The Mongols and the Islamic World by Peter Jackson

Author:Peter Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300125337
Publisher: Yale University Press

Pluralism and false reports of conversion

In chapter 11 we saw how Mongol attitudes towards the numinous led khans and their lieutenants to be open to the techniques employed by all religious ‘experts’ and to show equal favour to all faiths, granting privileges to the ‘religious class’ within each confession and patronizing Muslim shrines and other holy places. On occasion, moreover, a Mongol khan – perhaps seeking common ground with one group or another – voiced sentiments that indicated sympathy towards a particular faith, as when Hülegü, according to Bar Hebraeus, informed the patriarch that Christians had visited his grandfather Chinggis Khan and had taught him their religion, or when he privately revealed to the Dominican David of Ashby his desire for baptism and told the Armenian Vardan that he had been a Christian since birth.134 We know of no such revelations apropos of Islam; but just as zealous Western missionaries trumpeted tendentious reports of conversions,135 so too our Muslim sources are quite capable of misinterpreting acts of largesse. While writing realistically of Batu’s disinterested stance in religious matters,136 Juwaynī nevertheless assures his readers that Möngke showed greater favour towards Muslims than towards the representatives of other faiths, perhaps because the future Qaghan, his brothers and his cousins had allegedly been tutored by Iftikhār al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Abī Naṣr Qazwīnī.137 Jamāl al-Qarshī, al-Yūnīnī and the late fifteenth-century historian Mīr Khwānd all independently credit Qaidu with the same partiality.138 Some writers went still further. Jūzjānī, writing in distant Delhi, transmits reports from ‘trustworthy informants’ that both Ögödei and Batu had secretly adopted Islam.139 He makes Berke, attending Möngke’s enthronement, predict that the days of infidel rule are numbered and has the new Qaghan himself utter the shahāda – a piece of wishful thinking by any standard.140 Mongol administrators, too, were sometimes thought to have adopted Islam. For Juwaynī, the Uighur Körgüz, governor of Khurāsān, had embraced the faith shortly before his death.141 The Christian Kirakos transmits a similar rumour about Körgüz’s successor, Arghun Aqa (d. 673/1275);142 it finds no echo in Muslim sources, though Arghun Aqa’s son Nawrūz would prove heavily committed to the Muslim interest.

We should distinguish four levels of conduct on the part of Mongol rulers: firstly, marked (though not exclusive) favour towards Muslim personnel and Islamic charitable foundations (awqāf; sing. waqf), of the kind likely to prompt the misconceptions described above; secondly, adoption of Islamic practices at a personal level; thirdly, enforcement of the Shari‛a, involving the downgrading of rival faiths; and fourthly, a move beyond this, to active persecution of their adherents. Even within the third category we might still distinguish between the wholesale reimposition of the jizya and exemption from the tax for priests and monks (corresponding to what had been their position as regards the qubchur or their status under certain pre-Mongol dynasties like the Saljuqs). There is a final point to be made in this context. Anything more than the personal adhesion of a Mongol ruler risked undermining the pluralism demanded by Chinggis Khan’s edict.

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