Mathesis Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The successors of Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405), supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān), developed a distinctive form of saint-philosopher-kingship without precedent in Islamic history. Most notably, as part and parcel of their universalist-imperialist quest to transcend binaries political (caliphate vs. sultanate) and epistemological (ẓāhir vs. bāṭin) in equal measure, they fashioned themselves absolutist astrocrats, capable of talismanically marrying heaven to earth, by means of a personal mastery of astronomy-astrology. Of manifest political utility, the science of the stars had attracted the perennial interest of ruling elites since antiquity, to be sure; but these Timurid rulers were the first to pursue it within an explicitly lettrist-neopythagorean framework—whence the dual astrological-lettrist platform undergirding Timurid claims to imperial universalism, which definitively timuridized the very title ṣāḥib-qirān; and whence the mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory, a revolutionary development much feted by historians of science. Thus institutionalized, this same (occult-)scientific platform remained an effective means of performing a specifically Timurid mode of sovereignty throughout the Persianate world until at least the mid-17th century, and especially in Mughal India.

This article discusses the personal scientific output and patronage programs of two Timurid philosopher-kings: Iskandar Sulṭān b. ʿUmar Shaykh b. Temür (r. 1409-14), hugely ambitious (if soon foiled) patron of the sciences of stars and letters, who authored the preface to a state-of-the-art manual of mathematical astronomy (and perhaps the manual itself), the Sultanic Compendium (Jāmiʿ-i Sulṭānī); and his more successful cousin Ulugh Beg b. Shāhrukh b. Temür (r. 1409-49), founder of the Samarkand Observatory and Madrasa complex and co-author of the crucial New Sultanic Star Tables (Zīj-i Jadīd-i Sulṭānī), who was hailed by his astronomer and lettrist patronees as messianic sultan-scientist (al-sulṭān al-faylasūf). Intriguingly, while the intellectual-imperial projects of both men are indeed unprecedented in the Islamicate context, they may be said to islamicize—perhaps consciously—the classical model of Archytas (Arkhūṭas, d. 347 BCE), ruler of the powerful Greek city-state Tarentum and leading pythagorean philosopher, who too was a mathematician-astronomer king. Nor do they seem to have had true successors: no subsequent Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic sovereign is known to have personally authored scientific texts in the quest to mathematize the cosmos.

Nevertheless, the model established by Iskandar Sulṭān and Ulugh Beg ensured that astronomy-astrology and lettrism in particular would continue to be heavily patronized by subsequent Timurid, and Indo-Timurid, dynasts (as well as their Safavid and Ottoman competitors). This includes in the first place Emperor Akbar’s grandson Shāhjahān (r. 1628-57), self-proclaimed Second Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān-i sānī), who commissioned upon his accession the Zīj-i Shāhjahānī, an updated and corrected version of Ulugh Beg’s star tables of two centuries prior; tellingly, it features the first preface in the Arabo-Persian astronomical tradition to be explicitly lettrist in tenor. The same feature is shared by the preface to the Supreme Secret (Sirr-i Akbar), a much-celebrated Persian translation of the Upanishads, the first, by Shāhjahān’s son Dārā Shukūh (d. 1659), concordist author of a number of other works. This famed but ill-starred saint-prince, who was executed by his more politically and militarily astute brother Awrangzēb after a failed succession bid, did prefer sufism to astral science; but his casting of Hindu tawḥīd in lettrist terms was similarly calculated, I argue, to signal his performance of Timurid sovereignty.

Such authorial evidence suggests that the neopythagorean worldview of our royal actors must be taken far more seriously than it has been to date; that they held the cosmos itself to be a mathematical text to be riddled by scientists of stars and letters alone explains the contours of their remarkable intellectual-imperial projects. And if the world is indeed a text, it also demands to be written, preferably in marble: may we thus not style Shāhjahān himself author of the unparalleled cosmographical logogriph (muʿammā)—which poetical genre was made a mainstay of lettrist practice precisely by Timurid scholars—that is the Tāj Maḥal?