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A. Azfar Moin , The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam , South Asia Across the Disciplines (New York : Columbia University Press , 2012). Pp. 368. $55.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.
Islam and Secularism
The Millennial Sovereign recovers a shared world of sacred kingship that pervaded India, Iran, and Central Asia in early modernity. A. Azfar Moin argues that a Timurid-based social dispensation produced a particular type of sovereignty in which a ruler promoted his political claims largely through embodied spiritual practices. Beliefs about the turning of the Islamic millennium (1591-92 ce) played a key role in shaping this world, particularly the conviction that a messiah would emerge and usher in a new auspicious era. In this charged atmosphere, kings and their subjects alike looked to astrology, dreams, and omens to understand and lay claim to royal and religious authority. By carefully analyzing this realm of fused popular and esoteric millenarianism, Moin outlines a formidable challenge to the conventional narratives of Mughal and, to a lesser extent, Safavid history that is likely to surprise even specialists. Along the way, The Millennial Sovereign demonstrates several innovative methods of historical analysis that have the potential to alter how scholars access and make sense of the early modern past.
Moin devotes his first chapter to Timur (d. 1405) and pieces together the prevalent ideas concerning charismatic royal authority and the Islamic millennium that marked the rise of the Timurid cultural order (and the falling away of the Chinggis Khan world). His account of the Mughals in Chapter 2 begins with Babur, who founded the Indian Mughal Empire in 1526. Moin then proceeds chronologically through the next four Mughal rulers (Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan), devoting a chapter to each, and highlights how they all enacted power through Timurid-based spiritual practices and political ideologies. He periodically compares the Mughals to their Safavid counterparts and highlights connections between...