Dialogism and Territoriality in a Mughal History of the Islamic Millennium

Journal of the Economic and  Social History of the Orient 55 (2012) 220-254 brill.com/jesh

Ali Anooshahr*

Abstract

The sixteenth century witnessed the flowering of European literature that claimed to describe the encounter between Western travelers and the indigenous population of the rest  of the world. Similarly, some Persianate writings of the same period present a dialogical encounter, not so much with the European other, but with rival Muslim empires. One of  the writers in this genre was Ja‖far Beg Qazvīnī, sole author of the third part of the Ta～rikh-i  alfī (Millennial History), supervised by the Mughal emperor Akbar. In his book, Ja‖far Beg  drew on an unprecedented store of sources from rival courts and treated the Ottomans,  Mughals, and Safavids as essentially equal political and cultural units following identical  historical trajectories. He also developed one of the earliest Mughal expressions of “Hindu stan” encompassing South Asia in its entirety. While most analyses of this outstanding  example of dialogical historiography have downplayed its value because of its paucity of  new information, the present article will seek instead to demonstrate its significance for its  unusual worldview.

Le seizième siècle vit la floraison d’une littérature s’attachant à décrire la rencontre entre les  voyageurs occidentaux et les populations indigènes du reste du monde. De façon relative ment similaire, les productions culturelles persanisées de la même période font apparaître  un certain nombre d’auteurs qui s’engagèrent dans une rencontre dialogique avec des  empires musulmans rivaux. Parmi eux se trouve Ja‖far Beg Qazvīnī, seul auteur de la  troisième partie de la Ta～rīkh-i alfī (Histoire d’un millénaire) supervisée par l’empereur mog hol Akbar. Dans cet ouvrage, Ja‖far Beg Qazvīnī puisa à un éventail sans précédent de  sources persanes et turques issues de cours rivales et traita les Ottomans, Moghols et Safa vides comme des unités politiques et culturelles essentiellement équivalentes et aux trajec toires historiques identiques. Il formula également une des expressions mogholes les plus  précoces d’un « Hindustan » englobant l’ensemble de l’Asie du Sud. Tandis que la plupart  des analyses de cet exceptionnel spécimen d’historiographie dialogique a minimisé sa valeur  en raison du peu d’informations factuelles nouvelles qu’il apportait, la présente contribu tion s’attachera à l’inverse à démontrer l’importance de l’inhabituelle vision du monde qui  y est développée.

Keywords

dialogism, territoriality, Mughal historiography, Ta'rīkh-i alfī

Jesuits in tattered robes travel aboard Portuguese carracks and galleons,  equipped with Bibles, astrolabes, and polyglot dictionaries. hey meet  natives in distant islands, copy their hieroglyphs, pore over scrolls and  manuscripts, and unearth new kinds of knowledge. What they bring back  opens the eyes of Europeans and changes their consciousness forever. his,  at least, is the common popular image of early modern encounters between  Western travelers and the indigenous population of the rest of the world.  However, recent scholarship has shown that a simultaneous and compara ble phenomenon occurred in other parts of the globe as well, as documented, for instance, in the Persian and Turkish texts of the same period.  One might cite as an example an anonymous Ottoman author of the late  sixteenth century who wrote a “History of the West Indies” (Tarih-i Hind i Garbî), drawing on Spanish accounts of the New World.1 A few decades  later a Mughal belletrist, ‖Abd al-Sattār Lāhūrī, learned Latin and Portu guese and composed several books recording his textual—as well as  actual—dialogues with the Jesuits.2 In short, a new universalism in the  worldview of these particular authors and their literary circles can also be  observed.

Closely related to these developments was the rise of Turco-Persian writ ings that describe encounters involving south, central, and western Asia.3 his is certainly the case for travelers,4 but also, I will argue below, for a number of pioneering historians of the late sixteenth century, whose work  described a new dialogue with rival but not totally alien cultural or politi cal spheres. hese intra-Asian encounters are much more fertile for tracing  the features of what some have described as a universal “early modernity”,  as they demonstrate an intensification in the sixteenth century of a change  in the worldview of a large group of people in the Islamic world. In the  specific case to be discussed here, we find, for example, the first formula tion of inter-imperial dialogue coupled with a pan-Indian territorial iden tity, which was subsequently adopted by other Indo-Persian authors of the  sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The man who gave expression to this vision in India was Ja‖far Beg  Qazvīnī. He came to South Asia from Safavid Iran shortly after 1576, and  after some adventurous years in Mughal service—a rebellion in Bengal, his  miraculous return to imperial grace, his appointment as paymaster of the  army, and composition of poems all the while—was given by the Mughal  court the task of completing the final third of the Ta～rīkh-i alfī (Millennial  History)—a mammoth chronicle of several thousand folios narrating the  events of the Muslim world from the death of the prophet Muḥammad to  the end of the sixteenth century (the time of the Muslim millennium).

Unfortunately, the sheer size of this composition has prevented modern  scholars from analyzing it meticulously, and while there are overall assess ments of the text in a handful of recent studies, it has been mostly neglected,  compared with other Mughal chronicles of the reign of Akbar (1556-1605),  which were long ago edited, translated, and extensively mined for their  information.5 No single article-length study of the “History” has been  undertaken to date, and certainly no one has tried to examine the Alfī as  the expression of a new worldview appearing in the Indo-Persian world.  he present essay is meant to reverse this trend by providing the first  detailed analysis of two central motifs in this text—a particular form of  dialogism, as well as its configuration of imperial territory.6

Dialogue in the Alfī, I will argue, meant allowing as many compet ing voices (or sources) as possible to speak in order to discover a higher  truth, while territoriality implied reifying geographical space as an autono mous political and historical subject. hese two central motifs are closely  interconnected. Dialogue in the last part of the Alfī serves as the means  through which empires are represented by their own voice. By extension,  the Mughal court in which the text is produced functions as the ultimate  source of arbitration among rival Muslim sects and powers whose claims  to sovereignty would now be localized in distant territories, away from the  subcontinent (primarily its southern parts), which was now reconfigured  as “Hindustan” and thus subject to Mughal imperial claims. his pan Indian vision of political sovereignty—of an all-India “state”—was itself  new and involved projecting cultural and historical unity onto the diverse  past and population of South Asia. In doing so, the Mughals preempted the  British by a few centuries. Before arguing all this, some background on  the production of the text and its authors will be given in order to clarify  the nature of the project.

1. he text and its authors7

The commission to compose the Ta～rīkh-i alfī was issued in 1585 by the  emperor Akbar and his close advisors. he ostensible purpose of the project  was to draft a history of Muslim kingdoms to commemorate the impend ing Muslim millennium, which would fall on 19 October 1591. A new  dating system was devised (presumably to inaugurate a new epoch), and  the chronology began with the celebration, not—as in the regular (hijrī)  Islamic calendar—of the migration of the prophet Muḥammad from  Mecca to Medina in 621 CE, but rather of his death in 632—hence the  change from anno hegirae (in the year of migration . . .) to anno mortis  (in the year of the [Prophet’s] death [riḥla]). Originally, seven contributors  were assigned the task of writing the book. he initial plan was for a seven year rotation, according to which each author would write the events of  each of the first seven years. After the events of the seventh year were com pleted, the team would move to writing the annals of years eight through  fourteen. he most accomplished of the group (who was to begin the  project) was Naqīb Khān. He represented the cream of a former style of  universal historiography, a recent exemplar of which had been produced in  the Safavid city of Qazvīn a few decades earlier. Naqīb Khān’s grandfather  was the author of the highly regarded Lubb al-tavārīkh, but Naqīb Khān  and his father had been forced to flee the Safavid court because of their  supposed adherence to Sunnism. Naqīb Khān’s erudition commanded the  respect of all; he was said to have memorized the most famous universal  history available at the time, the voluminous fifteenth-century Rawḍat al safa, by Mīr Khwand. Another contributor was Mīr Fatḥallāh Shīrāzī, who  had likewise emigrated from Iran and had reached the Mughal court by  way of the Deccan. His expertise in astronomy made him the best candi date for the invention of the new regnal calendar of Emperor Akbar. he  ilāhī (“divine”) was a solar calendar based on old Persian zodiacal months  (as opposed to the common lunar Islamic ones). Moving down the list,  two brothers, both physicians, also came from Iran. Abū al-Fath Gīlānī ̣ and Humām Gīlānī fled the Safavid court after falling from favor with the  reigning monarch, Shāh Tahmāsp, and made their way to India clandes- ̣ tinely, passing themselves off as merchants. Along with these four “Iranis,”8 there were three authors who had been born in India: Ibrāhīm Sirhindī,  ‖Abd al-Qādir Badā～ūnī, and Nizām al-Dīn Ah ̣ ̣mad; the first two came  from scholarly and juridical backgrounds and the last was in the military.  here is an interesting balance of religious views in this team. Badā～ūnī,  Sirhindī, and Nizām al-Dīn were Sunnis, while the Gīlānī brothers and ̣ Fatḥallāh Shīrāzī were Shiites. Naqīb Khān held an ambiguous position. In  Iran he was suspected of being a Sunni and in India he was considered a  Shiite. Finally, at least one author, Badā～ūnī, was sympathetic to the  contemporary millenarian movement of the Mahdavis.9 his attempt to harmonize the religious views of the authors was intentional and had much  to do with the goals of the project (more on this below).

The original team soon completed five cycles, down to the year 35 anno  mortis, but not without controversy. Badā～ūnī was accused at least once of  imposing his strong Sunni views on the history but was, much to his relief,  cleared following an investigation. However, once the fifth cycle was com pleted, that is, from the year 36 onwards, Abū al-Fath Gīlānī convinced ̣ the emperor to disband the original group and assign the entire task to a  new author, Mullā Aḥmad Tattavī. Mullā Aḥmad was born in South Asia  but moved to the Safavid domains during the reign of Shāh Tahmāsp. Fol- ̣ lowing Shāh Tahmāsp’s death and the accession of his son Ismā ̣ ‖īl II, in  1576, Mullā Aḥmad left Iran for Mecca, made his way from there to the  coast of the Deccan in southern India, and then arrived at Akbar’s court.  He had converted to Shiism at an early age and had a reputation for zeal otry in his faith. Much to the dislike of Badā～ūnī and like-minded others,  Mullā Aḥmad finished parts one and two of the Alfī, down to the reign of  the Mongol ruler Ghazan Khān (1295-1304), giving free rein to his sectar ian biases. At this point (1588), however, Mullā Aḥmad was murdered by  a Mughal aristocrat, Mīrzā Fūlād Barlās, who was himself known for his  strong Sunni views and had suffered some affront at the hands of the mulla.  Another author thus had to be found to complete the task, and Ja‖far Beg  Qazvīnī was chosen.

