Islam and the Millennium: Sacred Kingship and Popular Imagination in Early Modern India and Iran.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the institution of sacred kingship in the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It examines how a particular style of sovereignty came to be practiced by Muslim dynasts in early modern India and Iran. This was a style that can aptly be described as “saintly” and “messianic.” In a widespread phenomenon, Muslim monarchs came to embody their sacrality in the manner of Sufi saints and holy saviors. The messianic nature of sovereigns was evidenced by miraculous lore and astrological calculations, embodied in inventive court rituals and dress, visualized in new forms of art, and institutionalized in cults of devotion and submission to the monarch as both spiritual guide and material lord. In order to account for this historical development, this study emphasizes the performative aspect of Muslim kingship. Using methods of cultural history and anthropology, it argues that the social personality of Muslim sovereigns developed in a dialectic with the collective ideals and imagination of their diverse subject populations. Rulers drew inspiration less from scriptural sources of Islam than from broader processes of social memory, devotional practice, and popular myth. Notions of sovereignty were shaped by the master symbols and narratives of a shrine-centered Sufism, organized around the hereditary cult of the saint, which had come to dominate the religious and social life of this milieu. Thus, claims of political power became inseparable from claims of saintly status, giving rise to a long enduring pattern of messianic kingship. In short, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the rise of Muslim empires in this period, and questions the legalism and doctrinal basis of Islamic institutions of rule. Instead, in a revisionist vein, it reveals the symbolic and corporeal practices of sacred kingship and shows its adaptability to the diverse social and religious contexts across early modern India and Iran.