This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

The early Islamic empire may have been the largest by land, but military reach should not be mistaken for highly centralised administrative structures: these only developed as the empire fragmented but were replicated in the tenth-century successor states, where the position of vizier gained increasing political influence. Nor should imperial success be mistaken for a stable elite, as newcomers – notably court scribes and religious scholars – challenged the military. The Abbasid caliphs’ fortunes varied with their military, fiscal and administrative structures, but they remained necessary legitimisers of other political structures, too sacred to depose. However, it was the ʿulamaʾ who established and elaborated ideological structures that long outlasted the first Muslim empires. After the mid-thirteenth-century upheavals, the ad hoc reach of Turco-Mongol and Arabo-Berber trans-regional leaderships formed an ‘archipelago’ in a ‘sea of semi-independent regions’ characterised by violent, volatile and complex power relationships. Eventual stabilisation ended centuries of political turbulence, centred around the great early modern empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals.

The early caliphate adopted the political organisation predominant in the late antique Middle East – imperial monarchy, sanctioned by divine power – but with a distinctively Islamic ideology of leadership involving kinship, piety, victory and justice. The prime location for the performance of royal power was the court, particularly for caliphal accessions or successions. The warrior rulers filling the caliphal vacuum after 945 adopted Islamic means of legitimisation, including oaths of loyalty, honorific titles, robes of honour, and being named on coinage and in Friday prayers; while the ʿulamaʾ increasingly claimed spiritual authority as ‘heirs of the Prophet’. The new Turco-Mongol elites from the thirteenth century on found a role for military strongmen, incorporating the nomadic virtues of strong leadership, good fortune and royal genealogy into a fluid mixture of ideologies. Performance of power encompassed the hajj, hunting parties, public sessions dispensing justice and rituals designed to bind the palaces of the court more closely to the towns wherever they were based.