South Asian rulers founded at least four madrasas in Mecca during the Mamluk period: the Bangaliyya (بنجالية), Khaljiyya, Ghulbarghiyya, and Kanba’iyya. The Bangaliyya was naturally founded by the Sultan of Bengal, Ghiyath al-Din A‘zam Shah (r. 1390-1411).

Finished this book about the historical relationship between the Tatars and Bashkirs of Imperial Russia and Bukhara. One of the main sources for this book is the Tārīkh-i Barāngavī of Ahmad al-Barangavi, which Frank calls “one of the most extensive autobiographies in Tatar Islamic literature.” Ahmad al-Barangavi was a native son of Paran'ga and a madrasa student in Bukhara from 1901 to 1905.

Finished this book. It's a comparative history of the Ottoman and Mughal Empires from the 16th to early 18th centuries. There are obvious similarities between the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. They were patrimonial, bureaucratic, agrarian empires at different ends of the Persianate cultural complex. The Hanafi school of law was dominant in both empires.

I'm trying to find out who was the last Chinggisid ruler. If you try to look this up you'll come across wrong answers. The historian of the Mongol Empire Timothy May claims (incorrectly) in one of his books that the "last Chinggisid ruler abdicated his throne in Khiva in 1920." However, the last Khan of Khiva Said Abdullah wasn't a Chinggisid but rather a Qungrat. In an article, May claims that the "Soviets deposed the last Chinggisid ruler of the Khanate of Bukhara . . . in 1920." You may recognize the last Khan of Bukhara from this pic.

Finished this book about a unique polity, the Crimean Khanate, which was a successor state of the Golden Horde, an Ottoman vassal, and (according to the author) an elective monarchy. The Crimean khans reigned over most of Crimea and the Nogay steppes north of the Black Sea. They also claimed suzerainty over certain Circassian tribes. (There was a long and complex relationship between Crimea and Circassia.)

Bukhara is one of the most important cities in the history of Central Asia and Islam. Until the Soviets banned Islamic education in 1928, Bukhara’s madrasas were still drawing students from throughout imperial Russian and beyond (Afghanistan, British India, and China). Classes were not in session during the summer, and some students took on summer jobs in order to make a living. One option was to spend the summer with nomadic Kazakhs or Turkmen.

Reading this book about Hajj in the late tsarist and early Soviet empires. It’s essentially a century of Russia vacillating between regulating and banning the Hajj. Important nodes on historic Hajj routes are now located in Russia, such as Astrakhan. Ibn Battuta is the first to mention the town in 1333. He claims it was founded by a Tarkhān (an ancient Central Asian title) who went on Hajj, hence the town's name, Ḥājjī Tarkhān.

Little known fact is that southernmost India was briefly under the rule of the Delhi Sultans followed by an independent Sultanate of Maʿbar (also known as the Sultanate of Madura/Madurai). Far southern India was known as “Maʿbar” to medieval Muslims.

https://twitter.com/akhivae/status/1238948724258242567

Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī (r. 1296–1316) sent Malik Kāfūr to raid the region in 1310 and coins were minted there in the name of the Delhi Sultans until 1333-4, when in that year (or later) the governor rebelled and established an independent Sultanate of Maʿbar.

This is one of the most page-turning history books I’ve read recently, mostly because it's full of interesting (and lurid) anecdotes. It’s about the slave trade in the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, focusing on the period from 1750 to 1873, when Russia finally conquered Khiva. The author makes two assertions repeatedly in the book:

1. Iranian Shi'a were the main victims of the Central Asian slave trade in the 19th century. Relatively speaking, the number of Russian slaves was “minuscule.”

2. Russian abolitionism in Central Asia is a myth.

Decided to make a thread about the Muslims of imperial Russia and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) since I keep coming across fun facts about the subject. There is a Crimean Tatar folk song called “Port Arthur,” named after the Russian port in Manchuria that was attacked by Japan. The song was inspired by the large casualties taken by Crimean Tatar soldiers fighting thousands of miles from their homeland.

