Islam's History Is Not All Blood-Soaked

William Dalrymple Reviews The Mughal Emperors And The Islamic Dynasties Of India, Iran And Central Asia, 1206-1925

By Francis Robinson
Last Updated: 12:01 am BST 30/08/2007
Telegraph

In 1526 Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Turkish poet prince from Ferghana in Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked followers; and with him he brought some of the first cannon seen in India. With these he defeated the Delhi Sultan and established his garden-capital at Agra.

Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, he also wrote one of the most fascinating diaries ever produced by a great ruler.

In its pages he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition similar to Pepys's, comparing the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of opium and wine.

In time, Babur's new Mughal Empire grew to be the greatest and most populous of all Muslim polities, with around 100 million subjects - five times the number ruled by their nearest rivals, the Ottomans.

Indeed the Mughals were partly responsible for shifting the centre of gravity of the Islamic world eastwards, so that today more Muslims live to the east of Afghanistan than to its west.

In Milton's Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God's creation.

This was hardly an understatement: by the age of Milton, Lahore had grown larger even than Constantinople and, with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the Fort, the Great Mughal ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan.

The Mughals were really rivalled only by their Ming counterparts in China. For their contemporaries in distant Europe they became potent symbols of power and wealth - connotations with which the word Mughal (or Mogul) is still loaded.

Yet if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most powerful and majestic, they also defined Islam at its most tolerant, pluralistic and eclectic.

Their empire was effectively built in coalition with India's Hindu majority and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.

This was particularly true of the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605), who issued an edict of universal religious tolerance, forbade forcible conversion to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives.

At the same time that Jesuits - and those who sheltered them - were being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, when most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and while in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori, in India Akbar was summoning Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujerat and Jesuits from Goa, as well as groups of Indian atheists, to come to his palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring that 'no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him'.

All this is important to remember at a time when simplistic and inaccurate notions of Islamic history and theology have wide currency, both inside and outside the Islamic world.

For Orientalists such as Samuel Huntingdon and his master, Bernard Lewis, the Ottoman and the Mughal empires are potent symbols of Islam at its most threatening and aggressive.

Lewis's books consistently depict two fixed and opposed forces at work: on one hand the West, which he envisages as a vulnerable citadel of pluralistic and open minded Judeo-Christian civilisation; and on the other hand, quite distinct, a hostile Islamic world hell-bent on aggressive conquest and conversion.

Yet such simplistic binaries quickly fall apart on any sort of fair-minded examination.

Both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569-1627), for example, were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary, something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their Muslim faith: over the main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar's capital is an inscription which still bears the legend:

'Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen.'

Francis Robinson is one of the country's great authorities on Islamic and South Asian history and his new book is an excellent introduction to this often surprising world. It is no whitewash - the Emperor Timur, for example, is depicted in appropriately blood-thirsty colours pushing his Luristani and Armenian prisoners en masse over cliffs, and riding heavy cavalry right over the choir of Koran-holding singing children sent out of the town of Sivas to beg for his mercy.

Yet The Mughal Emperors remains a vital corrective to the influential but partial and wrong-headed readings of the flag bearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as Naipaul, Lewis and Huntingdon, all of whom continue to manufacture entirely negative images of one of the greatest and most varied civilisations in world history.

In an age when a working knowledge of the world of Islam is no longer a refinement but a necessity, Robinson's book is an excellent introduction to the history and culture of not only the Mughal Empire, but also the other Muslim dynasties that shared their Persianate Central Asian civilisation.

Presented as a sort of illustrated biographical dictionary to the rulers, and arranged chronologically by dynasty, it gives a clear and readable panorama of a sphere that needs to be far better understood if we are ever to understand the Muslim world that impinges with ever greater frequency on our daily lives.