The Cham Bani of Vietnam’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 23 (2006), p. 131; Bruckmayr, ‘Between Institutionalized Syncretism’, p. 18. Cf. Po Dharma, Pānduranga, vol. 2, p. 66 n. 105. Cf. Étienne Aymonier, ‘The Chams and Their Religions [1891]’, in H. Parmentier, P. Mus and É. Aymonier (eds), Cham Sculpture of the Tourane Museum: Religious Ceremonies and Superstitions of Champa, ed. and trans. W. E. J. Tips (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001), pp. 21–65. Po Dharma, ‘Deux princes malais au Campa: Leur rôle dans la vie socio-politique et religieuse de ce pays’, in Le monde indochinois et la péninsule malaise: Contributions de la delegation française au deuxième Congrès international sur la civilisation malaise

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55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

islamisation (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia, 1990), pp. 19–27. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 179. Yasuko, ‘Study of the Almanac’, pp. 326–30. The Indian Hindu Saka era is either a solar or lunisolar reckoning running from either of two points in March 78 ad. It was in use throughout India as well as in Cambodia, Java and Ceylon. J. F. Fleet, ‘Śaka Era’, in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion & Ethics, vol. 11 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), p. 96. On octaval calendars in the region, see Ian Proudfoot, Old Muslim Calendars of Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Doris E. Blood, ‘The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society’, in M. Gregersen and D. Thomas (eds), Notes from Indochina on Ethnic Minority Cultures (Dallas, TX: SIL Museum of Anthropology, 1980), pp. 40–3. Po Dharma et al. (eds and trans.), Akayet Inra Patra: Hikayat Inra Patra (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian Dan Pelancongan Malaysia and EFEO, 1997). S. W. R. Mulyadi, Hikayat Indraputra (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983). Braginsky, Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature, p. 393. Dharma et al., Akayet Inra Patra, p. 135. For an overview of differences and similarities betwenn the Malay and Cham versions of the story, see ibid., pp. 30–77; and Gérard Moussay, ‘Akayet Inra Patra: version cam de l’Hikayat malais Inderaputera’, in Le monde indochinois et la péninsule malaise: Contributions de la delegation française au deuxième Congrès international sur la civilisation malaise (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia, 1990), pp. 110–12. Gérard Moussay, ‘Um Mrup dans la littérature cam’, in Le Campā et le monde malais: Actes de la Conférence internationale sur le Campā et le monde malais organisée à l’Université de Californie, Berkeley 30-31 août 1990 (Paris: Publications du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1991), pp. 95–107. Indeed the stories and their heroes were at times even presented as the very antithesis to true Islamic heroism. Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image, pp. 19–21. The Jat and Bani Chams living in the former Pandurangan territories in Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan provinces number approximately 100,000 individuals. The entirely Muslim Cham community in Cambodia and former Khmer territories incorporated into the Vietnamese state (i.e. An Giang and Tay Ninh provinces) accounts for roughly 400,000 and 20,000 people respectively. Mathieu Guérin, ‘Les Cam et leur “véranda sur La Mecque”: L’influence des Malais de Patani et du Kelantan sur l’islam des Cam du Cambodge’, Aséanie 14 (2004), pp. 29–67; Omar Farouk Bajunid, ‘The Place of Jawi in Contemporary Cambodia’, Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 20 (2002), pp. 124–47. Bruckmayr, ‘Contentious Pull’, pp. 177–82; Cambodia’s Muslim Communities. Bajunid, ‘Place of Jawi’. Personal communication with the present Kan Imam San leader (kh. Oknha Khnour / ch. Ong G’nur) Kai Tam at Sre Brey (Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia), 13 May 2012. A transcription is provided in M. A. Jaspan, ‘Cham History: Ms. Shewn [sic] to Me by Tjegu Ly Musa’, typescript dated 2 January 1967, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/2. Muhammad Salih b. Hj. Harun Kemboja, Pedoman Bahagia Membicarakan Sukutan Waktu dan Kiblat yang Mulia (Kota Bharu: Matbaʿat al-Kamaliyya, 1934). The publication includes praises by major Kelantanese scholars of the day in its initial pages. Ibid., pp. 2–6. Hull History Centre, SEA 8, SEA 39 and SEA 42. M. C. Ricklefs and Petrus Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian

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72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84. 85.

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Languages in British Public Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 41; ‘Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: Addenda et Corrigenda’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 (1982), p. 306. The Sufi treatise (i.e. SEA 39) was readily identified as a text informally called Bayan Syarik by respondents from among the Kan Imam San and recent breakaways. Personal communication with Imam Kai Tam at Svay Pakao and Ong G’nur Kai Tam and Yousos Tum at Sre Brey (Au Russey), 13 May 2012. M. A. Jaspan, ‘Cambodian Cham: Rokaa – General Evaluation (2) & (3)’, typescript, 19 December 1966, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/3. Collins, ‘The Muslims of Cambodia’, pp. 63–8. Abdullah b. Mohammed Nakula, ‘Keturunan Melayu di Kemboja dan Vietnam: Hubungannya dengan Semenanjung dengan Tumpuan Khas kepada Negeri Kelantan’, Warisan Kelantan 8 (1989), pp. 28–9. Personal communication with Ong G’nur Kai Tam at Sre Brey, 13 May 2012; and with Tourman (ʿAbd al-Rahman) and his wife at Prey Thnorng (Kampot, Cambodia), 5 May 2012. The latter have recounted the Kan Imam San hagiography of the saint, which had been related to them during pilgrimage to his shrine. A very similar oral hagiographic account on Imam San was recorded by Collins in ‘The Muslims of Cambodia’, pp. 63–4. Phu Van Han, ‘The Development of the Jawi-Cam Script in South-West Vietnam Cam Communities’, paper given at Kertaskerja Seminar Antarabangsa Manuskrip Melayu-Campa, Kuala Lumpur, 6–7 December 2004. Po Dharma, ‘Les relations entre la littérature cam et la littérature malaise’, in J.-L. Bacqué-Grammont, A. Pino and S. Khoury (eds), D’un orient à l’autre: Actes des troisièmes journées de l’orient. Bordeaux, 2-4 octobre 2002 (Paris and Leuven: Peeters, 2005), pp. 391–2. Guérin, ‘Les Cam’; Nakula, ‘Keturunan Melayu’, pp. 6–41. Phu, ‘Development of Jawi-Cam’. Information on Abu Talep is drawn from a spontaneously convened ‘village forum’ (17 May 2012) and interviews with the following former students of Abu Talep: Man Seu (Deputy Province Imam of Battambang) in Damspey (Battambang), 11 May 2012; Asyari b. Saleh and Hj. Ahmad Osman Ong Chu in Chroy Metrey, 17 May 2012. Hj. Ayyub and Abu Talep are also mentioned in Abdul Rahman al-Ahmadi, Tokoh dan Pokok Pemikiran Tok Kenali (Kuala Lumpur: Bahagian Kebudayaan, Kementerian Kebudayaan, Belia dan Sukan Malaysia, 1983), p. 44. Many of the text’s main lessons are, based on Akhar Thrah versions, summarised in Po Dharma, ‘Hommes et femmes au Panduranga’, in Nguyen The Anh and Alain Forest (eds), Notes sur la culture et la religion en péninsule indochinoise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), pp. 205–12. Abu Talep b. Hj. Ayyub, Muk Sruh Palei, xerox copy of original manuscript, private collection of Tuon Him (Chrang Chamres), pp. 20–1. An oral version transcribed by Jaspan contains this passage in almost identical wording. Cf. M.A. Jaspan, ‘Kabuon Muk Soh Pelai: The Discourse of Muk Soh Pelai’, undated typescript, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/1, pp. 4–5. M. A. Jaspan, ‘The Kabuon: A Particular Genre of Cham Literature’, undated typescript (first draft of unpublished article), Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/1, pp. 3–5. Julliet Baccot, ‘On G’nur et Cay à O Russey: Syncrétisme religieux dans un village cham du Cambodge’, doctoral thesis, Université de Paris, 1968, p. 102. Po Dharma, ‘Hommes’, p. 208.

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86. Jean-Michel Filippi, Recherches préliminaire sur les langues des minorités du Cambodge (Phnom Penh: UNESCO, 2008), p. 51; Kaori Ueki, ‘Prosody and Intonation in Western Cham’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hawai’i, 2011, pp. 31–3. 87. Ian Proudfoot, Early Printed Malay Books: A Provisional Account of Materials Published in the Singapore-Malaysia Area up to 1920, Noting Holdings in Major Public Collections (Kuala Lumpur: Academy of Malay Studies and the Library, University of Malaya, 1993), p. 49. 88. Sugahara Yumi, ‘The Publication of Vernacular Islamic Textbooks and Islamization in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 27 (2009), pp. 21–36. 89. Emiko Stock, ‘From Tuolngok to Ta Ngok: A Journey of Islam across Cambodia’, ChamAttic, 11 February 2012, http://chamattic.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/cliches-du-fin-fond-du-grenier-from-toulngok-to-ta-ngok-a-journey-of-islam-across-cambodia/ (accessed 9 May 2013). 90. Marrison, Sasak and Javanese Literature, pp. 72–3. 91. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 92. Theodorus C. van der Meij, Puspakrema: A Javanese Romance from Lombok (Leiden: Research School of African, Asian and Amerindian Studies, 2002), p. 193. 93. Ibid., pp. 188–93 (quotation from p. 191). 94. Bruckmayr, ‘Contentious Pull’, pp. 447–9; Philipp Bruckmayr, ‘Divergent Processes of Localization in 21st Century Shiʽism: The Cases of Hezbollah Venezuela and Cambodia’s Cham Shiʽis’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming). 95. Vladimir Braginsky, ‘Representation of the Turkic-Turkish Theme in Traditional Malay Literature, with Special Reference to the Works of the Fourteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop (eds), From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 265.

Bibliography Abu Talep b. Hj. Ayyub, Muk Sruh Palei, xerox copy of original manuscript, private collection of Tuon Him (Chrang Chamres). Ahmad, A. Samad (ed.), Hikayat Amir Hamzah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Kementerian Pelajaran Malaysia, 1987). al-Ahmadi, Abdul Rahman, Tokoh dan Pokok Pemikiran Tok Kenali (Kuala Lumpur: Bahagian Kebudayaan, Kementerian Kebudayaan, Belia dan Sukan Malaysia, 1983). Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). al-Attas, Syed Naguib, Preliminary Statement on a General Theory of the Islamization of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1969). Austin, Peter K., ‘Reading the Lontars: Endangered Literature Practices of Lombok, Eastern Indonesia’, Language Documentation and Description 8 (2010), pp. 27–48. Aymonier, Étienne, ‘Légendes historiques des chames’, Excursions et Reconnaissances 14 (1890), pp. 145–206. Aymonier, Étienne, ‘The Chams and Their Religions [1891]’, in H. Parmentier, P. Mus and É. Aymonier (eds), Cham Sculpture of the Tourane Museum: Religious Ceremonies and Superstitions of Champa, ed. and trans. W. E. J. Tips (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001), pp. 21–65. Aymonier, Étienne, and Antoine Cabaton, Dictionnaire čam-français (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906). Baccot, Julliet, ‘On G’nur et Cay à O Russey: Syncrétisme religieux dans un village cham du Cambodge’, doctoral thesis, Université de Paris, 1968. Bajunid, Omar Farouk, ‘The Place of Jawi in Contemporary Cambodia’, Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 20 (2002), pp. 124–47.

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Bastian, Adolf, A Journey in Cambodia and Cochin-China (1864) (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2005). Ba Trung Phu, ‘The Cham Bani of Vietnam’, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 23 (2006), pp. 126–33. Blood, Doris E., ‘The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society’, in M. Gregersen and D. Thomas (eds), Notes from Indochina on Ethnic Minority Cultures (Dallas, TX: SIL Museum of Anthropology, 1980), pp. 35–43. Boivin, Michel, L’âghâ khan et les khojah: Islam chiite et dynamiques sociales dans le souscontinent indien (1843-1954) (Paris: Karthala, 2013). Bousquet, G.-H., ‘Recherches sur les deux sectes musulmanes (“Waktou Telous” et “Waktou Lima”) de Lombok’, Revue des Études Islamiques 13 (1939), pp. 149–77. Bowen, John R., Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Braginsky, Vladimir, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV, 2004). Braginsky, Vladimir, ‘Imagining Kings of Rum and Their Heirs: The Dynastic Space of the Malay World’, Indonesia and the Malay World 41 (2013), pp. 370–95. Braginsky, Vladimir, ‘Representation of the Turkic-Turkish Theme in Traditional Malay Literature, with Special Reference to the Works of the Fourteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop (eds), From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 263–92. Brakel, L. F. (ed. and trans.), The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: A Medieval Muslim-Malay Romance, 2 vols (The Hague: KITLV, 1975–7). Brown, C. C., ‘Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, a Translation of Raffles Ms. 18’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, nos 2–3 (1953 for 1952), pp. 5–276. Bruckmayr, Philipp, ‘Between Institutionalized Syncretism and Official Particularism: Religion among the Chams of Vietnam and Cambodia’, in Andreas H. Pries, Laetitia Martzolff, Robert Langer and Claus Ambos (eds), Rituale als Ausdruck von Kulturkontakt: ‘Synkretismus’ zwischen Negation und Neudefinition (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), pp. 11–41. Bruckmayr, Philipp, ‘The Contentious Pull of the Malay Logosphere: Jawization and Factionalism among Cambodian Muslims (Late 19th to Early 21st Centuries)’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Vienna, 2014. Bruckmayr, Philipp, Cambodia’s Muslim Communities and the Malay World: Malay Language, Jawi Script, and Islamic Factionalism from the 19th Century to the Present (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Bruckmayr, Philipp, ‘Divergent Processes of Localization in 21st Century Shiʽism: The Cases of Hezbollah Venezuela and Cambodia’s Cham Shiʽis’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming). Budiwanti, Erni, Islam Sasak: Wetu Telu versus Waktu Lima (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2000). Cabaton, Antoine, ‘Les chams musulmans de l’Indochine française’, Revue du Monde Musulman 2 (1907), pp. 129–80. Collins, William, ‘The Muslims of Cambodia’, in Hean Sokhom (ed.), Ethnic Groups in Cambodia (Phnom Penh: Center for Advanced Study, 2009), pp. 1–110. Durand, E. M., ‘Notes sur les Chams’, Bulletin de l’École Française de l’Extrême-Orient 5 (1905), pp. 368–86. Durand, E. M., ‘Notes sur les Chams’, Bulletin de l’École Française de l’Extrême-Orient 7 (1907), pp. 313–55. Fatimi, S. Q., Islam Comes to Malaysia (Singapore: MSRI, 1963). Federspiel, Howard M., Sultans, Shamans & Saints: Islam and Muslims in Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2007).