This book (convincingly) refutes some of the shibboleths of modern scholarship on late medieval Anatolia, especially with regards to Islamization and what Islam actually looked like on the ground in medieval Anatolia. The books starts with a story from Ibn Battuta that highlights the nature of religiosity in medieval Anatolia, a story that contrasts sharply with what most modern historians have claimed.

PhD thesis on the early modern North Caucasus, when the Ottomans, their Crimean vassals, Muscovy, and (to a lesser extent) Iran fought for supremacy in the region. Hope it’s turned into a book someday.

tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807… Some maps show the Ottomans and Crimean Khanate encompassing certain regions in the North Caucasus, such as the Taman Peninsula and Kuban. This thesis does a good job of clarifying what that meant on the ground. Ottoman and Crimean influence was more than just nominal.

“Virtually every [Abbasid] caliph from the mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century had a Seljuk wife.”

Source: (Peacock) The Great Seljuk Empire, p. 140. “Seljuks also sought for themselves ‘Abbasid princesses, although such unions were rather rarer... such marriages had precedents in Buyid times.”

Reading this book about how perceptions of the Ottomans influenced early modern Western European political thought. Minor error: St Francis tried to convert the Ayyubid (not Mamluk) sultan to Christianity.

The anonymous Gazavat-ı Sultan Murad b. Mehmed Han (The Holy Wars of Sultan Murad, son of Mehmed Khan) is an Ottoman text that was gratuitous when describing the violence and carnage of war. It describes weapons coated with blood and heads rolling like pebbles on the battlefield. “God is most great, there was such a battle that, as the bloodshed continued, heads and legs, fingers and fingernails, axes and hammers, arrows and lances, shields and weapons poured onto the battlefield like a carpenter's chippings.”

I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in the history of the Eurasian steppe. It’s specifically about Kazakh ethnogenesis but touches on many related subjects such as state formation and the ethnogenesis of other groups like the Uzbeks and Ukrainians. Qazaqs were political vagabonds or ambitious brigands, and their way of life was known as qazaqlïq. When Babur lost his kingdom to the Uzbeks and was wandering in the political and geographical wasteland, he described this phase of his life as his qazaqlïq.

Reading about a very late representative of the Islamic historiographical tradition, Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī (d. 1913). He studied and worked in Islamic institutions in the Kazakh regions of imperial Russia and Qing China but wrote about things like the Russo-Japanese War. He also studied in Bukhara and visited Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Sofia, Istanbul and Syria on way to Mecca for Hajj.

It’s well known that Barbary corsairs enslaved European Christians. Less well known is that European Christian pirates did the exact same to Muslims. In one case, a Muslim girl was enslaved, only to give birth years later to a Christian son who was enslaved by the other side. This son would be known as Cığalazade Yusuf Sinan Paşa.

Born Scipione Cicala in Italy, his mother was the daughter of the Ottoman guard of Herceg Novi. She was converted to Christianity after she was enslaved and named Lucrezia. She married into the noble Genoese Cicala family.

The most interesting “renegades” who “turned Turk” in early modern Europe weren’t soldiers or diplomats, but religious dissidents. For example, Adam Neuser was a German who was baptized as a Lutheran and later converted to Calvinism, Antitrinitarianism, and finally Islam. He was part of a group of Antitrinitarians who found no scriptural basis for the Trinity in the Bible and believed Jesus was only human. He and his fellow Antitrinitarian Johann Sylvan were condemned to be executed as "Arians."

The physical geography of Central Asia has changed several times since humans first settled in the region. For example, it’s common knowledge that the Aral Sea has shrunk to a fraction of its original size over the past few decades. Less known is that the course of Central Asia’s most important river, the Amu Darya, has changed repeatedly. In prehistoric times it drained into the Caspian Sea via a distributary known as the Uzboy, currently a dry bed.

The most common names adopted by Christian European renegades “turning Turk”: Mehmed, Hasan, Ali, Ibrahim, Mahmud, and Ahmed. All these names are Arabic in origin, but I have, however, read of cases of Balkan converts adopting Turkic and Iranic names. Converts would generally adopt the fictional patronymic “ibn ʿAbdullah.” The name “ʿAbdullah” was rarely used as a given name in the core territories of the Ottoman Empire.