The Ottoman, The Safavid, And The Mughal Empire

The devastation of the Black Death following hard on the heels of the Mongol destruction of Islam’s most important city and capital of the Abbasid Empire, Baghdad, eliminated Islam’s old political order. Nonetheless, these two catastrophes prepared the way for new Islamic states to emerge. Of these, the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal dynasties ultimately grew powerful enough to become empires themselves.

The most powerful, the Ottoman Empire, occupied the pivotal area between Europe and Asia. They embraced a Sunni view of Islam, while adopting traditional Byzantine ways of governance and trying new ways of integrating the diverse peoples of their expanding territories. They were able to win the favor of exceedingly diverse polities by embracing a flexible and tolerant position on language policy and in politics. When local administrators became difficult to control, the Ottomans recruited, converted, and trained local young men to become soldiers and bureaucrats. They artfully balanced the decentralizing tendencies of the outlying regions with the centralizing forces of the imperial capital. Relying on a careful mixture of faith, patronage, and tolerance, the sultans curried loyalty and secured political stability.
The Safavids, though adherents of the Shiite vision of Islam, were at the same time ardently devoted to the pre-Islamic traditions of Persia.
An internally cohesive people, their rulers were not so effective at expanding beyond their Persian base. They did not tolerate diversity. Whatever territories they conquered they ruled much more directly, based on central – and theocratic – authority. They also succeeded in transforming Iran, once a Sunni area, into a Shiite
stronghold.

The Mughals ruled over the wealthy but divided realm that is much of today’s India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; here they carried even further the region’s religious and political traditions of assimilating Islamic and pre-Islamic Indian ways. Their wealth and the decentralization of their domain made the Mughals constant targets for internal dissent and eventually for external aggression.

The differences were obvious, especially in the religious sphere. The Ottomans were Sunni Islam’s most fervent champions, determined to eradicate the Shiite heresy on their border, where an equally determined Persian Safavid dynasty sought to expand the realm of Shiism. In contrast to these dynasties’ sectarian religious commitments, the Mughals of India, drawing on well-established Indian traditions of religious and cultural tolerance, were open-minded toward non-Muslim believers and sectarian groups within the Muslim community. Yet, the political similarities of these imperial dynasties were equally clear-cut. Although these states did not hesitate to go to war against each other, they shared similar styles of rule. All established their legitimacy via military prowess, religious backing, and a loyal bureaucracy. This combination of spiritual and military weaponry enabled emperors, espousing Muhammad’s teachings, to claim vast domains. Islam also bound together rulers and those whom they ruled. Moreover, their religious differences did not prevent the movement of goods, ideas, merchants and scholars across political and religious boundaries – even across the most divisive boundary of all, that between Sunni Iraq and Shiite Persia.