In the course of about sixty years at the beginning of
the 13th century a coalition of nomadic tribes under the leadership
of the Mongol Chinggis Khan conquered much of the inhabited Eastern hemisphere.
From the Korean peninsula in the northeast to Mesopotamia in the southwest from
Moscow in the northwest to the Gulf of Tonkin in the southeast. Except for
South Asia and Africa there was hardly a town or village within this gigantic
territory that was not affected in one way or another by the extensive military
activity of the people led by Chinggis Khan.
The sharpest image that remains from that era, of course,
is the recollection of conquest, destruction, and loss which has been left
to posterity by contemporary writers. I won't get into the debates that have
gone on about the record and actual extent of this. What I would like to do
instead is try and sketch for you in somewhat broad strokes an aspect of the
impact of the Mongol conquests and in particular of the figure of Chinggis
Khan that is little known or investigated and that is what we might call the
constitutional system introduced by the Mongols either by Chinggis Khan himself
or by his immediate successors.
I use this
term "constitutional system" somewhat loosely here in the sense
let's say of the British constitutional system. That is one without a chartering
document but one in which there is widespread consensus about incorrect and
correct forms of public behavior. A consensus which in some areas was documented
and in others remained more amorphous and subject to interpretation and change
as new problems had to be addressed. It is not a constitution in the sense
of a document drafted by a group of influentials and ratified in some manner
by the people whom it would affect. But it is a constitution in the sense
of a body of regulations rooted in a remembered and somehow sanctified past
that governed the rules of the game for participants particularly in the political
process.
It was based
on something called Chinggis Khan's Great Yasa or Yasaq which came to be called
in English the great code of Chinggis Khan or great law of Chinggis Khan.
The issue of whether or not Chinggis Khan promulgated such a code has become
a matter of some scholarly debate which I think is worth recapping for you
here briefly. The earliest source on the Yasa as a compiled code is the mid-thirteenth
century writer Juvaini writing about thirty years after Chinggis Khan's death.
At the very beginning of his large work, Juvaini has a section entitled "The
Regulations Qawa'idÓ which Chinggis Khan set forth after his rise to power
and the Yasas (ordinances) which he instituted. In this somewhat rambling
chapter Juvaini tells his readers that "Chinggis Khan established a rule
for every occasion and a regulation for every circumstance while for every
crime he fixed a penaltyÓ, (This is Boyle's translation of the chapter). Further
Juvaini says Chinggis Khan ordered that these Yasas and ordinances were to
be written down on scrolls and these scrolls were to be called the Great Yasa
book (This is not Boyle's translation, in the Persian its Yasa nama-i Buzurg).
Juvaini never saw, nor does he say he saw, the scroll or scrolls nor is there
any record of anyone else ever having seen them. Juvaini then goes on to describe
Mongol customs and things which Chinggis Khan prescribed as well as orders
he issued but does not actually say that these were part of the Yasa nama-i
Buzurg or the Great Yasa. He prefaces his remarks about them with the reassurance
that "Many of these ordinances are in accordance with the Sharia, the
Muslim lawÓ and among them he includes the hunt, the way in which the personal
guard of the Khan was organized, how the army was to be inspected, penalties
for unauthorized leave, and a system of post and various matters of taxation.
He doesn't say when this Yasa nama-i Buzurg was promulgated or under what
circumstances.