Ja‖far Beg was another immigrant from Qazvīn, having left Iran after the  accession of Ismā‖īl II. His family had been active in the Safavid and sub sequent Mughal administrations, and he had served Emperor Akbar as  both soldier and administrator since his arrival in the subcontinent. What  he represented, in addition to his wholehearted dislike of sectarian animos ity, was a new historical vision, one that was also developed in Qazvīn in  the last years of Shāh Tahmāsp’s reign and the early years of Ismā ̣ ‖īl II and  was unusually ecumenical and universalist in its purview.

Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū, a high ranking Turkman commander, was a precur sor of Ja‖far Beg who broke away from other historians of the early six teenth century by treating the Ottoman and Safavid realms as territorially  autonomous units, each with its own unique history (as represented by its  own set of sources). Ḥasan Beg composed his book in the Safavid capital,  Qazvīn, in the 1570s.10 His massive Aḥsan al-tavārīkh, of which only two  of the original twelve volumes survive, is unusual in early Safavid histori ography for its detailed treatment of events in the Ottoman Empire, which  the author represented without the virulent polemics common in the  works of his predecessors. For this he drew heavily on a Persian chronicle  of the Ottoman Empire by Idrīs Bitlīsī (the Hasht Bihisht), which was  composed at the end of the fifteenth century, and other, unnamed contem porary materials. Ḥasan Beg even tried to include what he knew of Mughal  history in his chronicle, though he seems to have been hampered by the  unavailability of sources—a good excuse, as no real Mughal historiography  existed at that time.11 It is thus significant that Ḥasan Beg shared a view of  world history similar to that of his junior colleague in Qazvīn, Ja‖far Beg.  his new method of historiography was precisely what Ja‖far Beg could  offer the Mughal court. We do not know exactly how he was chosen for the  task, but one suspects that, while the former method, as exemplified by  Naqīb Khān, was found wanting, and the continuation of Mullā Aḥmad  had stirred sectarian animosity, the new Qazvīnī “school” of ecumenical  and dialogical historiography, as represented by Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū in Iran  and Ja‖far Beg in India, played a major role in the latter’s commission.  Moreover, Ḥasan Beg’s bibliographic shortcomings could easily be rectified by the large library of sources made available at the Mughal court for  this very purpose.

Indeed, one can reconstruct the range of titles used in the composition  of the Ta～rīkh-i alfī, as Ja‖far Beg refers to them occasionally. here is the  Ta～rīkh-i Bahādurshāhī,12 written in Gujarat and describing the exploits of  Sultan Bahādur in his opposition to the Mughal emperor Humāyūn  (r. 1530-40, 1555-6). here is also material from Mamluk histories which  were apparently read and interpreted live by a bilingual speaker of Arabic  and Persian. Ja‖far Beg writes, for instance, “From this point on, I could  not discover the particulars of the biographies of Egyptian sultans from the  person being consulted while these pages were being drafted.”13 Much  material on early Ottoman history comes from Idrīs Bitlīsī’s Ta～rīkh-i Hasht  Bihisht.14 Regarding the khans of Mughulistan, Ja‖far Beg read the Ta～rīkh-i  Rashīdī, by Mirzā Haydar Dughlāt.15 here is much more. Dialogism in  the third part of the Alfī meant drawing on all such available sources, so  that the political other could have its say. Yet, Ja‖far Beg’s method was dif ferent from that of previous universal historians. here was indeed a unifying vision, philosophically defined, and the reasons and justifications for  this approach were stated explicitly.

2. Dialogue in the Alfī

he primary reason for the presence of dialogism in the Ta～rīkh-i alfī is the  nature of the imperial commission itself. he Mughal court was still some  years away from formulating explicitly the policy of sulḥ-i kull (“absolute  peace”) that it pursued at the very end of the sixteenth century, through  which new opportunities were extended to non-Muslim subjects. How ever, the ideas presented in the Alfī show that the emperor and his advisors  were well underway in that direction. In a few cases the policy is given a  name, āsāyish-i ‖āmm, which is roughly synonymous with sulh ̣ ̣-i kull (āsāyish is a generic term for tranquility, whereas sulh ̣ ̣ means specifically the  absence of war, and ‖āmm means “universal, general,” whereas kull implies  absoluteness). his was to be achieved through justice—not as discipline  and punishment, but as fairness in the service of truth. he role of the  Mughal court, as represented in the Alfī, was thus to serve as the locus of  ultimate arbitration among conflicting voices. hese ideas are laid out in  the preface to the third part by Ja‖far Beg, and because it is especially  important, most of the text will be translated below:

The best and most complete of divine gifts to humans consists of placing the reins of  power over them in the hands of a wise (‖āqil ), just (‖ādil ), and fair (bā insāf ̣ ) king,  because their material life depends on the survival of their kind, which in turn depends  on civilization and culture, while [civilization and culture] are impossible without a  just (‖ādil ) king. As for their spiritual well-being, humans need to drive fanaticism  and prejudice from their midst, and that can be accomplished only through fairness  (insāf ̣ ). Praise the Lord for giving us language for thanksgiving and for accepting our  thanksgiving in exchange for his gifts . . . Why should the people of this age not raise  their heads to the sky out of sheer joy or place their feet on the earth in happiness?  hey live under the shadow of the sun of such a king who has created justice (‖adl )  and who possesses fairness (insāf ̣ ). hose with untrammeled reason (‖uqūl-i āzād ) are  at his disposal, and those whose spirits are liberated are at his service. He has struggled  for the survival of justice (‖adl ) and the extinction of oppression. With the help of  reason (‖aql ), he has lifted fairness (insāf ̣ ) to glory from its usual abject state. Heaven,  which is the highest gift, is another name for his epoch. In fact, it would be reasonable  if this epoch should resent the name of heaven, since the latter is but a promissory  note, while the former is as good as cash in hand. In the safe haven of his justice,  human kind enjoys a leisurely repose. Even animals are at rest. he gates of the safe  house of his [Akbar’s] fairness (insāf ̣ ) are open to the practitioners of all religions. By  his just command, wolves are herding sheep. hanks to his fairness, infidels are caring  for Muslims. He is forever seeking knowledge, and his search is always increasing. He  is a friend of meaning (ma‖nī) and an enemy of chatter ( guft u gū). He cares about  what is spoken (sukhan), regardless of who speaks it (sukhangū).

[The emperor’s] all-inclusive mercy (shafiqat-i shāmil ) strives to benefit the masses  and the elite with his perfect knowledge (‖ilm-i kāmil ). His heart, which loves fairness,  intends that the communities of various religions learn about the truth and truthful ness (haqīqat va haqqiyyat) of one another, so that they may choose honesty (rāstī) and  abandon bigotry (ta‖asṣ uḅ ). He has therefore ordered that the main rational sciences  (masā～il-i ‖aqlī) of various religions and nations be translated by linguists into one  another’s languages and that the rose garden of reported sciences (masā～il-i naqlī) be  pruned of the implanted thorns of bigots. here have appeared a hundred innovations  in every community and a thousand doctrines in each religion. Many times, during  the instruction of “Certain Knowledge” [‖ilm-i yaqīn, a Sufi concept], he has said with  his inspired tongue, “Everyone has made up a saying and has found proof in support  of his camp. God save us from such reports. For instance, for years the call to prayer  was heard by everyone five times a day during the lifetime of the prophet Muḥammad,  and yet Muslim sects, be they Shiite or Sunni, transmit [conflicting] reports about it  to confirm their own position and disparage the other’s. his is to say nothing of the  accounts of more esoteric matters and the actions of the kings of the world, in which  biased writers and collectors of false rumors have held center stage. It is therefore a  matter of utmost urgency and importance to attempt to verify reports, since they are  not rationally derived knowledge.” hus, having gathered what was necessary for the  craft of historiography, viz., prominent books whose authors were reliable, an order  was issued to the late Ḥakīm Aḥmad [Tattavī] to write a history beginning from the  time of the death of the prophet Muḥammad, after verifying the reports as far as possi ble, and to include in it true accounts from every corner of the world . . . [After Ḥakīm Aḥmad’s death] I, the servant of the court, was elevated and appointed to this task.16

In Ja‖far Beg’s preface, the emperor Akbar is presented as the sublime seeker  of truth and as one who transcends partisan and sectarian bickering. he  text is meant to be authoritative and comprehensive, reflecting ideals of a  new Islamic universalism. No wonder that extensive use is made of various  sources produced at different courts, including those that might, at some  point, have rivaled that of the Mughals. he Ta～rīkh-i alfī and its patron are  not mere players in political games but the final arbiter and the standard  for lesser histories.

The notion of justice is equated with overcoming bigotry through fair ness (insāf ̣ ), in the sense of “listening to all,” of giving audience, in order  to discover the truth. he supreme position of the emperor as just arbiter  is due precisely to this ability to listen. he emperor loves ma‖nī (meaning)  and dislikes guft u gū (empty chatter).17 He loves what is spoken sukhan,  regardless of who speaks it (sukhangū). In other words he has an ear for  anyone who has something meaningful to say. Justice and peace are thereby  established as in a court of law through insāf ̣ , whereby insāf ̣ (lit., “causing  to reach the middle”) has the legal sense of an impartial arbitration, listening to and choosing fairly between two sides in an argument.18 Ja‖far Beg’s  method in the text is the same. He can, for example, read through conten tious Ottoman and Safavid texts, choose fairly, and then discover an even  deeper meaning: the historical pattern into which he then organizes the  teleology of the three empires. Part three of the Alfī thus diverges from old style universal histories that presented history dynastically but not territo rially and certainly did not try to reconcile conflicting versions of the same event through a self-conscious commitment to dialogue. Now, in order to emphasize the uniqueness of Ja‖far Beg’s sense of justice  as insāf ̣ , it would be helpful to compare his prefatory encomium to Emperor  Akbar to that of his contemporaries. For instance, Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī,  author of the historical-geographic work Haft iqlīm (“Seven Climes,” i.e.,  latitudinal zones), also praised the justice and mercy (‖adl va iḥsān) of  Akbar, in the section listing the rulers of northern India. In Rāzī’s world view, however, Akbar’s justice had nothing to do with equity or fairness but  was a disciplinary justice that brought about peace and security in his  realm. For instance he praised “especially the punishment of savage Afghan  highway robbers that harassed merchants and travelers.”19 It is this military  might of Akbar, and not his ecumenical policy, that, according to Rāzī, has  brought comfort to his subjects:

Those who call Hindustan their homeland (mutuvatṭ inān-i Hindustān ̣ ) from the time  of creation until now have never experienced such fortune and comfort (rifāhiyat).  he grandees and worthies are given the privilege of high rank and the rest of the  people (sā～ir al-nās) are free from the nuisance of jizya, zakāt, and other levies. [Verse]  “he kingdom is safe and its walls are fortified. We are infinitely obliged to God’s rule  for this.”20

The concept of justice as expounded by Ja‖far Beg thus differed from the  more usual conceptions of it in the late sixteenth century. But beyond the  theoretical preface, how was this new sense of justice as fairness mani fested, in concrete terms, in the Alfī? Basically, Ja‖far Beg removes overtly  contentious or apologetic language to produce a more “factual” and sani tized version of events. he term “factual” here refers strictly to Jafar Beg’s  method and does not suggest that his history is more reliable for a modern  positivist reconstruction of events. In a sense, our author tends to focus on  the “facts” of events, such as names, dates, and battles, and cares little for  the normative language of polemic.

