Akbar & the Mughal Synthesis

On 28 February 1580 three Jesuit priests from Goa rode into Fatehpur Sikri, the red sandstone city the Mughal emperor Akbar had raised on a ridge west of Agra. They were Rudolf Acquaviva, Antonio de Monserrate and the interpreter Francisco Henriques, and they had been invited by the emperor himself. Among their gifts was a new Royal Polyglot Bible, printed at Antwerp by Christophe Plantin in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac; Akbar received it with reverence and had it kept in a gold casket in his private rooms. Within weeks the priests were debating Muslim scholars before the emperor in his Ibadat Khana, the "House of Worship", on the long Thursday nights he gave to argument about God. They went home convinced he was about to be baptized. He was not. Akbar, who could not read, had built something else: an imperial court in which Sunni and Shi'i scholars, Brahmin pandits, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests and Catholic missionaries were all summoned to speak, and in which the final word on religion belonged, more and more, to the emperor. This chapter covers the religious world of the Mughal empire at its height, from Akbar (reigned 1556–1605) to the execution of his great-grandson Dara Shikoh in 1659: the debates, the translations, the imperial cult that historians call the Din-i Ilahi, the orthodox reaction, and the long argument, still fought today, over what it all meant.

The emperor and his inheritance

The Mughals were Central Asian Turks, descendants of Timur and, through the female line, of Chinggis Khan; Akbar's grandfather Babur had taken Delhi in 1526. Akbar was born in 1542 at Umarkot in Sindh while his father Humayun was in exile, and he came to the throne at thirteen. He ruled a Sunni Muslim dynasty over a population that was overwhelmingly Hindu, with Jain merchant communities, Shi'i nobles from Iran, Sikhs in the Punjab, Parsis on the western coast and, from 1510, a Portuguese Catholic colony at Goa.

His early decisions were political as much as religious. From 1562 he married daughters of Rajput Hindu kings, beginning with the house of Amber, and the Rajputs became pillars of the empire; his Hindu wives kept their own worship in the palace. In 1564 he abolished the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims that Islamic law prescribed. His nobility came to include Iranians, Central Asian Turks, Indian Muslims and Rajputs serving on the same terms, as his minister and historian Abu'l-Fazl records in the Ain-i Akbari.

Akbar also had a personal religious life that the sources describe as restless. He was devoted to the Chishti Sufi order. The shaikh Salim Chishti of Sikri was believed to have foretold the birth of the heir the emperor longed for; when a son was born in 1569 he was named Salim (the future emperor Jahangir), and Akbar built his new capital, Fatehpur Sikri, around the shaikh's village and mosque.

Sources are mixed on what Akbar could read. The chroniclers present him as unlettered, with books read aloud to him daily. Some modern writers have suggested dyslexia; that is a retrospective guess, not a diagnosis anyone can confirm.

The House of Worship

In 1575 Akbar ordered the Ibadat Khana built at Fatehpur Sikri, and it was completed in 1576. Discussions were held on Thursday evenings and sometimes ran through the night.

At first the disputants were Muslim scholars, and their quarrels with one another, as the court historian Abd al-Qadir Badauni records with dismay, did the ulama little credit in the emperor's eyes. The debates widened over the following years to include:

• Shi'i as well as Sunni scholars;
• Hindu pandits;
• Jain monks;
• Zoroastrian priests;
• in time, the Jesuits, and by some accounts materialists who denied any god.

The topics ranged across the nature of God, the reliability of scripture, vegetarianism and the treatment of animals, monogamy, and fire-worship. The Jesuits challenged the Muslim doctrine of tahrif, the claim that the earlier scriptures had been altered, and attacked Islamic readings of the Bible. Monserrate's own account, the Commentarius, is one of our richest sources. It is also the account of a missionary who hoped for a conversion that never came.

By 1582 the Ibadat Khana debates had been suspended. Which building at Fatehpur Sikri, if any that survives, was the Ibadat Khana is itself debated. The popular identification of the pillared Diwan-i Khas with it is not secure.

The mahzar of 1579

In September 1579 leading Muslim scholars of the empire put their seals to a legal attestation, the mahzar, drafted by Shaikh Mubarak, father of Abu'l-Fazl. It recognized Akbar as Imam-i Adil, a "just ruler", whose rank was above that of a mujtahid, a qualified interpreter of the law. Where the mujtahids disagreed on a religious question, the emperor could choose among their opinions, and his choice would bind all. The condition was that it accorded with the Qur'an and served the good of the people.