As time
passed other writers borrowed heavily from Juvaini, often without
acknowledgment and embellished and augmented his not very telling remarks. Not
only did the later writers choose to systematize his data into what they
imagined the Great Yasa to be, they also gave a time and place when it was
done. This tradition of augmenting and systematizing the very scanty and
unsystematic evidence of Juvaini found its way into European scholarship in
1710 with the publication of Petis De La Croix's History of Genghis Khan, first
in French and then twelve years later in English. The author describes the
great assembly or Kurultai of 1206 at which the Mongol Temuchin was given or
adopted the title of Chinggis Khan meaning Oceanic Ruler. Writes Petis De La
Croix, "When he had thanked all those present for the marks of love and respect
they showed for him, being sensible that the chief duty of a prince is to
establish good laws, he declared to them that he thought to add to the ancient
laws some new ones which he described and commanded that they would observe.Ó
Petis De La Croix then goes on to list twenty-two provisions of the Yasa. This
formulation by Petis De La Croix that Chinggis Khan deliberately promulgated a
constitutional code in 1206, pretty much held sway in the scholarly community
until the 1970's and reached its systematized form in Riasanovsky's " The
Fundamental Principles of Mongol LawÓ and George Vernadsky's "The Contents of
Genghis Khan's YasaÓ. This is from Vernadsky, "As to the date of the
promulgation of the Yasa both Rashid ad-Din and al-Maqrizi, (a Mamluk
historian) refer to the time of the great assembly in 1206 summoned by Temuchin
after his victory over the Naimans and Merkits. This by the way, this moment is
quite decisive in unifying the nomadic peoples under his banner and providing
him with the army which then became an army of conquest outside Inner Asia.
This reference seems to be acceptable. It was at this assembly that Temuchin
was officially proclaimed emperor (great khan) and assumed his title Chinggis.
It was likewise at this date that both the military and the administrative
foundations of his empire were laid. Consequently it was most likely in this
year 1206 that the compilation of Chinggis Khan's Yasa and Bilig, which were
his sayings, compilation of his sayings, were set forth.
Vernadski
then goes on to describe two purported revisions to the code, "The expansion of
the Mongols to China beginning in approximately 1211 and to Turkestan (from
1219) resulted in transformation of the local Mongolian khanate into a world
power. It was accompanied by a reconstruction of the whole system of
administration. Chinese, Uighur, and Persian traditions have each in turn
contributed their patterns to the organization of Chinggis Khan's empire. For
this work Chinggis Khan had at his disposal the best brains of Chinese and
Uighur statesmanship. It is possible that the original version of the Yasa was somewhat
revised at that time to adjust it to the needs of the expanded empire. The
first revision of the Yasa great code might have taken place at the Kurultai of
1218 which approved the plans of the proposed campaign against Turkestan. By 1225 the revisions of the code was
complete.Ó This latter part, about the revisions of the code appears to be pure
speculation. In the 1970's this formulation of a Great Code with several
revisions turned out to be a house of cards that came tumbling down when David
Ayalon a specialist on the history of Egypt in the Mamluk period that is the 13th
through the 15th century, began a critical examination of the
sources on the Yasa, (since one of the main sources was a famous Mamluk
historian al-Maqrizi) and in a brilliant series of articles Ayalon showed that
all the Islamic sources Persian and Arab alike had come from this section of
Juvaini that I mentioned above with the addition of their own imaginative
creations. In an article published in 1986, David Morgan of the University of
London took Ayalon's work one step further to raise the question, was there
ever a Great Yasa of Chinggis Khan? Juvaini's certainly indicates it when he
speaks about a Yasa nama-i Buzurg but gives no evidence that he actually seen
it. This Mongol Secret History written about about 1230 is another early source
for Yasa written sometime, one believes, in the Year of the Rat - either 1228
or in 1240 - but it makes no mention of such a code. It's a very odd thing, as
both Ayalon and Morgan point out, that a work so important to Chinggis Khan and
his successors should have left out any reference to such a code. It does
however make several uses of the word Yasa in the following contexts, as a
rulers directive, not always Chinggis Khan by the way, as a legally binding
precedent and as normative law the infringement of which entails severe,
usually capital punishment. "Since Yasa is the law of the ruler, i.e. the law
of the state it can by extension mean governance or rule as wellÓ, I am quoting
here from the Mongolist Igor de Rachewiltz. None of these things can be
identified as an ambiguous reference to a great code. The answer apparently or
at least according to de Rachewiltz as to whether or not Chinggis Khan
promulgated a great code lies in Chinese sources. In 1291 the Yuan Dynasty
promulgated the Ch'ing-yuan new code to satisfy in part the longing of Chinese
bureaucrats for a codification of the legal customs of the Mongols within the
rich heritage of Chinese judicial administration.The process leading to the
1291 codification was studied by Paul Heng-chao Ch'en in a monograph published
in 1979 called, "Chinese Legal Tradition under the MongolsÓ. De Rachewiltz used
Ch'en's work to suggest a very plausible modification of Morgan's thesis that
there was no great code promulgated by Chinggis Khan. The Chinese sources do
point clearly to a Great Yasa which was promulgated according to them in 1229
at the accession of Ogedai and it is de Rachewiltz's reasonable contention that
Ogedai not only publicly declared that he would uphold his father's decrees or
Yasas but also formally proclaim in essence a formal promulgation of them.
