Empires rarely move alone. They turn in constellations, drawn together by a mix of proximity, ideology, and ambition. The early modern Islamic world was shaped by such a triad — the Ottomans of Anatolia, the Safavids of Iran, and the Mughals of India — empires whose survival often depended less on conquest than on how they defined faith, negotiated identity, and measured one another in the shadow of God. Between them ran not just trade and ambassadors, but rivers of blood and belief — most enduringly, the sectarian fault line between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, a wound carved into statecraft as much as theology.
The Ottomans, emerging from the ruins of Byzantium and the fracturing Dar al-Islam, established themselves not only as temporal rulers but as the Imperial guardians of the Sunni world. With the conquest of the Mamluk heartlands in 1517, Selim I assumed the symbolic authority of the caliphate. Ottoman legitimacy henceforth drew from both the sword and the minbar, presenting the dynasty as defenders of Sunni orthodoxy against internal heresy and external infidel alike. This mantle, however, brought them into ideological and military confrontation with the Safavids, whose rise in Persia under Shah Ismail I was marked by a deliberate rejection of Sunni consensus.
The Safavid Empire, born from the fervor of a heterodox Sufi order, transformed into a militant champion of Twelver Shi‘ism. In doing so, it altered the religious geography of Iran forever, but at great political cost. Their dogma turned inward and outward — coercing the Persian population into doctrinal conformity while provoking the ire of Sunni neighbors. The Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 was not merely a military catastrophe for the Safavids, but a symbolic defeat of Shi‘i messianism at the hands of Sunni rationalism and gunpowder logistics. From this moment forward, Ottoman-Safavid relations vacillated between cold war and open hostility, with theology and territory always intertwined.
But while Ottoman-Safavid rivalry defined the western half of the Islamic world, the Mughals — descendants of both Timur and Genghis Khan — introduced a third axis that complicated sectarian and strategic alliances. Although Sunni in nominal affiliation, the Mughal court adopted the Persianate aesthetics, bureaucracy, and literary tradition that flourished under the Safavids. Emperors like Humayun sought exile in Safavid Iran, and in return were reinstated with Persian support. The diplomatic relationship that emerged was fraught with tension — over Kandahar, over protocol, over sect — but never hardened into the theological warfare that marked Ottoman-Safavid dynamics.
It was under Emperor Akbar that the Mughal Empire most decisively broke from any semblance of Sunni orthodoxy. While inheriting the Timurid rivalry with the Uzbeks, Akbar recognized that the sectarian rigidity of the Transoxianan Sunni khanates was politically incompatible with the vast and pluralistic Indian subcontinent. Akbar not only repelled Uzbek aggression in the north but also deliberately distanced his empire from Sunni theological purism, cultivating instead an ecumenical court culture rooted in Sulh-i-Kul — universal peace.
His Din-i Ilahi was less a religion than a metaphysical gesture, an imperial language of tolerance through which Sunni, Shi‘a, Hindu, Jain, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences could coexist under a single sovereign canopy. It was a philosophical architecture meant to undercut both Safavid exclusivism and Uzbek orthodoxy, while still drawing heavily from Persianate models of governance. Akbar's resistance to Uzbek overtures, his cautious yet respectful diplomacy with Safavid Iran, and his refusal to play into sectarian alliances marked the Mughal Empire as the most pluralistic of the Gunpowder trio.
These preferences echoed in the policies of his successors. Jahangir, inheriting his father’s Indo-Persian synthesis, maintained cordial relations with the Safavids, even as conflict over Kandahar persisted. Yet there was no serious tilt toward the Uzbeks, whose revival under the Ashtarkhanids brought renewed appeals for a Sunni front — appeals that were consistently rebuffed. Shah Jahan, though more theologically conservative than Akbar, still favored Safavid courtly diplomacy over Uzbek religio-political adventurism. The ideological lines of Akbar’s policy — a geopolitical distancing from Transoxiana and its Sunni rigidity — held firm.
Even in the western seas, these alliances bore subtle witness. When the Sultan of Gujarat called upon the Ottomans for assistance against the encroaching Portuguese, Istanbul initially responded with naval interventions in the Red Sea and Arabian coast. But when Gujarat faced the Mughal expansion under Humayun and Akbar, the Ottomans — despite their broader opposition to Portuguese influence — did not intervene on behalf of their co-religionists. The reasons were likely strategic: the Ottomans had no interest in antagonizing the Mughals, whom they maintained a cordial relationship with. It was, once more, a case where religious solidarity bent before imperial pragmatism.
Indeed, the vision of a Sunni axis did exist — most fervently in the imaginations of the Shaybanid and later Uzbek rulers of Central Asia. As Sunni traditionalists with a long-standing hostility toward the Safavid Shi‘a, the Uzbeks repeatedly attempted to forge an alliance with the Ottomans. Letters were exchanged, proposals made, and mutual interests against the “heretical Persians” discussed. But the Mughals’ refusal to join such an axis underscored their independent imperial theology, one that saw both Shi‘ism and Sunnism as local expressions rather than imperial identities to be weaponized.
And here lies the paradox: the Gunpowder Empires all shared Islam, Persianate culture, and early modern statecraft — yet they defined themselves most vigorously against each other. The Ottomans defined legitimacy through Sunni consensus and caliphal lineage. The Safavids invented legitimacy by embracing the charismatic vacuum left by the Hidden Imam, offering their shahs as his earthly substitutes. The Mughals rejected both poles, choosing instead to sacralize sovereignty itself, elevating emperorship above doctrine, blending Persian, Turkic, Indian, and Islamic traditions into a mosaic that resisted easy categorization.
If the Ottomans were the protectors of Sunni orthodoxy, the Safavids the revolutionaries of Shi‘i destiny, and the Mughals the architects of imperial ecumenism, then the story of their interactions is not one of linear rivalry but of theological triangulation — each adjusting to the others’ shadows, each redefining Islam through empire.
This ideological entanglement had real consequences. The prolonged Ottoman-Safavid wars drained resources and entrenched sectarian boundaries across Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. Safavid patronage of Shi‘a ulema reshaped Iranian society, while Ottoman policies hardened Sunnism into a legalistic orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the Mughals' balancing act allowed them to govern a pluralistic subcontinent without igniting the kind of sectarian violence that plagued the Middle East — at least until their decline.
And decline they did. Gunpowder, once their path to supremacy, became a relic. European War Machines roared in triumph. Bureaucracies ossified. Dynasties crumbled. But their legacies linger — in the Ottoman nostalgia of Turkish nationalism, in the Safavid mythos that undergirds the Iranian republic, in the Mughal aesthetic and controversial memory that still shapes Indian identity. The creeds they carved remain, etched into borders, prayers, and unresolved conflicts.
For further reading:
1. The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpower Empires and Modern Times; Marshall G. S. Hodgson
2. Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals; Douglas E. Streusand
3. The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It; Suraiya Faroqhi
4. Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals; Abraham Eraly
5. The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East; Barnaby Rogerson
6. History of Medieval India; Satish Chandra
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