Introduction

Summary

Between 1453 and 1526 Muslims founded three major states in the Mediterranean, Iran, and South Asia: respectively the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. By the early seventeenth century their descendants controlled territories that encompassed much of the Muslim world, stretching from the Balkans and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal and including a combined population of between 130 and 160 million people. By that time also members of these dynasties had demonstrated their palpable self-confidence by constructing many of the fortresses, mosques, bazaars, and tombs that still stand as emblems of their military strength, wealth, sovereign pride, religious commitment, and aesthetic sophistication. Their record of stunning architectural achievement climaxed when in 1643 the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan completed the last exceptional building of this Muslim imperial era, the Taj Mahal. Muslims and non-Muslims alike look back to the history of these states as collectively representing the last great moment of Muslim sovereignty. It is a world that Muslims lost in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Many twenty-first-century Muslims are still profoundly saddened when they contemplate this imperial past and compare it with the community's loss of power, wealth, influence, and cultural splendor in the contemporary world.

These empires are significant because of what they represented and achieved, and because their complexity reminds us that Muslim civilization, like the predominantly Christian European civilization, cannot be equated solely with rigid, narrowly doctrinal interpretations of the faith.