Ch'en concluded, "that the Yasaq was a collection of rules and instructions
given by Chinggis Khan in response to the needs of specific circumstances and
was later formally promulgated in 1229. Although it was not a systematically
organized legal work the Yasa provided the Mongolian ruling clans with
guidelines for the administration of government. The Yasa did not apply
universally as a code to all tribes under Mongolian domination but by virtue of
its authoritative character it did serve as a principal legal source in China
for the period following the fall of the Sung Dynasty. Because Chinese society
soon proved too complicated for Mongolian customary law to deal with the
application of the Yasa to Chinese cases its use gradually diminished and by
the end of the thirteenth century the Yasa as a source of law appeared to be of
minimal significance,Ó end of quote by Ch'en. So much for the Chinese side of
it.
Another region where the Yasa made enough of an impact to leave traces
in the written record was the Mamluk kingdom Egypt and Syria. There and
especially in the early and mid-fourteenth centuries, Mamluk amirs who knew
Mongols and Mongol customs introduced Mongol practices into the organization of
the sultan's bodyguard. The Mamluk historian al-Safadi who died in 1363 wrote
about one such amir, "He knew both the spoken and written Mongol language and
was versed in Mongol manners. He used to act as judge for members of the
bodyguard within the Sultan's house according to the Yasa and Yasaq which had
been established by Chinggis Khan. He knew the biography of Chinggis Khan and
used to read and consult it repeatedly. He knew the Mongol families and their
lineage and origins. He learned by heart the Mongol histories.Ó* But aside from the reference to the bodyguard there
is little evidence that Chinggis Khan's code had much influence in Egypt or
Syria. Al-Maqrizi, who died in 1440, and Ibn Taghri Birdi, who died in 1470,
both claim however that the Yasa was strong in the Mamluk sultanate from its
very beginning. But Ayalon through his painstaking research on all Mamluk and
related Ilkhanid sources for the period has shown how Al-Maqrizi and Ibn Taghri
Birdi both distorted and altered their sources. He does not however and I think
that this is - crucial give us reasons why they might have done so and why they
would have thought it first credible
to do so and second, important, to insist on the influence of the
Yasa. (*quoted by Ayalon in "Great YasaÓ IV pg. 135)
All of this though fascinating in its own right does not address a
crucial point and that is the survival of Chinggis Khan's legacy as a law giver
for as long as 700 hundred years after his death in some areas that came under
Mongol control at one point. Nor do the students of the Great Yasa address the
usefulness of the idea of a Great Yasa in the political life of many regions of
the Middle East. Indeed I think it ought to be asked, was the elaboration and
perhaps even outright creation of the idea of a great code of Chinggis Khan
part of a continuing public discourse about law and authority in society? What
were some of the assumptions of that debate and in what regions and on what
institutions did that debate have a marked impact and is that dialogue still
going on in Central Asia today?
