In 1254, after a long and anxious wait at the Mongol Empire’s capital of Qaraqorum, the Flemish friar and missionary William of Rubruck (ca. 1220–ca. 1293), finally got his wish to preach in person to the Mongol Qa’an Möngke (r. 1251–59). Before meeting the emperor, however, there was one final obstacle to overcome: outperforming his Muslim and Buddhist contenders in an interreligious debate. This multilateral court disputation was the first documented debate of its kind that included Christians (both Catholics and Nestorians), Muslims, and Buddhists. For William and for the Catholic Church more broadly, the encounter with Buddhism was entirely new. For the Muslim debaters, it was by no means the first interaction with Buddhists: Islam and Buddhism had a prolonged history of religious, intellectual, and commercial encounters and exchanges, but one that was fraught with friction and rivalry as well.
From our historical hindsight, however, this 1254 exchange in Mongolia can be seen as marking a new page in Muslim-Buddhist relations, not in the eastern territories of the Mongol Empire (China and Mongolia), but rather further west, at the other end of Mongol-dominated Eurasia, in Iran, which would shortly become the seat of the independent Mongol state of the Ilkhanate (1260–1335). Established by Chinggis Khan’s (r. 1206–27) grandson, Hülegü (r. 1260–65) in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan—areas with a predominantly Muslim population—the Ilkhanate would become a destination for Buddhist monks from across Eurasia. These Buddhist experts would travel great distances to spread the Dharma and take advantage of the opportunities of patronage that the new Mongol rulers of Iran, the Ilkhans, offered.
In the late 1280s, some thirty years after William’s visit to Qaraqorum, the Ilkhanid court in Iran experienced the height of interfaith exchanges. Learned monks gathered at the court of Buddhist enthusiast Ilkhan Arghun (r. 1284–91), and debated with Muslims and possibly others. It is against this backdrop that this book’s protagonist, Rashid al-Din (d. 1318), then still a court physician and an up-and-coming bureaucrat, found himself embroiled in a disputation with one of the Mongol king’s cherished monks.
Rashid al-Din describes his exchange in a treatise written nearly two decades after the event, and under very different circumstances. He was at the height of his tenure as vizier, the most powerful civil servant in the Ilkhanid state, and Islam had already prevailed over Buddhism to become the official religion of the Ilkhanid rulers. Rashid al-Din does not name his contender and refers to him only as a bakhshī, Buddhist priest. The Buddhist asked Rashid al-Din the following question in Arghun’s presence: “What came first, the bird or the egg?” Rashid al-Din notes that this was a “famous fable” among the Buddhists. The monk indeed evoked a well-known Buddhist enigma that appeared in the “Questions of Mellinda,” a Pali dialogue between a Buddhist sage and the Greek king Menander of Bactria, probably composed between 150 BC and 100 AD. Rashid al-Din writes that while the monk believed that he would fail to solve the riddle, he was confounded by it for only a moment before God divulged to him the answer. He does not tell us what answer he ended up providing nor whether the Buddhist offered a rebuttal. Instead, Rashid al-Din downplays his Buddhist rival, dismissing the monk as ignorant of the true meaning of his own riddle. Yet he does not disregard the question itself as a catalyst of a theological inquiry. Rashid al-Din is “inspired” by it, and in the remainder of this treatise, he proceeds to contemplate Islamic philosophical points regarding issues such as the createdness of Adam and the divine source of primordial human knowledge.
Rashid al-Din’s account of this debate certainly differs from the Flemish friar William’s report to the Pope about his multilateral debate at Möngke’s court in Mongolia. For one, William provides more detail about how the debate with the Chinese Buddhist representative evolved and about the type of arguments that each party employed. We know they debated the existence and unity of God and the cause of evil. The differences between the Persian Muslim’s and the Flemish Christian’s accounts notwithstanding, there are also striking parallels between the two. Both downplay the intellectual fortitude of their Buddhist opponents. And both emphasize their recourse to their own scholastic traditions of rational argumentation to overcome the challenges mounted by their Buddhist contenders, rather than relying on Muslim or Christian scriptures. Whereas both might have underscored cultural and linguistic disparities, whether explicitly or implicitly, their accounts ultimately give the impression of a common vocabulary—that of rational argumentation.
