Teaching Notes – RTN Nov 2015
This exhibition seeks to spotlight the cosmopolitanism of Islamic traditions and showcase
the historical traces of a much broader “middle path” in Islam than many may realize.
The Mughal dynasty - 1526-1858 – a Muslim Persianate dynasty of Turco-Mongol
origin that successfully ruled over large parts of what is now the Indian subcontinent,
Pakistan and Afghanistan. The polity included 150 million people, of diverse ethnic
and religious backgrounds, and at its peak in 1700, constituted one of the largest and
wealthiest empires in human history. At its peak, the Mughals had the world’s strongest
currency, the most efficient tax and revenue system, and the highest exports.
Babur, direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, a 12 year-old Timurid prince in
search of a kingdom, who conquers the fabled city of Samarkand at age 14, only to lose it a
few years later. After much adversity, he wins the kingdom of Kabul in 1504 when he is 21.
Many hard fought battles are won and lost as he expands and consolidates his kingdom. In
1526, he embarks on a risky adventure: the conquest of India. With 12,000 men, and
tactical brilliance, he defeats the 100,000 strong army (+ 1000 war elephants) of Ibrahim
Lodhi, the Afghan Muslim king of North India. One of Babar’s first actions in his new
capital, Agra: he plants a garden! As he put it: to bring beauty and harmony to dusty and
disagreeable Agra. Babur was a lover of nature, a poet, a composer, and a disciple of the
Muslim Sufi saints:
Say not that the rank of king is far from that of the mysticsI am a king, but I am the slave of the mystics!
Fate did not permit Babur to consolidate his new empire. In 1530, after a brief illness he
died at Agra. His tomb is in a verdant, symmetrical Mughal garden in Kabul.
Babur’s eldest son, Humayun, succeeded to the throne as the empire encountered a turbulent
period, and for a time he was in exile. State formation was put on hold. Scholarly and
scientific minded, he built an astronomical observatory, and was known to carry his favorite
books into battle. A lover of art, he invited the two greatest painters of Iran to train
Indian artists, initiating one of the world’s most admired painting styles – the Mughal
miniatures. Humayun died unexpectedly in an accident in 1556, leaving a shaky throne to
his 13-year-old son, Akbar.
Akbar is known to history as Akbar the Great, the empire builder – he expanded and
consolidated the empire.
Akbar was born in a desert outpost where Humayun and his wife, Hamida Bano, had fled.
Mughal princes at age four were sent to Sufi masters for ethical and religious education, as
part of their very rigorous training in the responsibilities of kingship. Akbar was dyslexic
and could not learn how to read or write. But he developed a prodigious memory,
mastered the skills of statecraft, had a profoundly inquisitive mind and inherited his
family’s taste in the arts. Akbar took full charge of his realm at age 17 (1560) and
created a distinct Mughal polity and culture in a participatory process that fused
Persianate traditions with those of South Asia. Alongside an unbroken series of
military triumphs, Akbar was a master of alliance-building and invited warring
factions to participate in the joint enterprise of state-building. To cement relationships
with Hindu Rajputs, Akbar married Hindu princesses (who practiced their faith), a policy
his successors maintained. A Hindu Rajput princess was the mother of the next emperor,
Salim Jahangir. When Akbar found himself at the age of 26 with no male heir, he and his
Hindu wife, Akbar sought the prayers of a Muslim saint, Shaikh Saleem Chishti, (of the
Chishti sufi order) residing in Sikri. The saint foretold the birth of three sons. Within a year
(1569) the first was born and named Saleem after the saint. In gratitude, Akbar vowed to
construct a new capital at Sikri, known as Fatehpur Sikri. Here, between 1572-85,
Akbar and his advisors devised far-reaching changes that transformed the economy
and culture of South Asia. The result was a rapid increase in efficiency, employment, tax
collection, monetization of the economy, commerce, economic expansion and productivity
both in agriculture and manufacturing (continued till the British). The Mughals exported
textiles, dyes, sugar, steel, cash crops & diamonds, and became the major magnet of
precious metals in the world.
