When Abul Fazl entered Akbar’s court in 1574, he carried with him a deep personal grievance against the orthodox Islamic scholars of his age. His father, the liberal theologian Shaikh Mubarak, had spent nearly twenty years as a fugitive, hounded from home to home by the religious establishment for his sympathies with unorthodox sects. This experience shaped Abul Fazl into one of medieval India’s sharpest critics of religious orthodoxy. He came to see the traditionalist clergy not merely as theological rivals, but as a genuine obstacle to stable, rational, and inclusive governance. His critique would go on to provide the intellectual foundation for some of the most significant political experiments of the Mughal period.
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Who were the traditionalists?
The “traditionalists” Abul Fazl criticised were the ulama, the body of orthodox Islamic scholars who interpreted religious law and claimed authority over both spiritual and legal matters in the state. For centuries, these scholars had positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of Islamic learning and the final word on what was permissible. They favoured taqlid, or blind adherence to established doctrine and precedent, over independent reasoning.
Abul Fazl’s family had felt the sharp edge of this orthodoxy. His father’s sympathy with the Mahdawi movement led powerful clerics like Makhdum-ul-Mulk Abdullah Sultanpuri to order the confiscation of his grants and drive the family into hiding. This persecution embittered the young Abul Fazl against the orthodoxy permanently. He devoted a large portion of his autobiography to describing his father’s suffering and dedicated much of his career to exposing what he saw as the narrow-minded bigotry of the clergy.
A clash of worldviews
This was not simply a personal feud. Abul Fazl drew his philosophical insights from an extraordinarily broad range of sources, including the peripatetic philosophy of Ibn Sina, the illuminationist tradition of Iran, and the mystical thought of Ibn al-Arabi. This wide reading shaped a man who valued reason and inquiry above received dogma. The orthodox ulama, who built their authority on tradition and textual literalism, represented the exact opposite of everything he believed about how knowledge and faith should function. The clash between them was, at heart, a clash between two fundamentally different views of how a society should be governed.
Reason over blind tradition
At the core of Abul Fazl’s critique was a defence of reason (aql) against blind imitation. He championed the majesty of rational inquiry over received faith accepted without question. Scholar Harbans Mukhia and others have noted that Abul Fazl positioned intellect and independent judgement as superior to the inherited certainties of the clergy.
This rationalism was not a rejection of religion itself. Instead, Abul Fazl drew a distinction between universal religiosity, which he saw as the shared essence of all faiths, and the narrow denominational squabbles of the theologians. He argued that true religion was universal and that all existing faiths were simply different paths toward the same divine truth. By framing matters this way, he reduced the orthodox ulama’s claims to special authority. If all faiths pointed toward one truth, then no single group of scholars could claim a monopoly on it.
Why orthodoxy threatened the state
Abul Fazl’s objection to the traditionalists was deeply political. He believed that religious orthodoxy actively endangered the stability and unity of the empire. The Mughal state ruled over a vast and diverse population of Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Christians, and Parsis. A state that allowed a narrow clergy to impose rigid doctrine and persecute dissenters would inevitably fracture along religious lines.
He saw the ulama’s interference in politics as a source of arbitrary judgement and division. When commenting on the discriminatory jizya tax on non-Muslims, for instance, Abul Fazl argued that its imposition stemmed not just from a desire for profit but from the clergy’s contempt for their opponents and a wish to destroy them. For Abul Fazl, a governance model held hostage by such prejudice could never deliver justice or maintain peace.
Sulh-i-kul: the inclusive alternative
Against the exclusivity of the orthodox clergy, Abul Fazl articulated the doctrine of Sulh-i-kul, meaning “peace with all” or absolute tolerance. This principle became the cornerstone of Akbar’s governance and ran through all of Abul Fazl’s political and religious thought.
The idea was strikingly inclusive for its time. Under Sulh-i-kul, all religions and sects enjoyed freedom of expression, with the single condition that they neither harmed the monarchy nor fought among themselves. Sovereignty itself was not confined to any one faith. Abul Fazl held that in a multi-religious country, the agent of God could not practise discrimination among the various faiths present in society. This was a direct rebuke to a clergy that defined the legitimate community narrowly and treated outsiders as inferior.
