Criticisms of Zia-Ul-Barani: Fundamentalism vs. Political Expediency

Ziauddin Barani occupies a strange place in the story of medieval political thought. He is celebrated as the first Muslim to write a serious history of the subcontinent, and his Fatawa-i-Jahandari remains the only surviving treatise from the Delhi Sultanate devoted entirely to political theory. Yet the same writer is routinely labelled a conservative, a fundamentalist, and even a bigot. So which is he? A narrow-minded apologist for orthodox rule, or a hard-nosed political strategist who used religion as a tool of statecraft? The criticism levelled against Barani is worth examining closely, because it reveals as much about how we read medieval thinkers as it does about Barani himself.

Why Barani attracts such heavy criticism
The accusation of discrimination against Hindus
Bias against the poor and low-born
The comparison that makes Barani look worse: Abul Fazl
Sulh-i-kul versus Shariat-based rule
Liberal versus orthodox
The other reading: Barani as a theorist of political expediency
When state law overrides religious law
Religion as a tool of consolidation
So was Barani a fundamentalist or a pragmatist?

Why Barani attracts such heavy criticism

Most of the controversy around Barani comes from two specific portions of his work. The first is his insistence that a Sultan must follow the Shariat, the religious law derived from the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The second is his views on Hindus and on people of low birth. Scholars point to Advice II and Advice XI of the Fatawa-i-Jahandari as the passages that earned him the reputation of being a conservative and a fundamentalist.

The charge is not baseless. Barani genuinely believed that a Muslim ruler was an agent of God whose duty was to uphold religious law in both his personal life and his public administration. He argued that rulers who followed these precepts prospered, while those who deviated failed. That is a deeply religious theory of kingship, and it does sit uncomfortably with modern secular values.

The accusation of discrimination against Hindus

Barani’s hostility toward Hindus is the part of his thought that generates the most discomfort today. He was openly opposed to the promotion of Hindu converts into positions of authority. Drawing on older Iranian monarchical traditions, he argued that high moral and intellectual attainment could not come from low birth, which conveniently excluded both Hindus and the lower social orders from power.

He went further in his prescriptions. Barani suggested that a truly Muslim king should not be content with merely collecting jizya and khiraj (taxes) from Hindus, but should ideally wage holy war to uproot what he considered false creeds. Statements like these are why he is read as an intolerant ideologue who wanted the state to actively discriminate on religious grounds.

Bias against the poor and low-born

It is important to notice that Barani’s prejudice was not only religious. He was equally contemptuous of the ganwaran (the rustic poor) and of anyone he considered low-born, regardless of faith. His ideal officials had to be men of high birth and noble character. His vision of justice, far from being even-handed, was strongly tilted in favour of the rich and the powerful. In this sense, the criticism of Barani is broader than communalism. He was an elitist who wanted to keep both religious minorities and the social underclass away from the levers of the state.

The comparison that makes Barani look worse: Abul Fazl

Barani’s reputation suffers even more when he is placed next to Abul Fazl, the great courtier and historian of Emperor Akbar who wrote the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari. Both men wrote about kingship, both cared about political stability, and both served at the centre of power. But their conclusions could hardly be more different.

Sulh-i-kul versus Shariat-based rule

Where Barani wanted the state grounded in religious law and Muslim supremacy, Abul Fazl built his theory around Sulh-i-kul, or “absolute peace.” This doctrine held that all religions were essentially equal and that the ruler, as a divine agent, could not discriminate between faiths. Under this principle, Akbar’s government integrated diverse religious and cultural groups into the administration on the basis of loyalty and service rather than creed.

Abul Fazl located the foundation of the state not in religion but in something closer to a social contract combined with the mystical idea of divine light flowing into a just king. This freed the monarch from dependence on the orthodox clergy, the ulama, and made sovereignty something that stood above any single faith. He simply did not believe Islam was superior to other religions, a position so radical for his time that critics called him a rebel and a kafir.

Liberal versus orthodox

Set against this, Barani naturally appears orthodox and rigid. Abul Fazl is remembered as a liberal thinker who introduced a secular element into the theory of the state, giving every subject an equal claim to the ruler’s benevolence regardless of faith. Barani, by contrast, wanted devout Muslims of high birth running the government and saw the state’s purpose as serving Islam. It is no surprise that liberal thinkers held Barani up as the example of everything they had moved beyond.

