Genghis Khan's Effect on the Muslim World

Abstract

Books Reviewed: Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of
the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004; Thomas T. Allsen,
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. UK: Cambridge University Press,
2001; Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World.
London: HarperCollins, 2004.
What these books have in common is their attempt to recast our perceptions
of the Mongols’ impact upon the Islamic world. Given the lore of gore
thrown up by the intervening centuries, the authors clearly had their work
cut out for them. Over the course of those centuries, hardly a schoolchild or
even an illiterate villager anywhere in the Islamic world, and certainly in
Muslim Central Asia, was not taught to dread and despise the very mention
of the Mongols – and especially their two most infamous and notorious leaders,
Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. To a great degree, the same holds true for
children in other parts of the world, especially in Europe, where the works
of Chaucer, Marlowe, and others contributed greatly to the vilification of
these two Mongols. 
After reading the three books under review, there is no option for the
careful reader but to reassess his/her own understanding of the Mongol centuries
(the thirteenth and fourteenth CE) and, indeed, of how history may
rightly or wrongly be represented and perceived. Much of the information
presented in these books is truly eye-opening. There is probably just as much
that is ultimately material for continued scholarly consideration and interpretation.
However, it is at the human level that any such reading must begin.
If history is really a matter of perspective, let me begin by quoting from
Justin Marozzi’s work:
Such cultural benefits to Persia of Mongol rule were all very well. But, as
David Morgan concluded in a recent study of medieval Persia: “We may
justly have our doubts over how impressed the Persian peasants, as they
did their best to avoid the Mongol tax-collectors, would have been by
developments in miniature painting. For Persia, the Mongol period was a
disaster on a grand and unparalled scale.” ...