The Conversion of Ghazan Khan

In 694 AH (1295 CE), on his accession to the throne, the Ilkhanid ruler Mahmud Ghazan converted to Islam and made it the religion of his state, one of the great turning points of the age. The Ilkhanate was the Mongol state that ruled Iran and the surrounding lands, founded by the descendants of Hulagu, the same Hulagu who had destroyed Baghdad and killed the last Abbasid caliph in 656 AH (1258). For two generations these Mongol rulers had been pagan, shamanist and in part Buddhist, lords of a Muslim population they did not share a faith with. Ghazan's conversion reversed that: encouraged by the Muslim amir Nawruz and by the religious climate of his realm, the new ruler embraced Islam, and much of the Mongol military and noble elite of Iran followed him into the faith, so that the conquerors were absorbed into the religion of the conquered. Ghazan made Islam the state religion, turned the patronage of his court to mosques, colleges, and the Persian-Islamic learning of the day, and undertook wide administrative and fiscal reforms; it was under his rule and that of his successor that his vizier Rashid al-Din composed the great universal history, the Jami al-Tawarikh. The conversion is best known from Rashid al-Din himself and from the historian Wassaf. This scene depicts the moment of the change at the Ilkhanid capital of Tabriz, on the mountain-ringed plateau of northwestern Iran: a great assembly of Mongol nobles in their steppe dress standing in the rows of Muslim prayer, the old signs of the court set aside, a mosque and prayer ground of the new Persian-Islamic building around them, the conquering elite of an empire entering Islam together. The framing is respectful, the turning of a Mongol dynasty to the faith, told through an assembly at prayer rather than through any single face.