Yet this comparison can be misleading if it is left there. Abul Fazl wrote nearly two and a half centuries after Barani, for a vastly larger and more confident empire that ruled a Hindu-majority population it could not realistically govern through religious exclusion. The two men faced completely different political problems. Judging Barani harshly simply because he was not Abul Fazl is a little like criticising an early thinker for not anticipating ideas that took centuries to develop.

The other reading: Barani as a theorist of political expediency

This is where the more interesting argument begins. A careful reading of the Fatawa-i-Jahandari shows that Barani was far less of a pure religious zealot than his reputation suggests. Underneath the orthodox language lies a strikingly pragmatic, even ruthless, theory of how to hold power. Many scholars now argue that Barani’s real concern was not piety but political expediency, the practical business of keeping a fragile state intact.

When state law overrides religious law

The clearest evidence is Barani’s treatment of Zawabit, the state laws framed by the ruler himself. Barani openly accepted that the king needed to make these laws to secure the welfare of the state, and he left no doubt that in cases of conflict, state laws would override the Shariat itself. For a man supposedly committed to religious law above all else, this is a remarkable concession. It means the foundation of his political theory was ultimately practical rather than purely religious.

Barani was willing to tolerate a good deal of laxity in following religious law, right up to the point where that laxity threatened the stability of the state. In effect, he believed the end, a strong and stable Muslim polity, justified the means. This is the logic of a strategist, not a fanatic. It is exactly why his Fatawa-i-Jahandari is often compared to Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Machiavelli’s The Prince, two of history’s most famous handbooks of hard political realism.

Religion as a tool of consolidation

Read this way, Barani’s emphasis on Islam looks less like personal bigotry and more like a deliberate instrument of rule. The Delhi Sultanate was a small Muslim ruling elite governing an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population, surrounded by rivals and constantly threatened by rebellion. For such a regime, a shared religious identity was one of the few things that could bind the ruling class together and give it legitimacy. Barani’s religious rhetoric served to consolidate the Muslim elite and justify the existing order. His Fatawa, in this interpretation, used the language of justice and faith as a facade for maintaining the monarchy and the power of the privileged.

There is even a case that parts of his thinking pointed toward what we might recognise as early secular statecraft. Notice that he separated the king’s personal religious conduct from his political role, allowing flexibility in governance that strict orthodoxy would never permit. His contributions to the theory of political obligation, the right to life and property, and the role of state-made law all belong to the realm of secular political theory rather than religious doctrine.

So was Barani a fundamentalist or a pragmatist?

The honest answer is that he was a bit of both, and the tension between the two is precisely what makes him interesting. The criticism of Barani as conservative and discriminatory is fair when measured against his explicit statements about Hindus and the low-born. There is no need to whitewash those views; they were genuinely exclusionary and elitist.

But reducing him to a fundamentalist misses the deeper structure of his thought. His Fatawa-i-Jahandari was written late in life, after he had been dismissed from court and was living in poverty, and much of it reads as a frustrated lament for an ideal Islamic state that never quite existed. It describes what he thought ought to be, not what actually was. The very gap between his religious ideals and his pragmatic acceptance of Zawabit tells us that Barani understood power could not be run on piety alone.

The most useful way to read Barani is therefore to hold both truths at once. He was a product of his age, carrying its prejudices openly. He was also a sharp analyst of how a vulnerable state survives, willing to bend religious principle to political necessity when survival demanded it. The label “fundamentalist” captures his rhetoric; the label “pragmatist” captures his method. Understanding the criticism of Barani means recognising that these two sides were never really separate in his mind.

What do you think? Is it fair to judge a fourteenth-century thinker like Barani by the liberal standards that Abul Fazl helped establish two centuries later? And when a thinker uses religion mainly as a tool to keep the state stable, does that make him more dangerous, or simply more honest, than one who claims to believe in tolerance for its own sake?

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Table of Contents

Why Barani attracts such heavy criticism 🔗

The accusation of discrimination against Hindus 🔗

Bias against the poor and low-born 🔗

The comparison that makes Barani look worse: Abul Fazl 🔗

Sulh-i-kul versus Shariat-based rule 🔗

Liberal versus orthodox 🔗

The other reading: Barani as a theorist of political expediency 🔗

When state law overrides religious law 🔗

Religion as a tool of consolidation 🔗

So was Barani a fundamentalist or a pragmatist? 🔗