For
the remainder of this talk I would like to touch on some of the instances and
contexts in which this debate gets recorded. Much of the debate must have taken
place and never been recorded but we get some little tidbits here and there
that are very suggestive about what was going on. I am going to begin with the
situation of the Golden Horde which was the division of the Mongols furthest to
the west assigned to the line of Jochi the oldest son of Chinggis Khan and
headquartered on the lower Volga River. In 1312 the reigning Khan of the Golden
Horde died. Two factions immediately emerged to claim the Khanate, one backing
the claims of the deceased Khan's son and the other backing the claims of Ozbeg
Khan, a recent convert to Islam and the man to whom the entire conversion of
the Horde becomes attributed. The story is told by an Iranian Jamaladdin
Qashani, author of Tarikh-i-Uljaytu Sultan who was a contemporary of Ozbeg
Sultan writing about four years after the events being described "On the Khans
death the leading figures of the Golden Horde gathered to choose a successor.
The faction backing the Khan's son said, that before placing the son on the
throne it was necessary to get rid of Ozbeg Khan whom they considered an enemy
of the state primarily because he was continually demanding they convert to
Islam. Ozbeg Khan hearing of the Khan's death traveled to the capital and
demanded his khanate be recognized and the military submit (meaning both), Obey
him and accept Islam. The chief of the rival faction then reportedly said, "Oh
Padshah you demand Islam from us but how can we obey? What complaint do we have
with the Yasa and Yasuun of Chinggis Khan that you summon us to the old Sharia
of the Arabs?Ó Ozbeg Khan then killed the man on the spot, the story goes. The other amirs in retaliation
conspired to kill him, inviting him to a banquet where on a signal he would be
attacked and killed. But one of the amirs in attendance informed Ozbeg of what
was planned and so he left the banquet on the pretext of the needing to relieve
himself and fled on a fast horse, returning later to attack, seize, and kill
all the hostile amirs and ascend the khanly throne and make the amir who
betrayed the others his closest confidant. This is a very rich story in the
narrative elements that it contains and we find all sorts of things that we
find in many, many other stories. The banquets which people go to unsuspecting
that their heads are about to be taken off at least in stories. Over and over
again they go to these banquets. The ruse of going out to relieve yourself and
thereby foiling the plot, and the issue of betrayal, particularly of the
Chinggisid way on behalf of Islam comes up over and over again. One of the elements, the one I want to
focus on here is the element Juvaini had already introduced in 1260, and it is
central to the tension over the legacy of Chinggis Khan as a law giver in the
Islamic world. This is what is called here the "old Sharia of the Arabs,Ó the
Islamic way or Islamic law, obedience to and regard for which is the
touchstone, in literary sources, of the justice and goodness of a ruler. In the
1260s when Juvaini said that these ordinances of Chinggis Khan were harmony
with the Sharia he wanted his readers to know that the regulations were the
regulations of a good ruler. Here however Qashani wants his readers to
understand that the Yasa of Chinggis Khan is antithetical to the Sharia, its
adherents are Islam's enemies, and its enemies are Islam's heroes. It is my contention that the durability
of this dichotomy, is largely dependent on the meaning that Yasa retains for a
significant proportion of the population over time. Without it having that
meaning, without it continuing to resonate amongst part of the population I
don't believe it could have, or would have, the kind of significance in
literature that it does.