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Filippi, Jean-Michel, Recherches préliminaire sur les langues des minorités du Cambodge (Phnom Penh: UNESCO, 2008). Fleet, J. F., ‘Śaka Era’, in James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion & Ethics, vol. 11 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), p. 96. Frede, Britta, Die Erneuerung der Tiğānīya in Mauretanien: Popularisierung religiöser Ideen in der Kolonialzeit (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014). Guérin, Mathieu, ‘Les Cam et leur “véranda sur La Mecque”: L’influence des Malais de Patani et du Kelantan sur l’islam des Cam du Cambodge’, Aséanie 14 (2004), pp. 29–67. Hamid, Ismail, The Malay Islamic Hikayat (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1983). Harnish, David, ‘Tensions between Adat (Custom) and Agama (Religion) in the Music of Lombok’, in David Harnish and Anne K. Rasmussen (eds), Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 80–108. Headley, Stephen C., Durga’s Mosque: Cosmology, Conversion and Community in Central Javanese Islam (Singapore: ISEAS, 2004). Jaspan, M. A., ‘Cambodian Cham: Rokaa – General Evaluation (2) & (3)’, typescript, 19 December 1966, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/3. Jaspan, M. A., ‘Cham History: Ms. Shewn [sic] to Me by Tjegu Ly Musa’, typescript, 2 January 1967, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/2. Jaspan, M. A., ‘Kabuon Muk Soh Pelai: The Discourse of Muk Soh Pelai’, undated typescript, Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/1, pp. 4–5. Jaspan, M. A., ‘The Kabuon: A Particular Genre of Cham Literature’, undated typescript (first draft of unpublished article), Hull History Centre, Jaspan Papers, DJA (2)/1/1, pp. 3–5. Kemboja, Muhammad Salih b. Hj. Harun, Pedoman Bahagia Membicarakan Sukutan Waktu dan Kiblat yang Mulia (Kota Bharu: Matbaʿat al-Kamaliyya, 1934). Launey, Adrien, Histoire de la mission de Cochinchine 1658-1823, vol. 1: 1658-1728 (Paris: Société des Missions-Étrangères, 1923). Levtzion, Nehemia, ‘Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization’, in Nehemia Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 1–23. Marrison, Geoffrey E., ‘The Coming of Islam to the East Indies’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 24, no. 1 (1951), pp. 28–37. Marrison, Geoffrey E., Sasak and Javanese Literature of Lombok (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1999). van der Meij, Theodorus C., Puspakrema: A Javanese Romance from Lombok (Leiden: Research School of African, Asian and Amerindian Studies, 2002). Moussay, Gérard, ‘Akayet Inra Patra: version cam de l’Hikayat malais Inderaputera’, in Le monde indochinois et la péninsule malaise: Contributions de la delegation française au deuxième Congrès international sur la civilisation malaise (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia, 1990), pp. 101–14. Moussay, Gérard, ‘Um Mrup dans la littérature cam’, in Le Campā et le monde malais: Actes de la Conférence internationale sur le Campā et le monde malais organisée à l’Université de Californie, Berkeley 30-31 août 1990 (Paris: Publications du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1991), pp. 95–107. Moussay, Gérard, Grammaire de la langue cam (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2006). Mulyadi, S. W. R., Hikayat Indraputra (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1983). Nakula, Abdullah b. Mohammed, ‘Keturunan Melayu di Kemboja dan Vietnam: Hubungannya dengan Semenanjung dengan Tumpuan Khas kepada Negeri Kelantan’, Warisan Kelantan 8 (1989), pp. 6–41. Po Dharma, Le Pānduranga (Campā) 1802–1835: Ses rapports avec le Vietnam, 2 vols (Paris: PEFEO, 1987). Po Dharma, ‘Etat des dernières recherches sur la date de l’absorption du Campa par le Vietnam’, in Actes du Séminaire sur le Campa organisé à l’Université de Copenhague, le 23

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mai 1987 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1988), pp. 59–70. Po Dharma, ‘Deux princes malais au Campa: Leur rôle dans la vie socio-politique et religieuse de ce pays’, in Le monde indochinois et la péninsule malaise: Contributions de la delegation française au deuxième Congrès international sur la civilisation malaise (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia, 1990), pp. 19–27. Po Dharma, ‘Le déclin du Campā entre le XVIe et le XVIIIe siècle’, in Le Campā et le monde malais: Actes de la Conférence internationale sur le Campā et le monde malais organisée à l’Université de Californie, Berkeley 30-31 août 1990 (Paris: Centre d’Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1991), pp. 47–64. Po Dharma, ‘Hommes et femmes au Panduranga’, in Nguyen The Anh and Alain Forest (eds), Notes sur la culture et la religion en péninsule indochinoise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), pp. 199–214. Po Dharma, ‘Les relations entre la littérature cam et la littérature malaise’, in J.-L. BacquéGrammont, A. Pino and S. Khoury (eds), D’un orient à l’autre: Actes des troisièmes journées de l’orient. Bordeaux, 2-4 octobre 2002 (Paris and Leuven: Peeters, 2005), pp. 383–95. Po Dharma, G. Moussay and Abdul Karim (eds and trans.), Akayet Inra Patra: Hikayat Inra Patra (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian Dan Pelancongan Malaysia and EFEO, 1997). Po Dharma, G. Moussay and Abdul Karim (eds and trans.), Nai Mai Mang Makah: Tuan Putri Dari Kelantan (Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian Dan Pelancongan Malaysia and EFEO, 2000). Poerbatjaraka, R. M. Ng, Menak: Beschrijving der Handschriften (Bandoeng: Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1940). Pritchett, Frances W. (ed. and trans.), The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Proudfoot, Ian, Early Printed Malay Books: A Provisional Account of Materials Published in the Singapore-Malaysia Area up to 1920, Noting Holdings in Major Public Collections (Kuala Lumpur: Academy of Malay Studies and the Library, University of Malaya, 1993). Proudfoot, Ian, Old Muslim Calendars of Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2006). al-Raniri, Nur al-Din Muhammad b. ʿAli, Kitab Bustan al-Salatin, 2 vols (Singapore: R. J. Wilkinson, 1899–1900). Renard, John, Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and the Visual Arts (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993). Ricklefs, M. C., Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930) (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007). Ricklefs, M. C., Islamisation and its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). Ricklefs, M. C., and Petrus Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian Languages in British Public Collections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Ricklefs, M. C., and Petrus Voorhoeve, ‘Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: Addenda et Corrigenda’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 (1982), pp. 300–22 . van Ronkel, P. S., De roman van Amir Hamzah (Leiden: Brill, 1895). Rooda van Eysinga, P. P. (ed. and trans.), Tadj oes-salatin: De kroon aller koningen (Batavia [Jakarta]: Lands Drukkerij, 1827). Stock, Emiko, ‘From Tuolngok to Ta Ngok: A Journey of Islam across Cambodia’, ChamAttic, 11 February 2012, http://chamattic.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/cliches-du-fin-fond-dugrenier-from-toulngok-to-ta-ngok-a-journey-of-islam-across-cambodia/ (accessed 9 May 2013).

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Ueki, Kaori, ‘Prosody and Intonation in Western Cham’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hawai’i, 2011. Van Han, Phu, ‘The Development of the Jawi-Cam Script in South-West Vietnam Cam Communities’, paper given at Kertaskerja Seminar Antarabangsa Manuskrip Melayu-Campa, Kuala Lumpur, 6–7 December 2004. Wieringa, Edwin, ‘Does Traditional Islamic Malay Literature Contain Shiʽitic Elements?’, Studia Islamika 3 (1996), pp. 93–111. Yasuko, Yashimoto, ‘A Study of the Almanac of the Cham in South-Central Vietnam’, in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M. Lockhart (eds), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), pp. 323–36. Yumi, Sugahara, ‘The Publication of Vernacular Islamic Textbooks and Islamization in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 27 (2009), pp. 21–36.

24 ISLAMISATION AND SINICISATION: INVERSIONS, REVERSIONS AND ALTERNATE VERSIONS OF ISLAM IN CHINA James D. Frankel

I

n the People’s Republic of China (PRC), religious freedom is guaranteed by the constitution, but is hardly taken for granted. Media fanning public fears about the spread of radical Islam is a recent development, as seen on the front page of the Hong Kong daily Ming Pao, which juxtaposed an influential Islamic community in Yunnan province with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.1 Such editorial skew is largely motivated by the interest in playing upon popular prejudice to help sell newspapers, a motivation shared by both Western and Eastern media. But the underlying preconception is strikingly similar. Fear among non-Muslims of Islamisation – the spread of Islamic extremism, or simply of Islam – has made its way to China. Islam first entered China during the Tang dynasty (618–906), perhaps as early as the seventh century. It was brought overland and by sea by Muslim merchants and mercenaries who had no intention of conquering or proselytising the Tang Empire, but mainly sought economic opportunities in China. These early arrivals, some of whom settled in China, laid the foundations for the enigmatic Muslim minority populations that live in the PRC to this day. The very fact that the original motivation of Muslim pioneers in China was not to spread their faith or conquer in the name of the caliphate, the Islamic polity of the day, created a very different set of circumstances for the spread of Islam and development of Muslim communities in China from what we observe in other regions, particularly in the central lands of the Muslim world.

Islam’s Arrival in China A folk legend widespread among the Hui, or Chinese-speaking Muslims, tells the story of how Islam first came to China. It recounts how the Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) had a nightmare foretelling the destruction of his empire.2 A foreign sage with the power to expel the mysterious evil force threatening his realm also appeared in the dream. After advisers helped interpret the dream, the emperor sent a delegation to the ‘Western Regions’ to seek out the holy man, who turned out to be the none other than the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet thereupon sent emissaries to China, who 495

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settled there and married Chinese women, thus making them the progenitors of the Hui people.3 What is important to note in the context of the present discussion is that the foundational myth affirms that, while Muslim ancestors came with the noble mission of bringing peace and harmony to the empire, they did not come to ‘Islamise’ China per se. In the mid-eighth century, Tang China and the burgeoning Islamic state, at the peak of its century-long expansion that spread its power from the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Iberia to the heart of Asia, were the two dominant forces of their day. The Muslim armies of the newly established Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) sought to continue the seemingly inexorable wave of eastward conquest achieved by their Umayyad (661–750) predecessors, while the Tang Empire likewise extended its imperial reach westward, deep into Central Asia. Inevitably, the two ‘superpowers’ encountered each other at the Talas River, along the present-day border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in a skirmish known as the Battle of Artlakh in 751. The Muslim forces won the day, but not decisively enough to justify further expansion. Tang China appeared too formidable to be conquered in the name of Islam, while any notions of Tang westward expansion were equally dashed in the battle. The military encounter at Talas effectively drew the boundary between the Abbasid and Tang spheres of control, and marked the eastward extent of the caliphate’s military-political Islamisation. If we were to subscribe to Huntington’s axiomatic claim that ‘Islam has bloody borders’,4 we should expect to find China and its Muslim neighbours mired in a perpetual state of conflict, a ‘clash of civilisations’. This was not the case. After the Battle of Artlakh, the Islamic caliphate and Chinese empire engaged in normal commercial and diplomatic relations. In fact, when the Tang dynasty was nearly overthrown by the rebellion of An Lushan in 755, the Emperor Suzong (r. 756–62) requested help to bolster his armies in Central Asia. The call was answered by Uyghur Turk and Sogdian allies, and by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–75), who supplied some 4,000 Arab soldiers. Far from taking advantage of the weakened state of the Tang, the caliphate assisted in saving the Chinese empire against which it had fought only four years earlier. Official Chinese histories record that, in gratitude, the emperor allowed the Arab mercenaries to settle in China and take Chinese brides; these mixed families may indeed have been among the earliest ancestors of the Hui people.5 Both before and after the Battle of Artlakh, China and the caliphate (both Umayyad and Abbasid) enjoyed mutually respectful diplomatic ties and Muslim merchants traded with China. Arab merchants from the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea had traversed the Indian Ocean to reach the South China Sea and port cities along China’s south-eastern coast for centuries prior to the advent of Islam, and continued to do so afterwards, bringing their new faith and religious values with them. Many of the merchants of the so-called Silk Road, who conducted commerce overland from the Middle East through Central Asia, arrived at the Tang capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) in the heart of China. Among them were Arabs, but also Persians and Turks, from communities that had recently been Islamised. Chang’an and the south-eastern ports became home to tens of thousands of foreigners during the Tang period, mostly merchants, who lived in specially designated foreign quarters which could be found in most major Chinese cities. This arrangement assured that aliens had little contact with the Chinese masses, apart from those people directly or indirectly involved in foreign

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trade. Goods and products from the Middle East, Central Asia and Indian Ocean region reached Chinese consumers and had a strong influence on the tastes and trends of Tang dynasty (especially elite) society, but religious ideas coming from the Islamic world had little, if any, impact on the average subject of the Tang Empire. Within the merchant quarters, foreigners were granted a liberal degree of autonomy to conduct their communal affairs. Thus, it is documented in a mid-ninthcentury traveller’s account contained in the Akhbar al-Sin wa’l-Hind (Accounts of China and India) that the Muslim community in the port city of Guangzhou had a qadi, appointed by the Tang regime, to rule on intra-Muslim legal cases.6 But the regime did not want its subjects to have much contact with alien residents, nor could they protect the aliens from popular uprisings like the Huang Chao rebellion of 878, in which upwards of 100,000 foreigners, many of them Muslims, were purportedly massacred in Guangzhou. Muslim immigrants in Tang China were in no position to effect the Islamisation of China, and there is no evidence to suggest that this was ever their intention. Many Muslims came to China to live and do business there, but their contact with the Chinese populace was limited by custom and law. As such, their ability to proselytise, had that been their intention, was circumscribed. In their foreign enclaves, they enjoyed sufficient freedom to practise their religion, but not to spread it. The only significant exception to this was their practice of marrying Chinese women, who often converted to Islam, thereby creating hybrid Chinese–Muslim families. The offspring of these intermarriages, and their descendants who continued the practice of intermarriage, were ostensibly the forebears of today’s Hui nationality.7

From Islam in China to Chinese Islam For much of their first millennium, rather than contributing to the Islamisation of China, Muslims there conversely underwent a process of Sinicisation. Responding to the rival pressures exerted on a diaspora community either to assimilate or to resist assimilation, China’s Muslims have exemplified a long history of accommodation and adaptation of Islam to their local contexts, resulting in the phenomenon of Chinese– Muslim simultaneity, a condition of belonging to two civilisations at the same time. Over the centuries, affected by the vicissitudes of Chinese history and various waves of Muslim migration in some periods and the curtailment of contact with the wider Islamic world in others, China’s Muslim population has grown increasingly complex and diverse, encompassing an array of multifaceted Islamic traditions in communities across the country. As we have seen, the earliest Muslims in Tang dynasty China were predominantly merchants and mercenaries, first sojourners then settlers, who lived in enclave communities where they upheld Islamic cultural and religious traditions in mixed Chinese–Muslim families. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), some of these families had gained considerable wealth and prominence in their local environs. As they rose in status, they also outgrew the limits of the foreign ghettoes and mixed more freely with the indigenous population.8 By this time, however, these Chinese–Muslim families were far less alien, both culturally and genetically. Generation after generation, intermarrying with local Chinese women, and sometimes adopting Chinese sons whom they raised as Muslims to marry their daughters, infused both Chinese genes and memes into these hybrid lineages.

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The Song period, therefore, saw a gradual process of naturalisation and assimilation, or Sinicisation, among multigenerational Chinese–Muslim lineages, alongside the continued influx of new Muslim arrivals into Chinese ports and trading centres.9 Members of the more established and assimilated Muslim families in south-eastern China became effective intermediaries in Chinese–Arab maritime trade. By the twelfth century, the volume of this trade brought so many Middle Eastern merchants to the port of Quanzhou, in Fujian province, that it came to be known to many foreigners by its Arabic name, Zaytun. Muslim residents of the city also enjoyed a considerable degree of religious freedom and political autonomy. This, however, should not be interpreted to mean that the city had been Islamised per se. Like Chang’an or Guangzhou before it, Quanzhou became a relatively cosmopolitan commercial centre, but Islamic cultural and religious influence on the local Chinese population was minimal. Quanzhou in the Song period competed with and eventually eclipsed Guangzhou as China’s principal centre of maritime trade, and was practically governed by Muslims of Arab descent, foremost among them the Pu family who had earlier relocated from Guangzhou.10 For generations, a member of the Pu lineage served as the imperial superintendent of foreign trade. The most famous of these officials was Pu Shougeng (d. c. 1297), who served as superintendent of trade and military commander of Fujian until he surrendered Quanzhou to the Mongols in 1276. The Mongol invasion and establishment of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) briefly linked China to the vast Eurasian Mongol Empire. Within decades, the Mongols conquered both the Abbasid and the Song territories, taking over the expanse of Central Asia inhabited predominantly by Muslims. Mongol rule promoted a revival of the overland Silk Road trade and the movement of people within their empire, bringing administrators from one region to work in another. This in turn led to a new wave of Muslim migration into China, and further intermarriage,11 contributing to the most rapid growth of the Muslim population up to that point in Chinese history. The Mongols are well known for their tolerance and patronage of religiously diverse constituencies within their empire. For example, the Yuan government sponsored the construction of mosques in the capitals of Dadu (Beijing) and Shangdu, among other cities. The Muslim community of Quanzhou was home to China’s shaykh al-islām, who served as direct liaison between the Muslim community and the Mongol regime. Quanzhou also had its own qadi, who served as the local judge and interpreter of Islamic law. Khubilai Khan permitted Muslims in China to fulfil such religious duties as fasting in Ramadan and the ritual slaughter of animals (until he later revoked these rights). But, again, this should not be mistaken for an Islamising influence within the empire, for these boons to the Muslim community were only as enduring as the khan’s personal favour and fiat. The trajectory of China’s Muslims shifted slightly when the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), overthrew the Mongols, who were expelled from the country. He did not, however, likewise punish those Muslims who had collaborated with Mongol rule, but rather drafted them into the service of the new regime. Muslims continued to serve in important offices, such as the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, and in other important civil and military posts. In order to assuage ethnic and cultural conflict within the realm, the Ming imperium implemented policies to encourage minorities’ assimilation into mainstream Chinese culture and society. For Muslims, in the central and eastern parts of the empire

