ACADEMIA Letters
“The Quarrel of the Universe let be”: the Akbarian “Universal Peace” (Sul-i-kul) Experiment in 16th century Mughal India
Tadd Fernee, New Bulgarian University
Universal Peace
The 16th-century Mughal state, under Emperor Akbar (1556–1605), coincided with Philip II’s (1556-98) Inquisitional campaign of Catholic purification in Spain. Akbar’s “Univer sal Peace” (Sul-i-kul) combined Indo-Islamic political traditions with an innovative secular rationalism, responding to early global modernity. The “enlightened philosophers” at Akbar’s court rejected the “chill blast of inflexible custom”.[1] Akbar commended “obedience to the dictates of reason”, reproving “a slavish following of others”.[2] Court historian Abul Fazl in voked an “earnest search for truth” to dispel “the darkness of the age by the light of universal toleration”.[3] “Universal Peace” anticipated Europe’s “moderate Enlightenment” rather than its “radical” stream driving French Revolutionary tabla raza politics.[4] A modernist horizon produced state patronage in science and technology, translation, and secularized arts, recruit ing multi-religious talent. Akbar said: “No one should be allowed to neglect those things that the present time requires”.[5]
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Universal peace sought to break the truth-violence-monotheism triangle: “Each one re garding his own persuasion alone as true, has set himself to the persecution of other worship pers of God, and the shedding of blood [has become] the symbol of religious orthodoxy.”[6] Abul Fazl saw “silence” and “fear” resulting from “fanatics who lust for blood”.[7] Akbar regretted early forced conversions: “we by fear and force compelled many believers in the Brahmin religion to adopt the faith of our ancestors.”[8] He restored converted mosques to Hindu temples.[9] Abul-Fazl condemned “clinging to an idea”, instead of people “judging for themselves”. For with “reflection”, people “shake off the prejudices of their education, the threads of the web of religious blindness break”.[10] Akbar argued: “What constancy might one expect from those converted under duress?”[11] This anticipated Locke: faith requires reason, not coercion.
Sufi Origins
Akbar’s reign experienced the “strife between shariat (Muslim Law) and tariqat (Sufism) which had started in West Asia with the rise of Sufism”.[12] Important Sufi currents saw the path to God as individual, not in outward obedience to authority. Al-Hasan al-Basri (643-728) said: “I have not served God from fear of hell for I should be a wretched hireling if I served him from fear.”[13]
In 1562, Akbar, moved by Sufi music, regularly visited Khwaja Mu’inu’d-Din Chishti’s shrine. This 13th century Chishti Sufi founder had taught that “if one is very hurt, one should pray to God to guide one’s enemy toward the right path”.[14] Another Chishtiyya founder urged that “no harm be done to any form of life”, pleading that his “followers be totally veg etarian”. A disciple enquired concerning the harm in meat from butcher shops. The Shaikh replied: “the butcher would have to kill again in order to replace the meat that was sold”.[15] Chishti valued dialogue over force: “Annihilate the enemy by discussion.”[16] From 1562, Akbar’s humanitarian reforms commenced.[17] In 1562, “abolish[ing] the enslavement of the families of captives finally stemmed the tide of forcible conversions to Islam”.[18] Chishti treatises argued for “no precedence of one religion over another”.[19] By the 1570s, Akbar completely followed the Chishti saints.[20]
Many humanitarian measures followed 1579: the abolition of slavery (1582), forced labour (1597), child marriage (1595) and widow immolation (sati)as a wifely duty (1583). In 1580, Akbar announced that “no man or woman, minor or adult was to be enslaved and that no con cubine or slave of Indian birth was to be bought or sold, for this concerned priceless life”.[21] Animal welfare also figured. The Jain saint Hariji Sur persuaded Akbar “to issue an edict forbidding the slaughter of animals for six months (…) and to set free many snared birds and animals”.[22] Cow slaughter was prohibited.[23] The slaughter of thousands of wild herds in a military demonstration of imperial might was canceled.[24] The animals were released with the message: “no one should be guilty of even killing a sparrow”.[25] Sul-i kul was preceded by Hindu-Muslim popular unity in bhakti and Sufi movements based on shared yogic practices and convictions about tolerance. The Mughal state tapped into this, “a force of social energy greater than the state.”[26] Identities were “amorphous” and barriers “permeable”, with an absence of sharp we/they distinctions”.[27]
Ibkahat
The Ibkahat (House of Worship)provided an all-religious symposium. Sunnis, Shi’as, Hin dus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians dialogued non-violently in seeking truth. Abul Fazl, seeing “persecution” thwarting “earnest inquiry”, urged “calmness of mind and freedom of expression” to “severe” truth from error.[28] The Ibkahat, “built around the cell of a Sufi saint”, hostedtheological discussions from 1575. Following successful empire-building, Ak bar initially consulted the Sunni theologians to implement God’s dictates (Shari’ a). When the theologians quarrelled fiercely, Akbar grew disillusioned. At first, only Muslims were admitted (Sufi shaikhs, ulama, and learned men). After 1578, the debate opened to Hindus, Jains, Christians and Zoroastrians. The ideological collision undermined consensus over fun damental issues, including the finality of Qur’anic revelation.[29] Mulla Badauni described profound intellectual enquiry: “Night and day people did nothing but inquire and investi gate … Profound points of science, the subtleties of revelation, the curiosities of history, the wonders of nature … were ever spoken of”.[30]