Lets jump ahead a century, from 1311 to the early 15th
century. Much has happened in the meantime besides the Black Death. The Mongol
Empire has broken up, the descendants of Chinggis Khan who held the Khanate
have all but disappeared from political influence. The Chinggisid successors
have all been Islamacised by this time, but the legacy of the great world
conqueror as lawgiver still lives. The time is 1411, and the place is Herat. It
is six years since the death of Tamerlane and during that brief period much of
what was conquered by him had been lost. Tamerlane after all is a Chinggis Khan
redux in terms of his conquests, his career, and his pattern of government. His
sons and grandsons hold sway over a new empire, but one which they will spend a
good deal of time and energy fighting each other to control. One of his sons,
Shah Rukh, who is in charge of Heart, sometime during the months of March or
April of 1411, according to a writer "abandoned the Mongol law court and gave
up the Mongol customary laws in favour of the ShariaÓ. He did this we are told
by introducing prohibition, that is no more alcohol in Herat, by getting rid of
the symbolic Chinggisid Khan who sat at his right hand, and by purifying the
tomb of his father Timur in Samarkand of its non-Islamic elements. We don't
know precisely what those non-Islamic elements were thought to be. The man who
wrote this was a Hanafi preacher and a specialist in the science of Hadith, a
man named Jalal al-Din Qa'ini. He had already been sent as a propagandist into
the mountainous regions west of Herat called Kohistan where remnants of the
Ismaili heterodoxy still lived after they were more or less wiped out by the
Mongols in northwestern Iran. His job at this point was to either convert them
to Hanafi Islam or to do an ethnic cleansing of the region. He was by all
accounts a hardliner on Islamic issues and it is more than likely that the
Chinggisid elements that were evident at court life, maintaining a household of
a separate symbolic Khan, and in daily life, the hunt and the alcoholic binges
which the court was famous for, were extremely offensive and perhaps
threatening to him. Whether Shah Rukh actually did what Qa'ini says he did in a
book which Qa'ini wrote even for Shah Rukh is really, I think, immaterial.
Clearly the Islamist wanted him to do it, advised him to do it, but his views,
I think represent only part of the spectrum of political thought that governed
Shah Rukh. Tamerlane himself was no less a Muslim in the eyes of his
documenters, but was also a zealous guardian of the Chinggisid political
legacy. Being himself not an agnatic, not a direct descendant of Chinggis Khan,
he could not claim to be sovereign. He maintained however a genuine Chinggisid
descendant for ceremonial and ideological reasons, not unlike the way in which
the English maintain for million and millions of pounds a year, a symbolic and
ideological monarch and royal household. The Chinggisid Khan often referred to
by modern historians as a puppet should perhaps better be referred to simply as
a symbolic head of state. Timur never adopted as far as we know the titular of
ultimate sovereignty, khan, khaqan, qa'an, and so on nor for that matter did
his sons and grandsons. They used titulature which is more reminiscent of
Iranian kingship, shah, padshah, as well as sultan which recalls Turkish
kingship. They used terms like shah, padshah and sultan, and they called
themselves in their titulature Mirza invariably which is an abbreviated form of
the word Amirzadeh or son of the Amir, meaning the son of Timur, or grandson or
great grandson.
From 1411 we jump forward another hundred years when one of the last
Timurids in Central Asia, Babur, the son of Umar Shaykh, is compiling his
memoirs. Babur is a politician and a born again Muslim, at the age of forty he
saw the light and gave up partying and drugs and alcohol, although he is not
self righteous about it. From him we get a rather different and more pragmatic
view of the survival of legacy of Chinggis Khan. To him, the way, the
Chinggisid way, and the law is more a matter of respect and regard for the past
for ones ancestors and their beliefs and for behavior which is considered still
acceptable though without sanction in the Sharia, the Islamic law, and probably
he was under continual pressure from people like Qa'ini to drop all this
Chinggisid nonsense. In a couple
of places in his memoirs, he explicitly refers to the legacy. He speaks of it
in one place in this fashion, " Our forefathers over a long period of time
respected the Chinggisid Tura or Yasa doing nothing opposed to it whether at
court or at a social gathering. Though it has no divine authority so that a man
must obey it of necessity, still good rules of conduct ought to be followed.Ó
For him it's a matter of manners, good breeding, doing the right thing. It is
not an issue that challenged the authority of the Sharia at all. But then again
he wasn't a Shariest, nor was he a zealot on ideological issues. We don't know
whether he is simply expressing his own views at a moment in life when he is
feeling particularly mellow, whether he is reflecting the views of his
contemporaries, or what. Certainly the whole issue had not receded into one of
a vestige of nostalgia for a distant past by his time. It remained very much
alive in the 16th century and indeed was rejuvenated by the coming
of a new Chinggisid political organization to assume the mantle of the past in
the name of the Jochid line of Chinggis Khan.
