A study of historical, political and religious thoughtof the early Mongols undertaken during the last fewyears has provided a thesis that, during the periodof their world domination in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries, they initiated an originaluniversal concept with the purpose of substantiatingand justifying the world's largest land empire.Furthermore, this concept was so developed that itconstituted a cohesive theory that can be calledTenggerism or Heavenism.

“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodgedin my mind for the several decades during which Ihave been working, on and off, on this early Persianhistorian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I readit originally in that monument of mid-VictorianAnglo-Indian scholarship, The History ofIndia as told by its own Historians. TheMuhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliottand John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists oftranslated extracts, many quite lengthy, from textsillustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent,the greater part of them dealing with what was thensome eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. InVolume II, the compilers presented several passagesfrom Bayhaqī's work, The History of SultanMaʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appearedin a printed edition at Calcutta in the BibliothecaIndica series, edited by the person who had in factproduced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal AsiaticSociety's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H.Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, butsometimes employed local munshis,not always with happy results. Although Persianculture was still very much alive in India in themid-nineteenth century, thesemunshis were far from beingau fait with the earlyeleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and wereat times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One ofmy favourites here is the Persian sayingṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand,translated literally and ludicrously in its contextas “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Whyanyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum,in the midst of a high-level discussion betweenSultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalentof a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom,already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, theShāh-nāma, means of course “tospread rumours clandestinely”.

Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in allforms of human society. Based on a system of mutualobligation, they denote any activity in whichvaluables are circulated between individuals orgroups of people. In the religious sphere theyinclude the transfer of both material and immaterialgoods between human and spiritual beings. Asoutlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur ledon, the classic work on the total systemof reciprocity, such exchange is governed by theprinciple of the gift entailing thecounter-gift.

In his Islam in Modern History,published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable forits insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to theextraordinary energy which had surged through theMuslim world with increasing force in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. He talks of:

dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its ownsake, and at the level of feeling a stirring ofintense, even violent, emotionalism…Thetransmutation of Muslim society from its earlynineteenth-century stolidity to itstwentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement.The change has been everywhere in evidence.

This surge of energy is closely associated with a shiftin the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldlytowards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean adevaluing of a faith of contemplation of God'smysteries and of belief in His will to shape humanlife, and a valuing instead of a faith in whichMuslims were increasingly aware that it was they,and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamicsociety on earth. This shift of emphasis has beenclosely associated with a new idea of great power,the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslimpower, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of acaliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape andprotect the community, this awesome task now fell toeach individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest thatthis shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the newresponsibilities for Muslims that came with it, isthe most important change that Muslims have wroughtin the practice of their faith over the past onethousand years. It is a change full of possibilitiesfor the future.

This paper is named and given in memory of MarkZebrowski, friend and respected colleague, whocontributed much to life, art history and theculture of India, including his pioneeringGold, silver and bronze from MughalIndia. I will focus on the brass vesselsinlaid with silver and gold which were produced forone Mamluk sultan, al-Nāṣir Muhammad (1293–4,1299–1309, 1310–41), whose name and titles areinscribed on more than forty-six objects (seeAppendix).

The Royal Asiatic Society was founded in March 1823.The practice of holding meetings at which paperswere given and discussed commenced the followingmonth in April of that year. Throughout the firstdecade of the Society's existence, these orallydelivered papers were later printed and distributedin substantial quarto volumes entitled‘Transactions’.

Once upon a time twenty nine upper middle-class friendsand their wives entered a thicket where the Buddhahappened to be and began to play. Another friend hadno wife, so a prostitute was brought for him. Whilethey were “disporting themselves” she took histhings and ran away. The remainder joined in asearch for her. Roaming in that thicket they foundthe Buddha seated at the root of a tree. They asked,“Lord, has the Blessed One seen a certain woman(ekam itthim)?” “What have you,young men, to do with the woman?”, he exclaimed.They explained. “Now what do you, young men,think?”, he asked, “Which is better for you, tosearch for a woman or to search for yourselves?”“That, Lord, would be preferable – to search forourselves.” So he preached and gave them ordination.The story is contrived as a setting for therhetorical question (like Mark 12:13–17).