The Influence of Ibn Arabi on Abul Fazal’s Philosophical Views

Sheikh Abul Fazl was not just Akbar’s court chronicler. He was the chief architect of an idea so bold that it placed the emperor above the religious scholars who had long claimed final say over right and wrong. To build this idea, Fazl reached back nearly four centuries to the writings of a Spanish-born Sufi mystic named Ibn Arabi. The connection between a thirteenth-century philosopher from Andalusia and a sixteenth-century Mughal ideologue may seem unlikely, yet it shaped one of the most ambitious political experiments in Indian history. Understanding this link explains how Akbar justified a tolerant, multi-religious state and how Abul Fazl turned mystical philosophy into a working theory of power.

Who was Ibn Arabi and why did his ideas travel so far 🔗

Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) was an Andalusian Sufi thinker born in Murcia, in what is now Spain. He is often called Sheikh al-Akbar, “the Greatest Master,” a title that signals his towering status in Islamic mysticism. His most influential works are the Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations) and the Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom). These texts explored a question that occupied mystics for centuries: what is the true relationship between God and the created world?

Ibn Arabi’s answer became known as Wahdat al-Wujud, often translated as the “Unity of Being” or “Unity of Existence.” It is worth noting that this term was actually coined by later interpreters rather than by Ibn Arabi himself. His disciple Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi and a long chain of Persian scholars systematised the master’s thought and carried it across the Islamic world. By the time these ideas reached the Persianate courts of South Asia, they had passed through centuries of commentary and refinement.

The concept of transcendental unity 🔗

At the heart of Ibn Arabi’s philosophy lies the claim that only God truly exists, and everything we perceive is a manifestation of that single divine reality. The differences we see between objects, people, and even religions are, in this view, surface-level appearances rather than fundamental truths. The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society describes how the ordinary person is captivated by plurality and manyness, while those with deeper knowledge perceive the underlying oneness of all things.

This is what scholars mean by transcendental unity. God is both transcendent (beyond and above creation) and immanent (present within it). Ibn Arabi insisted on holding both truths together. To stress only transcendence is to restrict God; to stress only immanence is to limit Him. The sensory differences that divide the world are real to our eyes but illusory at the level of ultimate reality. This idea is the philosophical seed that would later flower in Abul Fazl’s political writing.

How Ibn Arabi’s thought reached Abul Fazl 🔗

Abul Fazl did not stumble upon Ibn Arabi by accident. He inherited a rich intellectual tradition through his father, Shaikh Mubarak, a learned scholar who himself faced persecution from the orthodox ulama. This family experience of suffering at the hands of religious hardliners shaped Fazl’s lifelong suspicion of narrow theological authority. According to the study material prepared by IGNOU, Abul Fazl followed the political philosophy of Ibn al-Arabi and blended it with Sufi ideology to argue for the happiness and well-being of all people.

His intellectual debt has been documented in detail by major historians. Scholars such as Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi and Irfan Habib have shown the depth of Abul Fazl’s reliance on Ibn Arabi and his followers. A recent study published in Modern Asian Studies traces how the Sufi method of tahqiq, or the verification of divine truth, travelled through an elite Persianate intellectual network to the Mughal court. There, Abul Fazl took a philosophy that had been relatively quietist and turned it into a tool for governing an empire.

From mysticism to statecraft 🔗

This shift is the crucial point. Ibn Arabi’s ideas began as a contemplative path for individual seekers. Abul Fazl moved them out of the meditation cell and into the throne room. The same Cambridge study explains that wujudi philosophy was uprooted from its Sufi context and resituated in the political sphere to serve the goals of empire. What had once been a question of personal spiritual realisation became a justification for a particular kind of state.

The doctrine of sulh-i-kul 🔗

The most visible result of this borrowing was the policy of sulh-i-kul, usually translated as “absolute peace” or “peace with all.” This was the principle that the state should treat all religions and communities equally, without favouring one faith over another. If the differences between religions are merely different paths to the same divine reality, then it makes little sense for a ruler to privilege one path and persecute the rest.

Abul Fazl’s commitment to this idea was not abstract. The persecution his own family had endured gave him a personal reason to champion tolerance. His religious thinking treated all faiths as equal and emphasised fraternity across communities. He also condemned withdrawal from the world, arguing that asceticism helps only the individual who practises it, while service allows one to help a great multitude. For Fazl, the spiritually advanced person was not the hermit but the active servant of humanity, and the ideal ruler was the supreme example of such service.

The Ibadat Khana and the breach with the ulama 🔗

The roots of sulh-i-kul can be traced to the debates Akbar hosted at the Ibadat Khana, his house of worship. As recorded in this account of Akbar’s religious policy, these discussions exposed the narrowness and arrogance of the ulama and produced a lasting breach between them and the emperor. Once Akbar concluded that the religious scholars could not be trusted to guide the state impartially, he needed a new foundation for his authority. Abul Fazl, armed with Ibn Arabi’s philosophy, was ready to provide it.