With this group of Shibanid lineage out of Jochi, actually two Shibanid
lineages, one of which was centered just south of the Aral Sea in the delta of
the Amu Darya and the other which took over the oases of Central Asia: Bukhara,
Samarkand, Tashkent, Balkh, Herat, Shahkin Sabz. It was this group which
revived or lent new weight to Chinggisid law and Chinggisid institutions.
Ayalon, in concluding his remarkable study on the Yasa of Chinggis Khan and
assessing its impact on Mamluk Egypt wrote, "Later Mamluk historians especially
Al-Maqrizi and Ibn' Taghri Birdi claim that the position of the Yasa had been
very strong in the Mamluk Sultanate since its inception.Ó "Éwhat is absolutely
certain is that the Yasa even if it played some role under the Mamluks could
not maintain the same power for long, the Yasa and other Mongol customs and
institutions must have been losing ground in the territories governed directly
by the Mongols, how much more so outside these territoriesÓ.
But I think Ayalon is seeing this in rather narrow terms, that is he is
seeing a law which carried the same meaning over time and would have been as
recognizable to a Bukharan writing in the 17th century as it was to
a man from Tabriz writing in the early 14th. This tends I think to
shift Yasa from the realm of law to that of something approaching divine
revelation.
Perhaps a more reasonable assumption would be that for the word and
concept of Yasa or Chinggisid law to have remained in the public discourse and
more than that to have been controversial must have meant that it had
significant meaning for a significant part of the population. If the rise of
the Shibanids represents, as I am convinced it does, a rejuvenation of the
Chinggisid law and way in political life, then not only did it not lose ground
in the 16th century but actually substantially regained it. Not by
the way very long after Al'- Maqrizi and ÔIbn Taghri Birdi passed from the
scene.
In his study of the compilation of the
extensive geneological tables of the Timurid house known as Mu'izzal-ansab,
John Woods proposed that as the family's view of its past and its role in the
world evolved, the traditions about its genealogy also evolved. This is
probably a more useful approach to the issue of Yasa and how let's say, a
person in the 16th century referring to it might have conceived it.
We find several telling examples of this in the late 16th century
relating to the ruling Shibanid house, the Jani-Begid from some perspectives at
the peak of its power at this time and from others suffering a crisis of
identity that would soon contribute to its downfall. The chronicler, with no
apparent sense of anachronism or irony reports that Abdallah Khan l1 who was
Khan from 1583 to 1598 went to the Idgah, a large open area for the festival
prayers outside the city, to perform the prayer at the end of the month of the
fast. He did this, according to
the chronicler Hafiz Tanish and I am quoting this chronicler, "In accordance
with the Yasa of Chinggis KhanÓ. It's hard to imagine Chinggis Khan a
non-muslim going out to the Idgah to perform the Muslim prayers. But there is a
story in Juvaini that after the capture of Bukhara in 1221 Chinggis Khan did
indeed go out to the prayer ground and mounted the pulpit there not to pray,
but it was to round up the wealthy of the city in order to confiscate their
money.
So Yasa as a concept of authoritative practice was flexible and I think
should be seen as flexible. Had it not been, we assume, it would not have
survived.
In the oases of what is now Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan and the little kingdom of General Dostum in northern Afghanistan the
beginning of the 16th century saw more than a revival the spirit of
the Chinggisid Yasa, it saw a reinvention of it. First there was the
reinstitution of the Chinggisid Khanate, certainly an ancient steppe
institution but one that by this time was inextricably bound up with the memory
Chinggis Khan. The khanate had certain characteristics which I will just
briefly touch on, it is easy to find this information elsewhere. One feature is
that the khan must be the senior member of the clan. This does not seem to be
something specifically Mongol, but appears to have been picked up elsewhere and
by this time was institutionalized. We know this not because people in Central
Asia recorded it but because there was a visitor who came in 1507, and stayed
until 1509 fleeing the Shiite takeover of Iran his name was Khunji and he took
refuge at the court of Shibani. He notes in his book in which he writes of his
experiences there, "They call all the descendents of Chinggis Khan sultans and
the one who is eldest is designated khan.Ó So seniority is one feature. The
second characteristic that the Khanate revives is the idea that sovereignty,
rests not in an individual or an individual's line, but in a clan, a
whole clan. The clan therefore has a right to control the territory over which it
reigns and from this we have the phenomenon of the appanage system in which
individual members of the clan, the male members of the clan who have reached
their maturity, are entitled to a share of the territory.
