How did America's best-known Muslim-baiter come to be known as a "mogul"?
By N.M.
ROBERT DONALDSON created a stir by writing an ad for a Republican presidential candidate, Dr Ben Carson. It’s not the ad's catchy jingle that has drawn comment so much as its creator’s identity: Mr Donaldson is a self-described one-of-a-kind Black Christian Republican rapper from Savannah, Georgia. Even more intriguing is his choice of performance name—Aspiring Mogul—and his reason for choosing it. “It’s about me inspiring other black men, other African Americans," he has said, "to say, ‘Hey, you can start a business, you can become anything you want to become in America.'”
Of course, by “mogul”, Mr Donaldson means “businessman”, and not a medieval Islamic emperor. The word mogul is now so inescapably associated with entertainment grandees—whether Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul, or Jay-Z, a hip-hop mogul—that many are unaware of its roots.
Mogul is a corruption of Mughal, the most powerful Islamic dynasty in history, which ruled over most of India from 1526 to 1857. The Mughal emperors were great patrons of the arts and architecture; the artistic apogee of their empire was the Taj Mahal. The modern usage of “mogul” still carries musky traces of hedonism, even if private jets and yachts have replaced elephant hunts and diamonds.
Mughal itself, however, is a corruption of Mongol. Babur, the founder of India's Mughal dynasty, was descended from Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan. But it was not Babur, but his grandson, Akbar, who would go down in history as the Great Mughal or Great Mogul. Under Akbar, the Mughal Empire reached its zenith. Savannah's Aspiring Mogul, who admires Dr Carson for being a self-made success, might be interested to learn that the Great Mughal was born in a desert as his parents fled into exile, and had to fight to reclaim the kingdom his father had squandered. He was also famed for his political shrewdness and religious pluralism. This paragon also promoted the arts, invited Jain holy men and Jesuit priests to his court and ordered that a mosque in his capital be inscribed with a quotation attributed to “Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace)”. His bedroom was adorned with a mural of the nativity.
The Mughal Empire came to an end in 1857, after the British exiled the last emperor to Rangoon. By then, “mogul” was part of the English language. It is there in Milton’s 1667 “Paradise Lost”, when Adam finds himself looking down on the futuristic splendor of “Agra and Lahor of great Mogul”. A few years earlier, another poet, John Quarles, had used the word in a similar setting. In Quarles’s poem, “Divine Meditations”, God scolds Adam by saying “Thou great Mugul of baseness, cease to plead, Thy tongue’s a canker, and thy words are lead.” An admonishment that has the punch and slanting rhyme of a good hip-hop putdown.
In America, an editorial in the New York Tribune in 1877 described John A. Logan, a senator, as “the Head Centre, the Hub, the King Pin, the Main Spring, Mogul, and Mugwump of the final plot”. Mark Twain used “mogul” parodically in his fiction, referring to a station-master as the “great mogul” and christening the steamboat in “Pudd’nhead Wilson” “The Grand Mogul”. But easily the most charming, if apostate, use of the word was as an early 20th-century slang term in railroad diners, where ham ’n eggs were “a mogul with two headlights”, in honour of the latest steam locomotive.
The mogul-millionaire association gained currency first in the 20th century. It was not yet common in the heyday of robber barons like John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It was only in the 1930s that the term “movie mogul”, to describe Hollywood’s flamboyant studio magnates, sprang into prominence. Today, of course, there is no escaping the word: from the aspirational lifestyle variant like Martha Stewart to aspiring ones like Robert Donaldson from Savannah.
Of course there is one true mogul in the Republican race, and it isn't Ben Carson. The American press can't go a day without hanging the word hundreds of times, usually preceded by "real-estate", on Donald Trump. With his silken turban of hair and his own Taj Mahal, he is a bespoke candidate for the grandiose title (so what if the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City went bankrupt?). One can't help wonder whether this mogul-o-maniac's fatwa against Muslims entering America extends to the Islamic lexicon as well. If “mogul” is banned along with the Muslims who contributed the word to English, Mr Trump may need another moniker. And don’t bother to suggest “tycoon”—that's from the Japanese taikun, which itself is from the Chinese word for “great prince”.
One can practically hear Mr Trump in one of his nationalist fugues: Can't English even make its own words anymore?
