222 Part III: South Asia
tance can hardly be overemphasized. Charismatic Sufi figures were patronized
by sultans as “inheritors of charisma (baraka) derived through ‘chains of succes-
sion’ from the Prophet himself ” (Metcalf 2009:8). Sufi elders were guides to
inner realization of the divine, and miracles were evidence of divine interven-
tion in everyday life. Their lodges and tombs became cult centers, places of pil-
grimage and prayer.
An important theme of Sufism was the very great credence given to astrol-
ogy to predict world-changing events. The movements of the known planets
were carefully tracked. When Saturn and Jupiter came into conjunction in the
seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad was born. Another conjunction
occurred at the time of Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane, d. 1405), who conquered
much of Iran and Afghanistan and sacked Delhi in the late thirteenth century.
These conjunctions were seen as heralding the rise of an Islamic savior (mahdi),
an ideal sovereign, a true caliph. This cultural theme of a coming mahdi—an
idea that could be claimed by a charismatic Sufi leader or military general—
was another way in which Sufism shaped society and kingship.
The expansion of Islam into Asia is a story of vivid personalities and char-
ismatic figures, as the Prophet had been, spiritual leaders who became warriors
or miracle-working saints even lying in their sacred tombs, and world-conquer-
ing kings with messianic claims. Charismatic holiness was passed down blood-
lines from Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and Timur, similar to those of the Prophet
himself. In Persia and Afghanistan there emerged a new type of mass-based
Sufism centered on popular cults of the saints and hereditary forms of spiritual
leadership a century before the rise of the Mughals. “These traditions were far
more significant in shaping Muslim worldviews than the texts and traditions of
doctrinal Islam” (Moin 2012).
We get a picture of this worldview from The Baburnama, a memoir written
toward the end of his life by Babur, the Mongol prince who brought the
Mughals^3 to power in India in 1526. It is based in part on a journal that he dili-
gently kept from his youth.^4 Babur was highly intelligent and keenly interested
in almost everything, both practical matters of conquest and rule and religious
matters that he heard about in his travels from Afghanistan into India. In fact,
the distinction between “practical” and “religious” matters would have made
little sense to him, as these were far from separate domains of knowledge in his
time. Azfar Moin provides many examples, such as the following:
In the year he came to Kabul, Babur was informed about a village shrine
where the tomb moved when prayers were offered. Upon arriving at the
shrine, Babur saw the miracle with his own eyes. Then he discovered that it
was a trick: “They had put a screen over the tomb, which, when they made
it move, made it seem as though the tomb was moving, just as it seems to
people riding in a boat for the first time that the shore is moving.” Although
Babur chastised the attendants and had the false screen destroyed, he did
not condemn the “spurious” shrine. Instead, he had a proper dome built
over it. (Moin 2012:65)