Miracles of the Golden Horde Ruler Berke in the Framework of Islamic History by Abdulghaffar Qirimi (Kırımῑ)

Abstract

The article analyzes the information in ‘Abd al-Ghaffar (Abdulghaffar) Qirimi's historical work "‘Umdat al-akhbar", in which the chronicler tells about the miracles by Khan Berke. The author of the article offers his own interpretation of why Abdulghaffar Qirimi (Kırımῑ) needed to endow Berke with miracles when describing the reign of Berke, to declare him a sheikh and a disseminator of Islam in the Golden Horde. Abdulghaffar Qirimi, who was well acquainted with Ottoman historical works on Islam and created his work within the framework of the Ottoman historiographic tradition, wrote the history of Khan Berke in a way understandable to Ottoman readers, adding the Islamic stories popular among the Ottomans. Thus, Abdulghaffar Qirimi inscribed the history of the Jochids in Islamic history, and endowed the first Muslim Chingizid with the epithet of the disseminator of Islam. As a result, the history of the Golden Horde entered into the corpus of the general “Islamic histories” of Ottoman historiography, and the history of the Jochid as the history of the Ottoman dynasty became Islamic from the time of the founders of the Ulus of Jochi.