The Age of Sahib Qirani: Messianic Kingship in Early Modern India and Iran

Today we think of Timur (d. 1405), the Turko-Mongol conqueror who ruled over much of Asia, as his enemies did: Timur-i lang, Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, a cruel conqueror who wrought destruction on a continent that had barely recovered from the ravages of the Mongol invasion initiated by Chinggis Khan. Yet, this image ignores an important strand of social memory across early modern Iran and India that revered Timur as Sahib Qiran (Lord of the Conjunction). Timur’s descendents were known for their cultural refinements. Even after they had lost political power, Timurid courts and princely retinues were the source of the “civilizing process”, the cultivated manners, habits, and tastes that shaped elite Persianate culture across large swaths of Asia. Timur’s important place in the cultural imagination of the period, preserved not only in royal chronicles but also in oral lore, Sufi hagiographies, paintings and memoirs, makes him an excellent case study for examining the new style of charismatic kingship that took shape in Muslim polities of this milieu. By focusing on Timur’s title, Sahib Qiran, an astrological expression meaning Lord of the Conjunction, I argue that kingship in this period was primarily enunciated in a messianic idiom. Messianism, or the belief that a savior figure would usher in a new utopian age, became especially important in this period for Muslim kings as earlier symbols of Islamic unity, such as the Abbasid caliph, no longer existed; as descent from the “pagan” Chinggis Khan became a key ingredient of royal claims; and as a new religious formation organized around the cult of Sufi saints shaped ritual and daily life. A focus on messianism as a royal myth in this period allows a critical rethinking of the processes by which new empires took shape in sixteenth century India and Iran.