Akbar nurtured and guided a cultural renaissance, in art and music. Akbar’s court
provided a performative nexus for West Asian/Persian, Central Asian and South
Asian musicians, and dancers. This blending of traditions created the renowned
Hindustani classical music. It was under his patronage that the Mughal style in both
painting and architecture came into being.
The administrative and cultural foundations of empire that were laid in the halfcentury of his rule gave the region a political cohesion and a historical direction that
were felt well into the eighteenth century. The early colonial administrators of the East
India Company initially turned to the grand framework of Akbar’s reign, recorded in the
A’in i Akbari, for learning about the land and its people and the principles to govern it.
The Muslim Mughals ruled a realm where the majority of people were of other faiths
and sects, largely Hindus, but also Jains, Sikhs, Christians and Jews. Humayun
attempted to create an imperial cult modeled after the Sufi kingship of the Safavids of Iran
– inspired by emerging Sufi mystical institutions, elite knowledge of astrology and alchemy,
and popular reverence for and memories of saints and heroes. Humayun failed and was in
fact humiliated and uncrowned by the Safavid Shah of his time. It was Akbar who – in a
grand performance of sacrality at the marking of the Islamic millenium –and
established the sovereignty of the Mughal empire. Akbar visualized a symbol, above
and beyond scholastic theologies and doctrines, to provide the nexus and a focus of
loyalty. He and his leading advisor, Abul Fazl, created a new dynastic ideology – Din
e Ilahi (the divine religion) that relied on the charismatic authority of the emperor and
the Mughal house. A new political dispensation was instituted on the principle of sulhi-kul, universal peace. Akbar embodied the ancient Iranian idea of the divinely
sanctioned monarch, and the idea of the king as father to his people, rooted in ancient
Indian concepts of kingship. The righteous ruler protects the four worldly “essences”access to life, honor, wealth and religion of everyone, regardless of race or religion. At
the same time, while Din e Ilahi was not presented as a religion, it was founded upon the
idea that Akbar was the saint of the age. He was presented as the Muslim Sufi ideal of the
Perfect Man and his courtiers and officers were encouraged to become his disciples. The
Din e Ilahi also had a disdain for religious scholasticism of all kinds. Akbar was dyslexic,
and his experience of religion was material, tactile, embodied, performed, revering a sacred
that was closer to that of the mystic than of the cleric. He prayed with the Jesuits in chapel
and meditated on icons, he wore the sacred cord of the Zoroastrians, he memorized a
thousand names of the sun in Sanskrit, and he modified his diet according to tantric
principles. Akbar’s vision of the unity of his empire was founded on bringing these
cultic elements (symbols, emblems, relics and ritual) of multiple Indian traditions into
his own practice and self-identity as the saint-king and the Sufi Perfect Human, a guide
to all his subjects regardless of religion.
This was pragmatic and visionary state-building which fashioned a unique model of
mutually reinforcing dual loyalties. Every individual was expected to be loyal to and
promote her/his own heritage while being loyal to the overarching inclusive vision of the
state, personified in the charismatic head of state – the emperor. But at the same time, it
aligned well with Akbar’s own deep and insatiable interest in religion, especially
embodied faith. He built the House of Worship at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575, where
debates were held between theologians of different schools of Islam and
representatives of all the other religions of South Asia. In 1580 Akbar invited Jesuit
priests from Goa to participate. The Jesuits received daily allowances and free land in Agra
to build churches and prosyletize. In 1577, Akbar granted the city of Amritsar to the Sikh
community to erect the Golden Temple. Imperial land and money built mosques and Hindu
temples that were maintained with imperial funds and with Akbar’s support, Zoroastrians
established a school of philosophy. Akbar commissioned translations from Sanskrit,
Arabic, Turkish, and Latin into the language of his court, Persian. At its height,
Akbar’s library held 24,000 manuscripts.