A good example is the history of the Sūr dynasty, which briefly over threw Mughal rule in northern India in the middle of the sixteenth cen tury. Ja‖far Beg’s presentation of these events is remarkably reserved and  free of overt vilification. Regarding the founder of the Sūr dynasty, he  wrote, “Most of Hindustan was captured by Shīr Khān, the Afghan, and  [he] attained the height of acclaim.”21 He omits reports about the begin nings of Shīr Khān’s career that suggested the future king was, for a time,  a highway robber, a flaw that a later official historian of Akbar, Abū al-Faḍl  ‖Allāmī, would go to great pains to emphasize.22 On the battle of Chausa,  in which the Mughals suffered their first decisive defeat by the Sūrs, Ja‖far  Beg writes, “Shīr Khān, who had spent a restful time in the middle part of  that country, had gathered a large group to himself. At night, near Chausa,  he raided the camp of His Majesty, Humāyūn, as was previously stated.  hat battle did not turn out the way the Mughal army wanted, and His  Majesty Humāyūn returned to Agra.”23 A large gap separates this account  from Abū al-Faḍl’s moralizing version in the Akbarnama, where the author  repeatedly credits Shīr Khān’s treachery for this victory, drawing on many  synonyms for this disparaging characterization.24

Ja‖far Beg even went so far as to tone down Bābur’s proclamation of vic tory over the Rajput lord Rana Sangha in the battle of Kanua—a seem ingly unnecessary editorial intervention in a text that was supposed to  celebrate the Islamic credentials of Emperor Akbar. So, for instance, while  not entirely eliminating the rhetorical Sturm und Drang of holy war in that  particular section of his source the Bāburnāma, Ja‖far Beg still deleted pas sages such as: “[these infidels] attached themselves as with chains and  bonds to that wicked infidel [Rana Sangha]. hese ten infidels, like ten  denouncers raising the banner of wretchedness—‘denounce unto them a  painful punishment’ [Qur～an 3:21]—held many followers, soldiers, and  districts broad in extent.”25 And, more emphatically:

That infidel, blinded by his own conceit, convinced the hardened hearts of the  benighted infidels to join forces, like “additions of darkness one over the other” [Q.  24:40], and to take up a stance of rebellion and war against the people of Islam, for the  destruction of the foundations of the holy law (sharī‖a) of the Lord of Mankind, upon  whom be peace. Like divine fate against the one-eyed Antichrist, the holy warriors of  the royal army came forth and, fixing the gaze of their insight upon the words, “When  the divine decree comes, sight is blinded,” and bearing in mind the holy verse, “Who soever strives to promote the true religion strives for the advantage of his own soul”  [Q. 29:6], executed the command that must be obeyed, “Wage war against the unbelievers and hypocrites” [Q. 9:73].26

The deletion of such bombastic and provocative passages was consistent  with Ja‖far Beg’s overall treatment of the history of the other. hese were  expunged for failing to contribute to the “facts” of the battle, such as the  arrangement of armies, order of attacks, and list of warriors.

Perhaps nothing better highlights Ja‖far Beg’s historiography devoid of  common inter-dynastic normative polemic than his description of the  battle of Chāldirān (1514), in which the Ottomans defeated the Safavid,  Shāh Ismā‖īl. A comparison of our author with his possible sources demonstrates clearly how he composed a narrative so terse and “factual” out of  many pages of virulently antagonistic prose. He writes,

One of the greatest events of this year was the war between the caesar of Rūm and the  pādshāh of Iran. he basic précis is as follows. When Sultan Selīm attained full inde pendence and felt at ease viz-à-viz his domestic enemies, he sent an envoy to Shāh  Ismā‖īl, saying that some of the provinces that were previously allied with the rulers of  Rūm were now in the possession of the Qizilbāsh. Withdrawing from them would  contribute to [mutual] love and friendship. Shāh Ismā‖īl answered with strong words.  he caesar gathered his entire army and headed for Iran. Shāh Ismā‖īl, too, came to  Tabriz from Hamadān intending to fight, and there he heard that Sultan Selīm was  marching rapidly. He went out to meet him, and in the first days of Rajab [late August]  the two armies encountered each other in a place called Chāldirān, twenty leagues  from Tabriz.

Sultan Selīm camped atop a hill and fortified his campsite with wagons tied together  with chains, placing countless guns and cannons on them. Shāh Ismā‖īl arranged his  lines with himself on the right wing and Muḥammad Khān Ustājlū, ruler of Diyarbakır,  on the left. Mīr ‖Abd al-Baqī, Sayyid Muḥammad Kamūna, and Mīr Sayyid Sharīf,  called the Sadr [chief religious officer] were in the center. Before the lines were formed, ̣ Muḥammad Khān told Shāh Ismā‖īl that the Ottomans should not be allowed to form  their lines and must be engaged while on the move. Once they fortified their campsite  it would be difficult to fight them . . . As he was very brave, Shāh Ismā‖īl himself killed  several Romans [Ottomans] . . . Many Qizilbāsh elite were killed, because there were  many guns and cannons in the army of Rūm [Ottomans] . . . he Qizilbāsh army was  defeated. Shāh Ismā‖īl’s army, which by then comprised only three hundred men,  charged the heart of the army of Rūm. He reached the wagon-fortress and sundered a  chain with his own sword. Most of his companions were killed in this charge. Perforce,  he went to Tabriz.27

There is nothing here on Safavid “heresy,” Ottoman “orthodoxy,” or false  pretension of victory, as is commonly found in Ottoman and Safavid  sources on this battle. Ja‖far Beg simply gives his readers the sequence of  events, names the brave and the dead (omitted from this translation), and  describes noteworthy military actions. He was thus able to assume a historiographical distance that was impossible for his source-authors writing in  Istanbul or Qazvīn, even for those with universalist ambitions. For instance,  the Ottoman Meḥmed Paşa Nişāncı, in his own chronicle of the Muslim  world, could not refrain from referring to Shāh Ismā‖īl as “unlucky and  wretched,” or as the “befuddled governor of Persia,” whose army of “here tics” was defeated by the “army of Islam” led by Sultan Selīm.28 Hoca  Sadeddin, in his Tacü’t-tevarih, praises Selīm for using the “sword of Jihad”  to “overthrow the enemy of religion and the sect of [heretical] innovation,”  that had “ravaged the foundations of the structure of the glorious pro phetic sunna with the pickaxes of oppression and heresy.”29 Mustafa  li, in  his more comprehensive Künhü’l-ahbar refers to Shāh Ismā‖īl as an  “unmanly wretch,” king of the “Qizilbash rabble” who promoted a “dis credited school of thought and an unclean way,” and who had to be dealt  with in a holy war.30 Let us not forget the mufti Kemalpaşazade, who was  alive and closely involved in the suppression of the Qizilbash under Selīm  I and who, in his own voluminous Tevarih-i  l-i Osman, quoted the legal  ruling by which the misguided Shāh Ismā‖īl was to be treated the same as  other warring infidels, his blood and that of his followers was to be spilled  with impunity, and no mercy was to be shown to his followers, wherever  they might be found.31

Across the border, early universal historians writing under Safavid  patronage took an apologetic view of the events of the battle of Chāldirān.  Khvāndamīr in his Ta～rīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar, criticized Sultan Selīm I for  “straying from the healthy and straight path, unlike his forefathers, and  rebelling against the appointees [of Shāh Ismā‖īl].”32 During the battle  itself, which Khvāndamīr describes in epic language, so many of Ottomans  were supposedly killed that Sultan Selīm had to confess to the extraordi nary strength of his rival. Finally, the author claims, Ismā‖īl stopped the  fighting in order to save the lives of his servants and resorted to a ruse by  engaging in a sham retreat. When Selīm arrived in Tabriz and heard that  Ismā‖īl was returning to make a counter-strike, he was overcome by fear  and escaped to his kingdom.33 hat is at least what Khvāndamīr wanted his  readers to believe. Some years later, Khvurshāh b. Qubād Ḥusaynī, author  of a history known as the Ta～rīkh-i Īlchī-i Nizāmshāh ̣ , who wrote much of  his history at the Safavid court, would refer unsympathetically to Sultan  Selīm as merely the governor of Rūm34 and would compare Ismā‖īl’s defeat  to the prophet Muḥammad’s failure in battle of Uḥud (625 CE) against  the pagans of Mecca.35 Yaḥyā b. ‖Abd al-Latīf Qazvīnī, whose grandson ̣ Naqīb Khān worked on the Alfī decades later, refers to the beginnings of  the conflict in his Lubb al-tavārīkh as the “opposition and rebellion” of  Sultan Selīm and downplays the severity of the Safavid defeat by stating  that Shāh Ismā‖īl saw it wise to withdraw. hereafter, Selīm, “in the absence  of His Majesty, the padshāh came to Tabriz from Anatolia, but, after two  weeks, out of fear of [Ismā‖īl’s] ferocious army, returned to Anatolia.”36

The sole exception to this abundance of defamation and defensiveness  was a Qazvīn-based universal historian by the name of Qāḍī Aḥmad b.  Muḥammad Ghaffārī, who wrote, in the late 1560s, his Ta～rīkh-i Jahānārā,  in which he referred to the Ottoman emperor as simply “Sultan Selīm” and  described the battle in a short and straightforward passage. he author felt  no compunction about describing Shāh Ismā‖īl’s defeat without resorting  to the justifications of former historians.37 Qāḍī Aḥmad’s Jahānārā is the  beginning of the new historiographical school produced in the Safavid  capital under Shāh Tahmāsp, after the peace of Amasya with the Otto- ̣ mans. Other historians—such as Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū, Sharaf al-Dīn Bitlīsī  (in his Sharafnāma),38 and Ja‖far Beg—expanded on the foundations laid  in Qazvīn by their respected predecessor by maintaining his relative  neutrality but also incorporating Ottoman and other source material into  their narratives. his sharply distinguished them from other sixteenth century “universal historians” writing in the Ottoman or Safavid domains.  heir new approach culminated, in the case of Ja‖far Beg’s Alfī, in a philo sophical position on universalism and impartiality detailed in the preface.