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in particular, imperial decrees encouraged intermarriage and the adoption of Chinese surnames, among other measures.12 These policies accelerated and intensified the process of Sinicisation, which had been progressing naturally for centuries. This process in turn galvanised a population that was simultaneously Chinese and Muslim, made up of communities and individuals embodying to different degrees a blend of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Muslimness’. The direct ancestors of today’s Hui minority, the Muslims of Ming China were already an internally diverse population, largely due to their dispersal throughout the empire. As Jonathan Lipman notes: ‘Based on the wide distribution of Muslims in China under the Yuan, the evolution of the Sinophone Muslims during the succeeding Ming dynasty took place in a bewildering variety of contexts.’13 It was not only these domestic policies encouraging assimilation that contributed to the rapid Sinicisation of Muslims in China during this period; Ming foreign policy also played a significant role. After a century of Mongol domination, the Ming dynasty was determined to control China’s borders. To this end, the regime extended and fortified the Great Wall, as much to keep its subjects inside the empire as to prevent invasion from outside. As the dynasty attempted to shore up its defences and rebuild the institutions of indigenous Chinese rule, Ming policy tended to be inward-looking, isolationist, even xenophobic. There was one noted exception to this trend: the second Ming emperor, Yongle (r. 1402–24), sought to engage the outside world and increase China’s international prestige and political-economic influence overseas. He commissioned a fleet of unprecedented size to sail the old maritime trade routes to the south, establishing commercial and diplomatic relations in Southeast Asia, the Indonesian archipelago and westward throughout the Indian Ocean region as far as the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. He appointed a Sinicised Muslim, the Yunnan-born eunuch Zheng He (1371–1433), as admiral of the fleet. Zheng He, a close and trusted adviser of the emperor, led seven voyages, dying at sea before making the final return trip to China.14 Wherever he landed, he aimed to impress the local people with the economic and military might of the Ming Empire. The fact that he was a Muslim certainly helped in the diplomatic aspect of the fleet’s mission, as many of the local populations of the region were Muslim and welcomed their Chinese co-religionist. On the other hand, Zheng He’s high degree of Sinicisation (he was a Confucian-trained imperial minister) assured his loyalty and made him an apt representative of the dynasty. Reversing the transactional dynamic of the early Muslim maritime merchants who first came to China back in the Tang period, Zheng He’s fleet extended Chinese power and influence into the heart of the Muslim world. Subsequent emperors increasingly withdrew China from foreign relations, which effectively cut China’s Muslims off from contact with their brethren abroad. The influx of new Muslim immigrants, which had served as a lifeline of Islamic traditions between the Chinese Muslim communities and the central Muslim lands for nearly seven centuries, came to a virtual halt. With increased pressure on them from the Ming government to adopt Chinese cultural norms, and with their access to outside Islamic influence curtailed, Muslims in China also struggled with hostile prejudice among their Chinese compatriots, many of whom still associated them negatively with their roles as tax collectors under the Mongol regime. There was also a lingering perception that they were foreign, despite the fact that many Muslim lineages had been present for centuries. The association of Muslims with trade, in a Confucian culture that regarded merchants as the lowest social class, further motivated them to diversify their

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professions in other sectors of the economy as a means to social mobility and greater acceptance by local officials and the Chinese population at large. All of these factors led Muslims in Ming China to construct their own uniquely Chinese Muslim identity. Some Muslim individuals, or even families, assimilated so thoroughly that they all but lost any connection to Islam. For instance, the Ming dynasty literatus Li Zhi (1527–1602), infamous for his anti neo-Confucian heterodoxy, came from a Muslim lineage that had apostatised from Islam several generations before he was born.15 We can only speculate as to how many similar but undocumented cases of lapsed Chinese Muslims may have occurred during the Ming period alone. Apart from this possibly high rate of attrition, the character of even devout Muslim communities also changed under the Ming dynasty. Cut off as they were from contact with Muslims outside China, and having for centuries perpetuated a tradition of intermarriage, particularly of Muslim men with Chinese women, Muslim communities throughout the country had become almost exclusively Sinophone and had lost the quotidian use of Persian and Arabic except for liturgical purposes. Many Sinicised Muslim families retained their ethno-religious identity, but encouraged their children to pursue a classical Chinese, Confucian education, which enabled them to take the civil or military service examinations, a means to social advancement. As political, economic, social and cultural pressures increased, from both within and outside their communities, and Muslims increasingly embraced Chinese customs and values, a concomitant decline in traditional Islamic knowledge and religious practice naturally followed. The process of Muslim Sinicisation reveals a familiar dilemma faced by minorities, Muslim and otherwise, throughout global history: whether to assimilate and gain acceptance in the mainstream society or to tenaciously cling to an ‘alien’ religious and cultural identity in order to avoid being absorbed by the majority. The tension created by these rival pressures caused some Chinese Muslims to fear for the survival of Islam in their homeland, leading to a uniquely Chinese Islamic revival.

A Sinicised Islamic Renaissance In the mid-sixteenth century, Hu Dengzhou (1522–97) felt a profound dissatisfaction with the quality of Islamic education available to him in his native Shaanxi province, so much so that he undertook a rare arduous and potentially dangerous voyage beyond China’s western borders.16 As mentioned above, foreign travel was discouraged during the Ming period, but Hu Dengzhou nevertheless left in search of Islamic learning, making his way through Central Asia to the Middle East as far as Mecca. In centres of Islamic culture like Samarkand and Bukhara, he received instruction from Sufis and other Muslim scholars, and thereupon returned to China with volumes of Arabic and Persian writings, as well as oral teachings he had received while abroad. Once home, he started a pioneering effort to reform Islamic education. With a small group of devoted students, he began translating the texts he had acquired into Chinese and proceeded to teach Islam to Muslim students in Chinese. This educational reform, known as jingtang jiaoyu (scripture hall education), then spread from one Muslim community to another, region by region, leading to the formation of an academic network and a curriculum consisting of a significant body of Islamic literature in classical Chinese. As the educational network expanded, this literary corpus, known as the Han Kitab (Chinese Islamic books),17 also grew to include not only translations

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of imported Arabic and Persian texts,18 but also original treatises on various Islamic religious subjects using the vocabulary of neo-Confucianism, thus representing a harmonisation of Chinese and Islamic worldviews. The authors of these texts represented the pinnacle of Muslim literati culture in Ming and Qing (1644–1911) dynasty society, simultaneously at ease in both the Confucian and Islamic intellectual traditions, which they presented as being entirely mutually congruous. After nearly a millennium of Muslim life in China, segments of the Chinese Muslim community had become so thoroughly Sinicised that they produced the elite Han Kitab scholars, also known as Huiru (Muslim Confucians), who epitomised Chinese– Muslim simultaneity.19 The original impetus for the educational reform movement out of which the Huiru evolved was to address the paucity of Islamic knowledge in China and the fear of further decline and attrition due to unrelenting assimilative pressures. The Han Kitab thus became a platform for the Huiru to address a dual audience: Sinicised Muslims who were literate (only) in the classical Chinese idiom and non-Muslim Confucian readers who wished to learn about Islam. The authors wanted to instil in the former a sense of the nobility and legitimacy of their Islamic heritage in order to stem the tide of ignorance and potential defection. They simultaneously hoped to persuade the latter readership of Islam’s compatibility with Chinese cultural norms to assuage any concerns that Muslims posed a threat to the Confucian social order. The jingtang jiaoyu educational system, the Han Kitab corpus and the Huiru movement in general may be viewed as equal parts Islamic revival and reform. Their underlying motivation was to preserve and transmit Islamic knowledge and tradition among Sinicised Muslims. After centuries of assimilation and acculturation, however, the only way their proponents saw fit to achieve these goals was by means of religio-philosophical synthesis. Whether their method and product was an Islamised Confucianism or a Confucianised Islam seems simply to be a question of perspective. There were probably some within traditional Chinese Muslim, or Gedimu,20 communities who may have thought the Han Kitab authors had gone too far in their accommodation of Chinese culture, that instead of reviving Islamic tradition the Huiru had in fact diluted or even bastardised it by their use of neo-Confucian philosophical concepts. To this charge, Liu Zhi (c. 1660–c. 1730), widely regarded as the epitome of Chinese Muslim scholarship, responded: The ritual of the Pure and True [i.e. Islam] comes from the teaching of the Arabian sage, and yet agrees in many ways with the ritual of the Confucians. Although the practices are particular and the customs are different, and there are also minor details in which they are not alike, for the most part they are generally similar to each other. Therefore, in my preface to ritual, I have explained the points of this matter frequently by using originally Confucian language to elucidate the meaning, wishing only for the people of this land [i.e. China] to know what I have explained.21 The Huiru and their constituency embodied the ethno-cultural simultaneity that provided a safe middle ground between the polarisation that lay at the heart of the diasporic dilemma. Rather than having to choose between the polar options of integration-assimilation or segregation-ghettoisation, members of this minority community attempted to have the best of both worlds, carving out a cultural niche in which they could not only survive in a potentially hostile society, but even flourish in many cases.

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Conceptually, the Han Kitab authors helped to create this safe space by placing Islam and Confucianism on an equal moral footing, and positing that they are both manifestations of a single, universal truth: The sage of the West, Muhammad, lived in Arabia long after Confucius, so far removed in time and space from the Chinese sage that we do not know exactly by how much. Their respective languages are mutually unintelligible. So how is it that their Dao is in full accord? They were of one mind. Therefore, the Dao is the same.22 While the socio-political circumstances of the Ming period had pushed many Muslims in China in the direction of greater assimilation, conditions after the Machu conquest and establishment of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) provided new challenges and opportunities. As Chinese society endured the aftermath of another foreign invasion, the Manchus systematically assumed control and sought to gain legitimacy as an imperium. The Qing imposed its political hegemony even as it attempted to gain acceptance over the ethnically and culturally diverse population it ruled. As foreigners, the Manchus’ greatest difficulty was to win over the Chinese majority, but they also had to appeal to other groups in the empire, including Mongols, Muslims, Tibetans and various tribal communities. They did this by projecting a multivalent, almost protean, imperial identity. The Manchus’ own fluid identity was reflected in the efforts of other subcultures within the empire to reconstruct their self-identities. Muslims, despite their non-Chinese ancestry, had undergone a millennium-long process of naturalisation and were now poised to take advantage of the opportunity to reimagine their history and redefine their place in China. The origin myth cited above, in which the arrival of Islam and Muslims in China was attributed to the dream of the Tang emperor and response by the Prophet Muhammad, was also co-opted by the Huiru in Han Kitab narratives such as the Huihui Yuanlai (Origin of the Muslims) by Liu Zhi’s father, Liu Sanjie. Such a legend simultaneously expressed Chinese (imperial) and Islamic (prophetic) origins, asserting a dual nobility. Versions of the myth come from traditional Chinese Muslim sources: oral traditions, inscriptions at mosques and histories written by the Han Kitab scholars in the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. These accounts contain evident factual inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Yet they are widely disseminated and maintained by Chinese Muslims themselves, assuming the character of religious myth; as Mircea Eliade has written: ‘Once told, that is revealed, the myth becomes apodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute.’23 The version of the narrative in the Huihui Yuanlai also refers to the Tang emperor’s dream: Formerly, Islam was found only beyond the western border, Who would know that Muslims were to dwell in China forever? It came about through the Tang Emperor’s dream in the night, That three thousand men were brought to establish it. By Imperial Command the seal of the Board of Astronomy was given to one of them. They dwelt peaceably in China tranquilizing the State. All thanks to the grace of the Emperor of Tang that today the State is firmer than ever.24

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The closing lines of this passage give thanks to the emperor, whereas one might expect a Muslim text to invoke Allah. Political motivations rather than religious scruples are clearly on display here. The remaining verses in this text provide further details of the dream and its aftermath. The emperor’s advisers encouraged him to establish peaceful relations with the holy man in his dream by sending an envoy to Hami, where the sage was believed to rule. A mission was sent to the West and, consequently, the delegation returned to China with a Muslim emissary by the name of Ko. The emperor was so impressed by Ko that he appointed him chief astronomer. Furthermore, he requested that 3,000 Arab horsemen be sent from Hami to live in China. Flaws in the story are obvious: the Prophet lived in Arabia, not Hami; Muslims did not occupy the office of chief astronomer until the Yuan-Ming period. Broomhall points out that the theme of an emperor’s dream prompting a visit by a foreign religious figure was probably borrowed from a similar story about the Han emperor Mingdi, who, it is said, in the year ad 64 also dreamt of a man in a turban, which resulted in the introduction of Buddhism to China.25 Another variation of the story of the emperor’s dream is told in a Chinese Muslim work of unknown authorship and provenance called the Xilai Zongpu (Record of the Arrival from the West).26 In this account, however, three delegates were sent by the Prophet to China, one of whom is called Wan Kousi in the Chinese text. This is likely a reference to the Prophet’s Companion, and maternal uncle, Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas. Wan Kousi was said to have made three trips to China from Arabia, and the Prophet is said to have appointed China to be his place of death.27 After the third voyage, he settled in Guangzhou where he is supposedly buried. An oral tradition collected in Ningxia province in 1979 repeats the story of the emperor’s dream. This account actually says that the sage of whom the emperor dreamt was a ‘Hui from the western regions’ where a ‘towel and water kettle are used to wash one’s body’.28 The earliest known written use of the term ‘Hui’ to describe Muslims dates to the thirteenth century, and the ablution implements mentioned are commonly used by Muslims in China who, during the winter months, must heat their ablution water in kettles; this is not the custom in Arabia or most Middle Eastern countries. According to this version, the emperor decided, rather arbitrarily, that he wanted to have Muslims in his empire, so an exchange of sixty Chinese youths for sixty Muslims was made.29 The leaders of the Muslim delegation were called Gens, Gais and Wan Gars. Of the original sixty men, only Wan Gars and twenty followers are said to have survived. At the emperor’s behest, Wan Gars and his men settled around Chang’an, married Chinese brides and became the progenitors of the Hui people in China.30 A similar oral tradition collected in far off Gansu in 1983 also says that in ‘the period of the Tang dynasty the men Gens, Gers and Wan Gars were sent by the sage Muhammad to China to propagate the religion of Islam’.31 This version says that Wan Gars was invited by the emperor to stay in the capital, and was permitted to proselytise.32 These and other oral transmissions from other regions all mention a figure whose name resembles Waqqas as the ancient forebear of the Hui. One of the more problematic traditional accounts is to be found in the Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu, the authoritative Chinese language biography of the Prophet, written by Liu Zhi. A passage on the introduction of Islam to China states: In the sixth year of Kai Huang of the Sui dynasty, which was the first year of the prophethood of Muhammad, there was seen in the sky a strange star. The Chinese Emperor Wen Ti commanded the Chief astronomer to divine its meaning, and he

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said that an extraordinary person had appeared in the West. The Emperor sent an envoy to investigate if this was really so, and after about a year he arrived in Mecca. He desired the Prophet to accompany him back to the East, but he declined. The Prophet sent Sa’d Wakkas and three others to go with the envoy to China. Muslims first entered China in the seventh year of Kai Huang of the Sui dynasty.33 Perhaps Liu Zhi was attempting to ‘correct’ his father’s version of events by using sources he considered more authoritative. Yet several aspects of this account are anachronistic and contrary to recorded history. First and foremost, the sixth year of the Sui dynasty (589–618) was 595, but Muhammad did not receive his first revelation until 610. Khan attempts to explain the chronological discrepancies by the difference between the Hijri and Chinese calendars, between which there is a rate of variability of about three years per century.34 It is furthermore unlikely that he sent any such delegation before the fall of the Sui in 618 because at this time his prophetic mission would only have been eight years old and still in its formative Meccan period. It was not until 628, the so-called ‘Year of the Missions’, that delegations were sent from Medina to the neighbouring states of Byzantium, Egypt, Persia and Yemen, calling their rulers to embrace Islam. It is improbable that an occasion of such importance as a mission to China would have been omitted from the hadith and prophetic biographies; it is similarly implausible that a visit by a Chinese imperial envoy would not have been mentioned.35 Liu Zhi’s account is undoubtedly apocryphal, though he may merely have adapted accounts found in earlier sources such as the Daming Dili (Great Ming Geography) of 1461.36 Almost all of these stories, whether found in mosque inscriptions, oral folklore or the writings of scholars such as Liu Sanjie and Liu Zhi have two details in common: Muhammad sent a delegation to China, which was led by a Companion with a name resembling Waqqas. But they contradict each other on his arrival date, some maintaining the impossible Sui dynasty date,37 as well his place of residence and burial. Of course, it is highly unlikely that Waqqas ever visited China, let alone died there.38 It is true that the Prophet did urge members of his community to travel the world, ‘even unto China’, and commanded them to spread the teachings of Islam in his final sermon in 632. Yet it is also unlikely that there was much proselytising on the part of the early Muslim settlers at all. As Chang reminds us: This new religion was brought to the Far East not by militant Arabs with swords on camelback, but by diplomats, scholars, merchants, scientists and artists, who held no ecclesiastical status. Their number was small and had little impact on the Chinese community, which was predominantly Confucianist. Islam as a religion was confined to the Arabs only because it was brought to China by the Arabs without any intention of gaining proselytes.39 These dubious Chinese Muslims traditions are clearly an attempt to glorify a forgotten past. Liu Sanjie wrote in the Huihui Yuanlai: Lest in years to come the future generations of Muslims should forget the origin of their religion and be unable to rediscover it, owing to the narrowness of their perceptions and the vulgarity of their expressions, it is here set down in fair style that it may be handed down to the latest ages and not be forgotten.40

