Political Thought During the Mughal Period: Contributions of Abul Fazal

When Akbar’s chief chronicler Abul Fazl sat down to write the Ain-i-Akbari, he was not merely recording the workings of an empire. He was building a complete theory of power, one that would justify a Muslim emperor ruling over a religiously diverse subcontinent without leaning on orthodox clergy for legitimacy. His writings remain one of the most sophisticated articulations of monarchical authority in medieval political thought, blending Persian statecraft, Sufi mysticism, indigenous custom, and a logic of governance that feels surprisingly modern. To understand how the Mughal state thought about kingship, justice, and tolerance, Abul Fazl is the essential starting point.

Who was Abul Fazl? 🔗

Abul Fazl ibn Mubarak was born in Agra in 1551 and rose to become one of the nine jewels (Navaratnas) of Akbar’s court. He served as historian, secretary, and close confidant of the emperor for roughly two decades until his assassination in 1602, a victim of court intrigue. He was not a detached scholar. He was a liberal thinker shaped by personal experience: his family had suffered persecution at the hands of the orthodox ulama, and this experience deeply informed his commitment to religious tolerance and his discomfort with hardline interpretations of Islam.

His two great works, the Akbarnama (the chronicle of Akbar’s reign) and the Ain-i-Akbari (its administrative third volume, completed around 1602), together form a single text. The Ain-i-Akbari is where his political theory lives. Importantly, Abul Fazl approached history with genuine rigour. He gathered multiple accounts of events, cross-examined eyewitnesses, and refused to rely on a single source before accepting a fact, which makes his work a valuable record of the period as well as a work of theory.

The theory of kingship: a dual foundation 🔗

Abul Fazl’s most influential contribution was his theory of kingship, and its genius lies in resting on two pillars at once: a divine origin and a social contract. This dual structure allowed him to claim sacred authority for the emperor while also grounding that authority in the practical needs of society.

The divine light of royalty 🔗

At the heart of the theory is the idea of Farr-i-Izadi, the divine light. Abul Fazl argued that royalty (Padshahat) is a light emanating directly from God, transferred to the king without the mediation of any human being. This was a deliberate break from older Islamic thought. Traditionally, the ruler was described as the zill-i-Ilahi, the “shadow of God.” Abul Fazl rejected this as inadequate. For him, the king was not a shadow but a direct recipient of God’s light, the highest object in a hierarchy of beings receiving that illumination.

This idea drew on the Ishraqi (illuminationist) philosophy of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi and the Sufi thought of Ibn Arabi, in which divine light flows like sunlight as the source of all goodness. The practical consequence was enormous. If the king received his authority directly from God, he did not depend on the clergy to legitimise his rule. This is why Mughal court paintings began depicting Akbar with a sublime halo (kiyan-khwarah) around his face, a visual echo of European images of Christ and the saints. The halo was political theology made visible.

The social contract and the state of nature 🔗

What makes Abul Fazl unusually interesting is that he did not stop at divine right. In the Ain-i-Akbari he also developed a theory of sovereignty based on social contract rather than Shariah. He painted a picture of society before the existence of a strong ruler: a condition of lust, anger, competition, and constant disturbance. Without a powerful sovereign, he argued, there would be lawlessness and rebellion.

This is a striking parallel to Thomas Hobbes, who decades later described a similar bleak “state of nature” to justify the need for an absolute sovereign. The difference is that Abul Fazl was writing in the late sixteenth century, well before Hobbes published Leviathan. For Abul Fazl, kingship emerged as a disciplinary institution holding a monopoly on force, precisely to maintain peace and order. Sovereignty, in this reading, is rooted in the needs of the social order, a conclusion he reached through reason and philosophy rather than scripture.

The king as a perfect man 🔗

Abul Fazl’s ideal ruler is far more than a strongman. He is a perfect man endowed with divine wisdom, capable of seeing truth clearly because his heart, illuminated by divine light, is free from conflict and disharmony. The king acquires the qualities of rule through prayer, devotion, a generous heart, and above all paternal love for his subjects.

The image of the king as father runs throughout the text. The emperor is also compared to a shepherd, a gardener, and a physician, all figures who nurture and heal those in their care. Subjects, in Abul Fazl’s favourite phrase, are entrusted to the king by God. This creates a relationship of mutual obligation. The king protects the four essentials of his subjects’ lives, namely life (jaan), property (maal), honour (namus), and faith (din), and in return subjects owe him obedience and a share of their resources in the form of taxes.

Crucially, divine sanction did not free the king from duty. Abul Fazl drew a sharp distinction between the just ruler and the unjust ruler. A king who discriminated on the basis of caste, religion, or class could not be considered a good king, regardless of the divine light he possessed. Legitimacy carried responsibility.