3. Territoriality

At some point, the logic of engaging in dialogue with sources from various  perspectives led Ja‖far Beg to construct autonomous territorial entities,  whose voices he then endeavored to represent. It is not until the section  describing the sixteenth century CE (the tenth Islamic century) that the  information begins to be arranged neatly according to geography, i.e. in  the Ottoman Empire (Rūm), the Safavid Empire (Iran), and the Mughal  Empire (Hindustan). It is worth noting that unlike our modern designa tion, Ja‖far Beg’s imperial units are not dynastic but politico-geographical.  he genealogy of the ruling house is not unimportant to him: but it is the  location of these dynasties that determines their identity. hey are in the  line of Roman, Iranian, or Indian kingship. Ja‖far Beg, moreover, presents  each of these territorial entities as following almost identical historical trajectories, suggesting their comparability, if not equality, as political enti ties, until the reign of Akbar.

Such a territorial vision of history was new, even when compared with  the earlier parts of the Alfī itself. For instance, the concluding part of sec tion two (vol. 6 of the Tehran edition), covering the years 611 to 683 AM,  (corresponding roughly the thirteenth century CE), written by Mullā  Aḥmad Tattavī, pays great attention to the details of Mongol history, from  Genghis Khān to his descendants, while barely mentioning events in South  Asia.39 Nor are the histories that the author treats explicitly conceived of  geographically. Often, the various entries do not begin with any territorial  rubric. he following passage covering the year 674 anno mortis (1275  CE), which contains one of the few more complete references to the Delhi  Sultanate, provides a good example. It ends after a long description of the  reign of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khān:

A scholar of Bukhara by the name of Rāzī had befriended [prince Temür, Kublai  Khān’s grandson], and claimed to know gold and silver alchemy, as well as magic. He  had ensnared that young prince with his drivel and would always drink wine with him  in secret. When they informed the khan of this, he separated that man from the prince  and sent him packing to Munzi [?]. On the way, soldiers lightened his body of the  weight of his head [i.e. decapitated him], but when Prince Temür finally became khan  after [Kublai] Khān’s death, he totally abandoned wine with a royal determination.  his happened when he was twenty-five. he foregoing has been a summary of the  accounts of the khan’s ministers which was recorded all in the same place in order to  avoid interrupting the narrative. Now we will return to finishing the events of the year  674 anno mortis.

One of the events of this year was the death of the eldest son of Sultan Ghiyāth  al-Dīn Balaban, the Indian (Hindī). He was the sultan’s heir and the ruler of Lahore,  Multān, and Sind. Amīr Khusraw and Ḥasan [both poets] were in attendance upon  him. His death occurred in a battle fought somewhere between Lahore and Riwalpuri,  against a Mongol army led by someone named Temür Āghā.40

The author is, of course, aware that he is shifting from the history of events  in the Mongol realm to the Delhi Sultanate about which he clearly cares  much less and to which he does not even try to give equal space. his shift  of location within the temporal continuum is not, however, marked by a  geographical signal but a personal one. He writes the history of dynasties,  not places. He applies the sobriquet “Indian” to the king perhaps as a help  to the ignorant reader, but certainly not as a marker of organizational divi sion integral to the text. his approach of Mullā Aḥmad in the first two  parts of the Alfī stands in contrast to Ja‖far Beg who, as his narrative  advanced chronologically, gradually began to arrange his material according to political geography. his practice finds its fullest expression in deal ing with the material of the sixteenth century, when the three comparable  empires were founded. he following excerpt demonstrates the transitional  period, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century; compare it with Mullā  Aḥmad’s section quoted above. It chronicles the events of the years 866-901  AM (876-911 AH or 1471-1505 CE) and shows the slow amalgamation  of disparate territories into larger ones. After explaining his difficulty of  finding exact chronologies for this period the author initially writes,

The provinces whose histories could be found are as follows: Khurasan and its depen dencies; the countries of the two Iraqs, Fars, Kirman, and Azerbaijan; the countries of  Transoxania, Hisar, and Turkestan; the countries of India, namely Delhi, Gujarat, Malwa, and Jawnpur; the countries of Rūm; the countries of Egypt and Syria; the  provinces of Moghulistan, etc.

In the year 877 AM, in Kashmir, Sultan Zayn al-‖Ābidīn, son of Sultan Sikandar,  who was known as Shāhī Khān, ascended the throne of kingship after his brother.41

We notice here that territory serves as the most important way, after chro nology, of introducing the material. At this point, all of these territories,  except the Ottoman Empire (Rūm), are still designated by mere geograph ical names. hey are not yet territorial “states.” he name “India” (Hindus tan) clearly has a comprehensive meaning, but it is still simply a  geographical designation comprising several smaller political units. As we  proceed through this section, however, broader political terms (such as  “Iran”) are added, to refer to the rise of a new empire, the Safavids. Ja‖far  Beg writes, “the affairs of the two Iraqs, Azerbaijan, and Shirvan, which are  the greatest of the lands (bilād ) of Iran in these years are as follows . . .”42 In  other words, we begin to see the amalgamation of disparate territorial units  into larger ones with overarching political histories—Iran, Rūm, and so  on. Ja‖far Beg’s innovation was so perplexing to the board of editors and  writers at work on the project that he was asked for clarification:

Since the events of these several years, in most of the regions (iqlīm) of the habitable  parts of the world, were all placed in one section because of the lack of information on  the exact chronology, it seems appropriate, in response to the suggestions of the read ers, to list here the names of the rulers of the regions and then write the history of each  in chronological order. In Azerbaijan, Persian Iraq, most of Diyarbakır, Shirvan, Fars,  Kerman, and their dependencies, Shāh Ismā‖īl ruled independently (bi-l-istiqlāl  ḥukūmat mīkard). Arab Iraq was in the hands of Sultan Murād, son of Ya‖qūb Beg the  Turkman, and Bārīk Beg. In Khurasan, Muzaffar Zamān Mīrzā and Badī ̣ ‖ al- Zamān  Mīrzā ruled in partnership. In Turkestan and its dependencies and attachments and in  Transoxania, Shāhī Beg was the independent king. In Egypt, Syria, Aleppo, and their  dependencies Qānsūh al-Ghūrī was the ruler of people. In Hindustan there were several great kings: Sultan Sikandar was the ruler of Delhi, its dependencies, and Jawn pur. In Gujarat Sultan Maḥmūd was ruler over people. In Bengal someone named  Muḥammad was independent and did not deign to look upon another. In Kabul,  Ghaznīn, and its dependencies His Majesty . . . Bābur was king. In Moghulistan  Mansūr Khān, son of Ah ̣ ̣mad Khān, was the ruler, and in Kashghar and its dependen cies Mīrzā Abū Bakr ruled.43

The author here reverts, under pressure from the board of editors/readers,  to territory as mere geography and history as mere dynastic history. his  underscores the novelty of Ja‖far Beg’s vision which was confusing to his  audience. Such objections did not, however, deter him or detract from carrying on in the new way. Not only did Ja‖far Beg introduce a new imperial  history by dividing up each year equally among the events of Iran, Hindus tan, and Rūm, but he also organized his material in such a way as to have  the three political-cultural monoliths progress historically in parallel,  according to a teleological pattern.

The order in which Ja‖far Beg arranged his new imperial history was,  first, a “foundation phase” in each domain initiated by a generous and  brave warrior, who laid the groundwork for his particular state, fol lowed by a great monarch who then brought justice and prosperity. A  pair of rulers in each realm embodied this trajectory—Bābur (r. 1526-30)/ Akbar (r. 1556-1605) for the Mughals, Ismā‖īl (r. 1501-24)/Tahmāsp ̣ (r. 1524-76) for the Safavids, and Selīm (r. 1512-20)/Süleyman (r. 1520-66)  for the Ottomans. his pattern was, of course, problematic for the Otto mans who were much older than the other two dynastic realms, but Ja‖far  Beg tried to overcome this dilemma by downplaying the importance of the  previous sultans and giving special notice to the Ottoman sultan Selīm I,  who was a near contemporary of Bābur and Ismā‖īl. So, for instance, in his  obituary of Sultan Meḥmed the Conqueror (r. 1444-6, 1451-81), Ja‖far  Beg wrote simply, “Sultan Meḥmed fell ill and died a natural death. hey  took his corpse to Istanbul and buried it. Sultan Meḥmed was a glorious  king and achieved great things, such as the conquest of Istanbul.”44 In  other words, no other Ottoman emperor before Selīm, not even the colos sal figure of Meḥmed the Conqueror, receives the amount of praise and  the lengthy obituary that Selīm does. he attention paid to Selīm I results  from the arrangement of the material according to a clear authorial need  to devise three parallel imperial histories.