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One cannot but note the unfortunate irony that this precious information being handed down to Chinese Muslim posterity was inaccurate; the history of which Liu Sanjie writes was lost long before he attempted its preservation – or was never known at all. Centuries after the putative arrival of their ancestors, Chinese Muslims, trying to make sense of their diverse heritage, attempted to reconstruct their origins. By claiming spiritual descent from Muhammad and genetic descent from one of his great Companions, Chinese Muslims linked themselves to a powerful mythical ancestry, from which they could derive legitimacy of place and identity. As Eliade has stated, ‘religious man wishes to be other than he is on the plane of his profane existence’, and this he achieves through myths.41 After a centuries-long process of Sinicisation, Chinese Muslims, by reimagining their origins in religiously evocative terms, hoped to ‘re-Islamise’ their profane existence in China by linking themselves to the Prophet and heartland of Islam. Liu Sanjie also wrote a treatise in which he redefined the very name by which Muslims in China were known. The term Huihui (or simply Hui) had been used to refer to Muslims since at least the Yuan period. Philologists commonly believe that the term derives from a Chinese transliteration of ‘Uyghur’, the ethnonym of the Islamised Turkic people living in the Central Asian borderlands adjacent to north-west China. Liu Sanjie, however, attempted to construct a more profound etymology based on the fact that the term is written using a reduplication of the Chinese character hui, which means ‘to return’: When the Pure and True [i.e. Islam] rectifies a man, and he obeys the True Lord’s plain command and follows the teaching of the Sage [Muhammad], then when the body returns to the Supreme Ultimate, his nature reverts to the mystery of the infinite . . . to . . . obtain the True Lord’s boundless reward – this is the meaning of what is called the ‘Double Return’ (Hui Hui).42 Liu Sanjie’s effort to reclaim and give new meaning to a slightly pejorative term reflects the increased confidence of his Chinese Muslim community in the Qing period. In a way, it also demonstrates how Muslim Sinicisation had evolved into a kind of Islamisation of conceptual space if not geographical territory. As such, it also anticipates present-day Muslim discourse in which many modern converts to Islam, invoking the doctrine of fiṭra (the belief that all beings are primordially and inherently submissive to Allah), prefer to be called ‘reverts’, indicating that they have not adopted a new or foreign religion, but have merely returned to their natural state.43

Islamic Resistance Besides this confident expression of Chinese Muslim simultaneity, conditions in the Qing period also gave rise to various other expressions of Islam and Muslim identity that were markedly less congenial to the prevailing Chinese social and political order. Unlike the isolationist Ming dynasty, which had virtually closed China’s international borders, the Qing Empire was intent on expansion. During the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1662–1722), the Qing assumed control of Inner Mongolia and invaded Xinjiang and Tibet. The conquest and annexation of Xinjiang was completed under the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–96) in the mid-eighteenth century.44 Qing expansionist policies had two important effects pertaining to Islam in China.

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First, by annexing Central Asian territory, the empire incorporated Muslim populations. Second, the newly drawn borders also permitted greater contact between Muslims in China proper and Muslims in the annexed territories and beyond. Both factors contributed to the growth and diversification of the overall Muslim population in Qing China, with lasting ramifications into the modern period. The annexation of Xinjiang (literally, ‘new frontier’) brought a number of new ethno-religious communities under Qing rule, chief among them the Uyghurs, a Turkic people with a long and proud history dating back to the pre-Tang period. The conquest of the powerful pre-Islamic Uyghur Khaganate in 848 scattered most of their population throughout what is now Xinjiang, in the various oases of the vast Taklamakan Desert. The spread of Islam among the Uyghurs, beginning around the tenth century was gradual, proceeding oasis by oasis, and was completed in the fifteenth century, with mass conversions of the eastern cities of Turfan and Ürümqi. In the seventeenth century, the Dzungar Empire had conquered most of northern Xinjiang. The Qing dynasty waged a protracted war against the Dzungars, whom they finally defeated in the mid-eighteenth century, bringing Xinjiang into their empire. This was followed by an influx of Chinese (Muslim and non-Muslim) settlers seeking economic opportunities in Xinjiang, which continues until today.45 The Qing annexation of Xinjiang thus set the stage for widespread ethnic, religious, social, economic and political conflict among local peoples and against the state. The Qing dynasty attempted to control Xinjiang first by installing regime-friendly local rulers; the Kangxi emperor installed an Uyghur chief in Hami in the early eighteenth century. After defeating the Dzungars, the Qianlong emperor tried to follow this example with disastrous results. He divided Xinjiang into four proxy states, which were resisted by the local Uyghurs. By the 1760s, much of Xinjiang was consumed in Uyghur rebellion. The imperial government had no choice but to impose an ongoing military occupation, which left the regime ill-prepared to deal with a rash of rebellions across China, throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sinicised Muslims in north-west China led some of these rebellions, for example in Gansu province in the 1780s. Hardly a unified ‘jihad’ against the Qing regime, this uprising began as a localised conflict between rival Muslim groups. As mentioned above, Qing expansion into Central Asia facilitated bidirectional traffic between China and the Muslim world, which had been nearly impossible during the Ming period. As a consequence, Sufi teachings made their way into north-western China. The communities that formed around Sufi leaders, who sought to spread their specific teachings as widely as possible among both Muslims and non-Muslims, often came into conflict with the imams of pre-existing Gedimu communities from which they hoped to attract converts. During the early eighteenth century, a saint of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, Afaq Khoja, came to Xining, Gansu, to disseminate his teachings and work miracles among the local Muslim population. He initiated a disciple called Ma Tai Baba, who opened a madrasa near Hezhou (present-day Linxia). He initiated his leading student, Ma Laichi (1673–1753), who in turn became a teacher. In 1728, Ma Laichi travelled through the Muslim world to perform the hajj in Mecca and acquired additional Islamic knowledge from various teachers during his voyage. Upon returning to China, Ma Laichi established his own mosque and madrasa in Hezhou, where he began transmitting

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Naqshbandi teachings. He emphasised the veneration of saints, visitation and prayer at their tombs and, most notably, a silent form of dhikr, the ritual remembrance and invocation of the names of Allah. Through his preaching and miracles, Ma Laichi gained a great following among the local Muslim and even non-Muslim population, and may thus be credited with a new wave of Islamisation (or Sufisation) in Gansu and Qinghai provinces. His lineage, or menhuan, continued hereditarily and his family amassed great wealth from followers’ donations. A generation later, another Gansu Muslim student, Ma Mingxin (1719–81), travelled to perform the hajj and subsequently remained in Arabia for sixteen years, studying under the Naqshbandi master ʿAbd al-Khaliq, who expounded a different set of devotional practices, including a more ecstatic, vocalised form of dhikr. Upon returning to China in 1761, Ma Mingxin began to disseminate these teachings, which also downplayed saint veneration and opposed the construction of elaborate mosques or tombs, as well as the accumulation of wealth by religious teachers from donations. Based on their practice of vocalised dhikr, Ma Mingxin’s menhuan came to be called the Jahriyya (literally, ‘loud’), and also gained a large following, from Gansu as far south as Yunnan province and as far east as Manchuria.46 Ma Mingxin’s group quickly came into conflict with the menhuan previously established by Ma Laichi, which came to be known as the Khafiyya (literally, ‘quiet’). The rival Naqshbandi sub-orders competed for followers, territory and influence. The Khafiyya described their doctrine as the ‘Old Teaching’ (Laojiao) in contrast to Ma Mingxin’s ‘New Teaching’ (Xinjiao), which they disparaged before the Qing authorities as a dangerous heterodox sect. As the conflict between rival menhuans grew increasingly hostile, local Chinese officials in Gansu became involved. The Jahriyya, feeling persecuted by the government, responded violently against both the Khafiyya and the imperial authorities, leading to rebellions in 1781 and 1783 that also prompted Qing military intervention.

Simultaneity, between Sinicisation and Islamisation This history of rebellions juxtaposed with the more conciliatory project of the Han Kitab has led some scholars to reduce Muslim interactions with Chinese culture and society to a simple ‘conflict or concord’ dichotomy. In fact, Muslim responses to the various pressures imposed on them by complex, dynamic historical circumstances in imperial China were diverse and nuanced. Rather than view Muslim attitudes and actions in terms of either rejection or accommodation of Chinese social and cultural norms, we might better understand these in terms of the survival-driven choice of diasporic, minority communities between assimilation into or differentiation from the Chinese majority.47 Along a spectrum ranging from extreme Sinicisation (to the point of apostasy) at one end to extreme Islamisation (or maintenance of a strong Islamic identity) at the other, Chinese–Muslim simultaneity represents the nuanced middle ground comprising many different degrees and varieties of ‘hyphenated’ identity (Figure 24.1). During the first millennium of their history in China, most Muslims acquiesced to assimilative pressures and inclined towards Sinicisation. Only after that process had progressed to the point of attrition did some Muslims attempt to stem the tide

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Figure 24.1 Sinicisation and Islamisation in China. and revive Islamic traditions in China, but by that time the revival itself had assumed a highly synthetic, or even syncretic, character in the Confucianised Han Kitab. Around the same time, in other parts of the country, a new influx of Islamic traditions (that is, Sufism) coming from the central Islamic lands, as well as the absorption of Islamised populations in annexed territories (for example, the Uyghurs), brought alternative versions of Islam into China, which sometimes clashed not only with the prevailing Chinese order in general, but specifically with the older, established Gedimu communities.

Sinicisation, Islamisation, Modernisation and Post-Socialist Postscript As China entered the modern era after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the circumstances set in place before the collapse of the imperial order gave Muslims a new range of options for the negotiation of communal and individual identity, from varying degrees of Sinicisation (accompanied by the rise of Chinese nationalism) to secularisation to Islamic revivalism. During the Republican period (1912–49), many Muslims embraced the modernising project of the New China and the promise of full inclusion as citizens by attaching their own identity to the national destiny. Some maintained their Muslim religious identity even as they struggled alongside their non-Muslim compatriots to build the nation. Others regarded Islam as the cultural background of their ancestors, but fully affirmed their identity as Chinese citizens and followed the trend towards secularisation. Still others took advantage of new freedoms to travel and revive connections with the global Muslim umma, performing the hajj and remaining in the Arab world, where they were exposed to modern Islamic (many of them Salafi) revival movements, such as Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose teachings they brought back with them to China. Like Islamists elsewhere, these returning pilgrims and students often portrayed the revivalist ideologies they propounded as the ‘true Islam’, free of dilutions or syncretic accretions, in contrast to various Sinicised versions: Gedimu, Huiru, or Sufi. The Salafisation of the Hui communities throughout China, but especially in the north-west and south-west, has continued through the twentieth century and progresses at a rapid pace today. This diversity and complexity persisted after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. The new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempted to establish

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its hegemony under a secular, Marxist model of modernity, which disdained religion as a vestige of feudalism. It imposed a Soviet-influenced system, which created fifty-six minzu (nationalities) out of the ethno-religious communities in China. Ten of the PRC’s shaoshu minzu (minority nationalities) are historically Muslim, the Hui and the Uyghur being the two largest.48 In principle, the Chinese Constitution guarantees certain religious rights, but according to Communist theory, religion, as part of the superstructure, is reduced to an aspect of culture, especially as it pertains to minority nationalities. Moreover, minority rights are inevitably subordinated to the state’s insistence on national unity, territorial integrity and society’s inexorable forward progress. Originally, the PRC expected citizens to voluntarily embrace revolutionary ideals and discard ‘backward’ beliefs and practices. But when these expectations failed to materialise, the CCP inaugurated the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), persecuting various religious followers, including Muslims as many mosques and religious schools were closed or destroyed. After a decade of denial of basic religious rights, conditions improved for China’s Muslims with the ‘Opening’ reforms of 1978. Over the past thirty or so years, as China has emerged as a world power, its citizens have benefitted in terms of increased economic and social opportunities. As the state has made good on certain constitutional guarantees, the PRC boasts of its solicitation of its Muslim citizens, especially in terms of mosque construction, the training of imams and the number of Chinese Muslims permitted to travel annually to Mecca for the hajj. These boons notwithstanding, not all of China’s Muslims are equally convinced of the CCP’s beneficence. Uyghur nationalism and self-determination, emergent in the early twentieth century, remain persistent problems for Beijing, which has branded many Uyghurs as separatists, extremists and terrorists. Most Uyghur ‘separatists’ are in fact secular, albeit culturally Muslim, but a small percentage do articulate their aims in explicitly religious, Islamist terms. Although most among the Hui population are content with the contemporary status quo, which affords them relatively ample rights, influence from revival movements elsewhere in the Muslim world has provided those who are suspect of the PRC’s position towards Islam and Muslims with an outlet for their feelings. Trying to maintain friendly relations with powerful, wealthy Muslim countries abroad, Beijing has allowed this influence to enter Hui communities through mosques and madrasas, inadvertently nourishing Muslim discontent at home. The influx of Saudi funding and Wahhabi missionaries in particular has introduced a distinctly Salafist trend to many Hui communities. For example, a noticeable shift in architectural design from traditional Chinese mosques built in the style of Buddhist temples to the ubiquitous green domes found on newly built mosques reflects a new wave of ‘Arabisation’, which reveals a subtle rift between some Muslims and the state. As Maris Gillette observes: Islam and Arabisation posed subtle threats to the Chinese government . . . in their capacity to provide [Hui] residents with an index of civilisation, a vision of modernisation, and the means for achieving civilisation and modernisation that differed from those the state provided and existed outside of the state’s purview.49

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In other words, the latest revisions of Chinese Islam, in a sort of wave of neo-Islamisation, presents a counter-hegemonic alternative to post-Socialist Chinese polity and culture, the future effects of which will demand our attention.

Notes 1. ‘Islamisation in China: A Country within a Country, Shadian, Yunnan’, Ming Pao, 18 January 2015, A1. 2. A version of the emperor’s dream, purportedly from a 1712 edition of the Liu Sanjie’s Huihui Yuanlai collected and translated by M. Devéria, is quoted in full in Marshall Broomhall, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (London: Morgan and Scott, Ltd, 1910; repr. London: Darf Publishers, 1987), pp. 61–6, and also in Donald Leslie, Islamic Literature in Chinese, Late Ming and Early Ch’ing: Books, Authors and Associates (Canberra: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1981), p. 74, and cited in Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), p. 205. Shujiang Li and Karl W. Luckert have also collected several oral versions of this story, reflecting minor variations, in Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, A Muslim Chinese People (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 237–43. 3. Hee-Soo Lee, ‘Islam in the Far East’, in Idris El Hareir and Ravane Mbaye (eds), The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture, vol. 3: The Spread of Islam Throughout the World (Paris: UNESCO, 2011), p. 761. 4. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22–49. 5. Jianping Wang, ‘Islam and Christianity in the Social Context of China’, in Dunhua Zhao (ed.), Dialogues of Philosophies, Religions and Civilizations in the Era of Globalization, Chinese Philosophical Studies XXV (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2007), p. 264. 6. S. Maqbul Ahmad, Arabic Classical Accounts of India and China (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1989), pp. 37–8. 7. Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999), p. 26. 8. Yokkaichi Yasuhiro, ‘Chinese and Muslim Diasporas and the Indian Ocean Trade Network under Mongol Hegemony’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2008), p. 79. 9. Arabinda Acharya, Rohan Gunaratna and Pengxin Wang, Ethnic Identity and National Conflict in China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 21. 10. Lee, ‘Islam in the Far East’, pp. 764–5. 11. Maria Jaschok and Jingjun Shui, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000), p. 75. 12. Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community, pp. 29–30. 13. Jonathan N. Lipman. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), p. 39. 14. See Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 15. On Li Zhi’s putative Muslim ancestry see, Mingshui Hong, ‘Mingmo wenhua lieshi Li Zhuowu de shengsi guan’ [The Late Ming Cultural Martyr Li Zhuowu on Life and Death], Donghai xuebao 39 (1988), pp. 43–62. 16. See Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad, pp. 39–43.

