2019/11/14 by Jonathan Brack · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Islamic Studies and History #Eurasian Exchange Networks #Byzantine Studies and History #Monarchy #Appropriation #Politics #Heaven #Islam #Ancient history #History #Exceptionalism #Emperor #Governor #Philosophy #Law #Theology #Political science
paper · pdf · doi:10.7817/jameroriesoci.139.3.0611
openalex publication_date 2019/11/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

 
 
 The roots of the formation of a post-Mongol political theology that situated Muslim emperors and sultans at the center of an Islamic cosmos are found in the Ilkhanid court in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Iran. This article investigates the case of the short-lived rebellion (1322–1323) of the Mongol governor of Rūm (Anatolia) and Mahdi-claimant Temürtash (d. 1327). It demonstrates how the discourse of religious reform was recruited to translate and support the claims of non-Chinggisid commanders to the transfer of God’s favor, thus opposing the Chinggisids’ heaven-derived exceptionalism. Exploring affinities with the Timurid appropriation of the mujaddid tradition a century later, the article argues that Temürtash’s rebellion signaled the early stages of the dispersion of a new political language that freed Muslim kingship from the restrictive genealogical and juridical Sunni models of authority .