In any event, Ja‖far Beg’s teleology of empire was expressed most strongly  in the obituaries written for the relevant monarchs. Here, for example, is  the obituary of Bābur, which, as will be seen, echoes those of Shāh Ismā‖īl  and Selīm I; his courage and generosity are emphasized:

He became king at the age of twelve and ruled for thirty-eight years. It is no secret to  the readers of this book that [Bābur] displayed so many signs of courage unparalleled  in the biography of any other king . . . His generosity was such that, when he obtained  the treasuries of the kings of Hindustan, accumulated for years, he distributed them in  less than a year, so that, when he decided to conquer Bengal and Bihar, he could not  afford the pay of the cannon masters or the cost of gun powder.45

Bābur is brave and generous to the point of personal poverty. In this he  resembled his contemporary Shāh Ismā‖īl:

The years of his life measured thirty-nine, and the length of his kingship reached  twenty-four years. He spent most of his time hunting, and in none of the four seasons  was he idle in that activity. He was characterized by courage, generosity, and loyalty,  and these are the best qualities of kings. In spite of the length of his uninterrupted  kingship over Iran, there was never enough cash in his treasury for one day’s expenditures. Whenever taxes arrived at his court from the country, he spent the receipts the  same day. He would occasionally give orders for plunder. Most of the time, he would  lose at backgammon, in absentia [perhaps played by a substitute?] to the commanders,  grandees, and notables of his kingdom. Many a man would be sitting at home, when  suddenly Shāh Ismā‖īl’s treasurer would bring measures of gold that the king had lost  in backgammon. he reverse would occasionally happen. If he elevated any individual,  that person would reach unimaginable ranks. He never humiliated anyone he had  elevated . . . His courage needs no elaboration, as he captured in a short time Azerbai jan, Diyarbakır, Shirvan, Arab Iraq, Persian Iraq, Fars, Kirman, and Khurasan, each of  which is the seat of a king. In most encounters he personally wielded the sword.”46

The same qualities of generosity and valor are thus shared by the early  Safavids and the Mughals. Ja‖far Beg tried to fit Sultan Selīm into the same  scheme, but the case of the Ottoman sultan proved difficult:

In this year Sultan Selīm, caesar of Rūm, died a natural death. In his country they used  to call him Khwandigār [“Lord”]. “Khwandigār’s downfall” is the chronogram of his  death. Sultan Selīm was a king who possessed the utmost bravery. He obtained great  victories. He was inclined to collecting wealth, and most of his decisions regarding  kingdom and money coincided with the decrees of fate. He added numerous territories to his inherited domain. he power of his courage and justice were unmatched by  his other qualities.47

Selīm does not possess daring and generosity in equal measure. hat Ja‖far  Beg intended him to parallel Bābur and Ismā‖īl, thus harmonizing chro nology with his views of dynastic rise, can be observed in his indirect way of speaking of his miserliness (“He was inclined to collecting wealth, and  most of his decisions regarding kingdom and money would coincide with  the decrees of fate”). Instead, Ja‖far Beg substituted another quality, justice,  which he paired with bravery.

Next in line, at least for the Ottomans and Safavids, were Tahmāsp and ̣ Süleyman the Magnificent. Humāyūn does not receive a similar obituary,  and Akbar was still alive during the composition of the text. Still, the pat tern seems clear enough. Tahmāsp and Süleyman took their kingdoms to ̣ the next stage, from conquest and reckless generosity to stability and finan cial responsibility. Here, for instance, is how Shāh Tahmāsp is described: ̣

For nearly fifty-five years Shāh Tahmāsp independently ruled most of the kingdoms of ̣ Iran (bā istiqlāl). At the beginning of his reign he defeated the Shaybānid Uzbek sul tans who had come to Khurasan with more than 200,000 soldiers. Sultan [sic] Bāyezīd,  son of the caesar of Rūm [Süleyman the Magnificent], came to him with his children.  he accoutrement of rule and his treasuries reached a degree that has not been achieved,  after the advent of Islam, by the sultans of Iran. Iran attained the height of prosperity  in his time [descriptions of fancy items, horses, and soldiers follow].48

Shāh Tahmāsp is praised for bringing prosperity and a growing treasury, ̣ and for outshining all other monarchs in Iran which now has been endowed  with a linear history extending to the pre-Islamic period. Two foreign policy matters are mentioned. Defeating the Shaybānids was clearly good,  but what about the account of Bāyezīd, son of Süleyman the Magnificent?  his was the one negative aspect of Shāh Tahmāsp’s rule, and Ja ̣ ‖far Beg’s  inclusion of it in the obituary underscores its importance. Ja‖far Beg does  not want to condemn the king openly, but those who knew the story or  had read Ja‖far Beg’s treatment of this event would immediately recall the  problem.

On 16 July 1562, Shāh Tahmāsp turned the refugee Bāyezīd over to ̣ Husrev Pasha, the Ottoman envoy in Qazvīn, who murdered him and his  children four days later and took the corpses back to the Ottoman Empire.  his incident displeased Ja‖far Beg: “To make it brief, the unthinkable happened. In the fifty-five years that Shāh Tahmāsp ruled Iran indepen- ̣ dently . . . he committed no other deplorable act but this. It has been heard  repeatedly from his jewel-bestrewing tongue, ‘Even though I certainly  knew that Bāyezīd had taken refuge with me and that people would fault  me for turning him in, because the welfare of several hundred thousand people was tied up in this . . . I did not protect him.’”49 Political necessity  and the good of the majority had led the shah to sacrifice a good man. Ja‖far Beg’s obituary of Shāh Tahmāsp’s contemporary, the Ottoman ̣ Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, is similar. Here too, an age of peaceful  existence for common people and overall affluence marks the reign of the  Lawmaker, though his reign, too, is not without defects.

The age of Sultan Süleyman lasted forty-eight years. During his age the kingdoms of  Rūm reached the height of prosperity . . . His rank surpassed that of his ancestors. In  fact, in my opinion, with the exception of Alexander the Great there has not been  another king in Rūm like Sultan Süleyman . . . I have heard repeatedly from the miraculous tongue of Shāh Tahmāsp that Sultan Süleyman controls the lands of seventeen ̣ kings of Iraq and Khurasan who used to issue coins and have their names recited in the  Friday sermon . . . [After the conquest of Tabriz], because [Sultan Süleyman] felt pity  for the people of the city, he bought the town, for a considerable sum, from his own  army and saved the populace from plunder . . . Because of the peace treaty between him  and Shāh Tahmāsp, the people of Iran lived in comfort for almost forty years.” ̣50

So the sultan resembles his Safavid neighbor for his wealth, his protection  of commoners, and the prosperity that his reign brought. He, like the shah  of Iran, is unmatched by the rulers of Rūm in all history since antiquity,  but Süleyman’s name, too, was sullied by one unpleasant incident near the  end of his reign. We are told that, during a battle immediately before his  death, Süleyman had sacrificed a contingency of his soldiers, misleading  them into fighting under the illusion of victory and then abandoning them  to certain death, while saving himself and the majority of the army, all on  the advice of a devious vizier.51 Here, as in Iran, the lives of good men had  been pawned for the welfare of the majority.

How does the Mughal emperor Akbar compare with his Safavid and  Ottoman counterparts? Although we do not have an obituary of the third  Mughal emperor (because the Millenial History had been abandoned long  before his death), Ja‖far Beg repeatedly describes Akbar as a superb monarch who, though similar in some ways to other sultans, far surpasses them.  For one, his reign has given rise to the same security and prosperity that  Tahmāsp and Süleyman had created for their subjects. However Akbar ̣ does not merely surpass Tahmāsp and Süleyman in scale. He is superior to them also because he is not tarnished by the flaws that marred the near perfect reigns of his counterparts. Unlike Shāh Tahmāsp, for instance, ̣ Akbar’s court protects and promotes all immigrants regardless of their ori gin. Ja‖far Beg writes,

It is no secret to the inhabitants of the world, from east to west, that the fallen of the  world have only to seek refuge at his court, and no one returns from his threshold  disappointed. When it comes to giving, he makes no distinctions among friends, foes,  acquaintances, strangers, those who are near, and those who are far. [Verse] “In giving,  he did not discriminate between friend and foe/ the generous care only about the  essence of a request.”

Whoever has come to Hindustan—even if he has abandoned his homeland in  search only of basic sustenance and nothing more—will receive in the first week great  security of income, and within a short time, without much effort, will join the com manders (umarā). He will, in turn, begin giving away unthinkable largess to other  mendicants. his is unlike other parts of the inhabited quarters of the world, where  rulers have made it incumbent upon themselves to gather around them only a select  few whose families have been prominent in that country for generations and never  allow others and strangers into the ranks of the commanders and positions of trust.

The wretch who might by chance find himself in those countries will spend his life  in misery and dearth, even if he should exceed all the residents of those places in natu ral aptitude. But at this court an open invitation is the basic rule. Everyone from  everywhere will find care and tutelage and more, according to his ability. Displaying  the slightest bravery leads to a hundred honors, even though every inhabitant of this  kingdom is braver than the famous people of other regions.52

Akbar, like his near contemporaries Tahmāsp and Süleyman the Magnifi- ̣ cent, thus represents the high point of similar imperial projects initiated by  Bābur, Shāh Ismā‖īl, and Selīm I. Akbar is, however, superior by far to the  Ottomans and the Safavids, as he avoids the major flaws of his rivals and  fashions a kind of meritocracy in his realm.

But what endows Akbar with these sublime qualities? As seen above, the  identity of kingship was, in the Ta～rīkh-i alfī, derived not from genealogy  but from geography. We know that Ja‖far Beg was suspicious of the family  connections of kings and grandees. Akbar, for instance, is not considered  a Tīmūrid monarch, as Ja‖far Beg deems the ancestors of the emperor to  have been “Iranians,” those who dwelled and reigned in Iran. In describing  the battle of Ankara (1402 CE) between Tīmūr and the Ottoman Sultan  Bayezīd I, for example, Ja‖far Beg writes, “One cannot find in histories a  battle like [the battle of Ankara], except for the great war of Iranians and Turanis, about which Persian mythmakers have fabricated whatever they  pleased. Tīmūr took revenge on Rūm and the Romans for what Alexander  the Great had done to Iranians.”53 Here, Tīmūr and Bayezīd are identified  with the territories they rule, and their identity is retrojected into a primordial past, the destiny of which they share with the likes of Alexander  the Great and Darius. Ja‖far Beg was aware that the Ottomans had no  biological connection to Alexander and Tīmūr none to the Achamenid  emperors. However for our author the location of each ruler allowed him  to share a continuous destiny and identity with other great monarchs of  the same realm.

By the same logic, the preeminence and primary identity of Akbar too  was due to his location. As Ja‖far Beg noted above, the people of India are  far more heroic than most famous people of the world, and they are  improved by the immigration of the world’s elite. he best embodiment of  pre-Akbari royal ideals in the third part of Ta～rīkh-i alfī is therefore not a  Tīmūrid or Chingizid ruler but a South Asian one, the sultan of Kashmir.  his is unique to part three of the text and is clearly Ja‖far Beg’s invention,  because, in the previous sections of the Alfī, the model against which  Akbar’s actions were judged was that of the Mongols. A comparison of the  two parts of the text makes the contrast even sharper. Earlier, Mullā Aḥmad  Tattavī had written about the Mongol Mangu Khān:

When Mangu Khān sat on the four pillows of rule he wished that peace and security  should extend to all living beings on the day of his enthronement. He ordered that, on  this blessed day, no living creature should treat another in enmity. Rather, all should  be busy in pleasure and festivities. He then ordered that, just as all groups of people  today are busy with festivities and enjoyment, they should likewise avoid harming any  kind of animal, whether birds or beasts, whether they fly or graze on all four legs.  Whatever people eat this day should be from meat that was prepared previously. He  went beyond animals and ordered that plants and minerals, too, should remain undis turbed on that day. So he issued a yarligh [decree] stating that no one today should cut  a tree or disturb the surface of the earth with nail and horseshoe[?]. Nor should anyone  pollute running water with filthy things.