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17. The Han Kitab, which began as classical Chinese translations of Islamic texts, grew into an extremely diverse corpus that included works on scriptural commentaries (tafsīr), books on the life of the Prophet (sīra) and other religious figures, Islamic legal writings (fiqh), manuals on Muslim religious practice, philosophical and mystical treatises, and even philological, historical, geographical and astronomical works. See James D. Frankel, Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), p. 35. 18. It is difficult to ascertain the titles of the Islamic texts whose translations made up the earliest of the Han Kitab because the authors rarely cited or documented the original Arabic and/or Persian, and they were not always immediately recognisable in the Chinese translations. Sufi texts were definitely prominent among the sources and four became staples of the corpus: al-Razi’s Mirsad al-ʿIbad min al-Mabda ila’l-Maʿad; al-Nasafi’s Maqsad-i Aqsa; Jami’s Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿat and Lawaʾih fi Bayan Maʿani ʿIrfaniyya. Liu Zhi actually provided bibliographies for his the Tianfang Xingli and Tianfang Dianli with sixty-six distinct titles, which give us some insight into what the Huiru were reading and translating. See Donald Daniel Leslie and Mohamed Wassel, ‘Arabic and Persian Sources used by Liu Chih’, Central Asiatic Journal 26, nos 1–2 (1982), p. 78. 19. Sachiko Murata, ‘The Muslim Appropriation of Confucian Thought in Eighteenth-Century China’, Comparative Islamic Studies 7, nos 1–2 (2011), p. 14. 20. The term Gedimu is derived from a Chinese transliteration of the Arabic qadīm, meaning ‘ancient’, and refers to those Chinese Muslim communities that traced their origins back to foreign (Arab/Persian) ancestry and had undergone a long, gradual process of Sinicisation. These Sinophone communities were usually based around a local mosque in which the Hanafi Sunni form of Islam was taught and practised. Gedimu communities are often contrasted with versions of Chinese Islamic thought and practice that were introduced and developed later, for example, Huiru, Sufi and Salafi. 21. Liu Zhi, Tianfang dianli zeyao jie (repr. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Muslim Propagation Society, 1971), p. 211. 22. Ibid., p. 11. 23. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), p. 95. 24. Broomhall, Islam in China, p. 64. 25. Ibid., p. 68. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 69. 28. Li and Luckert, Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, p. 237. 29. According to a version cited by Broomhall, the number of Chinese and Muslims was 3,000 each (Islam in China, p. 67). 30. Li and Luckert, Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, p. 238. 31. Ibid., p. 242. 32. Ibid., p. 243. 33. Clyde-Ahmad Winters, Mao or Muhammad: Islam in the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong: Asian Research Services, 1979), p. 9. 34. M. Rafiq Khan, Islam in China, (Delhi: National Academy, 1963), p. 2. 35. Broomhall, Islam in China, p. 78. 36. Ibid., p. 75. 37. There is an inscription at the supposed tomb of Waqqas, dated 1816, which puts his arrival at 587. Another inscription at the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou unequivocally asserts the Sui date (Broomhall, Islam in China, p. 70). 38. Saʿd b. Abi Waqqas is counted among the great Companions of the Prophet, one of the ten to whom he gave the good news that they were destined for paradise. He entered Islam

512

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

islamisation when he was seventeen. He fought in the Battle of Badr in 624 and participated in the conquest of Iraq and parts of Persia. He served as governor of Kufa under the caliphate of ʿUmar. He later returned to the outskirts of Medina where he died. See Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, The Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, ed. and trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Abu Dhabi: Modern Printing Press, 1991), p. 1092. Hajji Yusuf Chang, ‘The Hui (Muslim) Minority in China: An Historical Overview’, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 8, no. 1 (1987), p. 63. Broomhall, Islam in China, pp. 64–5. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 100. Liu Sanjie, Qingzhen Jiaoshuo (Explanation of the Pure and True), cited in Broomhall, Islam in China, p. 305. See, for example, Michael Muhammad Knight, ‘Converts and Conversions’, in Julianne Hammer and Omid Safi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 83; Anne Sofie Roald, New Muslims in the European Context: The Experience of Scandinavian Converts (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 86–7; Karin Van Niewkerk, ‘“Conversion” to Islam and Construction of a Pious Self’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 668–9. On the Qing conquest, occupation and administration of Xinjiang, see James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 97–115, and Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 7–18. James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 114–17. Lipman, Familiar Strangers, p. 76. See Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community, p. 31. Hui, Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Uzbek, Tatar, Salar, Bonan, Dongxiang and Tajik. Maris Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 235–6.

Bibliography Acharya, Arabinda, Rohan Gunaratna and Pengxin Wang, Ethnic Identity and National Conflict in China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Ahmad, S. Maqbul, Arabic Classical Accounts of India and China (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1989). Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, The Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, ed. and trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Abu Dhabi: Modern Printing Press, 1991). Anon., ‘Islamization in China: A Country within a Country, Shadian, Yunnan’, Ming Pao, 18 January 2015, A1. Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005). Broomhall, Marshall, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (London: Morgan and Scott, Ltd, 1910; repr. London: Darf Publishers, 1987). Chang, Hajji Yusuf, ‘Chinese Muslim Mobility in Sung-Liao-Chin Period’, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 5, no.1 (1984), pp. 167–80. Chang, Hajji Yusuf, ‘The Hui (Muslim) Minority in China: An Historical Overview’, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 8, no. 1 (1987), pp. 62–78. Dillon, Michael, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999).

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Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). Frankel, James D., Rectifying God’s Name: Liu Zhi’s Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). Gillette, Maris, Between Mecca and Beijing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Hareir, Idris El, and Ravane Mbaye (eds), The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture, vol. 3: The Spread of Islam Throughout the World (Paris: UNESCO, 2011). Hong, Mingshui, ‘Mingmo wenhua lieshi Li Zhuowu de shengsi guan’ [The Late Ming Cultural Martyr Li Zhuowu on Life and Death], Donghai xuebao 39 (1988), pp. 43–62. Huntington, Samuel P., ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22–49. Jaschok, Maria, and Jingjun Shui, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000). Khan, M. Rafiq, Islam in China (Delhi: National Academy, 1963). Kim, Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Knight, Michael Muhammad, ‘Converts and Conversions’, in Julianne Hammer and Omid Safi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 83–97. Lee, Hee-Soo, ‘Islam in the Far East’, in Idris El Hareir and Ravane Mbaye (eds), The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture, vol. 3: The Spread of Islam Throughout the World (Paris: UNESCO, 2011), pp. 759–83. Leslie, Donald, Islamic Literature in Chinese, Late Ming and Early Ch’ing: Books, Authors and Associates (Canberra: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1981). Leslie, Donald Daniel, and Mohamed Wassel, ‘Arabic and Persian Sources used by Liu Chih’, Central Asiatic Journal 26, nos 1–2 (1982), pp. 78–104. Levathes, Louise, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Li, Shujiang, and Karl W. Luckert, Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, A Muslim Chinese People (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Lipman, Jonathan N., Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Liu, Zhi, Tianfang dianli zeyao jie (repr. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Muslim Propagation Society, 1971). Millward, James A., Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Millward, James A., Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Murata, Sachiko, ‘The Muslim Appropriation of Confucian Thought in Eighteenth-Century China’, Comparative Islamic Studies 7, nos 1–2 (2011), pp. 13–22. Roald, Anne Sofie, New Muslims in the European Context: The Experience of Scandinavian Converts (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Van Niewkerk, Karin, ‘“Conversion” to Islam and Construction of a Pious Self’, in Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 667–86. Wang, Jianping, ‘Islam and Christianity in the Social Context of China’, in Dunhua Zhao (ed.), Dialogues of Philosophies, Religions and Civilizations in the Era of Globalization, Chinese Philosophical Studies XXV (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2007), pp. 261–78. Winters, Clyde-Ahmad, Mao or Muhammad: Islam in the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong: Asian Research Services, 1979).

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Yokkaichi, Yasuhiro, ‘Chinese and Muslim Diasporas and the Indian Ocean Trade Network under Mongol Hegemony’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2008), pp. 73–102. Zhao, Dunhua (ed.), Dialogues of Philosophies, Religions and Civilizations in the Era of Globalization, Chinese Philosophical Studies XXV (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2007).

INDEX

Note: f indicates figure, n indicates endnote, t indicates table

Abadir, Shaykh, 251 Abaqa, Ilkhan, 356, 358, 362 Abbasids, 5, 6, 107, 194, 496 ʿAbd al-Khaliq, 507 ʿAbd al-Malik b. ʿAttash, 321 ʿAbd al-Malik b. Habib: Taʾrikh, 203 ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwan, Caliph, 108, 227 ʿAbd al-Rahman I, amir of Cordoba, 200 ʿAbd al-Rahman II, amir of Cordoba, 200 ʿAbd al-Rahman III, amir (later caliph) of Cordoba, 199, 201, 204 ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani, 120 Musannaf, 128, 129 ʿAbdallah b. ʿAmir, 110, 111 ʿAbdallah b. Selam, 302 al-ʿAbdi, Makhraba (Mudrik b. Khut), 86 Abdulfattah, Kamal, 159, 171 Abesh Khatun, 362 Abrun the Turk, 105–7, 108 Abu Hanifa, imam, 306 Abu Nuʿaym: Hilyat al-Awliya’, 127 Abu Qurra, Caliph, 194 Abu Saʿid, Ilkhan, 359, 361 Abu Talep, 482 Abu Yazid, 256 Abyssinia see Ethiopia acculturation, 26, 118–30 religious code-switching, 121–30 Acién Almansa, Manuel, 204 ʿAdal sultanate, 230 Adam, Pate, 423 Adilangu II, Pangeran, 425 Afaq Khoja, 506 ʿAfif, Shams-i Siraj, 384–5 al-Aflaki al-Arifi, Shams al-Din Ahmed, 141, 145 Afonso, Dom, of Kongo, 24, 29, 33

Africa ethnography, 9 Pentecostalism, 93 religions, 8 subdivisions, 245f see also Ethiopia; Ghana; Horn of Africa; Ifriqiya; Kongo; North Africa; Nubia; Sahel, Western; sub-Saharan Africa; West Africa agriculture, 76, 260 Agung, Sultan of Mataram, 27 Ahmad b. Hanbal, 126–7 Ahmad b. Ibrahim, 231, 232, 237 Ahmed Gragn see al-Ghazi, Ahmad b. Ibrahim Aisha Khatun, 363 Akbar, Emperor, 38, 385 Aksum, 223, 228, 247 ʿAlaʾ al-Din Bahman Shah see Hasan Gangu (Zafar Khan) ʿAlaʾ al-Din Kayqubad I, Sultan, 140, 141 al-ʿAlaʾ b. al-Hadhrami, 86 Alam, Muzaffar, 395 Albania/Albanians, 286, 287 Alexandria Patriarchate, 228 Algeria: Tahart, 194, 195, 254 Ali, Abdul Mukti, 448, 456 ʿAli b. Abi Talib, 401, 475, 476, 484 ʿAli b. Yahya b. al-Munajjim, 56 Ali, Mustafa, 280, 282 Almoravids, 257, 259 Altun Aba, Shams al-Din, amir, 139–40, 142, 144, 147 Amde Siyon, Emperor of Ethiopia, 229, 230 Amin, Samir, 204 Amitai, Reuven, 31, 336, 338, 355 Ampel, Sunan, 426 Ananda (grandson of Khubilai Khan), 356, 360

515

516

islamisation

Anas b. Malik, 125 Anatolia, 134–48 Aksaray, 142 Ankara, 140–1 Cappadocia, 142 conversion process, 298, 299 Islamic institutions, 137–42; madrasas, 138–41, 142, 143 Kayseri, 140, 142 Konya, 141–4, 145, 147 languages, 144 population, 142, 148 Sagalassos, 137 Sivas, 140, 141 Tanzimat reforms, 72 Turkicisation, 3–4, 134, 136–7 see also Rum al-Andalus, 199–207 Arabisation, 200, 201, 202 archaeology, 204–5 architecture, 205 Berber rebellion, 194 blasphemy, 201 burial practices, 205 Christians, 199, 201, 202–3 converts, 5 ‘Copper City’ legend, 203 Cordoba, 200–1 court culture, 200–1, 202 dhimmīs, 200 intellectual life, 203 Jews, 202 jurisprudence, 200, 201 legacy, 206–7 literary sources, 205–6 Madinat al-Zahra, 201 Muslim conquest, 200 rebellions, 201, 204 tribalism, 203–4 as a tributary society, 204 anthroplogy, 45n75 Anushirvan, 472, 474, 475, 484 apostasy, 88, 89, 90, 120–1, 123–4, 142 Arab, Molla, 300 Arabia conversion, 83–93; as an event, 84–9; models of, 93; as a process, 83, 89–92; sources, 83–4 Hijaz, 92 Hudaybiyya, 111 Mecca, 33, 483 Medina, 91 non-Muslims, 85 polytheism, 85, 87 population, 84 Arabian Sea, 231

Arabic Anatolia, 141 and Arabisation, 4 and Judaism, 5 Quran in, 90 and religious identity, 118–19 Southern Levant, 157 Arabisation, 3, 4, 7 al-Andalus, 201, 202 Chinese mosques, 509 Southern Levant, 156–8 Arabs and Berbers, 190, 192 expansion into North Africa and Spain, 191f Nubia, 224 Aram Shah, 398 Aramaic, 157, 158 archaeology, 7 Africa, 9 Anatolia, 137–8 al-Andalus, 204–5 Eritrea, 247 Ethiopia, 223, 247, 249–53, 260 Mao, 257–60 nomads, 254, 256–7 Red Sea Coast, 247–9 Somalia, 254 Somaliland, 254 sub-Saharan Africa, 244–62 architecture, 7 al-Andalus, 205 Gaza, 172 Mali, 256 Persianate, 396 Sasanian, 402 Ardeshir I, King, 104 Arghun Khan, 359 Arïq Böke, 355, 362 Armenian language, 137, 141 Arnold, T. W.: The Preaching of Islam, 5, 322, 379 Arps, Ben, 456, 459 Arya Cerbon, Pangeran, 427 Arya Damar, 426 Asad, Talal, 478 Ascalon, 169f, 172 Asfaw, Aklilu, 225 al-Ashʿari family, 107 al-Ashraf Khalil b. Qalawun, Sultan, 165 Asia see Central Asia; South Asia; Southeast Asia; West Asia Aspebetos (Peter), 88 Assman, Jan, 26 Astarabadi, ʿAziz b. Ardashir, 144 Athanasius of Alexandria, 83 Awdaghust, 254

index Axial Age, 25, 35 al-Aydarus, Abu Bakr b. ʿAbdallah, Shaykh, 261 Ayyubids, 159, 162 Azfar Moin, Ahmed, 33, 37–8 al-Azmeh, Aziz, 83, 87, 88 Baba Farid, 72, 384, 385, 386 Baccot, Julliet, 482 Badakhshan Buddhism, 325 Hudud al-’Alam, 325 Ismailism, 201, 317–28 Shiites, 317 Badio, S., 428 Baeda Maryam I, Emperor of Ethiopia, 231 Bahaʾ al-Din, 403 Bahman b. Isfandiyar, 402, 403 Baidu, 355, 363 Bakchos the Younger, 123–5, 128 Bakharzi, Sayf al-Din, 356–7 Bakharzi, Yahya Abu al-Mafakhir al-Din, 357 al-Bakri, Abu ʿUbayd ʿAbdallah, 27, 256 al-Baladhuri, Ahmad b. Yahya, 224 Ansab al-Ashraf, 103, 104 Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, 192 Balivet, Michel, 136 Balkans, 6, 278, 284 Banakati, 357 Banu Wafa’ (later Husayni) family, 161 Bar Hebraeus, 358, 363 Barbier, Père, 389 Barceló, Miquel, 203–4 Barros, João de: Decades da Asia, 432–3 Bartol’d, Vasilii Vladimirovich, 336, 337 Batinism, 202 Battle of Artlakh (751), 496 Battle of ‘Ayn Jalut (1260), 159, 164 Battle of Çaldıran (1514), 284 Battle of Manzikert (1071), 134 Battle of Milvian Bridge (312), 28 Battle of Mohács (1526), 278 Battle of Siffin (657), 194 Bauer, Thomas, 93 Baybars, Sultan, 159, 161, 164, 178nn48, 49 Bedouins, 164, 165, 169f, 178nn48, 49 Beira, Fr J. de, 44n68 Bel, Alfred: La Religion musulmane en Berbérie, 190 Belgian Congo: Suku culture, 47n98 Bengal, 9, 36, 247, 380, 382–4, 388–9 Berbers, 185–95, 204 acceptance of Islam, 195, 261 and Arabs, 190, 192 Baranis, 192 Butr, 192

