The Birth of Modern Jihad

How the Fall of Two Empires Birthed Islamic Terrorism

Some four hundred years ago, there used to be three epicenters of Islamic power—the Safavids in Persia, the Ottomans in the rest of the Middle East, and the Mughals in India, each unilaterally claiming the ultimate custody of the faith. For this story, we’re primarily concerned with the last two, the Ottomans and the Mughals. This remained the state of affairs for a good two hundred years or so before things took a dramatic turn, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Two events drive this story, one involving the Ottomans and the other involving the Mughals. But before we go there, a quick background on the two empires’ history and relationship.

Among the three, the Ottomans were the first to emerge and the Mughals the last. The rise of the Ottomans was the culmination of a tectonic shift in Islamic politics. Islam originated in Arabia and for the first few centuries, remained an Arab-dominated polity. It was at the turn of the tenth century that other ethnicities—the Persians and the Turks—started making their presence noted in the Abbasid power circles. The thirteenth-century Fall of Baghdad served as the final blow and created a vacuum that was quickly filled by what would soon become the Islamic world’s first non-Arab Caliphate, the Ottomans. The Turkic age was now in session. They were everywhere. While one came to dominate the Near East as the Ottoman Empire, another lorded over Central Asia, the Timurids. As the sixteenth century rolled around, the latter gave way to several new powers among them two that form this story’s trinity—the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India.

The Mughals and the Ottomans shared a fairly stable relationship. Of respectful skepticism. In other words, it toggled between resentment and goodwill with an underlying sense of distance. The Mughals, for instance, never explicitly recognized the Ottomans as a universal Caliphate. But at the same time, they did not explicitly deny it. The Ottomans, on their part, never recognized the Mughal claim of imperial primacy either. Under the surface of diplomatic bonhomie, there remained a constant state of ideological tension.¹ They just feigned indifference. To an extent, like the India and China of today. With that crucial piece of context in place, we should now be good to proceed with the story.