How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mongols
Or: Can a civilization recover from its "decline?"
One option in picking an academic research project is to look for items in the sources that do not seem to quite “fit in.” This could be an unexpected excursus in an otherwise predictable theological work, an historian whose mostly-straightforward chronicles include more details about alchemy than chronicles would usually require, a religious order which adopted norms of behavior which self-consciously challenged the existing social milieu — all ripe for a 400-page dissertation. As someone who has studied Islamic history and who has long had an interest in aforementioned off-color religious orders, I was naturally drawn as a younger researcher to the period following the Mongol invasions (i.e., after roughly the middle of the 13th century CE), which saw a number of new messianic movements spring up across much of the Islamic world.
Ironically, this actually proved a shortfall of my approach — religious orders which were fixated on the esoteric sciences and expected the imminent return of the mahdi, and which were willing to act militantly to hasten his return, “fit into” the post-Mongol period just fine, in the sense that they seemed to keep cropping up all over the place. Even the “mainstream” courts could be sites of great religious experimentation, whether this meant officials dabbling in the various occult sciences or sultans entertaining the arguments of Hurufi proselytizers (though, in the case of the latter, typically only for brief intervals). This could be understood as having happened for a number of reasons, but one is that it was a reaction to a crisis of legitimacy brought on by the Mongol invasions. With the rise of the Mongols came not only the suffering and social tensions inherent in war, but severe blows to the existing religio-political apparatus of much of Islamdom.1 Into this breach of both human desperation and a search for legitimate authority stepped a number of mahdi figures who were offering a salve to both sore points.
Whether this sociological take on post-Mongol messianism is fully sound is one thing, but the key association here is “Mongols” with “crisis” and “destruction.” This has naturally led to an idea in the collective consciousness that the Mongols caused not only short-term disruptions to the Islamic world, but may have effected a long term decline. This short-sighted conclusion has understandably been receiving some push-back lately, as I will discuss in a moment, but I think it will also be useful to speak to some bigger questions of what it means to be in “decline” in the first place, and whether decline can be reversed.
Revisiting the Mongol Period and its Aftermath
I bring all of this up because this question — of whether the Mongols should be thought of as initiating (or intensifying) a period of decline for Islamic Civilization — was the subject of a post a couple weeks ago over at Kasurian. I agree with the main thrust of the article (as a Timuridist, how could I not?), though as is often the case, there are larger and gloomier questions lurking in the background.
While you should go over and read the whole article, the basic argument is challenging the idea that the “Mongol invasions [were] the catalyst for Islam’s ‘long decline’” as presented in “classical Orientalist history,” in which the ‘Abbasid “Golden Age” of high art and culture was burnt to ashes by the advances of the Chinggis-Khanids. The author rightly points out that the flourishes of Mongol-era histories are often taken without a grain of salt, with the popular conception of the 1258 siege of Baghdad latching onto the “rivers of blood and ink flowing through the River Tigris.”2 Of course, inherent to Golden Age narratives is also the idea that the Golden Age, once snuffed out, is followed by a steady decline, and thus the Mongols could likewise be blamed for initiating said decline in the Islamic world for the centuries to follow.
The author of the Kasurian piece points out that this narrative is flawed from a number of angles, both on the strict matters of fact (Baghdad in 1258, so to speak, was not what it used to be) and on whether there is even merit to the idea that the centuries following the Mongols contained a “decline.” Of course there would have been devastation and considerable social pressures in the immediate aftermath of the invasions, but we are talking in terms of centuries, not months or years. As our author notes, the Mongol period, once stabilized, was one that allowed for relative commercial prosperity3 by fostering inter-regional trade, the Pax Mongolica,4 which both restored previous urban centers and elevated new ones — Saray is a good example. The Mongol period also saw the emergence of new artistic and architectural styles, and post-Mongol literature was hardly a wasteland. This is the age that produced Sa’di and Hafez, after all.
