Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate Available to Purchase

The political history of the Delhi Sultanate, the term commonly used to categorize the succession of Muslim states that ruled large swaths of northern India from 1206 to 1398, has rarely exerted much appeal on historians of the broader Islamic world or those of South Asia. Apart from the fact that few records have survived from the Indo-Muslim states of this era, most of their rulers exhibited unpalatable aspects of military autocracies so common to this era of sultanates, which became the political norm in the Islamic world following the deterioration of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the tenth century CE and the Caliphate's extinction by the Mongols in 1258. Peter Jackson, Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, Sunil Kumar, and others have published important works on the political and military history of the Sultanate regimes, but these studies are rare, especially when compared with the lavish historiography of the Mughal Empire. The religious...