Ali Anooshahr

It has long been known that the origins of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the sixteenth century go back to "Turco-Mongol" or "Turcophone" war bands. However, too often has this connection been taken at face value, usually along the lines of ethno-linguistic continuity. Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires argues that the connection between a mythologized "Turkestani" or "Turco-Mongol" origin and these dynasties was not simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate and invent the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties. Through constructed genealogies, nascent empires founded on disorganized military and political events were reduced to clear and stable categories. With proper family trees in place and their power legitimized, leaders became far removed from their true identities as bands of armed men and transformed into warrior kings. This created a longstanding pattern of false histories created by the intellectuals of the day. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can instead say that historians writing in these empires were the ancestors of the "Turco-Mongol" lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these early polities, Ali Anooshahr shows how "Turkestan", "Central Asia", or "Turco-Mongol" functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.

A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions

Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires

The Ghazi Sultans were frontier holy-warrior kings of late medieval and early modern Islamic history. This book is a comparative study of three particular Ghazis in the Muslim world at that time, demonstrating the extent to which these men were influenced by the actions and writings of their predecessors in shaping strategy and the way in which they saw themselves. Using a broad range of Persian, Arabic and Turkish texts, the author offers new findings in the history of memory and self-fashioning, demonstrating thereby the value of intertextual approaches to historical and literary studies. The three main themes explored include the formation of the ideal of the Ghazi king in the eleventh century, the imitation thereof in fifteenth and early sixteenth century Anatolia and India, and the process of transmission of the relevant texts. By focusing on the philosophical questions of ‘becoming’ and ‘modelling’, Anooshahr has sought alternatives to historiographic approaches that only find facts, ideology, and legitimization in these texts. This book will be of interest to scholars specialising in Medieval and early modern Islamic history, Islamic literature, and the history of religion.

A comparative study of the late medieval and early modern periods

The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam

* The first multi-disciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir, this collection of essays focuses on one of the least studied periods of Mughal history, the reign of Shah Jahan* Through subaltern court writing, art, architecture, accounts of foreign traders and poetry, the authors reconstruct the court of the Mughal emperor, whose influence extended even to 19th-century AfghanistanThe reign of Shah Jahan (1628-58) is widely regarded as the golden age of the Mughal empire, yet it is one of the least studied periods of Mughal history. In this volume, 14 eminent scholars with varied historical interests - political, social, economic, legal, cultural, literary and art-historical - present for the first time a multi-disciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir (r. 1605-27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida-Razvi study the various ways in which the events of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir's and Shah Jahan's historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and in art and architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor's ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz enumerates the bureaucratic hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from the court. Sunil Sharma analyses the new developments in Persian poetry under Shah Jahan's patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility and imperial escheat practices. Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and J.P. Losty sheds light on the changes in artistic patronage and taste that transformed Jahangiri painting into Shahjahani. R.D. McChesney shows how Shah Jahan's reign cast such a long shadow that it even reached the late 19th- and early 20th-century rulers of Afghanistan.This imaginatively conceived collection of articles invites us to see in Mughal India of the first half of the 17th century a structural continuity in which the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan emerge as a unit, a creative reconceptualization of the Mughal empire as visualized by Akbar on the basis of what Babur and Humayun had initiated. This age seized the imagination of the contemporaries and, in a world as yet unruptured by an intrusive colonial modernity, Shah Jahan's court was regarded as the paradigm of civility, progress and development.

Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature

The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan

Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires studies how fifteenth and sixteenth century chroniclers grappled with the Turkestani or Turco-Mongol origin stories of their patrons in the newly forming states of the Ottomans, Safavids, Shibanids, Moghuls, and Mughals.

Jaʻfar Mudarris Ṣādiqī

Horse's Head is a quest story of sorts in which the protagonist, Kasra, an unemployed white-collar worker, becomes acquainted with a young Kurdish woman and is infatuated with her and her plight with regard to Kurdish autonomy; after her departure he goes to the Kurdish regions in search of her, to in fact find himself. In a sense, Kasra, whose life seems aimless, is searching for a cause, a reason to give his existence meaning, and he tries to make the Kurdish girl's cause his own.

Ali Anooshahr

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