Older historians called it the "Infallibility Decree"; the name is misleading. The mahzar did not declare Akbar a prophet or infallible. It gave him the power to arbitrate between existing legal opinions, and later scholarship has debated how far that was a radical step and how far a claim of the kind Muslim rulers had often made. What is clear is that it moved religious authority toward the throne.

"Divine Monotheism": the Din-i Ilahi

From about 1582 Akbar admitted a small circle of courtiers as his personal disciples. Contemporaries called the path Tawhid-i Ilahi, "divine monotheism"; the name Din-i Ilahi, "divine religion", is the one that stuck later.

What the sources say it involved:

• A vow and signs of rank. Each initiate swore four degrees of devotion to Akbar: willingness to sacrifice life, property, honour and religion in the master's service. The emperor placed a new turban on his head and gave him a medallion bearing the sun and a small portrait of Akbar to wear on the turban.
• Rules of conduct. Disciples were enjoined to avoid meat where possible and to greet one another with "Allahu Akbar", answered with "Jalla jalaluhu".
• A cult of light. Akbar venerated the sun and fire, which Abu'l-Fazl explains as reverence for the divine light. According to his critics he prostrated before the sun, and a sacred fire was kept at court.
• The daily viewing. Each morning Akbar showed himself at a palace window, the jharokha, to crowds who came for his darshan, the auspicious sight of a holy person. Hindus had long sought that sight of deities and saints.

How small it was: historians have identified only about eighteen members by name. Birbal was the only Hindu of note among them, and the Rajput general Man Singh of Amber, one of the emperor's most loyal commanders, declined to join.

The two main witnesses could hardly disagree more:

• Abu'l-Fazl, the emperor's friend and ideologist, presents a philosopher-king leading seekers toward truth.
• Badauni, a translator at the court who kept his own secret history, the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, presents apostasy: an emperor who had abandoned Islam and was mocking it.

The Jesuits add a third view, of a prince who seemed to be founding a new religion with himself at its centre.

What historians argue over is what this was. The dominant view today is that the Din-i Ilahi was not a new religion in any full sense. It had no scripture, priesthood or mass membership, and there was no attempt to impose it on the empire. It looked more like a Sufi-style discipleship, with the emperor as pir (spiritual master), fused with a courtly bond of loyalty. The older view that Akbar founded a syncretic faith to replace Islam rests heavily on Badauni and the Jesuits. Both had reasons to exaggerate: Badauni to condemn it, the missionaries to explain their failure. The question is open, and it is also political: in modern India and Pakistan, Akbar has been made a hero of pluralism and a villain of apostasy.

Sulh-i kul: "peace with all"

The principle that tied Akbar's policies together was named sulh-i kul, "peace with all" or universal reconciliation. Abu'l-Fazl worked it into a theory of sovereignty. In his account the true king receives a divine light, the farr-i izadi, which passes from God to the ruler and sets him above the quarrels of sects, obliging him to protect all his subjects alike. The older Islamic language called the sultan God's shadow on earth; Abu'l-Fazl's language of light echoed Persian and Illuminationist philosophy.

Sulh-i kul was a policy of the state, not a promise of perfect tolerance. After the siege of Chittor in 1568 Akbar ordered a general massacre; the figure of some 30,000 dead is given in the sources. He also punished religious leaders who opposed him. But under this principle he did the following:

• Jain requests. He received the Jain teacher Hiravijaya Suri in 1582, gave him the title Jagadguru, "world teacher", and at Jain request forbade the killing of animals on the days of the Paryushana festival. Later decrees extended such bans to other days, including Sundays, sacred to the sun.
• Sikhs. He is said by Sikh tradition to have visited the third Sikh Guru, Amar Das, at Goindwal around 1569 and to have eaten in the langar, the free kitchen, seated on the floor among ordinary people, as the Guru required. The story is a cherished tradition; its details come from later Sikh sources.
• Hindu festivals. Hindu festivals were celebrated at court.

The House of Translation

In 1574 Akbar founded the Maktab Khana, a "house of translation", at Fatehpur Sikri. Its greatest project was the Razmnama, the "Book of War": a Persian version of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, made in the 1580s and completed around 1584–86.

