Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship & Sainthood in Islam

"Moin is interested in the Mughals’ ruling ideology. He starts by noting that Indian history is conventionally seen through the prism either of the British Raj or of a thousand years of Hindu-Muslim interaction. Moin argues instead that we need to take seriously the political ideologies that Babur had brought to India in 1526. He was a Central Asian prince who had expected to remain in Central Asia and inherit at least part of the great empire of his forefather, Tamerlane or Timur (d. 1405). Things did not work out that way. He was edged out by the Uzbeks, a rival confederation of Turks that drove him not only out of Samarkand, Timur’s glorious capital city, but out of Central Asia altogether. He fled first to Kabul, and finally to India in 1526, where he overthrew the last dynasty of Delhi’s sultans. But he brought with him a great deal of ideological baggage from Central Asia, most importantly this idea of millennial kingship. Hence the title of Moin’s book, which explores how kingship, sacrality, and millennialism formed a heady ideology on which the rulers of the Mughal empire drew in order to articulate their claims to sovereignty. The book elaborates this idea of ‘The Lord of the Conjunction’, a title that Timur himself never actually claimed, but that was attributed to him. It refers to astrologers’ understanding that the rare conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn signified an especially auspicious moment, and that anyone born under that conjunction was destined to have an exceptional career as a restorer of order, even a messiah, or at least an extremely important and powerful king. Earlier figures thought to have been born under such a conjunction included Alexander the Great , the Prophet Mohammed, Chinggis Khan , and then finally, Timur. So, by Babur’s day, the idea of the ‘Lord of the Conjunction’ was already widely accepted by populations across the entire eastern Muslim world, including Central Asia. Moin’s book explores how the first five Mughal emperors, as well as rulers in contemporary Iran, had been steeped in this potent ideological brew, which included Illuminationist thought, messianic beliefs, and esoteric schools of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, as well as the idea of the ‘Lord of Conjunction’. These ideas were manifested in different ways by Mughal rulers. Descended just several generations from Timur, Babur was acutely mindful of his exalted inheritance. He was also personally devoted to certain Sufi orders and deeply committed to astrology. His son Humayun went further and aligned his courtly regimen with the heavens, believing that each day was associated with the influence of one of the five major planets, the sun, or the moon. In court, he aligned the colours of his clothing with whichever celestial object was ruling on that day. The real break came with Humayun’s son Akbar, who usurped juristic authority by claiming to be the renewer of the age, a central idea in both Shi‘i and Sunni theology, as it has quasi-millennial connotations. Soon after he did that, there was an actual conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which gave him additional millennial heft. In the last 10 years before the year 1000 in the Islamic calendar—which was 1582—he stopped dating his coins with the actual date and simply stamped ‘1000’ on them. By this time he had clearly come to see himself as a millennial sovereign. When the year 1000 finally did come around in 1582, he patronized the writing of a chronicle entitled The Millennial History , which portrayed him as ushering in the second Islamic millennium. So, with Akbar, you have a very explicit case of how these ideas played out. “We need to take seriously the political ideologies that Babur had brought to India in 1526” Akbar’s son, Jahangir, inherited these same ideas. Yet Jahangir is often seen as having turned toward a stricter understanding of Islam. That’s certainly the impression one might get from writings in the chronicles about him. But if one looks at the art that he patronized, as Moin does, one finds something very different. In Sufi thought, it was great shaikhs, not kings, who were the real sovereigns of the world. Such shaikhs bequeathed temporary earthly kingship on this or that warlord, typically through the act of ‘predicting’ who would be the next ruler. This notion of sovereignty is often depicted visually, as in a Sufi holding a miniature globe of planet Earth, suggesting that spiritually powerful shaikhs were the true rulers of the world. Indo-Islamic writing is full of the trope of the pure and pious shaikh juxtaposed with temporal rulers, surrounded by courtly splendour and covered with blood spilt en route to the throne. But with Jahangir, such a juxtaposition is transformed. Some paintings depict Jahangir paired with Shaikh Moin al-Din Chishti, the most venerated Sufi saint of the Mughals. In one such miniature we see the shaikh holding a globe, with Jahangir also holding a globe, side by side, as if the saint is bequeathing the planet to the emperor. In many miniature paintings, moreover, Jahangir is seen enveloped in a huge sun or a moon, symbols associating him with universal kingship. The penultimate of these five great rulers, Shah Jahan, surpassed all of his predecessors in articulating claims to millennial sovereignty. As the patron of the Taj Mahal and the Peacock Throne , he used art and architecture in very deliberate ways to project himself as a distant and majestic sovereign. He also built what we now know as Old Delhi (called Shahjahanabad in his day), which served as a vast stage for enacting his carefully-fashioned image as a sovereign far beyond the earthly realm of ordinary people. Above all, he claimed to be the Second Lord of Conjunction, following Timur in this respect. Not only did he happen to be born in the Islamic year 1000, which already gave him millennial credentials, he also sent huge armies into Central Asia with a view to conquering and annexing at least part of the core territory once ruled by Timur himself. Nobody had done that before, although the mission failed spectacularly and nearly bankrupted the empire. The last of the five great emperors, Shah Jahan’s son ‘Alamgir, actually rejected his inheritance of sacred kingship and sought to redefine Mughal sovereignty by codifying the Shari‘a and placing the empire under the idea of impartial, impersonal law, rather than a sacred king. But his experiment ultimately failed, as the people didn’t buy it. By this time they had come to see the emperor as a charismatic, sacred sovereign—someone who connected Heaven and Earth. Occasionally ‘Alamgir had to play that role himself, which, again, shows the staying power of those Central Asian ideas. In short, Moin goes further than other modern historians in trying to connect rulership under the Mughals with Central Asian ideologies."