Akbar’s vow “to liberate and dissociate himself (ibra wa tabarra namuda) from the tradi tional and imitative religion (din-i-majazi wa taqlidi)” followed from his doubts.[31] Closed in 1582, two consequences followed. Akbar believed “that all religions had elements of truth, and all of them led to the Supreme Reality”. Secondly, “the narrowness of views, bigotry and arrogance of the court ulamas” showed. For Akbar, this produced “the concept of Sulh-I Kul”, with its “crucial role in the emergence of a new liberal, tolerant state”.[32]
Another consequence was to marginalize the orthodox Sunni ulama, the ideological allies of the invading Mughals in the early military conquest. Orthodox court historian Abd-Al Qader Badauni disapprovingly observed: “Muslim radicals [were] throwing doubts on the authority of prophets and Imams, and utterly denying the existence of demons and angels, and mysteries and signs and miracles”.[33]
Transnational Space
The Akbarian court knew “that the Europeans had discovered the Americas, which [they] called Alam-i Nau, or the New World”.[34] Akbar was “keenly interested in the technologies and scientific discoveries of Europe”, sending “craftsmen to Goa to procure European goods and to learn European crafts”.[35] Such knowledge “could not but engender questioning about the finality of traditional knowledge”.[36]
The Akbarian conversion of local rulers into a service class of officials, new openness to the population through public “dawn meetings”, new translation bureaus to create a multi lingual integrated “public”, and the building of secure transport for military, trade and taxation purposes: these policies resemble 16th century European “new monarchies”.[37] The Mughal Empire existed within the Islamicate world of mobile wealth, long distance trade, extensive monetization, and military slaves. The Ottoman and the Safavid empires clashed continuously for control of Bagdad, South-Western Iran and Azerbaijan in a bitter sectarian Sunni/Shi’i conflict. The appalling Battle of Chaldiran (1514) witnessed European cannons and muskets for the first time in Central Asia, following their invention near Calais (1347).[38] Artillery accelerated easy killing. Old noble customs of slow and ritualized combat expired, as in 15th century Europe or Japan after 1543, and, tragically, in the 1532 massacre of the Incas by Pizarro.[39]
From 1579, “Hindustan” was “the centre of security and peace, and the land of justice and beneficence”, the home to floods of Iranian refugees fleeing the religious persecution of the Safavid court.[40] Persian poets fled to “Akbar’s land of religious freedom”.[41] Iranian Shiites were permitted to practice openly. This happened only years after the Massacre of the Night of St. Bartholomew in France, in 1572, following the Religious Wars, where 30,000 people were massacred in a single night.[42]
Imperial Consolidation
Akbar and Philip II present contrasting imperial consolidation strategies. The comparison reveals how the 16th-century pattern of economic growth favouring large states - identified by Fernand Braudel as the structural-conjunctural condition of early modernity - posed common horizons and challenges in Asia and Europe, with shared collective representations, producing also a shared range of alternate consolidation strategies. Both rulers consolidated large realms within the space of the “modern world” opened up by the American discoveries and new At lantic trade routes.[43] The silver from Philip’s American colonies financed continuous wars, while arriving in India to monetize the land revenue. Following Spanish seizure of Portugal in 1580, Philip headed the Portuguese Estado do India. Akbar welcomed Portuguese traders bringing silver, declaring: “we must not reject a thing that has been adopted by people of the world, merely because we cannot find it in our own books; or how shall we progress?”[44]
For Akbar and Philip, state organization required expensive artillery and a standing army, a tax base, and efficient territorial administration. Both relied on personal ties with local rul ing elites rather than impersonal institutions. Tolerance and intolerance were alternate strate gies of imperial consolidation. Although ideologies and values figured in their decisions, it remains crucial to recognize the wider transnational clusters of historically interrelated struc tures involving economies, technologies, organizations, and populations as well as the discur sive and imaginative resources shaping their divergent imperial politics. Yet this was also a conscious process, a revolution in thought about possible futures, that impacted all social cat egories. The long-term struggle of the ulama to keep the ambiguous pantheistic tendencies of predominant Chishti Sufism in conformity with received doctrine was transformed by a “public sphere” of open contestation with Ibkadat Khana (House of Worship). Change had a significantly dialogic character. In 1582, Akbar corresponded with Philip: “men most [being] fettered by bonds of tradition, [and] imitating the ways followed by their fathers”, ignoring “ar guments and reasons”, were “excluding [themselves] from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect”. Akbar opposed following “the religion in which [one] was born and educated”.[45]
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Alternate Horizons