Gracious! How strange it is that intelligent people have recorded this story about  Mangu Khān in histories and are amazed by his mercy. hey write, “Look at the good ness of God, who chose such a soul to rule over people and whose care for his under lings is so great that he wants his peace to extend beyond humans, even to animals,  plants, and minerals.” he king was, however, the source of such mercy for only a day.  hank God that the glorious shadow and deputy of God, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad  Akbar, the Ghāzī king (may his rule last till judgment day), always intends justly that  peace and security be extended to all creatures, whether beasts or men. He has thus  forbidden the shedding of animal blood on several blessed days each year. Wise people  should, therefore, in all fairness, observe that, if a king receives so much praise after  four centuries for establishing public peace (āsāyish-i ‖āmm) for a day, then surely a  king who has maintained this public peace for a long time will be praised forever by  all creatures.54

In this passage, the Mongol emperors serve as models for the Akbari policy  of universal peace—here termed āsāyish-i ‖āmm, rather than sulh ̣ ̣-i kull.  Akbar has, of course, outdone his predecessor and assured himself immor tality, but there is clearly no one else with whom he should be compared.  In part three of the Alfī, however, the new author of the text turns away  from the Inner Asian ancestors of the emperor and finds him a prototype  in the person of a South Asian monarch. For Ja‖far Beg, it is the Kashmiri  sultan Zayn al-‖Ābidīn (r. 1420-72) who embodies the virtues that modern  history associates with Akbar himself.

Sultan Zayn al-‖Abidin son of Sultan Sikandar, also known as Shāhī Khān, ascended  the throne in Kashmir after his brother and was called Sultan Zayn al-‖Ābidīn. He sent  a large army with Jasrath Khokhar, to help him capture Delhi. Although Jasrath was  unable to take on the king of Delhi, he was able to capture all of Punjab and other  places by the strength of the sultan’s army. he sultan then decided on world conquest  and sent an army to Tibet and annexed it. He devastated the countries along the Indus  and killed the inhabitants. He made his younger brother Muḥammad Khān his confi dant and consulted with him on all the major and minor matters but decided upon  those matters himself. He associated with all classes of people and had acquired great  knowledge and skill. His assemblies were always full of Muslim and Hindu sages. He  was a skilled musician. He spent all his time improving the provinces, expanding  farmlands, and channeling water to remote places. He issued a public declaration in  his kingdom that, if anything was stolen, the village chiefs should pay for it, and theft  thus disappeared completely from his lands. He also abolished the oppressive practices  that had been inherited from the time of Suha Bhat. He was the first and only ruler to  order that prices be written down. He put up inscriptions on copper plates in every  town and village saying, “he practices of oppression have been abolished in Kashmir.  Whoever comes after us and does not follow our orders will have to deal with God.”  For medical reasons, the sultan granted his tutelage to Shri Bhat, who was a skillful  physician, and, in response to Shri Bhat’s request, he invited back to Kashmir Brah mins who had, because of Suha Bhat efforts, left for distant lands during Sultan Sikan dar’s time, and he gave them property. He established charitable foundations in the  temples set aside for Hindus, rescinded the jizya [tax on non-Muslims], and abolished  the slaughter of cows. He called in knowledgeable Brahmins and other Hindus and  made them promise not to prevaricate and never to deviate from what is written in  Hindu books. He revived all the Hindu practices that had been halted during the reign  of Sultan Sikandar, including the marking of the forehead and the immolation of  wives with their husbands’ corpses. He also put an end to the gifts, fees, and other  confiscations imposed by officers on the people. He proclaimed that merchants should  not hide whatever goods they might import in their houses and should instead sell it  at the purchase price plus a small profit and the cost of transport. hey should not  commit fraud in making a profit. With the stroke of a pen he freed all the prisoners  who were jailed during the reigns of previous sultans.

One of his regulations was that, whenever he conquered a country, he permitted the  treasury to be plundered and divided up. He would then impose a tax on his new  subjects, based on that in effect in his capital. He would punish the unruly and arro gant people of that country and would look after the poor and the weak and maintain  them in an intermediate state, so that they would not grow rebellious due to excessive  prosperity or miserable due to acute poverty. His piety was such that he would treat a  female stranger as his own mother or sister. He never gazed upon other women or on  someone’s property with covetousness or betrayal . . . he crown’s income consisted of  his earnings from a copper mine that had been discovered and where workers continually labored.

In the time of Sultan Sikandar, many gold, silver, and other idols had been smashed  and turned into tankas [coins], which subsequently lost their value. he sultan com manded that coins should be minted from pure copper from his mine and circulated.  Whenever the sultan was incensed at certain people, he did not have to punish them:  rather, whatever evil he would speak of them would befall them as by a curse. When ever he was displeased with someone, he would drive that individual out of his king dom in such a way that his displeasure would remain unknown to that person and that  he would leave perfectly content. He dealt similarly with other important matters.

During his reign people could be part of whatever group that they wished, and no  person would trouble another as a result of bigotry. he Brahmins and other Hindus  who had converted to Islam through the efforts of Suha Bhat during Sultan Sikandar’s  reign would apostatize under Sultan Zayn al-‖Abidin, and none of the Muslim ‖ulama～

[jurist/scholars] could persecute them for their apostasy. he sultan built an aqueduct  near Mount Maran and a new city whose prosperity extended to five kurohs [about ten  miles]. He also constructed many more aqueducts to Kakpur and other places and  constructed bridges, to expand agriculture. He settled ‖ulama～, men of virtue, mendicants, and strangers in the areas that he had made prosperous . . . His detachment from  the world was such that, despite the sublimity of his honor and glory, he had no liking  for the apparatus of kingship and did not accumulate a treasury . . . he sultan honored  the ‖ulama～—saying that they are the guides of our people, who have led us out of  darkness and been our guides—and respected yogis, saying that they are ascetics and  strangers. He never looked upon anyone with a censorious eye . . . It was his custom  never to order the execution of thieves. Rather, wherever a thief was found, he would  order that he be shackled at his ankles, that he work at carrying soil and stones at  building sites, and that he be fed. He was so kindhearted that he forbade hunting, and  he did not eat meat in the month of Ramadan . . . He ordered that most Arabic andPersian books be translated into Hindi and that all Indian books on astrology/astron omy and medicine be rendered into Persian . . . He ordered the translation of the  Mahabharata, a famous book of India.55

The parallels between the sultan and the later Akbar are numerous. Akbar,  too, consorts with wise Muslims and Hindus in his assemblies, abolishes  the jizya, and promotes vegetarianism on sacred days. hey both protect  Hindu customs, promote Indian music (e.g., Mīrzā Tānsen, at Akbar’s  court), and have Sanskrit books translated into Persian. he Mughal  padshāh, like Sultan Zayn al-‖Abidin, expands his domains through successful conquests, collects taxes but no annual tribute from conquered ter ritories, and uses the prices at the capital as the standard for the whole  realm. hey both abolish oppression. hey both possess miraculous powers  of prophecy.

Akbar’s superiority thus arose from his Indian identity. He had brought  to perfection ideals that resembled but were not precisely the same as those  of other Islamic empires or even of his Mongol ancestors. Only India could  boast of such a monarchy, so the historical precedent for the Mughal  emperor was thus a non-Tīmūrid sultan of Kashmir. his territorial conceptualization of identity is not rooted in biology. As we saw in the case of  India, the territorial identity would extend also to immigrants and is related  to the notion of empire as a primordial, geographically defined “state.”

4. Toward explanations and implications

Ja‖far Beg Qazvīnī was not a typical immigrant to India from Iran, as he  did not just belong to the commercial or administrative sectors, from  which arose most of his fellow expatriates in the sixteenth and the seven teenth centuries.56 Rather, as a soldier and man of letters, he could offer his  services in the formation of a new Mughal imperial idiom, expressed in  Persian, of overarching rule in a diverse polity.57 his new idiom should  not, however, be confused with modern “liberalism”.58 here were clear political strategies, whereby the new Mughal Empire defined itself at the  expense of others. hese others were the Sunni Central Asian military elite,  who were now being removed from their positions of privilege, as well as  the Safavid dynasty, which was now being excluded from a newly defined  Mughal sphere of influence in the Subcontinent.

In the case of the first group, we know that only a few years before the  composition of the book the emperor had put down the rebellion of vari ous Central Asian Turani elite, who had supported his brother, Mīrzā  Ḥakīm.59 By idealizing an Islamic monarchy that is uniquely Indian and a  new identity for immigrants (including the ruling family) that is severed  from its Central Asian origin, the text provides an alternative to the sedi tious Turani emirs. In other words, if a Transoxianian audience was  addressed by the Alfī, it was not the Shaybānid rulers but their elite trans plants in India who were now being asked to assume a new, more appro priate, identity.60 It is significant that, while the divisions of the world  involving Iran, Rūm, and Hindustan as laid out by Firdawsī (fl. c. 1000  CE) and earlier authors are adopted in the Alfī, the term “Turan” is not  used to describe the Shaybānid domains. Nor do the Shaybānids fit into  the historical teleology proposed in part three, and there are no such  extended obituaries of any of the Uzbek kings as are provided for their  Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal counterparts. In addition, giving equal  audience to the voice of Irani/Shiite and Hindu groups at court implied  depriving the Turani amīrs (commanders) from their monopoly over polit ical discourse.

