Abul Fazal’s Theory of Justice: A Pillar of Mughal Governance

When we talk about justice today, we picture courts, judges, and a written constitution. But in sixteenth-century Mughal India, justice rested almost entirely on the character of one person: the king. Abul Fazal, the brilliant historian and chief advisor to Emperor Akbar, built an entire theory around this idea. For him, justice was not just a legal procedure. It was the supreme duty of a ruler, the very reason a king deserved to sit on the throne. His vision shaped how the Mughal Empire understood power, fairness, and the relationship between a ruler and the people he governed.

Who was Abul Fazal and why his ideas mattered 🔗

Abul Fazal (1551-1602) was one of the most influential thinkers of the Mughal era and served as grand vizier to Emperor Akbar from 1579 until his assassination in 1602. He was a historian, an administrator, and Akbar’s closest intellectual companion. His two great works, the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari, were not abstract philosophy. They were detailed accounts of how the empire actually worked, blended with a powerful argument about how it should work.

Fazal never wrote a single formal treatise titled “Theory of Justice.” Instead, his ideas on justice are woven throughout his writings, especially the Ain-i-Akbari, which forms the third volume of the Akbarnama and reads almost like an administrative manual of Akbar’s reign. To understand his theory of justice, we have to pull these threads together and see the pattern they form.

Why a ruler is needed in the first place 🔗

Before explaining what justice looks like, Fazal explained why society needs a ruler at all. His answer rested on a kind of social contract. He argued that human nature is full of conflict. People have clashing desires, anger flares quickly, and disorder grows by the day. In a chapter of the Ain-i-Akbari on the provision of livelihood, he described a world where, without authority, friendship is scarce and justice is almost non-existent.

This view of disorder before strong authority resembles the “state of nature” later described by Thomas Hobbes in Europe. For Fazal, the only cure was the firm hand of a single just ruler. Sovereignty, in his thinking, emerged as a contract between the king and his subjects to maintain peace and order. The king provides protection and fairness; the people offer obedience and loyalty in return.

How this differed from European contract theory 🔗

Fazal’s social contract was not the same as the one developed by Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau. There was a crucial difference. In his model, there was no mechanism for the people to remove a tyrannical king. The contract bound the ruler morally, but the subjects had no constitutional right to replace him if he failed. This is one reason scholars call his contract theory less developed than the modern Western versions. The check on the king was moral and divine, not institutional.

The divine light: justice as a sacred trust 🔗

Here is where Fazal made his most original move. He argued that true kingship came from a divine light called farr-i izadi. According to this idea, sovereignty was a radiance emanating directly from God to the chosen ruler, who sat at the highest point in the hierarchy of beings receiving that light. This concept was rooted in the Illuminationist philosophy of the Sufi thinker Shihabuddin Suhrawardi.

This was a bold claim. By saying the king received light directly from God, Fazal freed the ruler from depending on religious scholars to interpret divine law. The king was not merely the “shadow of God” (zill-i-ilahi) as earlier thinkers had said. He was the light of God itself, a source of spiritual and moral guidance for the whole realm.

But this divine status came with a heavy condition. The light did not shine on just any ruler who grabbed power through conquest or inheritance. It rested only on the just ruler. Justice was therefore not optional decoration on top of kingship. It was the proof that a ruler genuinely held God’s mandate. An unjust king, by failing in justice, revealed that he had no real claim to the divine light at all.

The just ruler versus the unjust ruler 🔗

Fazal drew a sharp line between two types of rulers. Drawing on his study of history, he had seen how monarchs misused their power, and he wanted to distinguish his ideal from these failures. He used the term true king or just ruler for his ideal and selfish ruler for the rest.

The just ruler, in Fazal’s view, was able “to convert, like a salt-bed, the impure into pure, the bad into good,” as noted in studies of his concept of monarchy. In other words, a just king transformed the society around him. His justice created an atmosphere where security, honesty, fidelity, and good conduct could flourish among the people.

What made a ruler just 🔗

Several qualities defined the just ruler in Fazal’s writings. Fairness meant treating all subjects equally, without discrimination based on religion, caste, or class. Moral integrity meant the ruler held himself to the highest ethical standard, since his authority flowed from a sacred source. Compassion meant special concern for the weak and the marginalized, ensuring no one was left without protection. And crucially, the true king did not cling to wealth and luxury for its own sake. He used the riches of the empire only as a means to serve a higher purpose, not as a personal indulgence.

The unjust ruler was the mirror opposite. He pursued his own selfish interests, discriminated among his subjects, and ruled through tyranny rather than fairness. For Fazal, such a ruler had broken the contract and forfeited any claim to legitimacy in the eyes of God.

