Looking for the Hidden King
One of the things I like most about studying Islam’s so-called Middle Period is the sheer variety and flux of expressions of religious piety that appear in it. One of the most well-known examples of this is, of course, the Safavid Dynasty, which famously started as a Sunni Sufi group before switching its allegiance to Twelver Shi‘ism at some point prior to establishing the Safavid Empire (1501-1736). But unless fourteenth and fifteenth-century piety – particularly Turkmen piety -- is your jam, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that alongside the Safavids, a plethora of groups with all manner of beliefs that fit neatly into neither Sunnism nor Shi‘ism populated greater Iran, Central Asia, and the Anatolian Peninsula well before the rise of the Gunpowder Empires.
I was reminded of this while reading Evrim Binbaş’s “The Jalayirid Hidden King and the Unbelief of Shah Mohammad Qara Qoyunlu” in a recent issue of the Journal of Persianate Studies (12:2). The Qara Qoyunlu haven’t received the same scholarly attention as, say, the Timurids and Safavids – probably because they were on the losing side of history – but they and their cohorts provide rich fodder for those interested in medieval Middle Eastern piety, especially that of an apocalyptic, messianic quality.
Image of ‘Uj ibn ‘Anaq and the prophets that is described in Binbaş’s article as showing clear signs of the “confessional ambiguity” of the fifteenth century.
Horufis (that is, believers in the metaphysical meanings of letters, or horuf) who maintained that their leader’s “physical persona represented the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet.” Expectations of the End of Times and of a savior who would appear to restore justice. Intimations of a hidden king (à la King Arthur) who would one day return – an idea possibly conflated with the idea of the Shi‘i Hidden Imam. Devotion to Jesus as an “essential element of Islamicate piety among certain groups.” Confessional ambiguity manifesting on coins and in paintings. All and more are conveyed vividly by Binbaş, a former student of John Woods at the University of Chicago who’s now at the University of Bonn.
Binbaş also makes astute observations about how historians tend to look at this period – that is, through Safavid-colored glasses, with the later victors filtering what we see. As he writes,
“The examination of fifteenth-century religious ideas is often driven by the desire to understand much later developments, such as the formation of the Safavid Empire, the emergence of Alevi communities in the Ottoman Empire, or other religio-political communities … Although such genealogical approaches are useful in order to understand the sixteenth-century developments, inevitably, they produce selective approaches towards understanding fifteenth-century developments. The idea that underpins these approaches is that the religious problems of the sixteenth century have religious solutions in the fifteenth century. The curious incidence of the … hidden king suggests that the problems of the fifteenth century, just like the problems of the sixteenth century, should be treated in a much more extensive and comprehensive web of references that should include interregional and connected analysis of any given problem as well as a holistic approach that encompasses all the cultural, religious, and political peculiarities of a given time period.”
These are very useful suggestions, ones that most historians would, I imagine, endorse without qualm. Without committing the very same error, however, to my mind one of the most interesting elements about the groups mentioned in this article is the way they prefigure 19th-century messianic movements in Iran and Iraq such as the Babi and the Baha’i Faiths. Operating in roughly the same region, these groups likewise expected an imminent End of Times and the return of an awaited salvific figure (figured as both king and Imam). They similarly incorporated Jewish and Christian figures in their belief systems, cultivated the metaphysical interpretations of letters, and emerged as neither Shi‘i nor Sunni nor even Muslim, but something new and apart. The historical contexts that shaped these movements are quite different, of course, and the expressions are different as well. But perhaps something can be gained from a comparative approach, what Lawrence E. Sullivan so eloquently describes as “hold[ing] matters up to view, display[ing] them in a striking manner and in a new arrangement, in order to disclose relationships and significances that may have been less evident or absent.”*
At the very least, it seems there’s nothing new about looking for the Hidden King.
(*In fact, both Hamid Dabashi and Said Arjomand have already taken steps in this direction. Dabashi notes that the Babis were the “direct descendants of the Hurufiyyah movement, attributing cabalistic significance to letters and numbers.”)