the three empires and the islamic phoenix 305mysticism, irfan, and religious philosophy, falsafah, and advocated
strongly the need to focus on jurisprudence, fiqh, in learning and
teaching Islam. His influence can still be detected until the present
day (ibid.). Majlisi resistance of the teaching of mysticism was directed
to the earlier school of Shi"ism that was founded by Mir Dimad and
Mulla Sadra a few decades before him. To link spiritual enlighten-
ment with the world of politics, he advocated, as elucidated in his
al-Afsan al-Arbaah (the fourfold journey), that the political leader
should undergo a form of spiritual training before embarking on a
career in politics.
There does not seem to be a notable work on Islamic economics
under the flafawids, however. The Shì"ah jurists’ preoccupation with
teaching the public the Shì"ah’s doctrine seemed to have left little
room for literature on Islamic economics. However, from the Shì"ah,
a notable piece in Islamic economic thinking emerged. “Iqtisàduna”,
Our Economics, is a major piece of work on Islamic economics by
an eminent Shi"ìscholar, Muœammad Bàqir al-Sadr. The book was
written in the late nineteen sixties. The book will be examined in
chapter nine.
The Mongol Empire
The persecution of the Sunnis in the flafawìd Empire and the hos-
tility the flafawìd emperor Shah Ismàìl against the Uzbecks, was in
effect a reason d’être for the establishment of the Moghul Empire.
The initial founder of the Moghul, or Mongol, empire was Babùr
(d. 1530), whose memory came back to life in December 1992 when
members of the Hindu fundamentalist party, Bharatiya Janarta Party
(BJP), dismantled his mosque in ten minutes, under the rolling cam-
eras of the press and a watching army, claming that the mosque was
built by Muslims on a destroyed Indian temple (Armstrong, 2000).
Babùr was a Sunni fugitive who fled to the Afghan Kabùl during
Ismàìl’s war with the Uzbecks then managed to establish his control
over the remains of the Mongol empire that was left by Timur Lane
in north India. But his initial success was to be hindered by the fac-
tional power struggle among the Afghan amirs, which lasted until
- In 1560, Akbar (1542–1605), a descendant of Babùr began to
establish his authority over the amirs until he was finally acknowledged
as the undisputed ruler of the Empire. Retaining the old Mongol