Introduction

From earliest historical times, belief that power has a divine aspect of some kind has been more or less universal. Consequently, religion and empire have tended to function as partners, from ancient Near Eastern notions of the king as a god to the civilizing missions of the French and British in the nineteenth century, predicated on a superior culture derived from Christianity.

This chapter explores some of the myriad dimensions of the relationship between religion and empire with particular focus on the empires of the Islamic world, while also alluding to their predecessors, neighbors, and rivals: Sasanian Persia, the Byzantine Empire, Latin Christendom, and finally the European colonial empires which moved into the same geographic space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Such idealized visions of society and the position of rulers within it were usually theorized by literate and educated—and thus often religious—personnel who will­ingly or unwillingly bridged the gap between the political and religious spheres. On occasion they were co-opted by rulers to formulate appropriate statements about the latter; sometimes they themselves wrote to encourage rulers to view themselves

Amira K. Bennison, Empire and Religion In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0009. in a particular manner; they could also offer pointed “advice” and constructive crit­icism; or roundly denounce breaches in the perceived ideal relationship between the ruler and the gods or God. This two-way literature encompasses history writing, tracts on political philosophy and legal theory, and advice literature of the ubiqui­tous “Mirrors for Princes” genre.

The chapter then considers how rulers made manifest their theoretical connec­tion to the sacred in the concentric circles of power in which they operated. It will look first at the status rulers held in relation to dominant beliefs or confessional faiths, ranging from headship of a religious community to divine rights to rule, and the material support offered to them. A particularly powerful form of support was the construction of monumental religious buildings, designed to convey messages of power as well as piety in conjunction with the imperial rituals and ceremonies which sometimes took place within them. However, since the interplay between empire and religion was not just exercised in urban settings, where most major re­ligious buildings clustered, but also over the vast terrains of empire itself, it will also explore how rulers demonstrated their religio-political legitimacy by the delinea­tion of sacred routes and the modification of the religious landscape across their domains.

After considering these imperial uses of religion, the chapter concludes with a brief look at religious movements as a form of resistance to such hegemonic imperial structures through the overlapping modalities of sectarianism, messianism, heter­odoxy, and heresy. In pre-modern times, when the existence of the divine was not questioned, most forms of opposition made some appeal to religion. Consequently, religio-political resistance was more common than opposition couched in solely political terms, especially when imperial personnel consciously deployed religion for their own ends. Despite the rise of secularism, this can be as true today as in the past and underlines the continued appeal of religion not simply as the adjunct to empire, but also its fiercest opponent.