Mongol invasion on the Muslim world

The Mongolians entered history as just oneness among a number of nomad tribes on the steppes of central Asia. The rise of the Mongols and the beginnings of the Mongol conquests arose out of a dramatic shift from such disunity to unity, and it was achieved through the personality and military skills of one man. In all probability he was born in 1167. He was given the name of Temuchin.The nomad world he entered was a fierce and brutal one of rivalry and survival skills. same(p) all Mongol children, Temuchin in condition(p) to ride with great skill and to handle a bow and arrows. aft(prenominal) an eventful younger life his thoughts turned towards the opportunity of defeating his rivals and taking check off of the unified Mongol tribes. Many years of warfare followed, the decisive supremacy cosmos Temuchins defeat of the Naimans.In 1206 a grand assembly was called at the source of the Onon River. A white standard symbolizing the protective liveliness of the Mongols was raised . Its nine saddles represented the newly unified Mongol tribes. The gathering thus proclaimed Temuchin as Genghis Khan (Universal Ruler) (Turnbull, 2003).Before we turn to the Mongols beliefs and their attitudes towards the religions of otherwises, more or less general observations are in order. We can non take it for granted that the motives for, or then(prenominal)ce character of, conversion in the thirteenth vitamin C will be identical with those we would recognize todayor certainly those which would meet with the citation of the purist. In bulge outicular, such motives might have more to do with political, diplomatical or economic considerations than with inner conviction.We should be wrong to emphasize the single over against the communal, the internal over against the outward form of law or cultic practice, and the profoundly personal transformation over against the adoption of additional heathenish norms. For instance, the Uighur conversion to Manichaeism in the la te eighth coke had owed something to economic relations with Sogdian merchants, and it has also been calledlike the Khazar afghans adoption of Judaisma declaration of ideological independence. (Jackson, 2001)Like earlier steppe linguistic rules, the Mongol qaans presided over public debates between representatives of opposite faiths. The impulse behind these events is unclear. In a recent article, Richard Foltz points out that the military issue of the whole policy was to make mischief, save he stops laconic of suggesting that the aim was to divide and rule. It has been proposed that a debate took place at the point when the sovereign meditated a change of ghostly allegiance.There may be some truth in this Juwaynis broadsheet of the conversion of the Uighurs some centuries previously, indeed, appears to be based upon the idea that such debates were always the means of bringing the ruler to a new faith. simply we can non discount the possibility that one subroutine was ente rtainmentthat the public religious dis roveation, in other words, was the intellectual love seat of the bloody gladiatorial conflicts which the Mongols staged between captured enemy soldiers (Fiey, 1975).Lastly, the frontiers between divergent faiths were not impermeable. Shamanism was itself an amalgam, and we occupy no vantage point that enables us to distinguish some pristine model from accretions that might have connected themselves to the Mongols beliefs in the few centuries preceding the rise of Chinggis Khan (Franke, Herbert 1994). A syncretic approach had long been the hallmark of the nomads religious beliefs it is reflected in the sequestered account of the Mongols, where elements from the mythical history of the early Turks, the Khitans and other steppe and forest peoples are appropriated and merged into the Mongolsown origin myths (Amitai-Preiss, 1996).Intent as the Mongols may have been on communion the world only with subjects, they were also compelled to share it with a plethora of spirits, practically malevolently inclined and in any case termed demons by western European writers. When Rubrucks little group in 1253 passed through a uncontrollable stretch in the Tarbaghatai range, his guide asked the friars to chant a prayer that would put the demons to flight. Diagnosis of the activity of these invisible powers, and if possible their harnessing for good purposes, was the job of the shamans and in that location is no dearth of testimony that by the middle decades of the thirteenth century Mongol rulers manifested a heavy dependence upon shamans and fortune-tellers.Shamanistic activities are geared to influencing conditions in this life, not to securing an after-life. The Mongols ancestral beliefs and practices and the great world religions, in other words, were valid for different spheres hence the tolerant policy of the Mongol qacans, to which we shall parry (Elias, 1999). So it was not at all incongruous that a Mongol sovereign or p rince should make some formal gesture towards, say, Christianity or Islam while continuing to observe the shamanistic practices of his forebears Rubruck saw even those of Mngkes wives who had no knowledge of the Christian faith venerating the cross (Charpentier, 1935).We do not have to see this as some kind of heavenly insurance, as if any of the several faiths with which the Mongols were confronted might embody the Truth