517

enslavement, 192, 193 Essuk/Tadmekka, 256 identity, 189–90 Kharijite, 195 Mafakhir al-Barbar, 195 revolts, 193, 194 and Sufism, 190 Berg, C., 429 Berke Khan, 42n35, 354–5, 356–7 Bethlehem, 228 Bhuvanekabahu VII of Kotte, 45n74 Bible Hebrew, 60 New Testament, 455; Gospels, 59, 61–2, 64, 66 Old Testament, 29; Ethiopia in, 223–4; Isaiah, 61; Psalms, 61 and the Quran, 227 Southern Levant, 157, 158 Bilad al-Sham, 163f, 167 Bilal b. Rabah, 247 biographical dictionaries, 6, 136, 144 al-Biruni, Abu Rayhan, 388 Bitlisi, Idris, 280 Bogomils, 279 Boivin, Michel, 485n7 Bosnia, 277–87 Bogomils, 279 Christians, 284, 285 devşirme, 280–1, 283–4, 285, 286 economy, 278 Franciscans, 279 Poturnaks, 282–5, 286, 287 Sarajevo, 278, 286–7 Sufi brotherhoods, 279 taxation, 278 urbanisation, 278–9 Braginsky, Vladimir, 444, 484 Brahmans, 36 India, 380, 382 Vietnam, 474–5, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480 Braude, Benjamin, 281 Brawijaya, Prabu, 426, 427, 431 Brett, Michael, 160 Brunschvig, Robert, 67 Buddhism Badakhshan, 325 China, 356 and conversion, 34 expansion of, 32 Mahayana, 35–6 Mongols, 358, 359, 361, 362 Qarakhitai, 365n2 Sindh, 8 Theravada, 36 Bulgaria, 136, 287

518

islamisation

Bulghars, 156 Bulliet, Richard, 6, 7, 24, 84, 202, 297, 386 Bulughan Khatun, 363 Bungsu, Radja, 42n38 Burak, Guy, 304–5 Burhan al-Din Ahmad, 144 Burke, Peter, 121–2 Burton, Richard, 251 Byzantines, 134, 192 Caballero, Luis, 205 Cakobau of Fiji, 29 Cambodia Akhar Thrah texts, 479, 480, 481–2 Chumnik, 483 Jawisation, 474, 480 Kan Imam San group, 480, 481, 484 Shiism, 484 Canfield, Robert, 323 caravanserais, 140, 147 Carlson, Thomas, 7 Carthage, 192 Çelebi, Fıraki Abdurrahman (attrib.): Kırk Suʾal, 302 Cemali, Zenbilli ʿAli, 300 cemeteries al-Andalus, 205 Gao, 259, 260 Central Asia conversion process, 23, 35, 36, 336–48 Mongol era, 340 Qarachuq, 342, 343, 344 Syr Darya valley, 339 Cevahirü’l-İslam, 297 Chabui (wife of Khubilai Khan), 362 Champa, 435, 477, 479 Chandar Bhan Brahman, 396 Chang, Hajji Yusuf, 504 children, 359–60 education, 123, 126, 298, 305, 361 Mongol, 357–8 China, 495–510 Buddhism, 356 Chang’an (Xi’an), 496 Confucianism, 9, 37, 501, 502 conversion process, 356 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 509 Gedimu communities, 501, 506, 508 Great Wall, 499 Han Kitab, 9, 501, 502, 507, 508 Huang Chao rebellion (878), 497 Hui people, 503, 505, 508, 509 Huiru (Muslim Confucians), 501, 502 Islam, 495–500, 502–5

Islamic education, 500–1; madrasas, 506, 509 Manchus, 502 Ming dynasty, 498–500 Mongols, 498 mosques, 498, 506, 509, 511n20 Qing dynasty, 502, 505–6 Quanzhou, 498 rebellions, 434, 505–7 religious freedom, 495 Sinicisation, 497, 498–500 Song dynasty, 497 Sufism, 506, 508 Sui dynasty, 504 Tang Empire, 495–7 trade, 421, 496, 498 Xi’an see Chang’an Xilai Zongpu (Record of the Arrival from the West), 503 Xinjiang annexation, 505, 506 Yuan dynasty, 498 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 508–9 Chinggis Khan, 359 Chinggisids, 359, 361–2, 364 Christendom, 38 Christianity Arab conversion to, 88, 93 Constantine and, 28 Ethiopia, 237 Mongols, 358–9 Nubia, 224–5 Pentecostalism, 93 Puritans, 74 religious code-switching, 122–5 Scandinavians’ conversion to, 84, 87, 322–3 Christians Anatolia, 136, 138, 143 al-Andalus, 199, 200, 201, 202–3 Balkans, 6, 284, 285 belief in Christ, 59 Bengal, 389 conversion to Islam, 4–7, 67, 139, 144–5, 229, 280, 284, 287; Ethiopia, 223, 224, 225, 231, 232 and futuwwa, 145–6 Gaza, 167, 171 and interreligious marriage, 128–9 Iran, 362 and Joseph story, 453–5 language of faith, 118–19 Mongol era, 360 Oman, 89–90 Ottoman Empire, 298 Quranic knowledge, 126 Southern Levant, 157, 158, 160, 161–2

index Syria, 7 and waqfs, 140 see also Nestorians; Puritans churches al-Andalus, 205 Cappadocia, 142 Constantinople, 362 Ethiopia, 232 Gaza, 167 Jerusalem, 228 made into mosques, 139 Rome, 28 and waqfs, 146 Clovis, king of the Franks, 29 Cohen, Amnon, 159 coins Almoravid, 259 Anatolia, 137 Chinese, 440n72 Constantinople, 28 Essuk/Tadmekka, 256 Harlaa, 253 pagan symbolism, 28 Conde, Fr João de Vila do, 45n74 confessionalisation, 8 Constantine, Emperor, 28, 29 Constantinople, 134, 362 ‘Constitution of Medina’, 91 convents, 235 conversion Christian attitude to, 56–7, 379 and incorporation, 32 language of, 119–20 narratives of, 8, 298 and rulers, 21, 22–5, 33, 34 in scholarship, 4–9 usage of term, 3, 4, 379 see also acculturation conversion chronicles, 26–30 Central Asian, 31 Fijian, 29 Malay, 23, 26, 27, 38 miraculous acts of, 27, 31 Qïrghïz, 31 Russian, 29 West African, 27, 33 Coptic language, 3 Crane, Howard, 140 Croatia see Klis Crone, Patricia, 204, 317 Crusaders, 7 Crusades see Shepherds’ Crusade Cu Cu (Jinbun), 425, 427, 430, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436 Cuçuf, Pate, 423, 434

519

cults: pre-Islamic, 24, 32, 33–4, 87–8 Cyril of Scythopolis, 88 Dabashi, Hamid: The World of Persian Literary Humanism, 395 Dahlak Islands, 227, 248 Muslim tombstone, 247–8, 249f Dalai Lama, 45n77 Darrab, Amirah, 321 Datu Kahfi, Syeh, 427 Daʾud, Sultan, 139 David, King, 60 al-Dawla, Rashid, 361 Day, Anthony, 446 Despina Khatun, 362, 363 DeWeese, Devin, 27, 28, 31, 32, 357 Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde, 4, 8 Dharma, Po, 482 dhimmīs, 6, 7, 141–2, 158, 192, 200 divorce, 128, 129, 130 Djajadiningrat, H., 429 DNA analysis, 137 Doquz Khatun, 362 Dulafi, ʿUmar, 107 Dulafids, 107 Dunamma, King, 34 Dunya Khatun, 363 Durand, E. M., 472, 476 Dzungar Empire, 506 Eaton, Richard, 7, 24, 34, 36, 37, 72, 76, 109, 247, 323, 393, 396 Efendi, Birgivi Mehmed: Vasiyetname (Risale-i Birgivi), 299, 301 Efendi, Ebussud, 300, 301 Efendi, Sarı Gürz Hamza, 300 Egypt Arab conquest, 83 conversion process, 5, 6, 7 Coptic Church, 229 demography, 160 language, 3 madrasas, 138 Ottoman conquest, 231 Sufism, 161 waqfs, 146 Eleni, Queen of Ethiopia, 231 Eliade, Mircea, 502, 505 Elias of Damascus, 122–3, 128 elites Arab, 84–5 and conversion, 36 Icelandic, 87 and iconoclasm, 33

520

islamisation

elites (cont.) Mamluk, 160 Mongol, 36 Ottoman, 281, 283 Persianate, 396 Samanid, 324 Ellenblum, Ronnie, 157, 158 emigration, 91, 161–2 emirates, 231, 233 English language, 205 Epalza, Mikel de, 202 Eritrea, 227, 247 Ethiopia, 223–37 Addis Ababa, 235 ʿAfar people, 254 Amhara people, 229, 232, 233, 235 archaeology, 223, 247–53 Argobba people, 225, 227, 251 Berbera, 231, 249 Christianity, 223, 224, 225, 229, 231, 232, 237 Church, 236 feudalism, 233, 237 Franks, 233 geography, 223 Gondar, 232, 235 Harar, 249, 250f, 251–2, 260–1; shrine of Amir Nur, 261f Harlaa, 251–3 Islam, 224–30, 235; resistance to, 231–3 isolationism, 232–3, 237 Kebra Negast, 224, 225, 227 Lalibela, 228 languages, 223 religious discrimination, 233 Solomonic dynasty, 229–30 Tigray, 228, 229, 232, 236 trade, 227–8, 233, 237, 252–3 tribalism, 224 warfare, 260–1 Zagwe dynasty, 228–9 Zailaʿ, 228, 230, 231, 232, 249–50 zawiyas, 235 see also Aksum Euthymius, 88 Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar, Shaykh see Baba Farid Faridun, King, 401 Fasilidas, Emperor of Ethiopia, 232 Fatimids, 5, 224, 228 Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., 248–9 Fazlullah, Rashiduddin: Jami al-Tawarikh, 48n111 Feridun Beg: Mecmuʿa-yı Münşeat ül-Selâtin, 282, 284

Fiji, 29 Fine, John V. A., Jr, 279 Firdawsi: Shahnama, 356, 395–6, 397, 398, 405f, 406f, 407f, 408f, 409f, 410f, 411f Firuz Tughluq, Sultan, 385 Fisher, H. J., 24, 246 Flood, Finbarr, 396 Floris, Peter (Pieter Willemsz van Elbinck), 447 Fowden, Elizabeth, 93 Francis of Assisi, St, 45n74 Franciscans, 279 Franks, 156, 158, 159, 233 French language, 205 Frenkel, Yehoshua, 161 Furati, Mevla (attrib.): Kırk Suʾal, 302 futuwwa, 145–6, 147 Galawdewos, Emperor of Ethiopia, 232 Galland, Antoine, 307 Gama, Vasco da, 231 Ganges River, 383 García Sanjuán, Alejandro, 204, 207 Gaspar de Lisboa, 45n74 Gaza, 162–71 battles, 162, 164 Bedouins, 164, 165 Christians, 167 countryside near, 168–71 al-Halabi on, 164 Ibn Battuta on, 165 Jews, 167 Mamluk-era inscriptions, 166–7 mosques, 165, 166, 167f, 172, 179n60 port, 172 al-’Umari on, 164, 165, 171 Yakut on, 162 Geikhatu, Ilkhan, 359, 361, 362, 363 genealogy, 70, 400 George I, Catholicos, 89, 90 George Tupou, King of Tonga, 34 Georgia, 37, 47n102 Ghana Kano Chronicle, 27, 30 Kitab Ghonja, 27 al-Ghassani, ‘Abd al-Masih al-Najrani, 127 al-Ghawri, al-Ashraf Qanṣuh, Sultan, 179n60 Ghazan Khan, 23, 27, 43n48, 45n70, 355, 357, 359, 361 al-Ghazi, Ahmad b. Ibrahim, Imam (Gragn), 231–2, 261 Ghiyath al-Din Balban see Ulugh Khan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I, 141 Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq, Sultan, 385 Ghosh, Mkhitar, 146 Ghurids, 400 Gibson, Thomas, 38

index Gillette, Maris, 509 Giri, Sunan, 426–7, 434, 435 Glick, Thomas F., 205 On G’nur Ban, 481 Golden Horde, 8, 355 Gonzaga, Francesco, 45n74 Graaf, H. J. de, 1, 428 graffiti, 92 graves, 3, 435 Greek language, 141, 158 Greeks, 136 Green, Nile, 33 Güchlüg, 363 Guernier, Eugène: La Berbérie, l’Islam et la France, 189 Guichard, Pierre, 203–4 Gunung Jati, Sunan, 425, 428, 432, 433 Hadiwijaya, Sultan of Pajang, 440n69 Hafsunids, 201 hagiographies Bengali, 383 Christian, 122–5 Yasavi, 342, 344 al-Hajj ʿIsa b. Mahmud, 143 al-Hakam II, Caliph, 202 Halevi, Leor, 3 al-Hamadhani, Ahmad b. Muhammad b. al-Faqih, 104 Hamawi, Sadr al-Din, 357 Hamzah, Amir, 475, 476, 484 Hanafism, 200, 296, 304–5 Hanafiyyah, Muhammad Ali, 475, 476, 484 Hanaway, William, 394 Hanoka, Mimi, 111 Haour, Anne, 23 Haroun, Mat Sales (Muhammad Salih Kemboja), 481 Hasan IX, Sultan of the Maldives, 47n102 Hasan b. al-Nuʿman, 193 Hasan Gangu (Zafar Khan), 402 Hasan-i Sabbah, 321, 326 Hassan b. ‘Atiyya, 127 Hassen, Mohammed, 235 Hawaii, 32 Haydar, Mirza Muhammad: Tarikh-i Rashidi, 363 Hazarahs, 323 Hazini, Shaykh, 342 Cevahirü’l- Ebrar, 342 Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, 342–3 Herzegovina, 282, 284, 285 Heywood, Colin, 277 Hillenbrand, Carole, 139, 143 Himyarites, 85 Hindu Kush, 323

521

Hirsch, B., 249 Horton, R. H., 8, 246 Hu Dengzhou, 500 Hülegü Khan, 355, 358, 362 Hunayn b. Ishaq, 56–7, 59, 62, 65, 67 Hungarians, 277, 278, 353 Husayni family see Banu Wafa’ (later Husayni) family Husen, Raden, 426, 427 Hütteroth, Wolf-Dieter, 159, 171 Ibadites, 194, 195, 256 Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, 191f Ibn al-ʿAs, ʿAmr, 86 Ibn al-Athir, 142 Ibn al-Faqih: Kitab al-Buldan, 106, 108 Ibn al-Fuwati, 144 Ibn al-Munajjim, 56 Ibn ‘Arabi, 38, 141 Ibn Battuta, 145, 165 Ibn Bibi, 140–1 Ibn Hafsun, 204 Ibn Hawqal, 199, 325 Ibn Hawshab ‘Mansur al-Yaman’, 320 Ibn Hisham: Sirat Rasul Allah, 227 Ibn ‘Idhari, 192 Ibn Khaldun, 190, 192–3, 225 Kitab al-ʿIbar, 195 Muqaddima, 195 Ibn Masarra, 201–2 Ibn Mi’mar, 145 Ibn Rustam, imam, 194 Ibn Sa’d, 86–7 Ibn Shaddad: al-Aʿlaq al-Khatira, 164 Ibn Taghri Birdi, Jamal al-Din Abu al-Mahasin Yusuf: al-Nujum al-Zahira fi Muluk Misr wa’l-Qahira, 179n53 Ibn Ziyad, Ibrahim, 227 Iceland: conversion to Christianity, 87 iconoclasm, 32–4, 39 al-Idrisi, 228 Idrisids, 195 Ifat sultanate, 230 Ifriqiya, 193, 194, 195, 201 Ilkhanids, 355–6, 357–63, 396 Iltutmish, Shams al-Din, Sultan, 398–9 Imber, Colin, 282 Imbert, Frédéric, 92 immanentism, 25, 30–1, 32–3, 34, 36, 38, 136 India ancient, 380 Ayodhya, 109 Bahmani Sultanate, 401, 402 Baudhayana-Dharmasutra, 380, 382, 388 Brahmans, 380, 382 caste system, 380–1, 382