In this context, the events surrounding the murder of Mullā Aḥmad  Tattavī by Mīrzā Fūlād Barlās gains special significance. We know that  Mullā Aḥmad was in the habit of reading his drafts before the emperor,  and he had, on several occasions, used this stage to humiliate the Turani  commanders by insulting their religious sensitivities. he Mullā’s attacker,  Mīrzā Fūlād, was descended from one of the most prestigious Mongol  lineages, the Barlās. His close connections to Central Asia had even led to  his appointment as ambassador to Uzbek rulers. By attacking the author of  the Alfī, the Mīrzā was in fact assailing the ideology expressed in it, which he had naturally found threatening. Akbar’s reaction is also notable. While  capital punishment was only infrequently meted out to the Central Asian  commanders, the emperor, signaling a new attitude, ordered the Mīrzā to  be executed gruesomely and publicly, by being dragged to death by an  elephant.61 In sum, the composition of the text and the impartiality that it  celebrated retained a sharp political edge, as it toppled the Turani and  other Sunni elite from their accustomed prominent stations

The invention of an imperial sovereignty that was meant to extend to the  whole Subcontinent also had a political intent, as it closed off South Asia  to all but Mughal imperial claims. Part three of the Ta～rīkh-i alfī contains  the first expression of the concept of Hindustan as a political and cultural  unit, here under Mughal rule. his concept has been the subject of recent  scholarly interest. M. Athar Ali points out that the historical unity of India  first appears not in British colonial historiography but in late-sixteenth  century Indo-Muslim chronicles, such as those of Nizām al-Dīn Ah ̣ ̣mad,  Badā～ūnī, and Firishtah.62 Sunil Kumar expands this argument, stating  that, as the Mughals conquered various northern Indian sultanates in the  sixteenth century, they had to devise a new notion of Hindustan to reflect  the changed political context. he novelty of the historian Nizām al-Dīn ̣ Aḥmad’s accomplishment and contribution was “to conceive the subcon tinent as a geographical and political entity associated with a state [and  this] far exceeded the historical imagination of his peers, who still thought  in regnal units. In his argument, Hindustan was conceived as a state, first  under the Sultanate and, after its fragmentation, reunited once again under  the Mughals.”63 But why was Nizām al-Dīn able to do this? he fact that ̣ he was among the original authors of the Alfī gives us a clue, for it is in  that work that we see the development of the concept of Hindustan as an  all-South Asia political state, alongside Rūm and Iran. he older volumes  of the Alfī, as argued above, share much with earlier regnal chronicles, and  it is Ja‖far Beg who begins to conceive of this new imperial India.

Early on, Ja‖far Beg also used Hindustan (or Hind) primarily in its orig inal geographic sense, referring to Delhi and its dependencies, or, at most,  extending to Jawnpur, Bengal, Gujarat, and Malwa.64 Sultan Sikandar  Lōdī and his son Ibrāhīm are thus referred to merely as rulers of Delhi  (ḥākim-i Dihlī or pādhshāh-i mamlakat-i Dihlī).65 However, “Hindustan”  as a unifying term denoting a single region with a particular history and  culture suddenly enters the text following Bābur’s conquest of the Lōdī  kingdom in the 1520’s. Ja‖far Beg writes, “Now, according to what was  promised earlier, I will begin to describe the sultans of Hindustan, who  ruled in different places at this time.”66 He even feels the need to define  precisely what he has in mind, and he begins a long description of the  topography and culture of the entire subcontinent. It borders on oceans on  three sides and has the Himalayas to the north, but it definitely includes  Kashmir. Bengal is to the east, and its local lords (zamindārs) rule semi independently. heir language and religion is one with the Hindu people  (mardum-i hindū, used earlier67 of the non-Muslim warriors of Malwa). To  the south of Bengal lies Orissa and to the west Bihar. A mountain range  stretches from the eastern end to the western end (Sind), while to the  south are the eminent kingdoms of Deccan and Vijayanagar. Another  mountain facing the Gulf of Aden stretches from Sind to Malwa, and these  mountains are full of elephants, and have two or three prominent rajas.68

After this cultural and geographical description follows a chronology of  the various rulers of the subcontinent, including a list of kings that goes  back to the late fourteenth century, to the time of Firuz Shāh, of Delhi.  he Deccan was ruled by five sultans, four of whom were Muslims: Nizām ̣ Shāh, ‖Ādil Shāh, Qutbshāh, and the sultan of Bīdar. A detailed history of ̣ the Bahmanids is then given, ending with the fragmentation of their realm.  Sind, Multan, and Kashmir are treated more briefly, but the author prom ises to attach an appendix to the Alfī detailing the histories of Kashmir and  Bengal.69 It is no coincidence that this section owes much of its content to  the Bāburnāma. he proper sense of an imperial Hindustan is, of course,  understood to be realized through Mughal rule. During the downfall and  exile of Bābur’s son Humāyūn, the vision of territorial unity is fragmented  again, as in the days of the sultanate. A typical entry runs as follows: “In  this year [1548 CE], Selīm Khān Afghān was the ruler. He made Gwalior  the seat of his government and sent armies out to capture Bengal, Bihar,  Tirhut, and Malwa. Sultan Maḥmud was ruler in Gujarat.”70 he unifying  vision is gone, and we are left with an impressionistic chronicle of small  kingdoms. It is, of course, with Akbar that we return to the greater lands  of Hindustan.

This Indian empire is called the “savād-i a‖zam Hindūstān ̣ ” (the great  savād of Hindustan) or iqlīm-i Hindūstān (the clime/region of Hindustan).71 he first term is precisely what is used by Nizām al-Dīn in the preface to ̣ his history and is most likely his source. Ja‖far Beg’s usage is new and occurs  in the Alfī before it does in the other major works, by Nizām al-Dīn ̣ Aḥmad, Badā～ūnī, and Abū l-Faḍl. he term savād is old and is defined in  medieval Arabic dictionaries as a large region and as a community of people.72 he use of the term iqlīm to refer to India as an imperial unit is also  unusual. Iqlīm, in the Ptolemaic sense of a “clime,” was the norm for con temporary authors. Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī’s late sixteenth-century book the  Haft iqlīm (“Seven Climes”), for instance, understood Hindustan to be  part of the first, second, third, and fourth climes. Each clime was under a  different planetary influence, which gave rise to characteristics common to  inhabitants of the same latitudinal zones.73 So, for instance, the island of  Serendip (modern day Sri Lanka) lay in the first clime,74 where, along with  Nubia and Yemen, it was under the influence of Saturn, and its people  were dark skinned.75 he second clime, which was under the influence of  Jupiter, included not only the Deccan, Gujarat, and Bengal,76 but also  Arabia. he third clime, under the influence of Mars, included the Gangetic  plains, the Punjab, Kabul, and Qandahar, as well as most of Iran, Syria,  Mesopotamia, and Egypt.77 In other words, India had a purely geographi cal sense for Rāzī and not a cultural or political one. His conception of  India within the Ptolemaic system is thus very different from Ja‖far Beg’s  redefinition of clime as political and territorial unity.

Ofcourse, as stated above, this new territorial configuration has a polit ical dimension. Until the late sixteenth century, the southern kingdoms of  the Subcontinent (i.e., the Deccan) had closer diplomatic ties to Safavid  Iran than to Mughal north India. By including the Deccan in the empire  of Hindustan and simultaneously assigning the Safavids to “Iran,” Ja‖far  Beg was providing the basis for further exclusive Mughal claims on the  lands to the south. Neither the Deccani sultans nor the Safavids would see  eye to eye with the author of Ta～rīkh-i alfī with regards to his claim of  Mughal sovereignty over the Deccan. So, for example, the Safavid historian Maḥmūd Natanzī (c. 1598), author of ̣ Nuqāvat al-āthār, reports that  when Akbar demanded obedience from the four independent (bi istiqlāl )  kings of Deccan, they, after much worried consideration, sent an envoy to  tell the Mughal emperor:

From the beginning of our rule, we have been utterly compliant with the commands,  prohibitions, and obedience-deserving orders of His Majesty Shāh Tahmāsp. Nothing ̣ proceeds from us in matters touching upon kingship without the advice of that sub lime monarch. herefore, please halt this matter until we make it known to his world protecting court; whatever is issued there regarding this affair we will make our plan  of action . . . When the King of Kings of the kingdoms of India [Akbar] learned about  this request, he immediately dispatched a messenger to their envoy and sent back with  him gifts for the sultans of the kingdom of Deccan and apologized. He specifically  emphasized, “Do not do anything that would cause Shāh Tahmāsp to learn that I had ̣ intended to do this.”78

Whether or not the Deccani sultans and Akbar really did have this  exchange, we can surmise from its inclusion in an Iranian chronicle that  the Safavids considered Mughal claims of sovereignty in South India to be  in competition with their own designs.

A similar view of Safavid-Deccani relations also existed in some of the  Deccani Sultanate as well. For instance in a letter to Shāh Tahmāsp dated— ̣ based on a reference to the Mughal Emperor Humāyūn’s exile in Iran79 —to  1540/1, Burhān Nizām Shāh of Ah ̣ ̣madnagar (in the western Deccan) refers to himself as “the servant of the family of the prophet Muḥammad,  in whose flesh the love of those descendants of the prophet [the Safavids]  is intermingled.”80 He then promises to help a Safavid army, “should [Shāh  Tahmāsp] set out to conquer some of the countries of India ( ̣ bilād-i Hind ),  which is in the hands of rebels and mutineers, and strive to encircle those  lands that are under the moon of infidelity and enmity.”81 hus, to claim  India as a single domain to be ruled by the Mughals was a challenge not  just to local kingdoms but to rival empires, such as that of the Safavids,  whose sovereignty was conveniently assigned and restricted to their own  “traditional and historical” domains—Iran.

Several factors thus allowed the composition of the Ta～rīkh-i alfī as a  dialogical text with a new view of territoriality. hese factors grew out of  the conditions of the Safavid and Mughal courts in which the author  resided. he Alfī, while presenting the Mughal court as the source of ultimate arbitration among rival Muslim sects and empires, also helped mar ginalize the Sunni Central Asian (Turani) commanders that had formed  the core of Mughal military power but that had, during the years of impe rial consolidation, proved to be notoriously intractable. Finally, by gradu ally developing the notion of an Indian empire, it laid the groundwork for  the later historicization—in the works of Nizām al-Dīn Ah ̣ ̣mad, Badā～ūnī,  and, finally, Firishtah—of Hindustan as an independent political and cul tural unit separate from the rest of the Islamic world. It was the work of  Firishtah, who had added ancient Sanskrit-based history and mythology to  this teleology, that was translated into English by British officials in the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and served as the basis of the colonial  imagination of a linear pan-Indian historiography, from the Vedic age to  the present.