Akbar’s experiments in religion made waves. The Jesuit chroniclers observed that some
“believed the king to be mad” while some conservative religious scholars felt that the king
was committing heresy on a daily basis through the promulgation of the Din e ilahi. His
relationship with the established clergy was not helped by an imperial decree in 1579
(signed probably reluctantly by eminent scholars of Islam) in which Akbar was declared
the imam of his age – the highest religious authority – which gave him the right to intervene
in matters of religious doctrine and law. This was highly unusual – temporal and spiritual
authority were usually kept separate. In many ways, Akbar was acting to bring control
and accountability to the religious establishment.
In all these efforts, Akbar was influenced and supported by a coterie of close advisors
– including Abul Fazl, a scholar and polymath - who was Akbar’s chief secretary,
historian, close friend, and officer and administrator. His family was of Yemeni descent.
His father, Shaykh Mubarak was a teacher and scholar who moved his family to Agra when
Akbar was establishing his rule in India. Both of his sons entered court service – Faizi was
Akbar’s poet laureate and more attracted to court life. Abul Fazl was a awkward and
bookish and lived an ascetic lifestyle – and was not too interested in the court, but his
sincerity and wisdom attracted Akbar and the two became close friends. Abul Fazl’s
influence has been enormous. Between 1589 and 1598, he penned the chronicle of Akbar’s
reign, the Akbarnameh (The chronicle of Akbar). The first two books are more narrative
histories and the third book, Āʾīn-e Akbarī (The Institutes or Regulations of Akbar’s
imperial administration) describes in detail India under Akbar’s reign.
Abu’l-Fażl created a legend of Akbar and messianic kingship that long survived both the
emperor and the empire. His ability to see the study of history as a secular, rational
endeavor was revolutionary; he used many different sources of information, from the
imperial archives to Hindu Rajput chronicles to oral traditions from Muslims and
Hindus. The AN is one of the main sources on Mughal history for historians today. But
equally important is Abu’l-Fażl’s role as a theorist of Islam in India: “He addressed
himself to the role of Islam in Indian history, squarely facing the difficulty of
reconciling theory with fact—the theory of Islam as a universal religion in which state
and community are ideally coterminous, with the historical fact that Islam in India
was the religion of a minority community ruling over a Hindu majority.” (Iranica
Online, see below)
According to him, all religions held the same universal truth. He understood Hindu
traditions as essentially monotheistic, and held that it was one and same God who was
worshipped in all religions. He was not the first by any means to hold to this. The idea of
Hindus as monotheists begins to take hold in the 11th century, in the works of the polymath
and explorer al-Biruni, who in his History of India, asserts that Brahmins worshipped the
single God – and was developed in the writings of multiple scholars for centuries. Many
of the early Muslim scholars who visited and/or wrote on India showed a nuanced and
sophisticated understanding and even appreciation of the use of images and idols in the
ritual and practice of other religions, even as they themselves affirmed monotheism. These
scholars include Al-Biruni (d. ca. 1048), al-Mas`udi (d. ca 947), al-Shahrastani (d. ca.
1142), al-Muqaddasi (d. ca. 990), Gardizi (d. before 1041), and al-Idrisi (d. 1166). These
ideas were also deeply ingrained in Muslim intellectual circles of Abul Fazl.
Resources consulted:
Munis Faruqui, Religious Interactions in Mughal India (co-edited with Vasudha Dalmia)
(Oxford University Press, 2014)
A. Azfar Moin, Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia
University Press, 2014)
Andre Wink, Akbar (Makers of the Muslim World Series) (Oneworld Publications: 2008)
Zeenut Ziad, The Magnificent Mughals (Oxford University Press, 2002)
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-fazl-allami-historian
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/akbar-nama-the-official-history-of-the-reign-of-themughal-emperor-akbar-964-1015-1556-1605-including-a-statistical-gaze