Separating the throne from the pulpit 🔗

This is where the influence of Ibn Arabi becomes politically decisive. If sensory and doctrinal differences are illusory, then no single religious tradition can claim a monopoly on truth. And if no tradition holds a monopoly, then the religious scholars who speak for that tradition cannot claim ultimate authority over the ruler. Abul Fazl used this logic to separate temporal sovereignty from theological doctrine.

The result was a theory of kingship that placed the emperor above the religious establishment. As one analysis of Abul Fazl’s theory of kingship puts it, through the policy of sulh-i-kul he freed the temporal sovereign from any particular faith, from religious law, and from the dictates of the theologians. The king was no longer bound to enforce one community’s interpretation of divine law. He stood above all communities as a just and impartial guide.

The theory of divine light 🔗

To give this elevated kingship a spiritual foundation, Abul Fazl developed his famous theory of divine light, or farr-i-izadi. He argued that royalty is a light emanating from God, a direct ray of divine favour. This was a deliberate upgrade from the older idea of the king as merely the “shadow of God” (zill-i-Ilahi). A shadow is dim and dependent; a ray of light is direct and radiant.

The political payoff was enormous. According to a discussion of Abul Fazl’s theory of sovereignty, the king received divine components directly from God, which gave him authority over his subjects without any intermediary. Because the ruler received wisdom straight from the source, he did not depend on the ulama to validate his rule. Everyone, including the religious scholars, had to submit to the one who possessed this divine light. The emperor became the spiritual guide of the nation rather than its student.

Universalism in action: the Razmnama 🔗

One striking example of how Abul Fazl applied Ibn Arabi’s universalism appears in the preface he wrote to the Razmnama, the Persian translation of the Mahabharata. The Cambridge study referenced earlier shows that in this preface, Fazl used the philosophy of God’s unity to defend even the worship of idols, treating images as places where divinity could be encountered. This was a remarkable position for a Muslim official, and it flowed directly from the idea that all sincere worship ultimately addresses the same single reality.

This engagement with the Mahabharata was not idle curiosity. It reflected genuine respect for Indian philosophical traditions and the conviction that wisdom could cross religious boundaries. The epic’s exploration of righteous duty and political ethics gave Abul Fazl a rich resource for thinking about governance, and his willingness to draw on it demonstrated sulh-i-kul in practice.

Tensions and criticisms 🔗

The system Abul Fazl built was brilliant but not without flaws. Critics have long pointed to a logical tension in his thought. On one hand, he supported the idea that sovereignty rests on a social contract and the need for social order. On the other hand, he granted the king authority through divine light. These two foundations do not sit together comfortably, since one locates power in human agreement and the other in divine gift. Fazl tried to combine them, but the inconsistency remained.

There is also a scholarly caution worth noting. It would be a mistake to assume that Akbar and Abul Fazl were reading Ibn Arabi directly and inventing their own interpretation from scratch. As the Modern Asian Studies article emphasises, centuries of commentary stood between the thirteenth-century mystic and the Mughal court of the 1580s. The ideas they used had already been institutionalised, popularised, and reshaped by generations of scholars. Abul Fazl was working within a living tradition, not reviving a dead text.

Finally, the practical success of these ideas was limited. The cosmopolitan vision behind sulh-i-kul and the related Tauhid-i-Ilahi strengthened governance during Akbar’s reign, but it did not take deep or lasting root across the subcontinent. The experiment depended heavily on the personality and authority of one extraordinary emperor, and it struggled to outlive him.

Why this connection still matters 🔗

The link between Ibn Arabi and Abul Fazl is more than a piece of intellectual history. It shows how a philosophical idea about the nature of reality can be converted into a concrete theory of the state. By arguing that differences between religions are surface appearances of a deeper unity, Abul Fazl gave Akbar the intellectual freedom to rule above sectarian divisions. He detached political power from religious orthodoxy and built a case for a tolerant, centralised monarchy. In an age when most rulers justified their power through one dominant faith, this was a genuinely radical move, and its philosophical engine came from a Sufi mystic who had died more than three hundred years earlier.

What do you think? If a ruler’s authority is justified by the claim to stand above all religions, does that genuinely protect tolerance, or does it simply concentrate too much power in one person? And can a philosophy designed for individual spiritual realisation ever be fairly translated into a tool for governing an empire?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahdat_al-wuj%C5%ABd
2. https://ibnarabisociety.org/unity-of-being-in-ibn-arabi-souad-hakim/
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84185/3/Unit-14.pdf
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/sufi-method-behind-the-mughal-peace-with-all-religions-a-study-of-ibn-arabis-tahqiq-in-abu-alfazls-preface-to-the-razmnama/7A03A08D97D889FD9F4E3625C9F1DE7B
5. https://selfstudyhistory.com/2020/09/29/akbar-evolution-of-religious-and-social-outlook-theory-of-sulh-i-kul-and-religious-policy-part-i/
6. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/ba-honours-political-science/abul-fazl-theory-of-kingship/17540014
7. https://memorients.com/articles/the-radiant-kingship-abul-fazls-mughal-theory-of-sovereignty