The translation was made in stages:

1. Hindu scholars explained the Sanskrit. 2. Naqib Khan, with Badauni and others, made a Persian draft. 3. The poet Faizi, Abu'l-Fazl's brother, polished passages.

Badauni hated the work, which he thought poisoned his faith. The royal copy was painted by the imperial atelier and covered all eighteen books of the epic and its appendix, the Harivamsha. It is one of the great illustrated manuscripts of the world. The Ramayana, the Atharvaveda and other works were also translated.

The aim is usually described as mutual understanding: Muslims and Hindus who knew each other's scriptures would quarrel less. Abu'l-Fazl wrote a preface to the Razmnama in that spirit. Modern scholars (Audrey Truschke among them) have also read the translations as a way to fold Sanskrit learning into the imperial ideology, with the Mughal emperor as heir to Indian kingship.

After Akbar: reaction, mysticism and Aurangzeb

Akbar died at Agra on 25 October 1605. The Jesuits' hope that he would die a Christian was not fulfilled; the accounts that he died as a Muslim cannot all be tested, and they come from partisans on each side. The imperial circle of disciples did not outlast him in any organized way. Abu'l-Fazl had been killed on 12 August 1602 near Narwar by the men of the Bundela chief Vir Singh Deo, acting for Akbar's son Salim.

Orthodox reaction. The Naqshbandi shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) became the leading voice of Sunni reassertion against Akbar's legacy. He urged the rulers to reimpose the jizya and to restore Islamic law. Against the Sufi doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, the "unity of being", which could blur God and creation, he taught wahdat al-shuhud, "unity of witnessing". Jahangir imprisoned him in Gwalior fort in 1619; the reasons given vary, and some accounts say he refused to prostrate before the emperor. His followers called him the Mujaddid-i Alf-i Thani, "renewer of the second millennium" of Islam. How much influence he had in his own lifetime is debated.

Dara Shikoh. The opposite path was taken by Dara Shikoh (1615–1659), eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir to the throne, a disciple of the Qadiri Sufis:

• In 1654–55 he wrote the Majma al-Bahrayn, "The Confluence of the Two Seas", which set out correspondences between the terminology of Sufism and of Vedanta, the philosophy of the Upanishads.
• In 1657 he had fifty Upanishads translated from Sanskrit into Persian as the Sirr-i Akbar, "The Greatest Secret". In its preface he proposed that the "hidden book" (kitab maknun) mentioned in the Qur'an (56:78) is none other than the Upanishads.

That claim is a theological speculation of his own, not a position of Islamic scholarship. In the war of succession that began in 1657 Dara was defeated by his brother Aurangzeb, tried for heresy and executed in 1659.

The Sirr-i Akbar had an afterlife. Its Persian text reached France, where Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron translated it into Latin as the Oupnek'hat (1801–02). This was the first European translation of a body of Upanishads. Schopenhauer read it from 1814 and called it the consolation of his life and would be of his death.

Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707) reimposed the jizya in 1679 and ordered the destruction of certain major temples, including the Vishvanath temple at Benares and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura, both replaced by mosques. How to judge his reign is among the most bitterly contested questions in Indian history:

• Richard Eaton's survey of temple desecrations counts relatively few that can be securely tied to Aurangzeb's orders, and relates them to politics (rebellion and loyalty) rather than a general campaign.
• Audrey Truschke (Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King, 2017) stresses that he also protected temples and gave land grants to Brahmins.
• Critics answer that he was markedly less tolerant than his predecessors and that the numbers understate what his subjects experienced.

This chapter does not resolve that debate.

The believer's lens

For many Muslims in South Asia, Akbar's story is a warning. On this view an emperor, flattered by courtiers and confused by clever debaters, strayed from Islam; Sirhindi's renewal and Aurangzeb's piety restored it. For many others, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and secular, Akbar's court is an ideal: a ruler who listened to every faith and sought the truth common to all, and Dara Shikoh a martyr to that vision. For Jains, Hiravijaya's meeting with the emperor is remembered as a triumph of non-violence. For Sikhs, the emperor sitting on the floor of the langar shows the equality the Gurus taught. For Akbar's own disciples, as Abu'l-Fazl presents them, the emperor was a bearer of divine light, and devotion to him was a path to God. Each of these readings is a religious or moral judgement, and each draws selectively on the sources.

