Definitions

Neither “empire” nor “religion” are entirely self-evident terms, and the connections between belief and power cannot easily be categorized into those applicable to empires rather than to other forms of polity.

In the predominantly Western historiography related to the pre-modern non­European world, “empires” are often defined as such without analytical rigor in terms of their supposedly “despotic” structures of government in comparison to modern “democratic” nation-states. Consequently, the term “empire” is loosely applied to myriad political structures ranging from the Achaemenid polity to the universal Islamic caliphate and much smaller entities such as the early modern sul­tanate of Morocco. This is an obviously flawed taxonomy rooted in the European historical experience in which the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and national dynastic monarchies vied for power from the medieval period onward, with victory ultimately going to the latter. Across North Africa and Asia, rule by “outsiders” often of tribal origin was as common in what might loosely be called “city-states” as it was in medium-sized “kingdoms” and much larger “imperial” political formations.

In discussing the Parthian and Sasanian “empires,” Pourshariati introduces Toumanoff s distinction between feudal and dynastic polities which he applied to Caucasia.^[682] According to this model, the crucial difference lies between centralized regimes (feudal) which function in terms of lord and vassal as well as ruler and subject, and federal regimes (dynastic) which co-opt regional dynasts who remain largely independent in their territories, a system expressed by the Persian imperial title shahanshah (king of kings). The history of the Near and Middle East can be seen as a struggle between these two forms due to the repeated expansion and contrac­tion of central power from pre-Islamic times to the Ottoman era with permutations in the political-religious dynamic following suit. Imperial regimes in India often had to interact with similar local dynasts, and central power experienced similar fluctuations.

In the Islamic world, this federal versus centralized model subsisted with another paradigm of particular relevance in a discussion of empire and religion, the clas­sical Islamic taxonomy which distinguished between religio-political and temporal forms of rule. On the one hand there was the caliphate (khilafa) and/or imamate (imama), a universalist religio-political formation, and, on the other, Muslim sultanates and non-Muslim “tyrannies” (in this sense, “tyrant” (taghiya) is a tech­nical term which does not imply good or bad rule, but rather the absence of Islamic foundations for it). Although sultanates such as the eleventh- to thirteenth-century Saljuq sultanate could control vast domains and diverse populations and were thus “empires” in the generic sense of the word, they rested on fundamentally different bases from the classical caliphates.^[683] In contrast to the caliphate, the sultanate soon lost all universalist aspects and became a plural, temporal institution.

In the early modern era, however, the concepts of caliphate and sultanate became conflated in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, both of which laid claims to reli­gious as well as political leadership, creating a hybrid form which had to accommo­date significant, sometimes majority, non-Muslim populations of Christians and Hindus, respectively. Both empires became increasingly enmeshed with modern European imperial claims and ambitions, which destabilized such relationships and meta-narratives of Muslim global power. It is noteworthy that the Ottomans only became concerned with asserting their caliphal status on the international stage in response to increasingly assertive Russian claims to defend and protect Slavic Orthodox Christians in Ottoman territories. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire is the Islamic example which fits best with European understandings of the term, evoking both Rome and the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside older Islamic examples.

The definition of religion is as complex as that of empire. In their discussion of state and religion in India, a handful of scholars list 12 categories of approach to the study of religion, illustrating the contested hermeneutics of religion. These categories range from seeing religion as an “autonomous agent defining the thought world of a civilization,” an “artificial category,” a moral code, spirituality of some form, law, local customs, or the worship of one or many gods.^[684] In the ancient world, there was a tendency for religion to be a matter of praxis in the form of rites and rituals often involving sacrifices to gods, the spirits, or ancestors. The contempo­rary Western perception of what constitutes religion dates to the shift in meaning of the Latin term religio engineered by early Christian writers in the Roman imperial environment and the subsequent development of the concept to denote a system of faith and worship in the nineteenth century as new European colonial empires emerged.^[685]

While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate the different ways of looking at religion, it is important to recognize their diversity and to remain aware that the contemporary Western definition of religion is not the only way in which humans, rulers included, have grappled with the metaphysical realm.

Within this spectrum, two major shifts in the meaning of religion can be perceived. First, a shift from polytheism to monotheism, and second, a shift from perceiving gods and goddesses primarily as local patrons who had to be cultivated to achieve stability and prosperity in this world to the view that religion was a matter of truth versus falsehood and that following the correct God's prescribed code of conduct was an individual responsibility with consequences for one's personal sal­vation. Within Europe and western Asia, such confessional monotheistic religions came to dominate, and a broadly shared understanding of religion emerged which intersected with the political sphere in comparable ways. Further east, in the Indian subcontinent and the Chinese zone, such shifts did not occur in the same manner. In India, monotheistic, polytheistic, and philosophical strands entwined, while in China a more ritualistic and philosophical approach dominated at least at the inter­face between the political and religio-ethical spheres.

In discussing the interplay between empire and religion, however defined, it is essential to bear in mind the latter's abstract nature and therefore the cru­cial role played by its interpreters, religious professionals, in delineating its rela­tions with (temporal) power.