Equally importantly for the question at hand, though, is that while the Mongol invasions led to an extreme political crisis in the dissolution of the near-universally-recognized ‘Abbasid Caliphate and rule under a military power who were not-quite-yet-Muslim,5 it would be bizarre and ahistorical to suggest than Muslim institutions have been wallowing since Hulagu. As the Kasurian article correctly notes, Chinggis-Khanid signifiers of legitimacy — descent from the Golden Family, appeals to son-in-law (kuregen) status, restoration of the Chinggis-Khanid vision — were sources of legitimacy from which Muslim polities of the period would often draw, which was a practical decision that nonetheless required a certain amount of creativity and flexibility. And even if we bracket Chinggis-Khanid political theory proper, the post-Mongol period (i.e., after the early 13th century C.E.) would eventually bear witness to the rise of arguably the most powerful and sophisticated states in the history of Islamic civilization in the Gunpowder Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. So much for decline!6
At least, so much for the simple narrative of Golden Age→Mongols→Downward march to modernity. If we are willing to draw from the historical facts that the premise of the Mongol Irruption causing irreparable damage to Islamic Civilization is flawed, it is worth asking why the mass disruption of existing political, economic, and religious forms of authority (to varying degrees) was not sufficient to undercut the whole project. Consider the following from our source article:
The greatness of a civilisation is measured not by the absence of challenges, but by its capacity to identify, respond, and adapt to them. Injecting dynamism into the otherwise staid ‘rise and decline’ theory, British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed a further dynamic of ‘challenge and response’. For Toynbee, civilisations do not simply rise and decline in inevitable cycles but succeed or fail based on their creative responses to existential challenges. These challenges, whether environmental, political, or cultural, serve as catalysts that either dismantle a civilisation or elevate it to greater heights.
The invocation of Toynbee caught my eye because this challenge-and-response model of world history with the “civilization” as the unit of analysis is one from a host of theories among the world historians on the topic of what happens when a civilization faces a critical setback. This idea of civilizational crisis as a sort of test of internal adaptability is one model, but it is not the only model, and there are a few additional questions that also come to mind.
Namely — did Islamic Civilization, per se, survive the Mongols?
Stuck Civilization, or Crisis and Renewal?
In other words, one might ask not whether Islam survived the Mongols — it is clear that states led by Muslims continued to find great success following the Mongol invasions — but how exactly a “civilization” is understood. One could imagine, for instance, an alternative reading in which the Mongol invasions are not the end of Islamic civilization but of, say, Arabic civilization. There may be an Islam-as-religion continuing on past this close of Arabic civilization, but it could be existing in a paradigm of new civilizations (Mongol? Ottoman? European?) which were riding their own historical ebb and flow. Others would naturally find this unconvincing and, nodding to continuities (despite disruptions) of literary culture/religious instruction/aesthetic vision among Muslim communities, feel that to discount the existence of an Islamic civilization is to discount historical realities. Two visions of world history that came to mind while I was reading the source article at hand were those of Oswald Spengler and Marshall Hodgson, each of whom would have addressed this moment of Mongol crisis in the Islamic world through different lenses.
One of Spengler’s main contributions to the study of world history is the argument that the main driver of History is neither the nation-state nor material conditions, but Culture — that which is fundamentally a spiritual response to our being-in-nature, and which conditions our approach to the world. Spengler likewise wholly rejected a “chronological”/causative view of history, one event or figure leading seamlessly to the next, which for Spengler is as useful as believing that Summer causes Autumn. What is actually driving these events forward in History are the cultural logics which animate human society and each have their own distinctive signs, symbols, and norms. One task of the historian in this understanding is “dealing comparatively with the individual life-courses of the Cultures” to determine certain archetypes and continuities among them, namely, the key signifiers of each life-stage of the Culture.
So, using a seasonal analogy, the Cultural Springtime is marked by the emergence of the earliest towns and cities (still possessing the “feeling of earth-boundedness”), the development of civic norms, and the creative development of the culture’s distinctive signs and symbols, driven by the Culture’s own Spirit, which is the actual mover of History. While these cultural forms become increasingly refined over time, they eventually become so wholly expressed that they transition into being fixed, exhausted, and no longer capable of further development. It is at this point that the Culture transitions into being a more Wintry Civilization, marked not by the bucolic but Culturally-active town in the countryside, but by the World City, which has become deracinated from the very source of its own creativity. As such, high Civilization can be extremely materially powerful, even while it has ceased to develop the spiritual Cultural forms which were the driver of its very success. In the later days of the Civilization, the World City has led to an increasingly rootless population, the rise of the Third Estate and consequent dwindling of the Nobility and Clergy has seen the supplanting of tradition by money-mindedness, and all of this is followed by phase of Caesarism, in which politics re-asserts its control over moneyed interests. With the decline and collapse of a frigid civilization, there can follow the new Spring of a Culture on the rise. There is much more to Spengler than this tidy little summary (and you can probably already imagine a number of potential objections), but this cyclical nature of Cultures/Civilizations has been one of his most well-known contributions to our conceptions of World History.