So we have the issue of seniority, secondly the issue of appanage rule,
of corporate rule of the territory. Somehow Central Asia in particular lent
itself to this by virtue of the oases system. That is we have small areas of
concentrated populations scattered over a fairly large area. We see in the
revival of the Khanate also a clearer articulation of the tension between the
partisans of the Chinggisid way and the Islamic way or Islamic law. On the one
hand it is possible to find in the written record examples of the melding of
the two. We find this interesting description of the enthronement or accession
to the khanate of the same Abdullah Khan whom I mentioned before. He gets news
of the death of his father and a group of his amirs consult and decide that he
is eligible to succeed to the khanate, even though actually he is not the
eldest at this point. The story starts from here, "At this point a group of
amirs turned to Sa'id ul-Din Juybari, a sufi sheikh saying, "It is the custom
of the great khaqans and the noble sultans that whenever a person is recognized
as deserving of the royal throne they set him on a piece of white felt and they
lift him up. So the khoja brought a white felt carpet whose owner, while
performing the hajj pilgrimage, had baptized with the water of the sacred well
Zamzam. They seated the royal personage on the carpet and with three other
people (all of whom are named in the text) this holy man grasped the carpet and
together they raised him up to rulership.Ó Now the accession of a khan to
rulership by virtue of sitting on a white felt carpet is a nice steppe image
and we now have it Islamicized by the baptism of that carpet or the sprinkling
of that carpet with water from the well of Zamzam in Mecca. But it's a very
problematic story of course, and not whether this represents the actual
practice of enthronement. What's problematic is that the whole process had to
be explained to this sufi sheikh. He had been born and raised in the region, he
had seen khans come and go, so presumably he knew how it was done, and what was
involved. But I think in writing up the story it was essential to somehow
distance the figure, distance Islam, in the mind of the writer from this
practice which can only be considered un-Islamic.
We see the same thing in a story written about fifty years earlier by a
famous member of a Mongol tribe, the Dughlat, Mirza Haider. A work that has
twice been translated into English. He presents himself throughout the
narrative as firmly on the side of the Sharia, as a proponent of the Islamic
way. And one of the stories he tells in his book is about an ancestor of his, a
man named Amir Khudaidad. He wishes not unreasonably to present him in the most
favorable light he can but it must have been known that he betrayed his master
a Chinggised named Wais Khan, who ruled over the Turfan oasis which is now in
northwestern China in the mid-fifteenth century. According to the story that
his descendent Mirza Haider tells, when Amir Khudaidad reached the age of
ninety-seven he felt the need to make the pilgrimage, seeing his time must have
been drawing near. But his master refused to let him go. So he turned his back
on him, betrayed him, and joined Ulugh Beg who was the ruler at Samarkand at
the time, a Timurid, who had also just by chance been fighting with Wais Khan
and other Chinggisid Mongols of that region. That is one part of the story. At
Samarkand Ulugh Beg said to Amir Khudaidad, "No one knows the Chinggisid law
like you, please teach me all its rules for I need them to rule my kingdom.Ó
The Amir then said, "We have long
since cursed and abandoned the Chinggisid code and adopted the law of the
Prophet, but if you with all your knowledge of the lawÓ, (and Ulugh Beg of
course was well known as a scholar) "still consider the Chinggisid code
worthwhile to learn then I will teach it to you and myself apostatize.Ó I think
it's a wonderful story with many nuances; this imagined figure of Ulugh Beg,
the rehabilitation of family honor through showing loyalty to the Islamic way
against the Chinggisid way, and so on. But I only really use it here to bring
your attention to this issue of the tension that underscores and signifies the
durability of the Chinggisid way.
