Padshah-i Islam

The kites wheeling into the twisting thermals over Fatehpur Sikri in 1579 would have witnessed a highly unusual sight. Over the smooth red walls of the palace a charpoy was being slowly hoisted up, carrying a Brahmin, one Debi, a theologian and a scholar. The charpoy reached a balcony perched high on the fortress where the Padshah of Hindustan was sitting on a takht, leaning out to listen to the priest. A discussion was had, in which the Brahmin ‘instructed [Akbar] in the secrets and legends of Hinduism, in the manner of worshipping idols, the fire, the sun and stars and of revering the chief gods of these unbelievers, such as Brahma, Mahadev, Bishn, Kishn, Ram and Mahama… His Majesty, on hearing further how much the people of the country prized their institutions, began to look upon them with affection.’ The writer of these astounding words was Badauni, appalled witness to Akbar’s increasing interest in different religions and alternative truths. Badauni also wrote that a Brahmin named Purushottam, a scholar and a translator, had been asked by Akbar to invent Sanskrit names for all things in existence. Abu’l Fazl, reflected more compassionately on Akbar’s affection for his Hindu subjects when he wrote about the people of Hindustan in lyrical terms: ‘Shall I describe the constancy of its inhabitants or record their benevolence of mind? Shall I portray the beauty that charms the heart or sing of purity unstained? The inhabitants of this land are religious, affectionate, hospitable, genial and frank. They are fond of scientific pursuits, inclined to austerity of life, seekers after justice, contented, industrious, capable in affairs, loyal, truthful and constant.’

 

Akbar had demonstrated for a long while his affinity and fondness for the people of Hindustan: his long hair, his careful etiquette, his love of Indian tales like the Panchatantra and Singhasan Battisi, his nurturing of Rajput and other Hindu noblemen, his elimination of discriminatory laws and practices were all manifestations of this fondness. Now, in October 1578, Akbar spoke openly in court of his great love for the people of ‘Hind’ and ‘praised the truth-based nature of the people of India’.

 

If the manner of Akbar’s enquiring into the tenets of Hinduism by suspending a Brahmin on a charpoy was altogether piquant and unusual, then there were a great many such scenes playing themselves out in Fatehpur Sikri at this time as Akbar’s plastic, inquiring mind analysed everything of interest around him. When Hakim Ali Geelani, a Unani* physician of renown, arrived at the Mughal court from Persia, Akbar ordered several bottles containing the urine of healthy and sick people as well as that of cattle and asses to be presented to the hakim for the detection of disease. Fortunately for the physician, he was said to have diagnosed each one correctly and thereby became a valued and favourite courtier of Akbar. Badauni was somewhat less enthralled with the young Shia physician and he wrote that ‘his excellence in acquired knowledge and especially the science of medicine is extreme…but he is a youth, self-opinionated and of limited experience…. It sometimes happens,’ added Badauni with caustic wit, ‘that a patient after taking one of his draughts speedily has a taste of the draught of extinction.’

 

If the manner of Akbar’s enquiring into the tenets of Hinduism by suspending a Brahmin on a charpoy was altogether piquant and unusual, then there were a great many such scenes playing themselves out in Fatehpur Sikri at this time as Akbar’s plastic, inquiring mind analysed everything of interest around him.

 

Another experiment conducted around this time was prompted by the arrival at court of a man with no ears, just a flap of skin where the ears would have been. But even without ears, the man could hear everything around him provoking considerable amazement. Akbar wanted to understand if there might be a ‘natural language’, a zuban-i-qudrut, which would be spoken even if it wasn’t heard and learnt through childhood. He then ordered that twenty infants be placed in a specially constructed sarai and attended to by wet nurses and attendants who were told strictly never to talk to their charges. As Fatehpur Sikri resonated with the many languages of the numerous itinerant visitors, in ‘Gung Mahal’,^† as it was popularly known, the infants grew up in hushed and disconcerting silence. A few years later Akbar rode past the Gung Mahal again, and stopped by to visit the children. They communicated only in grunts and gestures and no natural language, concluded the Padshah, had spontaneously evolved in the silence that surrounded them.

 

 

In the ibadat khana, Akbar continued to search out truths in their many beguiling forms. These philosophical discussions, initiated by Shaikh Mubarak and his sons, greatly enchanted Akbar, as we have seen, who had not had a formal introduction to these ideas in his boyhood. Now, Akbar admitted, these high voltage exchanges between articulate and learned men enthralled him. ‘I have organized this majlis for the purpose only that the facts of every religion, whether Hindu or Muslim, be brought out in the open,’ said Akbar, according to an early recension of the Akbarnama. ‘The closed hearts of our (religious) leaders and scholars [have to] be opened so that the Musulmans should come to know who they are!… They only think of Muslims (i.e. themselves) as those who recite kalima, consume meat and perform sijda on the earth. (They should know) Muslims are those who wage war on their “self ” and control their desires and temper; and surrender (themselves) to the rule of law.’