and so it was advisable to court them all, although the idea finds support in a rescue ascribed to Qubilai by Marco Polo. On leaving the camp out of the Mongol prince Sartaq, Rubruck was told, Do not call our master a Christian he is not a Christian he is a Mongol. (Heissig, 1980) Although he goes on to say that they take the term Christendom as the name of a people (i.e. presumably the Franks of Europe), it is ambiguous whether this necessarily supports DeWeeses contention that religion in inside(a) Asia was a communal affair.It may well have been so but Rub ruck (whose interpreter was proverbially inadequate) could easily have misunderstood the reason for the warning, and a different report comes to mind. We should notice that on several occasions the Mongol terms for religious specialists seem to have been interpreted as denoting the religious community as a whole. Rubruck, for instance, employs the Mongol word toyin (Chinese daoren, man of the path, i.e. Buddhist non-Christian priest) as a designation for the Buddhists (idolators) in general (Fennell, 1983). And the use of erken (Christian priest) betrays a similar confusion in the thirteenth-century sources.This might explain the discernible bewilderment of the Qacan Gyg at Innocent IVs postulate that he become a Christian and the anger in the camp of the Mongol general Baiju over the same injunction on the part of Ascelin. The Qaan Mngke, too, objected when Rubruck was misrepresented as having called him a toyin. It is possible that with one elision the Mongolian lexicon recogn ized only religious specialists and contained no word for the various(prenominal) religious community en masse. The exception was the Muslims who confronted Chinggis Khan in the compliance of the powerful Khwrazmian Empire.Here two words were available sartacul, employed in the Secret History to designate the Khwrazm-shhs subjects, and dashman (from Persian dnishmand, literally learned man), which denoted the Muslim religious material body. But to the best of our knowledge the phraseology contained no word for Christian or Buddhist, as opposed to erken or toyin for priest/monk. Even in the late thirteenth century Persian authors in the Mongol empire equated Christian (Persian tars) with Uighur on account of the large number of Christians among that people (Allsen, 1994).At what juncture Shamanism merits being called a religion, it is difficult to say. It has been proposed that in any consideration of the religious beliefs and practices of Inner Asian peoples we need to distingui sh between democratic cultic practice kinsperson religion, as Heissig calls it and what has been termed Tenggerism, centered on the sky-god, i.e. those beliefs and practices associated with a monarchy based on divine sanction. DeWeese is skeptical, and sees the dichotomy as between, not two competing levels of religious thought and ritual, but imperial and domestic styles of evoking essentially the same system of religious set and practices (Amitai, 2001).A clash between the aspiring steppe emperor and the representative of popular traditions might, nevertheless, provide a framework within which we can locate the hastiness of Teb Tenggeri (Kkch), the shaman who had been instrumental in Chinggis Khans enthronement but had then got above himself and was eliminated. Rashd al-Dn seems to suggest that Teb Tenggeri had a following among the ordinary Mongols, who were ready to believe in his spiritual accomplishments. The difficulty with this scenario is that it was Teb Tenggeri who i nvoked Heavens formula and Chinggis Khan who disregarded it (Bundy, 1996).The notion that the early thirteenth-century Mongols worshipped the supreme sky-god, Tengri (Tenggeri), has been challenged on the basis of the way in which the term tenggeri is used in the Secret History, the only Mongolian narrative source that has come down to us.But Anatoly Khazanov makes the plausible suggestion that the Mongols were experiencing the pull of monotheism, as Tengri took on more of the attributes of the omnipotent God. Indeed, a shift is visible during the early decades of the conquest period, to judge from the comments of contemporaneous observers. The Mongols believed in one God, creator of all things visible and invisible, though they did not worship Him, as was fitting, reverencing idols instead. Subsequent observers, at any rate, were ready to class the Mongols as monotheistic.Rubruck assumed that they had acquired monotheism from the Uighurs. You are not a polytheist, Qadi Hamd al-D n Sbiq Samarqand told Qubilai Qacan during the clampdown on Islamic observance in china in the 1280s, because you write the name of the great God at the star of your edicts (yarlighs) (Jackson, 1994). This development, of course, made it easier for representatives of the different confessional groups to claim the Qacan as one of their own.ReferenceAllsen, doubting Thomas T. The Rise of the Mongolian Empire and Mongolian Rule in northeasterly China. In CHC. Vol. 6 Alien Regimes and Border States, 9071368, eds. H. Frank and D. Twitchett. Cambridge, 1994, pp. 321413.Amitai, Reuven. The Conversion of Tegder Ilkhan to Islam. JSAI, 25 (2001), pp. 1543.Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Ghazan, Islam and Mongol Tradition A View from the Mamlk Sultanate. BSOAS, 59 (1996), pp. 110.Bundy, David. 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