Genghis Khan: Liberal Philosopher King?
Sure, he butchered thousands. But the maligned
Mongolian leader may have done as much for religious
freedom as Thomas Jefferson.
By Stephen Healey
In the hilariously bad 1956 film, The Conqueror, John
Wayne played Genghis Khan in what one critic called
“history’s most improbable piece of casting unless
Mickey Rooney were to play Jesus in ‘King of Kings.’”
Wayne taped his eyes back to look more Asian, and he
chewed up the scenery wearing a Fu Manchu moustache and
spouting goofy lines like, “I believe this Tartar woman
is for me. My blood says take her!”
It’s hardly shocking that the Duke portrayed the
visionary Mongol leader as an “oriental cowboy,” as he
called him. But it is startling to consider that
Western history hasn’t been much kinder to Genghis
Khan. Ever since the Enlightenment, we’ve remembered
the great khan as little more than a barbarian on
horseback, a ruthless leader who brutally conquered and
plundered most of the civilized world.
Author Jack Weatherford hopes to dispel this image. In
his superb book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the
Modern World, Weatherford presents the 13th century
conqueror as a progressive and innovative ruler who not
only established international law but subordinated his
own power to it. He promoted social tolerance and
humanitarian values, outlawing torture, abolishing the
sale of women, granting diplomatic immunity, and
establishing free trade. He even built schools and
championed literacy (thanks to Genghis Khan, Mongolia
today has a higher literacy rate than the United
States).
Genghis Kahn’s contributions to Western civilization
can hardly be overstated. His trade routes introduced
to Europe technologies such as printing, the cannon,
compass, and the abacus, as well as Mongol products
like tea, lemons, carrots, playing cards, rugs, and
pants. The Mongols also developed the first
international postal system and paper currency.
True, Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people
than anyone else in history. Using rapid siege and
attack warfare that inspired the German blitzkrieg,
Genghis Khan conquered more nations in 25 years than
the Romans did in 400. But he extended and sustained
his empire by exercising shrewd diplomacy (and wily
propaganda) as well as military might. By winning over
opponents with his considerable charisma, by marrying
and adopting children for political purposes, and by
rewarding loyalty and punishing dissent, Genghis Khan
accomplished what no one had dreamed possible—he
overcame 10,000 years of fierce tribal warfare to unify
Mongolia. The khan and his successors ruled their
empire so wisely, and so benevolently, that an age of
unprecedented peace and open trade flourished over the
next 150 years.
Perhaps the greatest key to his success—and the biggest
surprise to emerge from Weatherford’s book—was that
Genghis Khan was a deeply spiritual man who established
laws protecting religious freedom. Unlike most other
great conquerors, Genghis Khan did not force his
religion on the nations he vanquished. He believed that
to conquer a nation, one had to conquer the hearts of
its people, and he achieved this by allowing them to
worship any deity, and adhere to any scripture, they
wanted. And because his empire included every religion,
from Buddhism and Christianity to Judaism,
Manichaeanism and Islam, each of which claimed to be
the one true faith, he hoped to minimize the religious
strife he’d seen divide nations.
Genghis Khan even promoted all faiths, exempting
religious leaders and institutions from taxation. He
wasn’t merely trying to keep the peace; he believed
that every religion had something significant to offer.
“Just as God gave different fingers to the hand,” said
his grandson, Mongke Khan, explaining Mongol religious
toleration, “so has He given different ways to men.”
Granted, Genghis was no Mahatma Ghandi. Indeed, at
times he resembles a certain hawkish evangelical world
leader today, as when he instilled fear in his enemies
by declaring, “I am an instrument of the wrath of
heaven!” A devout shamanist, Genghis Khan believed that
his close standing with the divine helped him to win
wars. He had often “felt the presence and heard the
voice of God speaking directly to him in the vast open
air of the mountains in his homeland,” writes
Weatherford, “and by following those words, he had
become the conqueror of great cities and huge nations.”
Before engaging in battle, Genghis Khan would sometimes
pray for days, alone on a mountain, seeking the
guidance of the Eternal Blue Sky. When presenting a
case for war to his supernatural guardians, he’d
recount the generations of grievances the Mongols held
against an enemy. He’d explain why war was necessary, a
last resort initiated by his enemy and not sought by
him or his people. At other times he’d offer elaborate
prayers of thanks for a victory, removing his hat and
sash, a gesture that rendered him, the most powerful
man on earth, powerless before the gods.
The khan’s undeserved bad rap, Weatherford shows,
traces back to 18th century European anti-Asian
sentiment. Though Renaissance writers praised Genghis
Khan’s virtues extravagantly, Enlightenment thinkers
blamed him and the Mongols for Europe’s most detestable
qualities. In a play intended to attack the French
king, Voltaire, perhaps fearing for his head,
substituted Genghis Khan for his nation’s cruel and
ignorant ruler. He described the khan as a “wild
Scythian soldier bred to arms” and his people as “wild
sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots, and in
fields.” They “detest our arts, our customs, and our
laws,” Voltaire wrote, “and therefore mean to change
them all.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, pseudo-Darwinian
scientists linked criminal behavior biologically to the
Mongols, and eugenicists coined the term “Mongoloid” to
describe retarded children, who they believed had
inherited degraded Mongol genes through centuries of
interbreeding.
Genghis Khan’s true legacy wasn’t accessible until the
fall of the Soviet Union. Once Mongolia opened in 1990,
Jack Weatherford was among the first scholars to visit
and begin peeling away the misperceptions. Among these
was the notion that Genghis Khan was a reprobate, a
hedonist who collected women and luxuries as the spoils
of war. Although the khan was polygamous and had
accumulated tremendous power and wealth, Weatherford
shows that he possessed a sober manner and was devoted
to leading a simple life. “I hate luxury,” said Genghis
Khan, summarizing his ideals, and “I exercise
moderation.” Raising his sons to become rulers, he
insisted that the key to leadership was self-control,
and he cautioned them against pursuing a “‘colorful’
life with material frivolities and wasteful pleasures.”
Indeed, Genghis Khan’s paternal advice offers a
timeless wisdom to our own age of unchecked
consumption. He claimed that the fall of his enemies
had more to do with their weaknesses than his own
superior strengths, saying that God had condemned the
civilizations around him because of their “haughtiness
and their extravagant luxury.”
Materialism, said the man who had conquered the world,
leads the soul astray. “It will be easy,” he warned his
sons, “to forget your vision and purpose once you have
fine clothes, fast horses, and beautiful women.”
And then, he added, “you will be no better than a
slave, and you will surely lose everything.”