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.