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- Convenor:
-
Jonathan Brack
(Northwestern University)
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Panel
- Theme:
- History
- Location:
- Room 109
- Sessions:
- Saturday 25 June, -
Time zone: Asia/Tashkent
Short Abstract:
The panel explores various aspects of change and continuity in Mongol patterns of government, ideology, cultural patronage, and religious alliances, as well as in the representations of the Mongols among their subjects.
Long Abstract:
The near-century long Mongol rule over Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Anatolia (the Ilkhanate, 1260-1335) saw considerable changes to Mongol patterns of government, ideology, cultural patronage, and Mongol religious alliances, as well as to the representation of the Mongols among their subjects. In this panel, we explore continuities and changes in Mongol institutions in conjunction with changes to local attitudes and perceptions of the Mongol conquerors in Ilkhanid Iran. Researchers tend to emphasize local adjustment to the new conditions created by Mongol domination. Yet, how, and to what extent, did Mongol systems of governance and rule change in response to the Mongols’ encounters with local (Muslim, Persian, Turkic) and foreign (Buddhist, Chinese) cultural, political, and religious traditions in the Ilkhanate over time? What kind of new cultural syntheses emerged in Mongol dominated Iran?
Each paper explores a different aspect of Mongol encounters and exchanges. The first paper explores changes to the representations of the Mongols by Persian and Muslim authors compared to Chinese and Western attitudes. The second paper examines changes to Mongol relations with local dynasties in the Ilkhanate and the decline in Mongol cultural patronage of Islamic institutions in semi-autonomous Ilkhanid provinces from the 1280s. The third paper focuses on the charitable foundations established by the Mongol rulers as part of their performance of sacral kingship. The final paper compares Muslim and Buddhist methods of accommodating and converting Mongol religious patterns, primarily the Mongol tendency toward a form of religious pluralism and their model of sacral kingship.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 25 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The Ilkhanid court was an arena of inter-religious, Muslim and Buddhist, competition and exchange. The paper explores the strategies Muslims and Buddhists used to address, accommodate, and convert their Mongol patrons’ religious patterns, primarily their religious pluralism and sacral kingship.
Paper long abstract:
The Buddhist efflorescence under Mongol domination is evident in the religion’s “return” to Iran under Mongol aegis, centuries after it was largely erased from the Persian-speaking world. From the Ilkhanate’s inception until Ghazan’s conversion to Islam in 1295, the Ilkhanid rulers were avid supporters of Buddhist monasteries and traveling monks. The Mongol court became an arena of inter-religious, mainly Muslim and Buddhist, competition, rivalry, and cultural exchange. The paper explores some of the strategies employed by members of these two religious parties to address, accommodate, and convert their Mongol patrons’ religious patterns, primarily the Mongol tendency toward a form of religious pluralism and their divinized model of sacral kingship.
Focusing on the Ilkhanid court in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-centuries Iran – a period of religious transition and change - I examine how Muslims and Buddhists explored and employed conceptual equivalences between Chinggisid traditions and elements of their own religious frameworks to gain influence and favor, and persuade the khans to convert or retain their earlier commitment to their new religious affiliation. I suggest that they employed this assimilative approach to maneuver within the religious paradigm of the Mongols while molding and manipulating it to their own religious ends. The paper further demonstrates how this ‘translation’ process of Mongol religious (immanentist) patterns became an arena of Buddhist- Muslim rivalry and competition, but also cross-cultural fertilization and exchange between the two religions.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines and reconstructs the physical space of mausoleum-centered endowed cities built by Mongol Khans and their courtiers to explore the public performance of sacred kingship and the crafting of a new body politic in Mongol Iran.
Paper long abstract:
My work explores charitable complexes built by Mongol Khans to historicize sacred kingship in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century Iran. As new converts to Islam, the Mongol Khans deployed divine symbols and rituals to lay claim on their ancestral lineage and the inherited mantel of the Islamic Caliphate. I argue that this project was not limited to the discursive realm but was embodied in the charitable cities the Khans endowed. These mausoleum-centered endowed charitable city-cum-sovereign were the material representations of the Khan’s sacred kingship, the legacy of which was memorialized by subsequent rulers. Inspired by Buddhist temples and Sufi shrines dotting the landscape of the greater Mongol empire, endowed charitable cities came to define sovereign piety and authority and provide a city model that linked imperial legitimacy to the circulation of goods, water, knowledge and people around the sacred body of the Khan. I examine and reconstruct the physical space of mausoleum-centered cities from their extant endowment deeds, ruins and remains to explore the public performance of conversion, sacred kingship, and the crafting of a new body politic. In specific, I explore endowed charitable cites built in or around Tabriz in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I argue that these building projects, referred to as ‘gateways of charity,’ were the material representation of Mongol Islam that illuminated the confessional politics of shrine-centered kingship popularized in this period.