Almost a century after Mirza Haider wrote, that is in the, 1630's, a
historian at Balkh, Mahmud the son of Amir Wali provides another extraordinary
glimpse into the living tradition of Chinggised law in practice. With his
depiction of court life, ceremonial rankings based on remembered positions in
Chinggis Khan's army, four hundred years later. He has a separate section on
the tribes, of the Dasht-i-Qipchak. This region, by now a mythical one,
is actually the area today called the Kazakh steppe. But by 1630 it had a
certain mythic quality as an original homeland for the people who lived in the
oases. There is only one copy of this work, it is in London and its a very
difficult read. Mahmud was a mainstream Muslim, he was not a zealot
particularly but a man of his time and comfortable with its religious practices
which included shrine pilgrimage and in the seventeenth century what was
probably the equivalent of the 1960's hippy treks from Europe to Nepal. This
was going to India, and going to India and backpacking or the seventeenth
century equivalent of backpacking from shrine to shrine around India and then
returning to what must have seemed a more boring life in Central Asia. Anyway
he had done all this by the time he came to write his book. He has left us a
section in his book which is subtitled - the great deeds blessed virtues, and
refined characteristics of the man who was of the sponsor of his work and held
Balkh in the early seventeenth century. In this section he gives a long and
difficult disquisition on the issue of law in society in which he makes a
number of points. Including this, one, that customary law is antithetical to
Sharia. (He gives customary law the name of yasa and yusun). He said it is
known as yasa and yusun to the Mongols and tura to the Uzbeks. This type of
evil innovation had in his time, he said been promoted by politicians to the
detriment of the prescriptions and proscriptions of Islamic law. When his
patron came to the throne however he strove among other things to undermine the
foundations of customary law. This is a complete replay in 1630 of the Shah
Rukh story of 1411, the same issues are coming up again, the same kind of
response, with the kind of variation which one would expect from local
conditions. But the issue of the pull and the power of the Chinggisid yasa is
still there. But as I said he said he is not a particular hardliner on this, he
brings it up to make a point about his patron being a good Muslim ruler. So he
goes through this obligatory rant against the Yasa and then proceeds to
describe in great detail all the Yasa institutions and practices as he understood
them that were still being observed in early seventeenth century Balkh. These
included such things as kumiss drinking and the way in which kumiss should be
drunk. Also how a quiver should be worn when a man, particularly a man
expressing repentance to his ruler, appears before him. Then a lengthy section,
a very difficult section on court protocol, where people sat, and next to whom.
The derivation of those ranks, is not from anything Islamic but entirely from
the history of the Mongols and the Mongol army under Chinggis Khan. He doesn't
seem to have a problem with this, he gives us on the one hand his little
diatribe against customary law, but then proceeds to tell us all of the things
which have survived. There doesn't ever seem to be between these two a full
melding and synthesis of the traditions. Each one had its own jurisdictional
niche. In the public discourse about these two legal worlds, the lines are
clearly drawn, the differences are in black and white. One is good, one is bad.
In private however outside the texts, one imagines there is a much more subtle
process going on, in which things work side by side - one recognized as having
jurisdiction in one area and the other in another.
Certainly with the passing of time these Yasaist or political
institutions faded in importance. The Chinggisid lineages disappear in Central
Asia, and some of them moved to India. The Yasa may therefore have declined
simply because it became less important, certain terms survive as late as the
end of the nineteenth century in Afghan Persian meaning a person has been
brought to justice, usually meaning final justice. The twentieth century I
think has witnessed an ideological, break of about 70 years during which a new
conqueror, a new mandate, a new system of law and ideology, the period of
Russian Soviet power attempted to eliminate both aspects of the old
Yasa-Shari'a. What the long term effects of the post-Soviet debate will be I
don't know. I like to think that there are still some elements today of Yasa
and Sharia that will persist and come to the fore again, who knows. Anyway that
is where I will stop and leave the rest to your questions and
imaginations.