Akbar and the Divine Faith

Akbar came to the throne in 1556 at the age of thirteen, heir to a young and fragile empire founded by his grandfather Babur. Over the next half-century he expanded Mughal rule across most of northern and central India, governing a population in which Muslims were a minority and Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and others formed the majority. Early in his reign he took steps that won him support beyond the Muslim elite. He married Rajput princesses, appointed Hindu nobles to high office and, in 1564, abolished the jizya, the poll tax traditionally levied on non-Muslims under Islamic law.

Akbar was also personally drawn to religious questions. The sources describe him spending nights in prayer and conversation, and he was attracted to Sufi mysticism, especially the Chishti order, whose saint Shaikh Salim Chishti he venerated. In 1575, at his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, he built the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship, where scholars gathered on Thursday nights, the eve of Friday, to debate. At first the participants were Muslim theologians and jurists, and the disputes among them were bitter. Badauni, who attended, recalls scholars shouting and insulting one another, which seems to have lowered Akbar’s confidence in the religious establishment.

From around 1578 the circle widened. Hindu pandits, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests and later Christian missionaries came to court. In 1580 the first Jesuit mission arrived from Portuguese Goa, led by Rodolfo Acquaviva, with Antonio Monserrate, whose account of the court survives. The Jesuits hoped to convert the emperor and were disappointed when he showed interest in every faith without committing to theirs. The Jain monk Hiravijaya Suri also visited, and Jain sources credit him with persuading Akbar to restrict animal slaughter on certain days.

Zoroastrian priests from Gujarat, among them Dastur Meherji Rana, also came to court, and Abu’l Fazl reports that a sacred fire was kept burning in the palace and that the emperor honoured the sun at set times of day. Akbar’s curiosity took scholarly form too. He sponsored a translation bureau that rendered Sanskrit works into Persian, including the Mahabharata, known in its Persian version as the Razmnama, or Book of War, and the Ramayana, often lavishly illustrated by court painters. Badauni, who was assigned to work on some of these translations, complained bitterly of the task. For Akbar, it seems, every tradition held some part of the truth worth examining.

Out of these discussions grew an idea of kingship rather than a creed. Akbar’s minister and historian Abu’l Fazl described the ruler as a figure illuminated by divine light, standing above sectarian quarrels and responsible for the welfare of all his subjects. The guiding principle was sulh-i kull, peace with all: the state would not favour one religion over another, and it would protect the worship of every community. In 1579 a group of leading scholars signed a declaration that recognised the emperor’s authority to choose between competing interpretations of Islamic law, which critics saw as a bid to control the religious scholars.

Around 1582, the sources say, Akbar began to accept a small number of courtiers as disciples. The ceremony involved the disciple placing his head at the emperor’s feet and receiving a token, often a likeness of the emperor. Disciples pledged readiness to sacrifice property, life, honour and religion for their master, a formula that reflects the language of Sufi discipleship and of personal loyalty to the ruler. They were encouraged to avoid meat on certain days, to greet one another with formulas praising God, and to honour light, the sun and fire as signs of the divine. The surviving lists name only around eighteen or nineteen members, among them Abu’l Fazl himself and the Hindu courtier Birbal. The Rajput commander Man Singh, one of the empire’s greatest nobles, is reported to have declined.

Almost everything we know comes from two men with opposite views. Abu’l Fazl, in the Akbarnama and the Ain-i Akbari, presents Akbar as a philosopher-king and his policies as wise and tolerant. Badauni, an orthodox scholar who served at court, wrote a secret history, the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, in which he accused Akbar of abandoning Islam and inventing a new faith. His book was not circulated during Akbar’s lifetime. Later European historians, reading Badauni and the Jesuit letters, popularised the idea that Akbar had founded a new religion, and the term Din-i Ilahi, which appears mainly in later writings, became attached to it.

Modern historians, including S. A. A. Rizvi and contributors to Irfan Habib’s volume on Akbar, have largely rejected that picture. There was no scripture, no priesthood, no places of worship and no attempt to convert the empire. Instead, the discipleship is seen as an elite order of loyalty, drawing on Sufi models of master and disciple and on Persian ideas of sacred kingship, which bound key nobles to the emperor personally.

When Akbar died in 1605, the discipleship faded quickly. His son Jahangir kept the policy of broad tolerance and, according to some historians, went on giving favoured nobles tokens of discipleship, but the circle never again had the prominence it had under Akbar. The principle of sulh-i kull, however, had a longer life. It shaped Mughal administration for decades, until Aurangzeb, who reigned from 1658, reimposed the jizya in 1679 and favoured a stricter Islamic policy.

Akbar’s experiment has been remembered in very different ways. Some have celebrated him as a pioneer of religious tolerance and dialogue, and the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri draw many visitors. Others, following Badauni, have seen in him a ruler who strayed from Islam. His great-grandson Dara Shikoh, who studied the Upanishads and wrote on the meeting of Sufism and Hindu thought, continued something of his spirit of enquiry, but he lost the war of succession to Aurangzeb and was executed in 1659. Historians today tend to place him within the world of sixteenth-century Islamic kingship, Sufism and Indian diversity rather than treating him as the founder of a new religion.