100 • Karen Armstrong FARISgarrisons, leaving the civilians and the ulama to their own Is-
lamic devices. There had always been the possibility that the
military might interfere more in civil affairs, if an amir had
achieved anything resembling stability. To a degree, this hap-
pened under the Mongol rulers, who were powerful enough
to put new constraints on the ulama. The Shariah was no
longer permitted to be a potentially subversive code. By the
fifteenth century it was agreed that the ulama could no longer
use their own independent judgement {ijtihad) in creative
legislation; it was said that "the gates of ijtihad'' were closed.
Muslims were obliged to conform to the rulings of past au-
thorities. The Shariah had in principle become a system of
established rules, which could not jeopardize the more dy-
namic dynastic law of the ruling house.
The Mongol irruption into Muslim life had been trau-
matic. Mongols had left a swathe of ruined cities and libraries
behind them, as well as economic recession. But once they
had achieved victory, the Mongols rebuilt on a magnificent
scale the cities they had devastated. They also established
brilliant courts, which promoted science, art, history and
mysticism. Appalling as the Mongol scourge had been, the
Mongol rulers were fascinating to their Muslim subjects.
Their political structures remained subtly enduring and, as
we shall see, influenced later Muslim empires. The Mongols'
power had suggested new horizons. They had seemed about
to conquer the world, and had been a portent of a new kind of
imperialism, which linked the possibility of universal rule
with mass destruction. The splendour of their states dazzled,
at the same time as they undermined Muslim preconceptions.
Muslims were not stunned into passivity by the horrors they
had lived through, nor by the political defeat that these Mon-
gol states represented. Islam is a resilient faith. Frequently in
their history Muslims had responded positively to disaster,
and used it constructively to gain fresh religious insights. So