Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: a Study of Politics and Invented Traditions by Ali Anooshahr (review)

Ali Anooshahr's book offers an intriguing and valuable contribution to the growing field of comparative studies of the early modern Islamic Eurasian empires. The book explores how authors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries engaged with the ancestries and origin stories of the dynastic founders of their royal Turkic-Mongol patrons. Anooshahr highlights the various, creative modes authors in service of the court draw on in order to refashion and remodel, and in some cases, altogether invent or erase, their patrons' Turkic-Mongol pedigrees. Doing so, these individuals sought to establish their patrons' rule on a more formidable royal-genealogical legacy that could offer them some advantage in the competitive, and overly crowded, Eurasian arena of early-modern imperial claimants. As Anooshahr demonstrates, these cultural brokers went even further as they sought to downplay and disavow the ancestral past of their patrons, which was largely situated within the context of "Turkestan," that is, in their nomadic and Central Asian—often beheld as "barbarian" and pagan—origins. In its place, they fitted their patrons with new imagined lineages that would better suit and serve their sixteenth-century Islamic, Persianate, imperial, and mostly sedentary, present.

The book aims to apply a literary approach to unravel the discourses of political power underlying these Persian-language chroniclers' strategies to mis/represent their patrons' dynastic histories, which the author refers to as "the teleology of Islamic monarchies" (p. 2). Due to the state of the sources, historians of the early stages of the early-modern Eurasian polities are often confronted by three choices: attempt to "demythologize" and "historicize" the re-renderings of the dynastic foundational myths, seek an alternative avenue by rejecting these sources altogether in favor of more "objective" external accounts, or rather, read them for the way they seek to promote certain visions of the dynastic past in the context of their present. Anooshahr opts for this latter option exploring the often "intentional process of 'myth-making'" (p. 31).

Following a short introduction presenting the premise of the book, chapter 2 takes the reader on a slight detour by examining the seventeenth to nineteenth-centuries European intellectual debate on the roots of these "Asian empires" and the often contradictory observations Europeans made about the early-modern Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids, Uzbeks, and Mongols. The next five chapters, however, focus on five interrelated case studies of Persian historical writing that each relates to one of these Eurasian polities.

Chapter 3 examines the Persian historical writing of Idris Bitlisi, a refugee from Safavid Iran in the Ottoman court of Sultan Bayezid II, who was commissioned to compose "a book of history in the style of Persian works produced for the Ilkhans (Mongol rulers of Iran) to accurately chronicle the House of Osman and its achievements" due to the alleged unreliability of Turkish historical writing (p. 30). Focusing on Idris's sections on the origins of the Ottomans, Anooshahr argues that Idris actively sought to distance the ruling Ottoman house from their Turkestani-nomadic roots by "mythologizing Ottoman origin narratives." To this end, Idris appropriated and manipulated biblical and Quranic imageries and genealogies that allowed him to maintain the Ottoman connection to Central Asia, but also to relegate it to the distant past, offering the Ottomans in its place a new imperial pedigree heavily informed by the Ottoman pivotal expansion into the former Byzantine lands. Anooshahr situates Idris's efforts in an intermediate moment in Ottoman history, as the dynasty transitioned from their predatory-pastoralist, Turkestani-Central-Asian traditions to a new Rumli identity. Thus, he fashioned the Ottoman sultan as a new Caesar, an Alexander-like ruler, standing for agrarian prosperity, constrained military force and just sedentary-styled government.

Chapter 4 studies the origins of the Safavid state. Here Anooshahr deviates from the proclaimed goal of the book and explores not only the "myth-making" process of the early Safavids, but also...