One argument from Spengler in defense of viewing of history in this way is that it allows for more appropriate comparisons across cultures, because it does not let itself be fooled by (“mere”) chronology. For example, he would be skeptical of considering the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur to be a contemporary to Charlemagne, King of the Franks,7 not because they were from different cultures, but because their cultures were in different stages of development. For our question at hand, then, one would need to understand the Cultural background of Islam and its stage at the moment of the Mongol invasions so as to better parse what phase the Culture/Civilization was experiencing in the 13th century C.E.
For Spengler, the emergence of Islam was not a manifestation of a new Cultural dispensation so much as the maturation of an existing Arabian Culture, which had been born centuries before. While distinct in the particulars, Islam is felt to have not only shared a certain familiarity with Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism, but to have been “the prolongation of the great early religions”8 by virtue of its fundamentally being driven by the same Magian world-spirit9 as the rest of them. This is not an argument that Islam is “derivative” so much as that its emergence is best understood as the continued unfolding of an ongoing process, to which the Muslim community, driven by the same cultural forces as their predecessors in the Arabian cultural sphere, brought its own particular vision and dynamism. It does, however, suggest that Islam, like the rest of the great religious movements, necessarily had to confront the realities (as determined by Destiny) of its particular entrance into History.
The short story is that in Spengler’s imagining, the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam would have come at a relatively late stage in Arabian Culture. The high points of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate should be understand as the Culture having fully transitioned past the maturity of the Umayyad Period (“Perfection of Intellectualized Form-Language) toward the more rigid recurrence of established forms (“Exhaustion of Strict Creativeness, Dissolution of Grand Form, End of the Style”) in the era of Harun al-Rashid and his successors. For Spengler, the Mongol Period was the final stage which closed out Arabic Civilization (“Formation of a Fixed Stock of Forms, Imperial Display by Means of Material and Mass, Provincial Craft-Art”).10 So, in Spengler’s vision, with the collapse of Civilization, “religion becomes entirely historyless,” individuals are left only with “private histories, private destinies, private ambitions,” while the once-great cities remain as ruins of “an extinguished soul.”
There is more than one objection to be raised to this understanding of Islam in World History, but I think a strong one is that, despite the disruptions, there are still continuities in Islam which stretch well into the post-Mongol period. All of those grand Gunpowder Empires were self-consciously Muslim, fostered learning and teaching in the Islamic religious sciences, and would have patronized art and architecture which both drew from and innovated around existing forms. Perhaps the previous caliphates were pushed into the realm of historyless-ness by the Mongol invasions, but is that actually true for Islam? And beyond that, while there are obviously certain affinities between the Abrahamic religions in their attitudes towards the nature of God, the importance of prophecy, and the inevitable Last Day, isn’t it slightly overdetermined to say that they were, therefore, all equal expressions of the same underlying Spirit?
Consider, for example, Marshall Hodgson, who also dealt with the question of Islamic[ate] civilization11 while approaching the matter from a significantly different approach. As a world historian working in the 1950s and 1960s, it is possible to read his approach in The Venture of Islam as responding to, and implicitly critiquing, the definitions of Culture and Civilization as being handed down by figures such as Spengler and Toynbee. For one, he recognized Islamic Civilization as a civilization rather than a manifestation of, say, Spengler’s Arabian Culture/Magian Spirit. And while Hodgson was certainly interested in how Islam-as-religion animated Islamic Civilization, his definitions of culture and civilization in the first volume of the Venture strike me as more literary and sociological than spiritual (mystical?). On culture:
In a cross-section, a culture appears as a pattern of lifeways received among mutually recognized family groups. Over time, it may be more fully defined as a relatively autonomous complex of interdependent cumulative traditions, in which an unpredictable range of family groups may take part.
A civilization, on the other hand, is not defined through the solidification of a culture but through the multiplier effect of the interaction of these more localized cultures and the development of a shared “high culture:”
If we may call a ‘civilization’ any wider grouping of cultures in so far as they share consciously in interdependent cumulative traditions (presumably on the level of ‘high culture’ — of the relatively widely shared cultural forms at the urbane, literate level of complexity and sophistication), then the shared traditions will be likely to centre in some range of ‘high’ cultural experience to which the cultures are committed in common.
These high cultural experiences, mediated through urban networks of people of letters, may include literature, philosophy, political and legal values, and (though not exclusively) a shared religious community. Whether you agree with Hodgson’s approach on the interaction between culture and religion a la the Islamicate, what is being discussed here are networks of people with a broadly-defined shared set of cultural norms who participate in an intellectual high culture.