522

islamisation

India (cont.) Census of India (1931), 380, 382 Dawlatabad, 401, 402 Deccan Sultanate, 396 Delhi, 399, 400, 404 Delhi Sultanate, 384–5, 393, 402–4 frontier regions, 323 Hindu culture, 35, 36, 37, 379, 380, 382, 383, 384, 385, 388; see also Brahmans Hindu nationalists, 109 missionaries, 379–82, 383 non-Muslims, 6 Persianate culture, 393–4, 402–4 Saka era, 488n56 Sindh, 8, 16n36, 485n7 temple destruction, 109 see also Bengal; Lahore; Punjab Indonesia conversion process, 445 Joseph story, 446–7, 448 Sasak people, 475–6 Wetu Telu group, 475 inscriptions, 3 al-Andalus, 258–9 Essuk/Tadmekka, 256 Gao, 260 Gorongobo, 259f Mamluk, 166–7 Insoll, Timothy, 7, 33–4 Iran Bam, 110, 111 conversion process, 6 culture, 4, 76–7 Darabjird, 104, 105 Fars, 89, 104, 107 Furdujan, 105–7, 108 Gilan, 107 Jur (Firuzabad), 104 Kariyan, 104–5 Khurasan, 107 kingship, 3 Kirman, 111–12 languages, 3 Mongol, 355, 356, 359 personal names, 69, 71, 75 Qazwin, 107 Qom, 106, 107–8 Rayy, 107 Shiites, 16n40 Sistan, 103–4, 105 Zoroastrians, 353; fire temples, 102–12 Iranshah b. Abi al-Khayr: Bahmannama, 402 Iraq Baghdad, 145 Bible, 157 conversion process, 6, 7 Umayyads, 194

‘Isami, ‘Abd al-Malik: Futuh al-Salatin, 402–4 Ishoʿyahb III, Catholicos, 89, 90 Islamisation phases of, 9 usage of term, 3–4, 94n5, 473 Ismailis, Badakhshan, 201, 317–28 daʿwa (summons), 319, 320, 321, 324–5 frameworks of study, 321–4 identity, 327 sources of study, 319–21 Israyel, Bishop, 46n87 Iyasu I, Emperor of Ethiopia, 235 Iyasu II, Emperor of Ethiopia, 235 İzniki, Kutbeddin: Mukaddime, 299 ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I, Sultan, 140, 141 Jaffa, 172 al-Jahiz, Amr b. Bahr: Kitab al-Hayawan, 104 Jalal al-Din Muhammad, Sultan of Bengal, 37, 47n102 Jamshid, King, 396–7 janissaries, 280, 283, 284, 285 The Laws of the Janissaries, 280, 281–2 Japan, 22, 40n3 Jaspan, M. A., 481, 482 al-Jassas al-Razi: Mukhtasar Ikhtilaf al-ʿUlamaʾ, 127 Java, 419–36, 421f Amir Hamza story, 475 Batavia, 451 Bintara, 426 Cirebon, 423, 425, 427, 432, 433 Demak, 419, 422–3, 424, 425, 428, 430, 432, 433, 436 Giri, 423 Gresik, 423, 434–6 Joseph stories, 446, 447, 449–53, 452f, 455–60 Majapahit, 427, 431, 432, 434, 435, 436 Mataram, 425, 429, 430–1 Mula Ning Manusa (The Origin of Man), 476 smuggling, 440n72 sources: Babad Demak, 429; Babad Tanah Jawi, 27, 425–7, 428–9, 430–1, 434; Hikayat Hasanuddin, 429–30, 431–2, 433; The History of Java (Raffles), 423–4, 430, 432, 434, 435; ‘The Malay Annals of Semarang and Cirebon’, 436n4; new interpretation of, 430–4; Purwaka Caruban Nagari, 427–8, 430, 431, 432, 433; reliability of, 428–30; Suma Oriental (Pires), 422–3, 429, 431, 432, 433, 434 trade, 421, 422, 423 Tuban, 423, 439n66 al-Jawhari, Bukhari: Taj al-Salatin, 475 Jawisation, 474, 479–83

index al-Jawli, ‘Alam al-Din Sanjar, 165–6 al-Jazari, 43n48 Jerusalem Arabic tombstones, 157–8 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 228 Mamluk-era inscriptions, 166 Sufis, 161 Jesuits, 232 Jesus Christ Christian belief in, 59, 60 divinity of, 66, 67 and King David, 60 as a prophet, 62, 64, 455 Jews al-Andalus, 200, 202 Gaza, 167, 171 and interreligious marriage, 129 persecution of, 106 Qurh, 85 Southern Levant, 157 see also Judaism al-Jibal, 107 jihad, 6, 109 Jinbun see Cu Cu John of Damascus: De haeresibus, 126 John the Baptist, 60, 61, 62 Judaism, 5, 85; see also Jews Juvayni, ʿAtaʾ Malik, 358, 363 Juynboll, A. T. W., 303 Juzjani, Minhaj-i Siraj, 354, 356–7, 404 Tabaqat-i Nasiri, 399–401 Kahaumanu, high chiefess of Hawaii, 32 Kahina, the ‘Prophetess’, 192–3 Kanajeji, King of Ghana, 27, 30, 45n69 Kangxi emperor, 505 Karatay, Jalal al-Din, 140 Kasila, Prince, 192 Kastritsis, Dimitris, 282 Kayghalagh, governor of Rayy, 107 Kaykavus b. Iskandar: Qabusnama, 401 Kazakhs see Qazaqs Kefeli, Agnès Nilüfer: Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy, 445, 446 Kemboja, Muhammad Salih see Haroun, Mat Sales Kennedy, Hugh, 395 al-Khallal, Ahmad b. Muhammad, 126–7 Kharijites, 194, 298 Khubilai Khan, 355, 359–60, 362, 498 Khunjandi, Khamal, 45n77 Khusrau, King, 472 Khuzistan, 107 Khwandamir, Ghiyath al-Din, 363 Ki Gedeng Alang-alang, kuwu of Cerbon, 427 kings, 25–7, 28, 32, 37–8

523

Kinra, Rajeev, 396 kinship, 24–5 Kirmani, Hamid al-Din, 324 Kishli Khan, 403 Klis, 285 Kongo, 29, 33 Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad, 336–8 Korobeinikov, Dimitri, 142 Krstić, Tijana, 8, 285 Kunt, Metin, 286–7 Kurds, 178n48 Kuripeši, Benedikt, 284 Lacantius, 28 Lahire, Bernard, 121 Lambton, Ann, 395 Lanang, Wali, Shaykh, 426 language and conversion, 298–9 and genealogy, 70 invaders’ impact on, 156–7 and scholarship, 205 vernacular, 3 Lebna Dengel, 231, 232 Ledesma Ramos, Ramiro, 206 Leiser, Gary, 138, 139, 140 el-Leithy, Tamer, 146, 161 Levant see Southern Levant Levine, Donald M., 229, 233 Levtzion, N., 9, 259 Levy-Rubin, Milka, 157, 158 Lewis, Bernard, 159, 204, 254 Li Zhi, 500 Lieberman, Victor, 35 Ligg Yasu, 237 lineages, 32 Chinese, 497, 499–500, 507 Persian, 400, 401, 70 Sufi, 340 Linseele, Veerle, 253 Liu Sanjie: Huihui Yuanlai, 502, 504–5 Liu Zhi, 501, 511n18 Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu, 503–4 Lombard, D., 419–21 Lütfi Pasha Kitab Tenbihü’l-ʿAkılin ve Tenkidü’l Gafilin, 303 Risale-i Suʾal ve Cevap, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306 Tuhfetü’t-Talibin, 301 Luz, Nimrod, 161 al-Ma’afiri, Abu’l-Khattab, 194 Ma Huan: Yingyai Shenglan, 434–5 Ma Laichi, 506–7 Ma Migxin, 507 Ma Tai Baba, 506

524

islamisation

MacDonald, R. H., 260 Madelung, Wilferd, 317 madrasas Anatolia, 138–41, 142, 143 China, 506, 509 Egypt, 138 Syria, 138 Maghrib, 8, 190, 194; see also Algeria; Morocco magic, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 46n77, 445–6, 453; see also supernatural Mahfuz, Imam of Harar, 231 Makota of Kutai, Raja, 26 Malay language, 445, 474, 480, 482 Malay literature, 472–3, 476, 477, 482 Hikayat Bandjar, 23, 46n89 Hikayat Hang Tuah, 23 Hikayat Patani, 26 Hikayat Yusuf, 47n95, 444–60 Salasilah Kutai, 26, 31, 38 Sejarah Melayu, 23, 26 Tales of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ), 447–8 Malaya, 23, 26, 27, 38, 482 Maldives, 27 Mali conversion process, 24 Essuk/Tadmekka, 256–7 Gao, 254, 257–60, 261 Songhai people, 259 Timbuktu, 261 al-Malik al-Muzaffar Sayf al-Din Qutuz al-Muʿizzi al-Turki, 164 Malik b. al-Dukhshum, 131n27 Malikism, 201 Mamluks, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 168, 172, 284 Mansuriyya, 165 Manguin, Pierre-Yves, 23 al-Mansur, caliph, 496 Mansur II, amir, 324 Manzano, Eduardo, 204 Mappilas, 37 Marçais, Georges: La Berbérie musulmane et l’Orient au moyen âge, 189 marriage and faith, 304–5 Ilkhanids, 362 interethnic, 235, 422, 426, 428, 431, 496, 497, 498, 500 interreligious, 128, 142, 362–3 Mongols, 362 Punjab, 386 rituals, 128–9 see also divorce

Marwarudi, Fakhr al-Din Mubarak Shah: Nisbatnama, 400 Marwazi, 29 Massaia, G., 236 al-Masʿudi, Abu’l Hasan b. Ali b. al-Husayn, 104 Mawlana Ibrahim, 423–4 Mažuranić, Matija, 282–3 Mazyar b. Qarin, governor of Tabaristan, 58 Mehmed II, Sultan, 279, 280, 281 Melchert, Christopher, 127 Melville, Charles, 356, 396 Ménage, Victor, 136 Menelik I, King of Ethiopia, 224, 227 Mesih Pasha, 285 al-Mihrani, Khadir, 161 Mikhail, Maged, 7 Minkov, Anton, 286, 287, 297 Miqdad b. Aswad, 120 miracles America, 446 and conversion, 57 Jesus Christ, 66 Muhammad, Prophet, 25, 59, 60 see also magic missionaries Christian, 337, 379, 446, 453–5, 459 Ethiopia, 225 Ismaili daʿwa, 319, 320 Java, 428, 436 Kaba, 29, 40n3 Kongo, 33 Muslim, 379 Wahhabi, 509 Mogadishu, 228, 231 monasteries Anatolia, 139, 140, 146 al-Andalus, 199 Bakchos the Younger and, 123–4 Bosnia, 279 Buddhist, 325 Ethiopia, 229, 230, 232, 236 Monastery of the Cross (near Jerusalem), 161 Muslim visits to, 126 Oman, 89 Möngke Khan, 354 Möngke Timür, 362 Mongolia, 505 Mongolian language, 156 Mongols army, 355 Buddhism, 358, 359, 361, 362 China, 498 conversion process, 35, 85, 353–65

index elites, 36 Gaza, 162 impact of, 156 Iran, 356, 358–9 and Persian culture, 396 personal names, 363 Secret History of the Mongols, 358 Syria, 175n26 Takht-i Sulayman fortress, 356 see also Ilkhanids monotheism, 21, 25, 85, 119 Moraes Farias, P. F. de, 256 Morgan, Joseph, 195 Morocco, 193, 194, 195, 259 mosques Bada’un, 396 Bengal, 383 at caravanserais, 147 China, 498, 506, 509, 511n20 churches and monasteries changed into, 139 construction of, 110–11 destruction of, 109 Gaza, 165, 172, 179n60 Harlaa, 251–2, 252f Konya, 143 Ottoman Empire, 300–1 Mubarak Shah, 355 Mudrik b. Khut see al-ʿAbdi, Makhraba Mughals, 382–3 conversion process, 36, 37 painting, 396 Persian language, 395 Muhammad, Prophet on Abyssinia, 227 Biblical references to, 61 and China, 495–6 Chinese language biography of, 503–4 conversion of Arabian tribes, 87, 88 Hikayat Nur Muhammad, 476 in Hudaybiyya, 111 and Jurush, 85 on knowledge, 301 Malay stories of, 449 as a prophet, 60, 62, 64–5, 66, 119, 120, 126 and Quran, 56 respect for other religions, 105 and sacred spaces, 91 teachings, 59 Muhammad b. Tughluq, Sultan of Delhi, 385, 401–2, 403, 404 Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad b. Sam, Sultan, 393, 400 Mujashiʿ b. Masʿud, 110, 111

525

al-Muktafi (future caliph), 107 Muljana, Slamet, 419 al-Mulk, Nizam, 324 Mundhir b. Saʿid, 201 al-Muqaddasi, 85, 199 Murad III, Sultan, 282 Murad b. ʿAbdullah, 299 al-Muradi, 193 Musa b. Nusayr, governor of Ifriqiya, 193 Muslim b. al-Hajjaj, 108 Sahih Muslim, 119, 120, 125–6 Muslim Brotherhood, 508 Muslims Chinese, 22, 421, 434, 435, 436, 497–510 Christian festival attendance, 126–7 relationship with non-Muslims, 120–1 Southern Levant, 157, 158 see also Shiites; Sufis; Sunni Muslims Mustawfi, Hamdallah, 139 al-Muʿtadid, Caliph, 107 al-Muʿtasim, Caliph, 58 al-Mutawakkil, Caliph, 58, 61, 62 Muʿtazilism, 201 Muzaffar Shah, 422 Najm al-Din Zarkub of Tabriz, 146 Nalaputra of Sampang, 456 Naqshbandis, 279, 349n9, 506, 507 ‘Confessional Ode’, 321 Safar-nama, 321 Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah, sultan of Delhi, 399, 401 al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawun, Sultan, 164, 165, 166, 179n60, 229 Nasir-i Khusraw 321, 323, 325–8, 384 Aʾina-yi Iskandari, 395 Nasiri of Sivas, 145 Nasr II b. Ahmad, amir, 324 Nawruz (Mongol Muslim commander), 355 Naysaburi, Ahmad b. Ibrahim, 320 Necipoğlu, Gülrü, 300, 301 Nestorians, 57, 59, 360, 361, 362 Niai Gedi Pinateh, 424 Nicaea, 134 Nicholas IV, Pope, 359 Nigeria: Kano Chronicle, 33 Nirenberg, David, 106 Nishapur, 69, 71 Kitab Ahwal-i Nishapur, 111 Nixon, S., 256, 257 Nizami, Hasan, 404 Taj al-Maʾathir, 397–9 nomads, 164, 225, 256–7, 337, 339, 340, 357, 385 non-Muslims see dhimmis