The skeptical lens

The historian first notes that nearly everything about Akbar's religion comes from three interested parties:

• Abu'l-Fazl, the paid ideologist;
• Badauni, the bitter critic writing in secret;
• the Jesuits, the disappointed missionaries.

None is neutral, and much of the famous detail, such as the prostrations to the sun and the mockery of Islam, comes from the hostile ones.

Second, the "tolerance" of Akbar was an instrument of rule. In an empire where Muslims were a minority, binding Rajputs, Hindu officials, Jain bankers and Shi'i nobles to the throne was sound statecraft. That does not make it insincere, but it cautions against reading modern secularism back into it.

Third, Aurangzeb's reign has become a battlefield of modern politics, and both hagiography and demonization of him often run ahead of the evidence. Counts of destroyed temples vary widely with the sources used and how the counting is done.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Light. The master image of Akbar's ideology is light (nur). Abu'l-Fazl's farr-i izadi is a divine radiance passing to the king. Akbar's veneration of the sun and of the sacred fire, belong to the same symbolic field, which drew on Persian kingship, Illuminationist philosophy and the Qur'an's Light Verse (24:35). Coins struck near the end of the reign bear the Qur'anic phrase "Nur ala nur", "Light upon light".
• A pun on a coin. From AH 992 / 1584 CE Akbar's coins carried the legend "Allahu akbar, jalla jalaluhu". On its face it is pious: "God is great; exalted is His glory." But akbar ("greater, greatest") was also the emperor's name, and jalal echoes his given name Jalal al-Din. Read another way, the phrase says "Akbar is God". Badauni and later critics took it that way; defenders read it as ordinary piety with a courtly wordplay. The ambiguity is real and is probably deliberate. It is a documented instance of a double meaning in sacred formula, not a hidden code found later.
• The Ilahi era. Akbar replaced dating by the Islamic hijri calendar, in parts of state use, with a solar Ilahi era counted from his own accession, with Persian month names. Dating is itself a statement about whose time the empire kept.
• The jharokha and darshan. The emperor's daily appearance at a palace window turned a Hindu devotional form, the sight of the divine, into imperial ceremony. In paintings under Jahangir and Shah Jahan the emperor, often framed as if at the jharokha, wears a halo. The painters took the device from the Christian images that the Jesuits had brought, and it became a standard sign of Mughal sovereignty.
• Images from the Jesuits. The Jesuit missions brought illustrated books, engravings and paintings, and Akbar had his artists copy them; Jahangir went on collecting Christian images. Mughal artists painted the Virgin, Christ and saints from these models. The imagery was absorbed into Mughal art as a language of sanctity and kingship, not as a sign of conversion.
• Architecture as statement. The gate of the great mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, the Buland Darwaza, carries a Persian inscription quoting a saying attributed in Islamic tradition to Jesus (Isa, son of Mary): "The world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it." The saying is attested in Islamic sources, not in the New Testament. Fatehpur Sikri as a whole, a capital built around a Sufi saint's tomb, placed the emperor's rule under a saint's blessing. The white marble tomb of Salim Chishti in the mosque courtyard is still visited by those praying for children, Hindus and Muslims alike.
• The confluence of two seas. Dara Shikoh's title takes a Qur'anic image (18:60, where Moses seeks "the meeting place of the two seas") and turns it into a symbol of Islam and Hindu thought meeting. The image is a reading, not a claim that the Qur'an speaks of Hinduism.

Connections

• Other chapters. Akbar's court stands where several chapters of this work meet:
• Sufism (ch27) supplied his model of master and disciple, and the dispute over wahdat al-wujud.
• Shi'ism (ch80) came to court through the Iranian nobility.
• The Jains, the Parsis of Zoroastrian tradition (ch06), and the Sikhs (ch34) all received imperial favour.
• The Bhakti movements of the preceding centuries had already blurred Hindu and Muslim devotion in popular song.
• The Mongol parallel. The comparison with the Mongol court (ch81) is apt: Akbar descended from Chinggis Khan, and his debates recall Möngke's contest of religions at Karakorum in 1254. Both were empires that ruled many faiths and sought legitimacy above them.
• Europe. Akbar's reign coincided with the Reformation and the wars of religion (ch31): while Catholics and Protestants were killing one another in Europe, a Muslim emperor in India was hosting their missionaries' debates.
• Later influence. Dara Shikoh's Upanishads reached Europe and fed the Romantic and Theosophical interest in Indian thought (ch37).

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