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——. 1994. A Note on the Kabul Kingdom under Muhammad Mirza Hakim (1554-1585).  La Transmission du savoir dans le monde périphérique, Lettre d’information 14: 89-101. Tattavī, Aḥmad, and Āsaf Khān Qazvīnī. 2003. ̣ Ta～rīkh-i alfī: Ta～rīkh-i hizār sāla-yi Islām,

ed. Ghulām Riḍā Tabāt ̣ abāyī Majd, 8 vols. Tehran: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ̣ ‖Ilmī va  Farhangī.

 

Notes

*) Ali Anooshahr, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of California at  Davis, aanooshahr@ucdavis.edu.

1) Anonymous, Tarih-i Hind al-Garbi (Istanbul: Amira, 1874-5); T.D. Goodrich, he Otto man Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Otto man Americana (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1990).

2)‖Abd al-Sattār Lāhūrī. Majālis-i Jahāngīrī, ed. ‖Ārif Nawshāhī and Mu‖īn Nizāmī. Tehran: ̣ Mīrās-i Maktūb, 2006; M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyan, “Frank Disputations: Catholics  and Muslims in the court of Jahangir (1608-11).” Indian Economic Social History Review 46  (2009): 457-511.

3) See for instance C. Lefèvre, “he Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (1608-1611): Dialogue and Asiatic  Otherness at the Mughal Court” in this volume.

4) M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

5) J. Dowson (ed.). he History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. he Posthumous Papers  of the Late Sir H.M. Elliot (Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956), volume 14; S.A.A. Rizvi. Religious  and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign, with Special Reference to Abul Fazl,  1556-1605 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975): 253-62; S. Subrah

manyam. “he Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Histo riography.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 29 (1992): 304-6. 6) Genealogy, a significant theme in the historical works of this period, is not negligible in  the “Millennial History,” but it pales in comparison to that in the two books commissioned immediately before and after our chronicle, that is, the Akbarnāma and the so-called  Ta～rīkh-i khāndān-i Tīmūriyya.

7) he material in this section is derived from: Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History; the  preface to A. Tattavī and Ā. Qazvīnī, Ta～rīkh-i alfī: Ta～rīkh-i hizār sāla-yi Islām, ed. G.R.  Tabāt ̣ abāyī Majd, 8 vols. Tehran: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ̣ ‖Ilmī va Farhangī, 2003; Shāhnavāz  Khān Awrangābādī, Ma～āsir al-umarā, ed. Mawlavī ‖Abd al-Raḥīm and Mawlavī Mirzā  Ashraf ‖Alī (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1888-96): 1:90, 107-8; ‖Abd al-Qādir  Badā～ūnī. Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, ed. T. Subḥānī (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār va Mafākhir-i  Farhangī, 2000-1): 2:221-2, 275 and 3:66-8, 105, 115-6.

8) A useful term not yet in use at the time of the Alfī’s composition.

9) For a brief discussion and further references, see A. Anooshahr, “Mughal Historians and  the Memory of the Islamic Conquest of India.” Indian Economic Social History Review 43  (2006): 275-300, and A.A. Moin, “Islam and the Millennium: Sacred Kingship and Popular Imagination in Early Modern India and Iran,” PhD diss. (Ann Arbor: University of Michi gan, 2010): 239-47.

10) On Ḥasan Beg, see S. Quinn, “Hasan Beg Rumlu,” Encyclopædia Iranica (online edi tion: 2003), http://iranicaonline.org/articles/hasan-beg-rumlu.

11) Following his description of Humāyūn’s exile to Iran, for instance, Ḥasan Beg wrote  several entries on the wars between Humāyūn and Kāmrān (p. 1311); the deaths of Islam  Shāh Sūr, Sultan Maḥmūd of Gujarat, and Nizāṃ Shāh of Aḥmadnagar (pp. 1380-2);  Humāyūn’s battle with Sultan Sikandar Sūr, his death, and Akbar’s subsequent accession  (pp. 1384-90); Akbar’s war with Hēmū (pp. 1392-4); the fall of Bayram Khān; the con

quest of Vijayanagar by the Nizāmshāhī-Qut ̣ bshāhī alliance (pp. 1440-1); and Akbar’s con- ̣ quest of Gujarat (p. 1486). His sources seem to comprise oral information, victory  proclamations (Hēmū), and poems (Kāhī). But, while the attempt at inclusiveness resem bles that of Ja‖far Beg’s later works, the thematic arrangement and the teleology of empires  is absent here. Ḥasan Rūmlū, Aḥsan al-tavārīkh, ed. ‖Abd al-Ḥusayn Navā～ī (Tehran:  Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1978).

12) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5326.

13) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5268.

14) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5461.

15) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5631.

16) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 4243-4.

17) Not “dialogue,” as in modern Persian.

18) Similar comments are made by Abū l-Faḍl on the Persian translation of the Mahab harata, showing this attitude not to be peculiar to Ja‖far Beg but to be a feature of the court’s  self-presentation. See C.W. Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of  Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages.” Iranian Studies 36 (2003):  173-95.

19) Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, Haft iqlīm, ed. E.B. Samadi (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1960)  2: 596.

20) Rāzī, Haft iqlīm: 596.

21) Rāzī, Haft iqlīm: 520.

22) Abū l-Faḍl Allāmī, Akbarnāma, ed. Ghulām Riḍā Tabāt ̣ abāyī Majd (Tehran: Anjuman- ̣ i Āthār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 2006): 234-45.

23) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5692.

24) Abū l-Faḍl, Akbarnāma: 234-45.

25) Bābur, Bâburnâma: Chaghatay Turkish Text with Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan’s Persian  Translation, ed. W.H. hackston (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993): 3: 680. 26) Bābur, Bāburnāma 3: 680, slightly altered.

27) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5527-9.

28) Mehmed Paşa, Nişancı, Tarih-i Nişancı Mehmed Paşa (Istanbul: Tabhane-i Amire,  1862): 208.

29) Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, Tacü’t-tevarih (Istanbul: Tabhane-i Amire, 1861): 2: 339-41. 30) Mustafa Ali, Künhü’l-Ahbar, MSS Istanbul İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, TY 5959:  177a-b, between “9” and “1”.

31) Kemalpaşazade, Tevarih-i  l-i Osman, volume IX (MS, University of California Los  Angeles Library, Department of Special Collections, Collection 1656, box 3, no. 12): 19b. 32) Ghiyāth al-Dīn Khvāndamīr, Ta～rīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar, ed. Muḥammad Dabīr Siyāqī  (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Kitābfurūshī-yi Khayyām, 1974-5) 4: 544.

33) Kvandamir, Ta～rīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar, 4: 547-8.

34) Khvurshāh b. Qubād Ḥusaynī, Ta～rīkh-i Īlchī-i Nizāmshāh ̣ , ed. Muḥammad Riḍā Nasīrī ̣ and Kū～ichī Hānah～dā (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 2000): 68. 35) Khvurshāh, Ta～rīkh-i Īlchī-i Nizāmshāh ̣ : 69.

36) Yaḥyā b. ‖Abd al-Latīf Qazvīnī, ̣ Lubb al-tavārīkh, ed. Mīr Hāshim Muḥaddith (Tehran:  Anjuman-i Āthār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 2007): 286.

37) Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ghaffārī, Ta～rīkh-i Jahān-ārā, ed. Ḥasan Narāqī (Tehran: Ḥāfiz, ̣ 1964): 277.

38) Volume 2 of his Sharafnāma gives the history of the Ottomans and Safavids annalisti cally. Much more needs to be done on these historians to develop an explanation of their  method. heir presence in Qazvīn after the peace of Amasya, which was much valued by  the Safavids, is relevant, but most of them had a hybrid identity: Safavid/Mughal in the case  of Ja‖far Beg, Safavid/Ottoman in the case of Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū (whose tribe traced itself  to the descendants of Ottoman soldiers defeated in the battle of Ankara but ransomed from  Tīmūr by the Safavid shaykhs), and Ottoman/Safavid/Kurdish in Sharaf al-Dīn’s case.

39) Of the 572 pages covering this period in the Tehran edition, no more than thirty-six  deal with India’s history, and even these few pages deal almost exclusively with the history  of the sultans of Delhi, ignoring other parts of subcontinent to which the term Hindustan  was not usually applied.

40) Tattavī, Alfi: 4182.

41) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5375.

42) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5463.

43) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5485-6.

44) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5459.

45) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5624.

46) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5567-8.

47) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5549.

48) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5911.

49) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5772.

50) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5820-1.

51) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5818-9

52) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5789.

53) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 4943.

54) Tattavī, Alfī: 3903.

55) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5375-80.

56) S. Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern  State Formation.” he Journal of Asian Studies 51 (1992): 340-63.

57) M. Alam, Languages of Political Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004):  144.

58) Ibid.

59) S. Subrahmanyam, “A Note on the Kabul Kingdom under Muhammad Mirza Hakim  (1554-1585).” La Transmission du savoir dans le monde périphérique, Lettre d’information 14  (1994): 89-101; and M. Faruqui, “he Forgotten Prince: Mirza Hakim and the Formation  of the Mughal Empire in India.” JESHO 48 (2005): 487-523.

60) Subrahmanyam, “Mughal State”: 304-6.

61) Shāhnavāz Khān Awrangābādī, Ma～āsir al-umarā 3: 259-64.

62) M. Athar Ali, “he Perception of India in Akbar and Abu’l Fazl.” In Akbar and His  India, ed. Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

63) S. Kumar, he Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007):  356.

64) Qazvīnī, Alfī: 5485, 5502.

65) Ibid.: 5502, 5534, 5551.

66) Ibid.: 5576.

67) Ibid.: 5545.

68) Ibid.: 5576-8.

69) Ibid.: 5576-87.

70) Ibid.: 5709.

71) Ibid.: 5748, 5757, 5763, 5772, 5779, etc.

72) E.W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1983): 1462. 73) Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, Haft iqlīm, ed. Javād Fāḍil (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-i ‖Alī Akbar ‖Ilmī,  195-?): 1: 54.

74) Rāzī, Haft iqlīm (Tehran): 1:30.

75) Ibid., 1: 8.

76) Ibid., 1: 54.

77) Ibid., 1: 93.

78) Maḥmūd b. Hidāyat Allāh Afūshta Natanzī, ̣ Nuqāvat al-āthār fi dhikr al-akhyār, ed.  Iḥsān Ishrāqī (Tehran: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ‖Ilmī va Farhangī, second edition, 1994):  16-7.

79) Anonymous, Recueil de lettres diplomatiques. MS, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, supplé ment persan 1352: 17b.

80) Anonymous, Recueil: 17b.

81) Anonymous, Recueil: 17a.