To return to our Mongols: one could certainly imagine a civilization in Hodgson’s definition being forced into decline or extinction based on a massive outside invasion if, for example, its urban culture was so utterly destroyed that cultural continuity became impossible, or if it was supplanted by a new set of cultural norms enforced among the elites which made the previous civilizational model defunct. Hodgson’s question is why the Mongols, in his view analogous (though not identical) to the very Arab military excursions which were core to the expansion of Islam so many centuries before, not only did not displace the existing (Irano-Semitic) Islamic Civilization, but were gradually absorbed into it? His answer is that while the Mongols had their own cultural norms — Tengriism, the Yasa code, “men of genius” such as Chinggis Khan — they “brought nothing comparable to the Qur’an and the Islamic spiritual impulse.” And so, once the initial shock of the invasions had subsided, the remaining Mongol leaders, working closely with local Muslim elites and enmeshed in one way or another in Islamic cultural discourse, were folded into Islamic civilization.
In other words, a cultural-civilizational pattern of crisis, change, and renewal — but neither decline nor destruction. Periods of apparent “decline” may well feel quite grim in the moment, but so too can they reverse without us quite noticing as it is happening. Even more, the adaptations forced by these apparently-less-flourishing periods may themselves be key to future successes — but this is leaving the realm of history for futurism.
Postscript: Tangentially related to this topic are Hodgson’s thoughts on the opportunity for Islamic culture (among others) to provide answers to questions raised by the world-wide instability of our own Technicalistic Society. While related to the question of crisis and renewal, I will set this aside for its own dedicated post.
Notes on Sources
With the exception of what is addressed in the footnotes, quotations from Spengler are drawn from the second volume of The Decline of the West. While it is best to read both, the first volume, broadly speaking, will have more material on art/architecture/music, with the second volume dealing more with peoples/states/money/technology.
For Marshall Hodgson, I have sourced concepts and quotations from the 1977 volumes of The Venture of Islam.
If I may use a Marshall-Hodgson-ism. I’ll try to refrain from “Islamicate,” even though I understand the appeal — but that is a discussion for another time.
Not that the invasions did not lead to plenty of death and destruction — they did, at scale, and there is a reason that you cannot visit the bustling city of Merv today — but a) this was not all that rare in pre-modern warfare, and b) the Mongols also allowed cities to be spared through the payment of tribute, which while not exactly “compassionate” does mean that these supposed forces of Yajuj and Majuj could still be reasoned with according to certain diplomatic (so to speak) norms.
Agricultural records are another matter, but there are multiple methods to prosperity, then and now.
If you are ever in front of a room of students speaking about this topic, you are bound by professional standards to muse about whether it wasn’t more of a “Pox” Mongolica. The students find it side-splitting, believe me.
The Shadow Caliphate in Cairo would still have served as a method of legitimation for the Mamluks (obviously), though we also have sporadic examples of, for example, sultans in Ottoman or Indian domains seeking recognition from the Shadow Caliph as a means of shoring up their domestic standing.
Those concerned with current geopolitical trends might object that there has since been a decline in the fortunes of the Islamic World in the age of European colonialism and its aftermath compared to the so-called Golden Age, but the original question is whether the Mongol invasions were the turning point for Muslim fortunes. I think an off-the-cuff understanding of a “period of decline” would have trouble accounting for the Gunpowder Empires, short of shoehorning in moralistic criticisms of Oriental decadence or whatnot (which I do not find convincing).
For the record, Spengler — committed German that he was in delimiting his Western Culture driven by the Faustian Spirit — would have been far more interested in Otto the Great.
I will admit that, “at most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent Lutheranism was one” is quite the quote from the Decline! I’m not saying that one can rely on Spengler for everything.
I realize that out of context, this reads oddly. What Spengler means by “Magian world spirit” would be a religious worldview including such features as: a distinction between Spirit (ruach/pneuma) and Soul (nephesh/psyche); the Logos-idea of the descent of the Word into the world; the dichotomy between the exterior veil and the interior, hidden secret; and the form of the Apocalyptic. This is all in Volume 2, Chapter VIII of the Decline.
These categories are from the table in first volume of the Decline.
This is a discussion for another time, but Hodgson distinguished between “Islamic” — which is to be used for things related to “Islam in the proper, the religious [!], sense” — and “Islamicate,” which refers to “the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims,” but could include cultural artifacts produced by non-Muslims in this social and cultural complex.
Smiling wojak mongol holding european npc wojak face over his.