Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "(Re)naming the Khan: Muslim and Buddhist Cultural Brokers in the Ilkhanate and the Conversion of Chinggisid Fortune" by Dr. Jonathan Brack (Ben-Gurion University)

Monday, December 28, 2020, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

Please contact Alon Ben Yehuda, the Research Group assistant, to receive the Zoom link: alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il

ABSTRACT

Whereas scholarship on cultural brokers in the Mongol Empire (Thomas Allsen’s work for example) has largely drawn attention the role of brokers as “conduits", facilitators of inter-Eurasian exchanges, recent historical research on cultural brokerage (for example, Natalie Rothman’s work) has been emphasizing instead the way brokers themselves reaffirm and fix the boundaries of the very same items they are assigned and are reputed to mediate. Put differently, brokers, scholars now suggest, are concerned with retaining, translating, reinforcing, and even refashioning (or fabricating) cultural and/or social difference, as much as they are concerned with presenting themselves as being able to transgress differences. In this paper, I suggest, following Helmut Reimitz, that while local cultural brokers offered the Mongol elite assimilation, they did so by marketing to their patrons integration as social “difference.”

This paper explores Buddhist and Muslim cultural brokerage in the thirteenth-fourteenth-centuries Ilkhanid court in Iran. Buddhists and Muslims in Mongol service employed their political-religious vocabularies and concepts to translate, accommodate, reaffirm their Chinggisid patrons’ claims to a heavenly granted sacral mode of kingship, in other words, Chinggisid difference and exceptionalism. This process of Islamic and Buddhist translation and “accommodation” of the Chinggisids’ sacral kingship, however, entailed also its reconceptualization and domestication. Put differently, it was designed to displace Chinggis Khan’s and his successors’ immanentist model of divinized kingship with a constrained, Muslim and Buddhist, transcendentalist mode of righteous kingship, and thus offer integration and assimilation. This paper focuses on the process of translation of the Chinggisid claim to a unique, exceptional good fortune. Using the example of the Ilkhanid vizier Rashīd al-Dīn’s (d. 1318) experimentation with the refashioning of his Chinggisid patrons as sacral Muslim monarchs, I argue that Muslims (and Buddhists) mobilized translation to ethicize the Chinggisid divinized kingship through its association it with Islamic (and Buddhist) salvific imperatives. Furthermore, Rashīd al-Dīn was inspired by, and might have even directly appropriated, the Buddhist approach to the domestication of the Chinggisids’ divinized form auspiciousness.

Jonathan (Yoni) Brack is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Michigan, and was a postdoctoral fellow in The Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017-2020). He studies medieval and early modern Iran and the Mongol Empire. His research examines Muslim-Buddhist exchanges and polemics in Ilkhanid Iran, sacral kingship, and Mongol conversion to Islam. His recent and forthcoming publications include “A Mongol Mahdi in Medieval Anatolia: Reform, Rebellion, and Divine Right in the Post-Mongol Islamic World” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2019), and “Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260-1335 (Past & Present, forthcoming 2021). He recently co-edited, together with Michal Biran and Francesca Fiaschetti, a volume title Along the Mongol Silk Roads: Merchants, Generals, Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020).