Events

Monday Majalis: All under the Heavens… and the Heavens, Too: Universal History and Astrology in Mongol Iran

In recent scholarly and public venues, the Mongol Empire has been celebrated as a moment of pre-modern globalization, an opening of trans-continental trajectories of cultural, social, and biological exchange. This is exemplified by the celebrated work of Rashid al-Din, and especially by the world history that he presented to Öljeitü Sultan in 1307 and which has earned him hismoniker as the “first world historian.” This perspective, however, is not limited to modern analyses of the Mongol age. People living under Mongol rule were themselves already looking beyond familiar boundaries and recognizing their time as an age of new universalizing politics, scholarship, and faith. From the “detribalization” of the nomadic steppes into the supra-tribal Mongol state to Buddhist and Muslim ideas of universal kingship, the experience of Mongol rule was understood as something new and unbounded.

Event details

Abstract

This perspective, however, is not limited to modern analyses of the Mongol age. People living under Mongol rule were themselves already looking beyond familiar boundaries and recognizing their time as an age of new universalizing politics, scholarship, and faith. FroStefan Kamola is a research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies in Vienna, with research projects on historical writing and manuscript production in Mongol Iran. His 2019 monograph, Making Mongol History, reconstructs the commission, composition, and early manuscript reproduction of the Collected Histories of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) against the backdrop of intellectual and political history in Mongol Iran. His current work examines how other authors reimagined the craft of historical writing in the face of Mongol rule, including the scholar-bureaucrat Wassaf and the anonymous author(s) of an astrological apocalyptic text, the Book of Jamasp the Sage, written in reaction to the Mongol conquest of Fars.

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ifi/forschung/manuskriptkulturen/the-book-of-jamasp-the-sage m the “detribalization” of the nomadic steppes into the supra-tribal Mongol state to Buddhist and Muslim ideas of universal kingship, the experience of Mongol rule was understood as something new and unbounded. In this talk, I will reflect on how universalist ideas appear in historical writing and astrology in Mongol Iran.