Three Muslim Empires

One noticeable aspect of current debates about the future of the Middle East or the broader Muslim world is that such discussions usually lack allusions to or invocations of the three major Muslim states of the early modern era. These were the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, which dominated large parts of the Middle East and South Asia beginning with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the founding of the Safavid state of Iran in 1501, and the founding of the Mughal state in 1526. These three empires represented the last collective moment of Muslim imperial power, and their rulers patronized a stunning architectural and artistic florescence. Current residents of Istanbul, Isfahan, Agra, and Delhi—and the many tourists who visit these cities—walk daily by the architectural emblems of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal wealth, power, and aesthetic sophistication: Istanbul's Aya Sophia mosque and the Top Kapi Serai palace complex; Isfahan's central plaza, the Maidan, with its bazaars and two splendid mosques; and Agra's Taj Mahal and Delhi's Red Fort.

Buildings in these empires' capitals alone are sufficient evidence of the wealth, pride, and dynastic ambitions of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal monarchs. Ruling over territories that stretched from Ottoman North Africa to Mughal Bengal and Assam, rulers governed a diverse population of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and animists, a population that in 1600 totaled somewhere between 130 and 160 million people: 22-30 million people in Ottoman dominions, 10-12 million in Iran, and more than 100 million in Mughal India. In economic terms, these Muslim empires were primarily agrarian states, deriving the bulk of their revenues from the land. Manufacturing and commerce were nonetheless important, as evidenced by the care rulers in each state took to encourage industry and trade. Thus silk and cotton manufactures produced substantial income for Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, while transit dues on the spice trade funneled through the Red Sea, and Cairo was a valuable source of currency for the Ottoman state—at least prior to Portuguese and then Dutch seaborne competition. In addition, Ottoman taxes on Jewish and Christian communities, a canonical levy known as jizya, represented one of the most important Ottoman sources of ready cash. Mughal India, with its enormous quantity of arable land and production of cotton for both its huge domestic market and international trade, was not only the most populous but also the wealthiest of these three states, while Safavid Iran, which lacked arable land, was not only the most thinly populated but also the poorest.

Perhaps the least appreciated aspect of these Muslim states is that they collectively constituted an imperial cultural zone or a civilization, whose individual states, at least at the royal and aristocratic level, had asmuch in common, and exhibited as many variations,

A late 19th-century photograph of the interior of the Kebir Cami (Great Mosque) in Bursa. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-81547].

as the contemporary states of Europe. Therefore, it makes sense to consider them together as constituting a discrete Muslim entity within a broader Islamic civilization, rather than artificially to discuss them individually as unique political institutions with idiosyncratic cultures. Two phrases, Turco-Mongol and Perso-Islamic, encapsulate much of the common political heritage of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals.

Turco-Mongol alludes to these dynasties' common Turkic heritage. The presence of Turks in the eastern Islamic world first occurred as a minor phenomenon, when the 'Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim (833-842) began purchasing and then training Turkic slaves, known as ghulams or mamluks, as troops who would be obedient and loyal to the Caliph, in contrast to the Arabmuqatila tribes, who were responsible for the early Arabic conquests. Yet, while Turkic slave troops exerted an outsized military and political influence in later Islamic history—most noticeably as yeni cheri or Janissaries, the so-called slave troops of the Ottomans—they were dwarfed in numbers by the migration and then invasion of Oghuz Turks from Mawarannahr, or western Central Asia, the geographic repository of many Turkic populations.

In the 10th century members of this...