East Persia

Inspired by Brown Pundits I am currently reading Richard Eaton's India in the Persianate Age. This is a history of the Indies 1000-1765, which we call "India" and which Hindu nationalists call "Bharat". I use the plural because the peninsula and the valleys north of it comprise a diverse place, more so in the Middle Ages. (I don't know if Razib has read this one yet but he does approve Eaton 1993 on Bengal... where he's from.)

Eaton doesn't like that we call this era "mediaeval". He also doesn't like that we call it "Islamic" nor even "Islamicate". I think he's a bit touchy on the former. But then, I'm of a sort that rather prefers mediaeval civilisation. Many Britons still live in a Protestant tradition, which tradition I have rejected.

Eaton is, I concede, in his rights to concentrate on a definition which makes the most sense of the time and place. As the title promises, he is here to explain "Islamic" rule in India as more Persian than anything else. Specifically: post-Samanid.

Over on our side of the Indus and Khyber, the ninth-century Samanids had revived the Middle Persian tradition, but in Arabic script and in Islamic(ate) culture. The book gets around to the Samanids in the conclusion to its first chapter, focusing on Bal'ami's adaptation of Ibn Jarir Tabari (already Iran-centric) and on Firdawsi's Shahnameh. Eaton could have added the Letter of Tansar but, perhaps, this had to be introduced to India later, through that later Tabarite Ibn Isfandiyar.

Eaton's book is a corrective to "Islamophobic" discourse in and around India. At the same time Eaton is not a smarmy apologist like Covey or Moller. As working in the postSamanid era, his book doesn't have to address the disaster of Umawi and early-'Abbasi rule up to 180 / 800. The Samanids had two centuries of Islam behind them to piece civilisation back together. Similar patterns would hold eastward.

In Samanid discourse, the caliph commands Muslim spiritual life and standardises the law. Command and law-enforcement are the domain of the sultan. The caliph - Eaton doesn't say, but I will - retains the role of the Nestorian catholicos.

To the extent Islam inflicted deleterious effect in India, it was in flattering bandit kings like the Ghaznavids: that when they plundered peaceful foreigners, the alien deserved it for his "infidelity". The Ghaznavids didn't at first try to rule India; they were using the land to fund their adventure against western lands, then occupied by the Seljuq Turks. (Timur Khan would do likewise.) The Ghaznavids lost and fled into India - there, basically going native and doing nothing to advance Islam there. The Ghurids in Central Asia, more successful there at first, eventually suffered the same fate and followed the Ghaznavids to India too.

One truly Islamic tradition which these dynasts brought was the Mamlûkate - the slave-soldiery, set to become sultans in their own right. One such (Turkish) slave was Iltutmish, whom Eaton credits with bringing Islam to the transIndian lands - at any rate, what the Samanids had labeled as "Islam". His reign and his successors coincided with the Choresmian and then Mongol invasions of south central Asia from the north. So waves of Iranians, Turks, and other mostly-Muslim refugees, often with a long literate tradition, flooded into the sultanate throughout the seventh / thirteenth century.

Because these Muslim migrants were intelligent and competent, and often under sultanate protection as property, thirteenth century Islamicate rule turned out well for their "free" Hindi subjects... for the most part, and at first. These Muslims quit playing the eldorado game in India, now keeping the silver in-house. Islam taught the rulers to rule, and to be in no hurry to proselytise. Thus they settled on their own language, which was Persian, leaving Sanskrit and the local prakrits to the Hindus.

Worst off in this regime were the Buddhists, who had already lost the support of the people and were now - as landlords and (functional) atheists - a fat target for revenue-hungry Muslims. I suspect similar for what few Nestorians had reached this far: I mean, if the sultan already had a faraway papacy in the Baghdad caliph; what point in another, Christian one?

Also the Muslims could not avoid that good shahs and rajas were bad Muslims. Any given sultan's Muslim advisors are recorded as complaining bitterly that (per Barani) the sultan had allowed so many pagans (=Hindus) to become wealthy and powerful whilst coreligionists were left a-begging at the gates. Thus the Unprincipled Exception, that hypocrisy which alloweth diverse peoples to coexist. Some sultans, indeed, made effort to rule Islamically. `Alâ'd-dîn Khalaji was a case in point: banning alcohol and private charities, and jacking up the land-tax. His régime didn't long survive the man. But others' would.