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The Escorial and Humayun’s Tomb in comparison. Shaping the dynastic past of the Mughals and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century Royal tombs and monuments, such as the imperial tombs of India and the Escorial of Spain, are among the best-known monuments of the early modern period. This article compares the Escorial, which served as the dynastic vault for the Spanish Habsburgs but particularly glorified Emperor Charles V, and the tomb built for the Mughal emperor Humayun. Both were built by their sons, Philip II (r. 1556-1598) and Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1603). By tracing the building history and the commemorative practices that emerged around these two buildings we can analyse and compare how these two rulers – who were only the third of their line in a new territory – shaped the memory of their fathers and used it to legitimize their own power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on the Majalis-i Jahangiri (1608–11) by ʿAbd al-Sattar b. Qasim Lahauri, this essay explores some of the discussions the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27) conducted with a wide range of scholars, from Brahmans and ʿulama to Jesuit padres and Jewish savants. By far the most numerous, the debates bearing on Islam and involving Muslim intellectuals are especially significant on several accounts. First, because they illuminate how, following in the steps of his father Akbar (r. 1556–605), Jahangir was able to conciliate his messianic claims with a strong engagement with reason and to turn this combination into a formidable instrument for confession and state building. These conversations also provide promising avenues to think afresh the socio-intellectual history of the Mughal ʿulama inasmuch as they capture the challenges and adjustments attendant on imperial patronage, depict the jockeying for influence and positions among intellectuals (particularly between Indo-Muslim and Iranian lettrés), and shed light on relatively little known figures or on unexplored facets of more prominent individuals. In addition, the specific role played by scholars hailing from Iran—and, to a lesser extent, from Central Asia—in the juridical-religious disputes of the Indian court shows how crucial inter-Asian connections and networks were in the fashioning of Mughal ideology but also the ways in which the ongoing flow of émigré ʿulama was disciplined before being incorporated into the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in order to argue that there was a rise in prestige for various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, geography and astronomy. While these texts certainly fulfilled a political function (elucidating the cosmos for Mughal universalist claims), they also reflected aspects of the intellectual climate and practices of the sixteenth century that were undergoing a realignment with the expansion of royal authority throughout much of the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the career of Fath Allah Shirazi who matriculated in Shiraz with some of the most prominent scholars of the age, and subsequently moved to India as his specific network lost political power in Safavid Iran during the reign of Shah Tahmasp. Fath Allah found employment at the Bijapur Sultanate and finally went to Mughal India and contributed to a number of administrative, intellectual and ‘ideological’ movements at the Mughal court. Shirazi’s career is significant as it sheds light on the significance (and dangers) of personal networks that facilitated the political prospects of the elites in the Indo-Persian world. It also demonstrates the importance of the Deccan in elite circulations between Iran and Mughal India in this period. Finally, it shows how such individuals had to constantly modify their learning in order to meet the varying needs of the centres of patronage in which they served. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]