The king as a unifying figure
To make this vision workable, Abul Fazl developed a theory of monarchy that deliberately bypassed the religious establishment. He argued that kingship was a divine light (Farr-i-Izadi) received by the emperor directly from God, not mediated through any religious institution or clergy. The ideal king was an Insan-i-Kamil, a perfect man and enlightened guide responsible for the justice, welfare, and spiritual harmony of all his subjects regardless of faith.
This move was clever and consequential. By rooting royal authority in a direct divine relationship, Abul Fazl removed the ulama from their traditional role as the source of political legitimacy. The emperor no longer needed the clergy’s blessing to rule. He stood above them as a unifying figure for the entire population.
The Mahzar of 1579: critique into policy
Abul Fazl’s critique was not confined to theory. It found concrete expression in the famous Mahzar, a declaration issued in 1579 and drafted primarily by his own father, Shaikh Mubarak. The document fundamentally rearranged the relationship between religious and political authority in the empire.
The Mahzar declared that in cases of conflicting interpretations of Islamic law, the emperor had the right to choose whichever interpretation he deemed consistent with justice, public interest, and reason. It elevated Akbar to the position of imam-i adil, a just ruler standing above the mujtahids, the scholars qualified to interpret the law. With a single document, the orthodox ulama found their authority severely curtailed.
How Abul Fazl defended it
Abul Fazl played a central role in both shaping the climate that produced the Mahzar and defending its logic. During the weekly religious debates Akbar convened at the Ibadat Khana, Abul Fazl used his intellect and skilful steering of the discussions to discredit the ulama in the emperor’s eyes. He framed the decree not as an attack on Islam but as a means of preserving its true essence by preventing the sectarian conflicts and narrow interpretations that could divide the empire.
Interestingly, Abul Fazl explained Akbar’s authority to interpret law despite the emperor’s near-illiteracy by appealing to a higher form of knowledge. He argued that Akbar possessed supreme and intuitive knowledge, superior to the bookish learning of the scholars he dismissively termed “paper-worshipping scholiasts.” Reason and divine insight, in his framing, outranked rote scholarship.
The legacy of a contested critique
Abul Fazl’s challenge to the traditionalists was bold, but it was never universally accepted, even in his own time. His great contemporary critic, the historian Abdul Qadir Badauni, mourned what he saw as the decline of orthodox Islam under Akbar and condemned the marginalisation of the ulama. The contrasting accounts of Abul Fazl and Badauni remind us that history here is told through two opposing lenses, each reflecting the personal and ideological biases of its author.
Abul Fazl himself paid a price for his influence. In 1602, he was assassinated by Bir Singh Bundela on the instructions of Prince Salim, the future emperor Jahangir, who resented his hold over Akbar. Yet his intellectual legacy endured. Scholars have praised the rationality and inclusiveness at the heart of his thought, noting that few thinkers after him debated questions of sovereignty at the same level of reason and abstraction.
His vision of a state guided by reason rather than religious orthodoxy, and his insistence that the ruler serve all communities equally, anticipated later ideas about secular and inclusive governance. The constitutional principle of equal respect for all religions, sometimes expressed as sarva dharma sambhava, shares a clear conceptual kinship with the spirit of Sulh-i-kul, even though the mechanisms of a modern democracy differ entirely from those of a sixteenth-century empire.
What do you think? Was Abul Fazl’s critique of the traditionalists a genuine philosophical commitment to reason and tolerance, or primarily a clever justification for concentrating power in the hands of his patron, Akbar? And can a model that placed so much authority in a single enlightened ruler offer any meaningful lessons for inclusive governance today?
References
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/84185
- https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-fazl-allami-historian/
- https://selfstudyhistory.com/2020/09/29/akbar-evolution-of-religious-and-social-outlook-theory-of-sulh-i-kul-and-religious-policy-part-i/
- https://lotusarise.com/abul-fazls-concept-of-monarchy/
- https://www.gktoday.in/mahzar-nama/
- https://indianhistorycollective.com/padshah-i-islam/
- https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/ba-hons-political-science/abul-fazl-cpp/38738966
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