Although few now believe that the Mongol armies under Chinggis Khan or his successors had pointedly negative designs on the Muslim world, it is still widely believed that the advent of the Mongols bode ill for people and countries of the Islamic world. This view, however, has very little basis in fact and is increasingly being challenged. One recent biography of the great khan that appeared in 2007 was researched and penned by Michel Biran of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. What is remarkable is that it is published by Oneworld Publications of Oxford in their series of “Makers of the Muslim World.”45 Chinggis Khan and his successors enjoyed positive and fruitful relationships with those Muslims they encountered and with whom they had political, cultural, and mercantile dealings.
There is a story related by the revered South Asian saint Shaykh Nizam al-Din Awliya (d. 1325) concerning Chinggis Khan that not only demonstrates the presence of influential Muslims at the heart of the Mongol court early in their campaigns but also the sophisticated and benign attitude of the world conqueror toward mankind. Though not specific, the narrative suggests the date in which the events occurred to be in the second decade of the thirteenth century. A certain Khwajeh ‘Ali, the son of Khwajeh Rukn al-Din, the venerable Chishti saint, was taken prisoner by the Mongols. It so happened that when Khwajeh ‘Ali was brought before Chinggis Khan to explain himself, there was present at the Mongol court one of the disciples of the Chishti Sufi order. Upon seeing a fellow Chishti Sufi, he at once began wondering how best to realize his release.
It has already been remarked on that with the initial encounter with the Islamic world, Jebe Noyen, one of Chinggis’s four “Hounds of War,” was regarded as a liberator and welcomed by the Uyghur Muslims of the former lands of the Qara Khitai as their deliverer from oppression. When the full force of the Mongol war machine was ranged against the Khwtirazmshiih, the foremost representative of the Islamic world, there was a tradition emerging that the figure rallying the hosts of barbarism and ranks of infidels was not Chinggis Khan but in fact was the figure of the Sufi saint Shaykh Maslahat Khujandi.46 Sufi tradition believes that God had sent the Mongols to punish the blasphemous Khwarazmshtih who had defied the caliph and who was an insult to the Islamic world. A fifteenth-century chronicler, Dawlatshtih, records the terror of the Khwtirazmshiih who heard voices from the “unseen world” whispering, “Oh infidels, kill the evildoers”47 and relates that some saw the Prophet Khizr leading the Tatar hosts. Other stories stress the central role of Shaykh Najm al-Din Kubrii in guiding and initiating the Mongol devastation of Khwfirazm in fulfilment of God’s designs. These stories were restricted to Sufi circles, but their significance lies in their reflection of the widespread ill will felt toward the Khwarazmshtih by the Muslim world and the acceptance of Chinggis Khan as an agent of the Divine.
The Mongols in the role as the Punishment of God was a common image of the time and one found in Armenian, Georgian, and Chinese, as well as Persian and Arabic, sources. The medieval mind saw the world in religious terms, and all events were played out on a spiritual chessboard. Nothing happened by chance, and divine intent could be discerned behind every eventuality. Juwayni famously remarked after the fall of the Ismti’ilis at their fortress of Alamut that now God’s secret intent had become clear. It has often been assumed that Juwayni, a troubled devout Sunni Muslim, was trying to assuage his guilt at working for the Mongols by seeing the annihilation of, in his eyes, a blasphemous sect as just retribution by a vengeful God. However, his words toward the end of his history of Chinggis Khan48 were sentiments doubtless shared by many of his Muslim contemporaries. Not only had this perceived blasphemous scourge, the Ismti’ilis, been destroyed, but the despised Khwarazmshah had also been removed and Islam had indeed been freed from its Arab homeland and freed upon the world. Juwayni had traveled extensively, and he would have known the extent of Islam’s penetration of China. Islam flourished in China far more vigorously than today. The port cities of Hangzhou, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou were Muslim strongholds, while the province of Yunnan, safeguarding the Mongol state’s borders, had a Muslim governor, Sayyid ‘Ajall, safely and fully entrenched. The Mongols played host to an international audience, and the stage was centered in Muslim Iran. Juwayni’s words were not hollow prayers for forgiveness but rather the realization that his judgment had been sound and that the Chinggisids represented a Muslim renaissance.
Muslim acceptance of the Mongols coincided with the emergence of the dominance of the Toluids, the Mongol rulers of Iran descended from Ching-gis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui. However, this acceptance was more to do with an identification with a new elite and a new world order that split not only the Mongol world but the Islamic world as well. It was the Persians and Turks who happily forgot about the injustices of the House of ‘Abbas and the oppression of the Arabs and embraced a global vision and an economy and culture that spanned Asia from Kurdistan and Anatolia to Manzi and the three international port cities of Hangzhou, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou. Persian was the language spoken; Islam, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism were the religions practiced; and commerce was the cement. In Iran, the respected cleric and historian, Qacli Baclawi, had written and widely disseminated a “pocket history” that portrayed the Mongols as a legitimate and almost preordained Iranian dynasty. Written originally under Abaqa Khan (1234-1282), the second Mongol ruler of Iran from 1265, his little history found its way into every subsequent important historical bibliography, and the establishment of the Ilkhans so soon after their arrival suggests that the
Iranian delegation that petitioned Mongke Qa’an for a royal prince to rule over their province already envisaged absorbing themselves into the new Toluid empire that was emerging. In this brave new world, membership of the ruling elite was not dictated by ethnicity or religion. The Muslims of Iran and Turkistan were free to practice their religion, but their world was no longer bounded by the constraints of the past, and they were now members of a global community sometimes ruled over by infidels and sometimes ruling over infidels. This was the world that Chinggis Khan had left them, and this is the reason that so many Muslim rulers regarded Chinggis Khan and his successors as just and noble rulers.
World History
