This chapter outlines the history of Mongol Central Asia, known as the Chaghadaid Khanate, the least documented but most enduring of the Mongol successor states. Squeezed between the Chinggisid polities, lacking a strong sedentary basis, and home to two competing uluses, the Middle Mongolian Ulus, as the Mongols in Central Asia called themselves, was often plagued by warfare and suffered from “brain drain.” Yet it not only played a leading role in the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, but also introduced a political culture that impacted Central Asia up to the nineteenth century; contributed to the Islamization of eastern Central Asia; was the root of two of the most influential early modern empires, the Timurids and Mughals; and gave its name, Chaghatay, to the Eastern Turkic language. The chapter discusses its political history during the Mongol moment, and briefly reviews its postimperial history and aspects of economy, administration, and culture.

The chapter reviews the material culture of the Golden Horde and how it evolved from the nomadic culture of Mongolia, reflected, for example, in luxurious warrior belts and drinking cups. It stresses the religious diversity apparent in the Golden Horde burials and among its citizens before and after its Islamization, and how Islamization affected Golden Horde sites. It reviews town building under the Jochids and concludes with the Simferopol treasure, the content of which reflects the sophistication of the Golden Horde’s eclectic culture and its trans-Eurasian commercial connections.

The Ilkhanate was a Mongol-ruled state based in Iran and Mesopotamia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. Established by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, after 1258, it drew on previous decades of Mongol military and administrative intervention in the region. Throughout their eighty years in power, the descendants of Hülegü faced the challenge of governing a society and landscape foreign to Mongol traditional life and heavily scarred from previous waves of Mongol invasion. They met this challenge by employing indigenous administrative elites and adopting local customs. Most notable among these was Islam, which was increasingly becoming the majority religion in the Middle East at the time of the Mongol conquest and which the Ilkhans themselves adopted as part of their ruling ideology. The Mongols’ particular rapprochement with these indigenous practices established important institutions of royal ideology, land tenure, religious practice, and cultural patronage that persisted at Persianate courts in later centuries.

The chapter reviews the Mongols’ political, administrative, and economic relations with the forest peoples of Siberia and the Mongol impact on the region. It stresses the inclusion of Siberia’s northern products in the Eurasian east–west trade network and the transformations – linguistic, ethnic, and religious – caused by Mongol rule, as well as providing a panoramic view of forest–steppe relations before and after the Mongol period.

After coming to power in 2002, the AKP in Turkey took the country on a roller coaster from democratic reforms to authoritarian retreat. Starting off as a “conservative democratic” party with liberal tendencies, the AKP pivoted back to majoritarianism over the years. This chapter aims to make sense of this drastic shift and offers an account of the AKP’s swing from liberalism to electoralism. It discusses the AKP’s origins, its trajectory in government, and how it has taken a hegemonic direction despite its branding in its inception as a conservative party with an explicitly democratic agenda. To explain this transformation, the chapter identifies major forces inside the AKP, their diverging understandings of democracy, and describes how one wing prevailed over the other to take the party into a majoritarian direction. A key part of this process involves the rise of a dominant coalition under Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership. His growing command over organizational resources weakened his rivals with more liberal democratic orientations. This chapter traces these processes and their political consequences for Turkish democracy, with specific focus on Erdoğan’s righteous majoritarianism.

How did Tripoli, a medium-sized secondary city, become the centre of Lebanon’s anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist protest movement?

Anti-French mobilizations in Tripoli created a unique city corporatism that helped to unite most of the Sunni population politically until the 1970s. When Tripoli was carved out of Syria and attached to the new state of Greater Lebanon in 1920 by the French mandate, the city lost its importance and was demoted to secondary status.

This paved the way for a strong, Arab nationalist city identity in Tripoli, driven by Abdulhamid Karami, a man of religion turned politician. Tripoli’s nationalist identity subsequently morphed into various Islamist trends, involving the bourgeois Islamists, the pro-Palestinian Islamists and the Maoist-turned-Islamist urban poor.

Nationalist and Islamist ideas found a foothold in Tripoli due to the many ties between the city and prominent nationalists and Islamists in Syria. However, Tripoli’s ʿAlawites and Christians contested the Arab nationalist identity of Tripoli as formulated by its Sunni leaders.

The Islamic Tawhid Movement, an Islamist militia, emerged in 1982, and seized military control of Tripoli, which lasted until 1985. This chapter explores the Islamic Tawhid’s curious alliance with its most significant sponsor, the nationalist Palestinian Fatah group, and how they failed to mobilise support from Tripoli’s conservative middle class.