 

In September 1579, in the midst of these discussions, an extraordinary document was drafted by Shaikh Mubarak and signed by an additional six of the leading ulema of the court including Abd un-Nabi, the hakim ul-mulk, and Abdullah Sultanpuri. ** This decree, or mazhar, proclaimed Akbar to be the Padshah-i Islam and the Mujtahid of the Age. Through this declaration Akbar proclaimed for himself the role of interpreter of the law, thus freeing himself from the narrow confines of the sharia as practised by the ulema, and their distressingly limited understanding. Now, when disputes arose over religious points of law, it would be Akbar who would decide the issue and have the final say. However, it is clear that in the mazhar the emperor’s title as Padshah-i Islam, head of the orthodox Muslims, was sanctioned by the ulema, and not by divine providence, and Akbar only had the power to interpret Muslim law, not to create it. Moreover, every opinion Akbar proposed had to be in accordance with the Koran. He did not invent a new office for himself and in effect took over the functions and powers earlier vested in the sadr. The relatively pedestrian ambition of the mazhar can be gauged by Abu’l Fazl’s silence over it. Though it was drafted by his own father, Abu’l Fazl gives it a cursory recording because, for him, Akbar would go on to reveal much grander claims as his luminous destiny ‘unveiled’ itself. The term ‘mujtahid’ that Akbar adopted was, however, particularly provocative. It was a term used for a scholar of Islamic law who used judgement, or ijtihad, to resolve finely balanced points of law that had no legal precedent. Yet Akbar, as he had openly declared, was illiterate. So Akbar’s impeccable knowledge, despite his illiteracy, was explained by Abu’l Fazl as being supreme and intuitive knowledge as opposed to the learning of ‘paper-worshipping scholiasts’.

 

In September 1579, in the midst of these discussions, an extraordinary document was drafted by Shaikh Mubarak and signed by an additional six of the leading ulema of the court including Abd un-Nabi, the hakim ul-mulk, and Abdullah Sultanpuri. This decree, or mazhar, proclaimed Akbar to be the Padshah-i Islam and the Mujtahid of the Age. Through this declaration Akbar proclaimed for himself the role of interpreter of the law, thus freeing himself from the narrow confines of the sharia as practised by the ulema, and their distressingly limited understanding

 

In addition to the mazhar, Akbar also in this year decided to recite the khutba, the Friday prayers which usually included wishes for the reigning sovereign, himself. Faizi composed some verses for Akbar to recite from the pulpit:

In the name of Him who gave us sovereignty,

Who gave us a wise heart and a strong arm

Who guided us in equity and justice

Who put away from our heart aught but equity:

His praise is beyond the range of our thoughts

Exalted be his Majesty—Allahu Akbar!

 

 

The Mazhar of 1579 caused considerable disquiet, both in its own time and in the many interpretations attributed to it over the centuries. Apart from Shaikh Mubarak, it is likely that most of the other ulema signed the document under duress, submitting to pressure from the court. When the ulema of Delhi, the next most important city after the capital, were asked to sign the mazhar, Shaikh Jamaluddin refused, saying ‘why should we faqirs and people living in seclusion be troubled?’ referring to the greater austerity of the Delhi shaikhs and their careful distance from the glamour and lure of the court. Rumours began to spread that the imperial qazis had been forced, against their better judgement, to sign the document. The reading of the khutba was viewed with even more unease. The phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’ ***  was deliberately ambiguous yet almost insouciantly provocative. Even Babur and Humayun had had the traditional khutba recited, nominally giving reverence to the Ottoman Sultan. Akbar now deliberately distanced himself from acknowledging the Ottoman Sultan as overlord of all Islamic kingdoms and instead claimed for himself the role of king of the orthodox Muslims of Hindustan and for the Mughal Empire an equally righteous claim to rule in the land.

 

The phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’  was deliberately ambiguous yet almost insouciantly provocative. Even Babur and Humayun had had the traditional khutba recited, nominally giving reverence to the Ottoman Sultan. Akbar now deliberately distanced himself from acknowledging the Ottoman Sultan as overlord of all Islamic kingdoms and instead claimed for himself the role of king of the orthodox Muslims of Hindustan and for the Mughal Empire an equally righteous claim to rule in the land.