The king as a father 🔗

One of the most striking features of Fazal’s theory of justice is the image of the king as a paternal figure. He envisioned the sovereign essentially as a father of the family, or paterfamilias, who bears responsibility for everyone under his care. The relationship between ruler and subject was modeled on the relationship between a father and his children.

This was more than a sweet metaphor. It defined the king’s obligations. Just as a father is expected to nurture, protect, and guide his children regardless of their differences, the king owed paternal care to every subject. The running thread through Fazal’s discussions of kingship was this combination of paternal love, the jewel of justice and fair play, and absolute peace without discrimination.

The father analogy also explained the structure of obligation. The king treated his people as children, but in return the people were expected to respect and obey him. Yet this obedience was conditional in a moral sense. If the king discriminated on the basis of caste, religion, or class, he could no longer be considered a good ruler. The fatherly bond demanded fairness toward all, not favoritism toward some.

Sulh-i-Kul: justice for people of every faith 🔗

Fazal’s idea of justice was inseparable from his policy of Sulh-i-Kul, meaning “peace with all” or absolute tolerance. In a land as religiously diverse as India, he argued that a king who favored one faith over another could never be truly just. Sovereignty had to stand above any single religion.

Under Sulh-i-Kul, all communities were to enjoy freedom of belief and expression, as long as they did not threaten the state or incite conflict. This was a radical position for its time. By placing the monarch above sectarian divisions, Fazal made impartiality between religious communities a core requirement of just governance. Justice meant the king served Hindus, Muslims, and people of all faiths with equal care.

This emphasis on tolerance earned Fazal fierce criticism from religious conservatives, who accused him of abandoning the supremacy of Islamic law. Thinkers like Ziauddin Barani had insisted that the religion of Islam should hold the highest place in the state. Fazal rejected that view, and for this he was branded by some as a rebel or even a non-believer. His willingness to face such attacks shows how central impartial justice was to his entire philosophy.

Justice as rational, not arbitrary 🔗

Another important dimension of Fazal’s theory was his commitment to reason and rationality. He approached history and governance with a logical and remarkably secular outlook for his era. Justice, for him, was not the arbitrary whim of a powerful man. It was meant to flow from wisdom, careful judgment, and rational administration.

This is visible throughout the Ain-i-Akbari, which documented the empire’s revenue system, administrative ranks, and governance in precise detail. A just state, in Fazal’s thinking, was a well-ordered and rationally managed one. He also believed that no single individual could manage everything alone, so good governance required distributing authority among many officials to oversee different parts of the state. Justice was therefore tied to competent, organized administration, not just royal goodwill.

The lasting significance of Fazal’s theory 🔗

Abul Fazal’s theory of justice was an ambitious attempt to unify two ideas that usually pull in opposite directions. On one side stood the contractual idea that authority exists to serve the people and maintain order. On the other stood the divine idea that the king’s power comes from God. Fazal fused them into a single vision: a king who is both God’s chosen representative and the people’s protector and well-wisher.

The result was a theory where justice served as the bridge between heaven and earth. The divine light gave the king his authority, but justice was the condition for keeping it. The social contract created his duty, and paternal care defined how he should fulfill it. Sulh-i-Kul ensured that this justice reached every subject equally.

Of course, the theory had real limits. It placed enormous power in one person with no institutional way to remove a bad ruler. The only safeguards were moral and religious, which history shows are not always reliable. Yet for its time, Fazal’s vision was remarkably forward-looking. His insistence that the ruler’s main job is the welfare and fair treatment of all subjects anticipates ideas about government responsibility that we still debate today.

What do you think? If Abul Fazal believed a king’s justice could only be checked by moral and divine pressure rather than by institutions, do you think his theory could ever fully protect subjects from a tyrant? And in a country as diverse as India, how relevant is his idea that genuine justice requires a ruler to rise above every single religious or community identity?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_Fazl
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain-i-Akbari
3. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/lady-shri-ram-college-for-women/indian-political-thought/abul-fazal/39775739
4. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/ba-honours-political-science/abul-fazl-monarchy/94596220
5. https://memorients.com/articles/the-radiant-kingship-abul-fazls-mughal-theory-of-sovereignty
6. https://lotusarise.com/abul-fazls-concept-of-monarchy/
7. https://www.scribd.com/document/964692697/Abul-Fazl
8. https://kashmirreader.com/2024/11/03/abul-fazl-the-architect-of-mughal-governance-and-his-idea-of-sovereignty/