The emergence of the Islamic Tawhid Movement was closely linked to regional political events. The Lebanese Left and the Palestinian commando movement in Lebanon suffered a humiliating defeat during the 1982 Israeli invasion, and nearly 15,000 Palestinian commandos were forced to flee to Tunisia.

Tripoli became the last resort in Lebanon for al-Fatah. However, Syria, with a troop presence in Lebanon since 1976, did not accept the arrival of the Palestinian commandos, and a Syrian–Palestinian war broke out in the city. Tripoli’s Sunnis were generally pro-Palestinian and fiercely opposed to the Syrian Assad regime. Many youths in Tripoli turned to Islamism after the demise of the Left. However, the conservative middle class in Tripoli loathed Tawhid’s violence against civilians and despised its weak religious foundations.

Chapter 3 describes how profoundly the Ottoman conquest changed Albania. Devastation and flight completely altered the settlement structures, especially in the north. Albanians fled not only to Italy but also into the mountains, where they organized themselves into tribal structures. On the plains and especially in the south, many people came to terms with the new empire. Islamized Albanians became an essential pillar of the Ottoman military and administrative structures. Until around 1600 the southwestern Balkans remained mostly Christian, either Orthodox or Catholic. In the course of the seventeenth century, most Albanians converted to Islam for various reasons making the region even more religiously diverse. In addition to Sunni Islam, the Bektashi dervish order, which had absorbed Shiite and Christian influences, also established itself. In the early modern period, three religious cultures coexisted side by side, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim, whose adherents maintained cultural contacts not only with each other, but also with their co-religionists outside the area. The southwestern Balkans formed a peripheral zone of the empire. The imperial administration could barely control the mountain regions in a sustainable way. The result was a legal pluralism, with many Albanians, especially in the mountain areas, seeing customary law as a pillar of their identity and their special political position.

Chapter 1 describes the motivations of the Islamists, who crafted what became the 1996 Local Councils Law. In the face of protests and riots in the nation’s cities, Islamist lawmakers in the fourth Islamic Majles (1992–1996) turned to political decentralization to address poorly managed urbanization and local governance as a way of easing economic stresses among lower economic classes that had spurred unrest. The chapter explores the 1996 Local Councils Law in detail, including the structure and the responsibilities of elected local government comprising three institutions: the elected Islamic city council (shura-ye eslami shahr), the mayor (shahrdar), and the municipal bureaucracy (shahrdari). The chapter goes on to explain the institutional design and structure of elected local government and its place in the intergovernmental system resulting from the decentralization reforms. It highlights the tension between two parallel vertical systems of hierarchical governance, between the top-down appointed system bureaucratic hierarchy and the bottom-up. The contradiction between the two systems results from the tension between two counterpoised systems of upward and downward accountability.

The Islamic Republic of Iran prides itself on being the only country with an entirely codified Islamic legal system, and on being a pioneer in the Islamization of constitutional law. Part 1 of this chapter provides an overview of the different models of Islamic constitutionalism currently found in the Muslim world. Part 2 reviews Iran’s highly creative and ambitious project of Islamizing an entire civil law system and codifying Islamic law over a forty-year period and draws attention to the high degree of dynamism and reinterpretation of Shiite legal precepts that this project has required. Part 3 focuses on the making and amendment of Iran’s 1906/1907 and 1979 constitutions – which fused foreign, republican, and Islamic elements in unique ways – and on the role of the 1979 constitution in defining and regulating Iran’s distinctive present-day blend of institutional conflict and policy disagreement among religious conservatives, pragmatic reformers, and revolutionary leftists. Over time, a combination of innovative reinterpretation of Shiite legal principles and constitutional and institutional reform have reshaped the complex relationship between left-leaning legislative institutions constrained by Islamic principles and conservative religious scholars who operate outside the political system but are the arbiters of what it means to respect Islamic principles.

Islam travelled across the Asian expanse along land and maritime routes, as Muslims engaged in trade, proselytism, and conquest. While the territory and influence of Islamic political authority expanded, collapsed, and reached further once again, between the seventh and sixteenth centuries the realities and attributes of any given Islamic society varied greatly. This chapter provides a bird's-eye view of the expansive movement of Muslims out of Arabia and into Asia, as Islam crossed the Oxus/Amu Darya river (Uzbekistan), following two main paths. First was the military expansion of the Arab Muslim Empire, which reached its territorial apogee under the Abbasid, spreading as far as Transoxiana and Northwest India. Second was the movement of pilgrims, scholars, soldiers, and mystics – whose identities melted one into the other – across continental and maritime Asia, along the centuries-old Silk Road and the Indian Ocean networks. These trajectories allow us to see Asia as a historically cohesive space of Islamized interaction, where Muslims imagined themselves as part of a religious community, the umma.