Scholastic disputation indeed emerges from their reports as a shared currency enabling a certain exchange of ideas. Yet how far did such exchanges go? William’s account suggests that the debates went beyond the exchange of riddles and parables and could include hefty theological arguments. It also gives the impression, however, that the two parties remained ingrained in their own scholastic traditions. Rashid al-Din’s account, on the other hand, leaves more to the imagination. He gives the impression that few meaningful intellectual exchanges between Muslims and Buddhists took place under Mongol rule in Iran. And this impression is amplified by the general dearth of Muslim Ilkhanid descriptions of such exchanges, as well as the complete absence of any Buddhist textual documentation from the Ilkhanate.
Yet it is hard to reconcile this impression with what we know of the prevalence of Buddhism and the flourishing of the Buddhists during the Ilkhanate’s first four decades. As this book shows, a thorough examination of the Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din’s extensive theological works demonstrates that Buddhist, Muslim, and Mongol exchanges have left deeper and more consequential impressions than the silence of contemporaneous Muslim authors implies. Muslims at the court were exposed to and made a considerable effort to respond to Buddhist concepts. These might not have been the finer points of the Dharma, but rather, as we will see, Buddhist methods of engaging with political authorities and conversion strategies.
An Afterlife for the Khan explores the Ilkhanid court of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century as an arena of interreligious exchange and rivalry, where the conceptual differences and equivalences between various Eurasian structures of power and sacrality—Islamic, Buddhist, and Mongol—were debated and deployed. It unearths the various subtle ways in which cultural and religious agents employed their religious and political resources to accommodate, translate, manipulate, and subvert the symbols and structures of the religious Other.
Focusing on the theological-philosophical works of a Persian Muslim vizier active in the intellectual scene of the Ilkhanid court at the turn of the fourteenth century, An Afterlife for the Khan shows how the Persian-Muslim experience of Buddhism and its system of karmic-righteous kingship, on the one hand, and the accommodation of and resistance to the Mongol model of divinized kingship, on the other, generated and informed processes of creative experimentation in new modes of Islamic sacral kingship. Buddhists marketed concepts and models of karmic kingship as means of translating, reaffirming, and converting their Chinggisid patrons’ claims to deified kingship. The Islamic challenge entailed, therefore, not only winning their Ilkhanid patrons to the Muslim faith or cementing their commitment to Islam in the case of the Mongols who had already converted, but also uprooting their previous Buddhist education.
Jewish convert, Persian vizier, historian, and Muslim theologian Rashid al-Din stood at the center of the Muslim conversion efforts. In his theological and historical writings, invigorated by the lively atmosphere of an intellectually rigorous and religiously competitive royal court, Rashid al-Din not only engaged in the translation and assimilation of Buddhist narratives and concepts, or painstakingly attempted to dispute and disprove the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation. He was also inspired and informed by his Buddhist competitors and their strategies of conversion and domestication of the Chinggisid rulers. To this end, he experimented with a model of Mongol-Muslim kingship that paralleled Buddhism’s structure of karmic-righteous rulership.
This book argues that Rashid al-Din’s Buddhist- and Mongol-informed experimentation in Islamic theological discourses formed a crucial, intermediate stage between the two more dominant frameworks for legitimizing Islamic, sultanic authority—the pre-Mongol phase of a restrictive, legalistic, and genealogical-based caliphal structure, and the post-Mongol independent model of universal and sacral Islamic rulership buttressed by saintly and messianic discourses. The Mongol occupation of Baghdad and the consequent elimination of the ʿAbbasid caliphate in 1258 represented a dramatic event that shattered the religiopolitical foundation of the Sunni majority’s world. This cataclysm inaugurated an era of unprecedented constitutional crisis that exacerbated after the collapse of the Ilkhanid state in 1335. In subsequent centuries, new strategies for legitimizing sultanic authority were formulated to resolve this crisis. To that end, Muslim intellectuals increasingly made use of and elaborated on an innovative, comprehensive, and compelling vocabulary of sovereignty that effectively shifted the discourse of sultanic legitimacy away from the pre-Mongol restrictive genealogical and juridical parameters of Sunni authority. In its place, there emerged a new discursive realm of universal Islamic kingship that referenced and interlinked a variety of intellectual fields—from philosophy and theology to astrology, mysticism, and the occult. Rashid al-Din’s works marked the end of caliphal authority and the beginning of this new age of Islamic authority. In the remainder of this introduction, we first explore the central theoretical foundation of this research into sacred kingship and the strategies of religious agents with the Mongol rulers.
Jonathan Z. Brack – An Afterlife for the Khan
