Chapter five begins with the ousting of the Lodi dynasty by Babur, the first Mughal, and continues to his son Humayun’s reign. Sher Shah Sur, an Indo-Afghan warlord, briefly seized control from Humayun instituting several administrative practices that the Mughals adopted. After surveying Akbar’s military conquests and alliances, we consider how Akbar’s concept of state evolved and its impact on politics and policies regarding India’s multicultural, multiethnic population. We then analyze how these policies affected cultural production, arguing that the use of specific languages and the production of art and architecture were part of a carefully planned political campaign. The chapter ends with an exploration of the political careers and artistic patronage of two top nobles at Akbar’s court.

The Safavid/Shiʿi age dawned ominously in Khurasan, with Herat’s capitulation, the execution of Herat’s last Sunni shaykh al-Islam, and violence against Sunnis. Surprisingly, however, the shrine received Safavid support, from Shah Ismaʿil I and Shah ʿAbbas I. Nonetheless, endless Safavid-Uzbek wars and sectarian strife scarred Khurasan, leading members of the saint cult to find succor with kinsmen in Mughal India. During the succeeding centuries – late Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, Qajar, and Pahlawi rule – the shrine fell into disrepair and the cult withered. The founding of the (Shiʿi) Islamic Republic of Iran (1979), paradoxically, signaled the rejuvenation of the saint cult and the revivification of the shrine complex.

Chapter 3 shows how, in addition to drawing on earlier models, the chroniclers also looked to each other’s works as they composed their narratives.We see movement across dynasties in various ways, whether intellectually, as the chroniclers looked beyond dynastic borders to read and cite texts being produced in other parts of the Islamicate world, or physically, as chroniclers moved between Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman territories, writing under different dynasties for different patrons.The chapter has as its centerpiece a case study focusing on one historian, Khvandamir. Drawing on a late Timurid history, Khvandamir wrote one of the earliest Safavid histories, his Habib al-siyar, and then moved to India, where he wrote one of the earliest Mughal narratives, the Qanun-i Humayuni.The analysis shows precisely how Khvandamir appropriated a portion of his Safavid era text dealing with the significance of the number twelve relative to the Shi‘i Imams, carefully transformed it into a “cosmological” text, and incorporated it into his Mughal history written for the emperor Humayun (1505-1556).The chapter ends with an overview of the fortunes of Mir Yahya Qazvini’s descendants, who left Safavid Iran for Mughal India.