 

In response to these upheavals, there was a fusillade of caustic and sharp one-liners from critical courtiers and observers. Mullah Sheri, a courtier ‘renowned for his devastating one-liners as much as for his Islamic orthodoxy,’ according to historian Harbans Mukhia, said ‘this year His Majesty has laid claim to being the Prophet, next year, if God wills, he will become God himself’. Other courtiers, loath to attack the Padshah, laid the blame on Shaikh Mubarak’s sons, Abu’l Fazl and Faizi. The poet Urfi of Shiraz made an allusion to this scandalous influence when he wrote, ‘O Prophet, protect the Joseph of my soul (i.e. my soul) from the harm of the brothers; for they are ungenerous and envious, and deceive me like evil spirits and lead me wolf-like to the well (of unbelief)’. Akbar was particularly piqued when any reference was made to the disapproval of Ottoman sensibilities. When Qutbuddin Khan and Shahbaz Khan objected to the mazhar saying ‘what would the King of the West, as the Sultan of Rum, say if he heard all this?’ Akbar reacted sharply, accusing the men of secretly being spies from Constantinople, and sarcastically suggesting they go back to that country. The debate took a rather heated turn when Birbal joined in and Shahbaz Khan rounded on him, calling him a ‘cursed infidel’ and threatened him—Akbar could no longer contain himself and shouted to the dissenters in surprisingly robust language saying ‘would that they would beat your mouths with a slipper full of filth!’

 

Sensing these undercurrents of hostility and bitterness, Akbar decided to make a pilgrimage to Ajmer, as he had done so many times in the past decade in gratitude, hope, and prayer, but this time ‘as a means of calming the public and enhancing the submission of the recalcitrant’, according to Abu’l Fazl. Akbar dismounted several miles from the sacred spot to continue the journey on foot but ‘sensible people smiled’, wrote Badauni, and said ‘it was strange that His Majesty should have such a faith in the Khwaja of Ajmer, while he rejected the foundation of everything our Prophet, from whose “skirt” hundreds of thousands of saints of the highest degree like the Khwajah had sprung’. Perhaps Akbar might have sensed in the elements themselves a warning. On his way back from Ajmer, torrential rains lasting for three days caused a sudden, catastrophic flood which ‘washed out a large number of men, cattle and goods’.

 

This was to be Akbar’s last visit to Ajmer, this mystical spot where he had brought the turbulence of his thoughts so many times over the past ten years. These many repeated visits to the dargah, especially in the past decade, had been crucial in guiding his trajectory, as Akbar began to look for alternatives to orthodox Islam. Akbar would have been exposed to pantheistic Sufi doctrines, including fana, or extinction of the ego or the self, where the need to overcome one’s own bodily desires transcended other religious considerations. The Sufis had pragmatically accommodated themselves to the presence of other beliefs and often incorporated aspects of Hindu and Buddhist practices. ‘They shunned ritual and ceremony,’ according to historian Muzaffar Alam, ‘and spoke the language of the common people.’ Akbar had also carefully cultivated the symbology of the Ajmer dargah, along with Shaikh Salim’s living blessings, and effortlessly made it a part of the legacy of the Mughals of Hindustan. Now, finally, Akbar may have felt he had outgrown the need for this constant, visible reverence, having seen other, blazing horizons and guessed at many seductive truths.

 

After the Mazhar of 1579, once Akbar began to free himself from the need to be defined by a narrow Islamic identity, he began the complex and complicated process of creating a new identity for himself that reflected the diverse people and faiths of the court and the country. Among the nobility alone, for example, 17 per cent were Irani and another 15 per cent were Hindu. But before he could do that he had one last great challenge to face from someone who represented the old values and purely Timurid charisma—Mirza Hakim. In the next few years, having responded to the gauntlet laid down by that brother, Akbar would invite thinkers and scholars from across the empire and beyond the seas to Fatehpur Sikri and would assess the truth of their various beliefs.

 

As he evolved, another previously sacrosanct authority Akbar had finally outgrown were the duo of Abd un-Nabi and Abdullah Sultanpuri. ‘When two people clash together,’ was Badauni’s bitter assessment, referring to their constant bickering, ‘they fall together.’

 

The debate took a rather heated turn when Birbal joined in and Shahbaz Khan rounded on him, calling him a ‘cursed infidel’ and threatened him—Akbar could no longer contain himself and shouted to the dissenters in surprisingly robust language saying ‘would that they would beat your mouths with a slipper full of filth!’ 

 

Despite their great reluctance and shrill protests, Akbar sent them away to Mecca, with orders never to return to Hindustan. While the two mullahs were perforce being coaxed to depart to Surat and onward to the Holy Lands, three theologians of a different faith were heading in the opposite direction, from Goa to Fatehpur Sikri, carrying the relics of long-dead saints and dreams of martyrdom in their hearts.

 

*Traditional Islamic medicine developed and refined after studying the systems of the ancient Greek physicians. Largely spread through the efforts of the tenth-century Muslim physician and scholar, Ibn Sina, more popularly known as Avicenna.

 

†House of the Deaf.

**The other three were Ghazi Khan, Qazi Jaladuddin Multani, and Sadri Jahan Mufti.

***Which could be understood either as ‘God is Great’ or ‘Akbar is God!’