The year 1579 saw open revolt, a power struggle opposing Akbar and the dominant ulama who had lost their madad-i mash grants in the altered power balance.[46] Open ideological difference again erupted with the War of Succession (1657-1659). Akbar’s great grandson, Dara Shikoh (1615-59), argued for the unity of Islam and Hinduism in his The Mingling of Two Oceans (Majma-ul-Bahrain), declaring religions “separate in name, but in essence one with God”. The “ocean” transforms “itself into drops, waves and bubbles”.[47] Dara Shikoh waged war against his fundamentalist brother Aurangzeb. Dara Shikoh was executed as a heretic, to “uproot the bramble of idolatry and infidelity from the realm of Islam”.[48] The Universal Peace experiment survived, however, rooted in Indian composite culture. All religions pre sented divergent paths to a single existential truth, based on an epistemic limit defining the human condition. Nobody could be certain of possessing absolute truth. A willingness to reform tradition based on moral norms independent of any specific religion was the conse quence. It is an egalitarian and non-interventionist principle incarnating Omar Khayyam’s (1048-1141) call: “The Quarrel of the Universe let be”.[49]
References
[1] Eugenia Vanina, “Describing the Common, Discovering the Individual: A Study in some Medieval Indian Biographies”, in D.N. JHA and Eugenia Vanina, eds. Mind over Matter. Essays on Mentalities in Medieval India. (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), 91.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Syed Athar Abbas Rizvi, “Dimensions of Sulh-I Kul (Universal Peace) in Akbar’s Reign and the Sufi theory of the Perfect Man”, unpublished paper from the Akbar Fourth Cen tenary Conference, October 28-30, 2006 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Re search), 15.
[4] See Jonathon I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Eman cipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[5] Abraham Eraly, The Mughal World. Life in India’s Last Golden Age (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007), 341.
[6] Abul-Fazl, The A-In-I Akbari. III, 5-6. On the truth-violence-monotheism triangle see Mohammed Arkoun, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (London: Saqi, 2002).
[7] Abul-Fazl Allami, The A-In-I Akbari. Volume I, Tr. H. Blochmann (New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2008), 171.
[8] Harbans Mukhia, The Mughals of India (New Delhi, Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 37. [9] Mukhia, Mughals , 23.
[10] Abul-Fazl, The A-In-I Akbari I, 171.
[11] Mukhia, 38.
[12] Satish Chandra, Medieval India from Sultanat to Mughals. Part II (New Delhi:Har Anand, 2007), 431.
[13] Quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Stephen Hay, Royal Weiler, Andrew Yarrow (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), 412.
[14] Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India: Volume I (New Delhi: Munshi ram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997), 123.
[15] Quoted in Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India. I, 128.
[16] Quoted Ibid., 147.
[17] Ibid., 126.
[18] Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India: Volume II (New Delhi: Mun shiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2002), 425.
[19] Muzaffar Alam, “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaiks and the Formation of the Akbari Dis pensation”, in Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 28.
[20] Muzaffar Alam, “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaiks and the Formation of the Akbari Dis pensation”, 29.
[21] Quoted Irfan Habib, “Akbar and Social Inequities: A Study of the Evolution of his Ideas”, Proceedings, IHC: 53rd Session, 1992-93, 301.
[22] Pushpa Prasad, “Akbar and the Jains” in Akbar and his India, 99. [23] Eraly, 115.
[24] M. Athar Ali, Mughal India, 153.
[25] Shireen Moosvi, Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminis cences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007), 71.
[26] Mukhia, Mughals , 33.
[27] Ibid., 22.
[28] Abul-Fazl, The A-In-I Akbari III, 5.
[29] Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals. Part Two, 169-72. [30] Eraly, 341.
[31] Ibid.„ 20.
[32] Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals: Part Two, 169-72. [33] Eraly, 320.
[34] M. Athar Ali, Mughal India. Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67-69.
[35] Eraly, 342.
[36] Athar Ali, Mughal India, 67-69.
[37] Eraly, 174.
[38] Satish Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals. Part Two (New Delhi: Har-Anand, 2008), 42.
[39] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (London: Vintage, 1998), 257/68.
[40] Chandra, Medieval India, 174.
[41] Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Mughal Empire and the Iranian Diaspora of the Sixteenth Century”, in A Shared Heritage: The Growth of Civilizations in India and Iran, 107-108.
[42] Michael Curtis, The Great Political Theories: Volume One (New York: Harper perennial, 2008), 263.
[43] Dietmar Rothermund, “Akbar and Philip II of Spain: Contrasting Strategies of Imperial Consolidation”,unpublished paper from the Akbar Fourth Centenary Conference, October 28-30, 2006 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research), 1.
[44] Quoted in Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005), 291.
[45] Emperor Akbar, “A Letter of the Emperor Akbar Asking for the Christian Scriptures”, tr. Edward Rehatsek, in The Indian Antiquary, April 1887, 137.
[46] Chandra, Medieval India, 175.
[47] Dara Shikoh, “The Mystic Path”, in Sources of Indian Tradition, 445. [48] Quoted in Richards, 164.
[49] Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyet of Omar Khayyam (New York: Garden City Books, 1952), 63.
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