526

islamisation

North Africa, 122; see also Maghrib; Tripolitania Nosirwan, Po, 472, 474–5, 476, 477, 480 Nuʿaym b. Hammad: Kitab al-Fitan, 203 Nubia, 224–5 Nuqdan Khatun, 359 Nur, Amir, 251 shrine, 261f Nurcahaya, 483 Nursada, 483 Nurul Jati, Syeh, 427 Nushi e-Nasıhi, 296, 305, 309n20 Oakley, Francis, 26 Oceania, 37, 40n3 Oghuz Khan, 350n20 Oghuz Turks, 341, 344–5 Olagüe, Ignacio, 206–7 Öljeitü, Ilkhan, 30, 355, 359, 362–3 Oman, 85–7, 89–90 Omar, Ahmed Hassan, 225, 227 opinion polls, 76 origin myths, 23, 28, 400, 401, 502 Oromo people, 224, 233–7, 254, 261 Örüg Khatun, 359 Osman II, Sultan, 281 Østebø, T., 256–7 Ottoman Empire ʿaqāʾid literature, 298, 300, 301–7 Cevahirü’l-İslam, 301–2, 303–4, 305–6, 307 Christians, 298 confessionalisation, 8 conversion process, 8 devşirme, 280–2, 283, 286–7 foundation myth, 281 kullars, 279, 283, 284 mosques, 300–1 muftis, 300 Sunnitisation/confessionalisation, 296 Ottomanisation, 283, 286 Ottomans Bosnia, 277–87 conquest of Egypt, 231 and jihad, 6 Southern Levant, 159 Özbek Khan, 8, 45n73, 341 Padshah Khatun, 362 pagans, 5, 26, 27, 33, 40n90, 44n60, 50n136, 90, 95n15 Palestine conversion process, 7 Mamluks, 162 personal names, 74 population, 174n13 Pamiris, 322, 327 Patah, Raden, 426, 427

patronage, 88 Paul, St, 62 Paul, Jürgen, 338 Perry, John, 394–5 Persia: dynasties, 399–400; see also Iran Persian culture, 35, 323, 356, 393–404 humanism in, 395 myths, 396–7 and Turks, 398–9 works, 395 Persian language, 3 Anatolia, 141, 144 Delhi courts, 393, 395, 404 dictionaries, 394 Persianisation, 393, 394 personal names, 69–77, 178n51, 387t Bosnia, 286 Cambodia, 481 Cambridge University, 75 Essuk/Tadmekka, 256 Gao, 259 Iran, 69, 71, 75, 76 Konya, 143 logistic curves in research, 69, 70, 75, 76 Massachusetts, 74–5, 76 Mongols, 361, 363, 366n18 Palestine, 74 Punjab, 386, 388 Spain, 71 Turkey, 72 Philiponeau, Marie, 76 Pigeaud, Th. G. Th., 428, 451, 455, 456 pigs, 46n82 Pires, Tomé, 428 Suma Oriental, 422–3, 431, 432, 433, 434 Pluz, Hovhannes, 146 Pollock, Sheldon, 393 Polo, Marco, 327, 363 popular religion, 35 Portuguese, 37, 231, 232, 419 Poturnaks, 282, 283, 284–5, 286, 287 Prawer, Joshua, 158 prayer, 26–7, 126, 127, 305 preachers, 5 printing, 10 property, 89 proselytisation, 5, 37, 39, 40n8, 145, 227, 237, 251, 453–5, 484, 504 Ptak, R., 421 Pu Shougeng, 498 Punjab, 72–4, 380, 384, 385–6, 388 Puritans, 74 al-Qalqashandi, Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. ʿAli, 230 Qarakhitai: Buddhism, 365n2

index Qarakhitai Turks, 365n2, 399 Qarshi, Jamal, 356–7 Qayrawan, 192, 195, 200 Qazaqs, 340 Qilij Arslan, Sultan, 142 Qïpchaqs, 339, 355 Qïrghïz people: Manas epic cycle, 31 Qultaq Egächi, 359 Qumis b. Antunyan, amir of Cordoba, 201 al-Qunawi, Hajji b. Muhammad b. ʿAbdallah al-Tājir, 144 Quran and Bible, 227 Christians’ knowledge of, 126 and converts, 5 on the Honourable Seal, 110 on hypocrisy, 90–1 inimitability of, 56 inscriptions, 3, 92 interpretation of, 64, 201–2 Joseph story in, 447 al-Tabari’s commentary, 144 Turkish language, 301 Qurh, 85 Qutb al-Din Aybeg, 393, 398 Qutui Khatun, 358–9, 366n19 al-Qurtubi, Maslama b. Qasim, 202 Radushev, Evgeni, 287 Raffles, Thomas Stamford The History of Java, 423–4, 430, 432, 434, 435 Rama Raya, 396 al-Raniri, Nur al-Din: Bustan al-Salatin, 475 Rashid al-Din, 326, 350n20, 356, 357, 360, 361, 363 Rayy, 108 Razi, Najm al-Din, 144 Rebillard, Eric, 122 Red Sea, 231 Redford, Scott, 147 Reid, Anthony, 9, 38 Ricklefs, Merle, 27, 445 Riddell, Peter, 444–5 ritual systems, 32 Robin, Christian, 85 Robinson, Chase, 93 Rodim, Pate, 422 Rome: church of St John Lateran, 28 Rome, Po, 478 rulers and conversion, 21, 22–5, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39 supernatural powers of, 47n99 see also kings; kingship

527

Rum, 134, 141 Rumeli, 296–307 catechisation and conversion, 297–301 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 141, 145 Mathnawi, 144 Russian Primary Chronicle, 29 Rycaut, Paul, 286 Sadeq, Mohamed-Moain, 172 al-Saʿdi, ʿAbd al-Rahman: Taʾrikh al-Sudan, 23 Sadr al-Din, Pir, 328 Safad, 162, 172 al-Safadi: al-Wafi bi’l-Wafayat, 165–6 Safavids, 284, 296 Saffarids, 107 al-Safi b. al-ʿAssal, 60 Sahara: trade, 256, 258, 259 Sahel, Western, 254–7, 260 Sahlins, Marshall, 28 Sai Baba, 46n78 saints, 445 Bengal, 9 Borneo, 26 Ethiopia, 251, 261 Java, 424–5, 426 Sufi, 190, 195, 279 see also hagiography; shrines al-Saj, Muhammad b. Abi, 107 Saladin (Salah al-Din), 159, 228 Salim family (Gaza), 165 Salima b. ʿIyadh al-Azdi, 86 Salmon, C., 419–21 Samanids, 107 Samarians, 157, 158 al-Samarqandi, Abu al-Layth Bayan ʿAqidat al-Usul, 302–3 al-Muqaddima [as-salāt], 303 Risaletü’l-Esʾile ve’l-Ecvibe el-İʿtikadiyye, 303 Samarqandi, Abu’l-Qasim Ishaq: al-Sawad al-Aʿzam, 324 San, Imam, 481, 483 Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio, 206 Sarta Dengel, 232 Sasaks, 483 Sasanians, 61, 104, 356, 397, 398, 400–4 Savant, Sarah, 102–3 Scandinavia: conversion to Christianity, 84, 87, 322–3 Schoemann, Karl, 451 scripts Brahmic, 483 Cham, 474, 478, 481 Jawi, 474, 479, 480 Sasak, 474 sectarian movements, 319, 323, 326–8

528

islamisation

Sedaing Krapyak, Panembahan, 429, 431 Selim I, Sultan, 282, 284 Seljuq, 48n113 Seljuqs, 85, 134–48, 339 attitude to Christians, 141–2 support for Islam, 138 madrasas, 140–1, 142 waqfs, 139–41, 142 Şemsü’l-Eimme, 305 Shafi ʿis, 339 Shah Jahan, 385 Shams al-Din, Pir, 328 Shams al-Din, qadi of Jerusalem, 165 Shams al-Din, Muhammad, Shaykh, 27 Shams al-Din Iltutmish, Sultan, 393 Shansabani dynasty, 401–2 sharia law, 3, 105, 160, 382 Sharif Hidayat Allah, kuwu of Cirebon, 428 Sharon, Moshe: Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae (CIAP), 161, 168–9, 172 Shaw, Stanford J., 283 al-Shaybani, Muhammad, 127 Sheba, Queen of, 224 Shepard, Jonathan, 28–9 Shiism, 30, 329n7, 484 Shiites, 16n40, 284, 317, 323; see also Ismailis al-Shirazi, Muʾayyad fi’l-Din, 324 shrines, 146–7 Badakhshan, 326, 328 Bengal, 388 Ethiopia, 249, 261 Gaza, 172 Horn of Africa, 236 Kazakhstan, 336 Punjab, 384–5, 386 Shukurov, Rustam, 142 Siam: missionaries, 40n3; see also Thailand Silk Road, 35, 496, 498 Simonsohn, Uriel, 83 Singapore: Joseph story, 449 Siu Ban Ci, 427, 430 Siyal clan, 73, 386 Siyal, Ray, 386 Sizgorich, Thomas, 126 slavery, 192, 193, 224 Smail, Raymond, 158 Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, 282 Solem, Hj., 483 Solomon, King, 224 Somalia, 228, 254 Somaliland, 254 Sorghaghtani Beki, 358, 360, 362 South Asia, 379–89 conversion process, 36–7 distribution of Muslims in, 381f

temple desecration narratives, 109 see also Bengal; India; Punjab South Sulawesi, 38 Southeast Asia, 420f Akhar Thrah texts, 478–9, 480–1 conversion process, 6, 9, 22–3, 35, 36 hikayat literature, 23, 26, 46n89, 47n95, 424–5, 429–30, 431–2, 433, 473, 475, 476, 479, 484 Minangkabau Traditions, 477 trade, 22–3, 419–20 see also Champa; China; Indonesia; Java; Malaya; Maldives; Singapore; South Sulawesi; Sri Lanka; Vietnam Southern Levant, 156–73 Darum, 180n71 emigration, 161–2 Gaza, 162–71 Mamluks, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 168, 172 religious and linguistic demography, 157–8 Sozomen, 88 Spain Arab conquest, 4, 193, 206 personal names, 71 Shepherds’ Crusade (1320), 106 see also al-Andalus Spanish language, 205 Spiro, Melford, 34 Sri Lanka, 37 Stjepan Kotromanić II, King of Bosnia, 277 Strathern, Alan, 354 Sub-Saharan Africa, 9, 244–62 conversion, 23, 35, 246–7 diet, 244, 253, 256, 258, 260, 262 see also Ethiopia; Somalia; Somaliland Sufis Bosnia, 279 and conversion, 5, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 38, 144–5, 147, 336, 337, 344, 347–8, 356–7, 359, 379, 381–2 Ethiopia, 235 Gaza, 172 Mamluk patronage of, 161 and pre-Islamic religious traditions, 9 Yasavi, 339 see also futuwwa; Naqshbandis Sufism Berbers and, 190 China, 506 Maghrib, 195 Qadiriyya, 261 Turks and, 148n3 Sulayman b. Qutlumush, 134 Süleyman, Sultan, 300

index sultans ‘dual identity’ of, 141–2 and patronage, 147 Sumangsang, Pangeran, 431 Sumatra, 11, 422, 432, 433, 436, 447 Summa Theologiae Arabica, 118–19, 122, 129–30 Sungapati, Pangeran, 483 Sunni Muslims, 5 Badakhshan, 326 Bosnia, 285 China, 434 Ottoman Empire, 296 supernatural, 47n99; see also magic Susenyos, Emperor of Ethiopia, 235 Sutawijaya, 440n69 Suzong, Emperor of China, 496 synagogues, 105, 167 syncretism, 4, 32, 33 synods, 89, 90 Syria conversion process, 6 Crusaders, 7 landscape, 161 madrasas, 138 Mamluks, 159 Mongols, 175n26 non-Muslims, 7 population, 174n13 see also Bilad al-Sham al-Tabari, Abu al-Hasan ʿAli b. Rabban Sahl, 57–63, 224, 227 Firdaws al-Hikma, 58, 59 Kitab al-Din wa’l-Dawla, 58, 60, 61–3, 67 Quran commentary, 144 Radd ʿala’l-Nasara, 58, 59–60, 66 al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarir, 58, 107, 108 Tabaristan, 107 Taghai Temür, 361 Taharids, 107 al-Tahi, Asad b.Yabrah, 86 Tahir al-Din b. Shams al-Din: Bam-nama, 110, 112 Taizong, Emperor of China, 495–6 Taj al-Din, Hasan, 44n67 Takla Haymanot, St, 230 Taşköprüzade: al-Shaqaʾiq al-Nuʿmaniyya, 136 Tan Go Hwat, 427, 430 Tariq (Berber), 193 al-Tarjuman, ʿAbdallah see Turmeda, Anselmo Tarmashirin Khan, 41n20, 357 Tarsusi (Tarusi), Abu Tahir Muhammad b. Hasan b. ʿAli b. Musa: Darabnama, 395 Tatarstan, 446

529

taxation, 7 Anatolia, 136 Bosnia, 278, 284, 285, 286 Gaza, 171 jizya (‘poll tax’), 142 Qom, 107–8 Tegdaoust, 254 Tegüder, Ahmad, 31, 355, 357, 358–9, 363 Terken Khatun, 362 Terzioğlu, Derin, 296 Tesfa Iyesus see Yikunno Amlak, Emperor Thailand, 480; see also Siam Theodore of Mopsuestia, 60 Thorgilsson, Ari: Íslendingabók, 87 Thrace, 140 Tibet, 505 Timur, Emperor, 385 tombstones, 3, 157–8, 258 Tor, Deborah, 338, 394 trade China, 421, 496, 498 Ethiopia, 227–8, 233, 237, 252–3 Java, 421, 422, 423 Red Sea coast, 248 Sahara, 256, 258, 259 Southeast Asia, 22–3, 419–20 Western Sahel, 254, 262 transcendentalism, 25, 34–7, 39 Trenggana, Sultan, 425, 431–2 Trimingham, J. Spencer, 235, 246, 339 Tripoli, 172, 192 Tripolitania, 194 Tuan di Parangan, 26 Tuaregs, 261 Tükles, Baba, 45n73, 341, 357 Turan, Osman, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145 Turkey see Anatolia; Sivas Turkish language, 3–4, 144 Turkish literature, 144, 298–300; see also Ottoman Empire: ʿaqāʾid literature Turkmen, 147, 178n48 Turks Anatolia see Seljuqs Central Asia, 336–48, 365n2 and Persians, 398–9 Turmeda, Anselmo (Abdallah al-Tarjuman), 58, 63–7 Tuhfat al-Adib fī’l-Radd ʿala Ahl al-Salib, 63, 65 Tusi, ʿAli b. Ahmad Asadi: Lughat-i Furs, 394 ʿUbaydallah b. Abi Bakra, 103–5 ʿUbaydallah b. al-Habhab, 193 Ubayy b. Kaʿb, 87 ulama, 15n26, 34, 160, 200–1, 296–7 al-ʿUlaymi, Mujir al-Din, 161

530

islamisation

Ullendorf, Edward, 224, 228 Ulugh Khan (Ghiyath al-Din Balban), 400 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, Caliph, 67, 111, 202 ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, 129 ʿUmar b. Hafsun, 199 Umar Maya (ʿAmr b. ʿUmayya), 476 al-ʿUmari, Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Yahya b. Fadlallah, 164, 165, 171, 230 Umayyads, 5, 194, 202, 496 ʿUqba b. Nafi ʿ, 192, 194 Usama b. Zayd, 119 al-ʿUtbi, 203 ʿUthman, Caliph, 111 Uyghur Turk, 496, 506 Uyghurs, 506, 509 Uzunçarşılı, I. H., 281 van den Boogert, Jochem, 459 van der Molen, Willem, 451 van Ronkel, Phillipus, 447 Vietnam Book of Nosirwan, 472, 476 Cham people, 472, 474–84 Jawisation, 474, 481 Mekong Delta, 481, 482 Vijayanagara sultanate, 396 Vladimir of Rus, 28–9 Vryonis, Speros, 145, 162 The Decline of Hellenism and the Process of Islamization in Medieval Anatolia, 136, 138, 139, 140 Wade, G., 421, 429 Wahhabism, 508, 509 Waktu Lima, 483 Walad, Sultan, 141 Walangsungsang, kuwu of Cerbon, 427–8 Wali Songo (Nine Saints) of Java, 424–5, 426 waqfiyyas, 139–40, 142–3, 144, 146, 147 waqfs, 138–41, 146 Waqqas, Sa’d b. Abi, 504 warfare, 29, 225, 260–1; see also jihad Wasif (slave soldier), 107 al-Wathiq, Caliph, 58 Waziri, Ahmad ʿAli Khan: Tarikh-i Kirman, 110, 111 Weitman, Sasha, 74 Wen Ti, Emperor of China, 503–4 Wensinck, A. J., 297–8

West Africa, 27, 33 West Asia, 38 William of Rubruck, 142, 362, 363 Winroth, Anders, 84, 323 women conversion of husbands, 362–3 and divorce, 129 and faith, 305 and marriage, 128–9 Mongol, 357–8 moral guidance of, 482 Turko-Muslim, 362–3 Wood, Philip, 7–8 Xuanzang (Buddhist pilgrim), 325 Yaghi Arslan, 142 Yaji, King of Ghana, 27 al-Yaman, Jaʿfar b. Mansur: Kitab al-ʿAlim wa’l-Ghulam, 320 al-Yaʿqubi: Kitab al-Buldan, 227 Yaqut b. ʿAbdallah, Shihab al-Din Abu ʿAbdallah: Kitab Muʿjam al-Buldan, 162, 169 Yasavi, Ahmad, 336–48 as a poet, 337–8 as a saint, 340–7 Yazdagird III, King, 104, 400 Yazıcızade Ahmed: Envarü’l-Aşikin, 299 Yazıcızade Mehmed: Muhammediye, 299 Yazid b. Ali Muslim, 193 ‘Year of the Missions’ (628), 504 Yemen, 85 Yesünjin Khatun, 358 Yikunno Amlak, Emperor (Tesfa Iyesus), 229 Yohannes I of Ethiopia, 232, 233 Yongle, Emperor of China, 499 Zafar Khan see Hasan Gangu Zahhak (mythic Arab ruler), 400–1 Zara Yacob, King of Ethiopia, 231 Zeynal of Giri, pate, 423, 432 Zhao Rugua (Chinese geographer), 440n72 Zhelyazkova, Antonina, 286 Zheng He, 434–5, 436n4, 499 Zhu Yuanzhang, Emperor of China, 498 Ziyad b. Abihi, viceroy, 103 Zokomos, 88 Zoroastrians, 353 fire temples, 102–12