A four-fold vision of the state 🔗

Like Plato in The Republic, Abul Fazl proposed a fourfold division within the state and elevated it as the highest moral and spiritual institution. The four components he described were the nobles of the state, the assistants of victory (the military), the companions of the king, and the servants or those engaged in trade and craft. He stressed that equilibrium among these divisions was essential for the welfare and stability of the realm, with the king serving as the moral and spiritual guide who held them in harmony.

Sulh-i-kul: the doctrine of absolute peace 🔗

If divine kingship gave Akbar his authority, Sulh-i-kul told him how to use it. The phrase is Arabic for “absolute peace” or “peace with all,” and it was drawn from a Sufi mystic principle. Abul Fazl is credited with framing this idea, which Akbar then implemented as state policy.

Sulh-i-kul described a relationship of harmony among all religious communities. Under it, all faiths and schools of thought enjoyed freedom of expression, on the single condition that they did not undermine the authority of the state or attack one another. This was revolutionary in a kingdom containing Hindus, Muslims, Jains, and many others. Abul Fazl saw religious conflict as a fundamental source of human suffering, and Sulh-i-kul was the remedy.

The theory connects neatly back to the divine light. Because the king’s heart was a depository of Farr-i-Izadi, he could distinguish right from wrong impartially and judge all subjects equally before the law, regardless of their religion. Sulh-i-kul thus became Akbar’s standard for determining what was legally right or wrong within the empire. The doctrine liberated the sovereign from any single faith or the dictates of theologians, allowing him to stand above all communities as an impartial mediator. Many scholars regard this as an early articulation of what we might today recognise as the ethos of secular and pluralist governance.

It is worth noting the scholarly debate here. Historians disagree over whether Sulh-i-kul flowed from Akbar’s genuine spiritual convictions or from the political necessity of holding a diverse empire together. The honest answer is probably both. The policy served the practical goal of stability while also reflecting a sincere intellectual vision.

A highly centralized state 🔗

Abul Fazl’s theory of the perfect king was not just abstract philosophy. The Ain-i-Akbari documents how this vision was institutionalised through one of the most centralized administrative systems of the pre-modern world. At the centre stood the emperor, with all major officials reporting directly to him.

The Mansabdari system 🔗

The backbone of Mughal administration was the Mansabdari system, formally introduced by Akbar around 1571. The word mansab is Arabic for rank, so a mansabdar was a rank-holding officer. The system cleverly integrated three groups, namely the nobility, the armed forces, and the civil bureaucracy, into a single administrative pool.

Each officer held a dual rank. The Zat determined his personal status, salary, and position in the hierarchy, while the Sawar indicated the number of cavalry he was required to maintain. The brilliance of the design lay in what it prevented. Mansabs were not hereditary and required regular renewal by the emperor, who controlled all appointments, promotions, and dismissals. Land assignments (jagirs) given as payment remained imperial property and could be reassigned at any time. This stopped officials from building independent regional power bases that might one day challenge the throne.

The system also built in checks against fraud. Horses were branded and registered (dagh), and detailed descriptive rolls of soldiers (chehra) were maintained to ensure that officers actually kept the troops they were paid for. Separating revenue collection from military command further reduced corruption.

Revenue and structure 🔗

Complementing this was the land revenue reform associated with Raja Todar Mal, often called the Bandobast system. Rather than arbitrary taxation, revenue was assessed scientifically based on land measurement and the productivity of crops, making the system more equitable and giving the state a reliable income. The administration operated across central, provincial (subas), and local tiers, with subedars, faujdars, qazis, and zamindars each performing defined roles. The result, as Abul Fazl describes it, was a state that resembled the administrative ambition of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, centralized yet flexible enough to govern enormous diversity.

Indigenous custom and synthesis 🔗

One of the defining features of Abul Fazl’s thought is its syncretism. His theory of Padshahat blended Mongol, Turkish, Iranian, Islamic, and Indian political traditions into a single framework. His administrative model wove together Persian bureaucratic practice, Islamic jurisprudence, and indigenous Indian customary law. The justice system itself combined Sharia with local custom, with village panchayats handling grassroots disputes. This deliberate blending was not accidental. It was the intellectual foundation that allowed a single state to govern a society of many faiths and many laws.

Criticisms and legacy 🔗

Abul Fazl’s ideas have not escaped criticism. Scholars have pointed out that his theory can appear contradictory, idealistic, and at times utopian. His unwavering praise of Akbar reflects his official position, which required him to defend and glorify the emperor, raising the question of how much is theory and how much is courtly flattery. His vision of an infallible, almost perfect king also left no mechanism for removing a tyrant, a weakness shared with other absolutist theories of the era. And some argue that his ideas had limited influence on later, less tolerant Mughal rulers.

Even so, his legacy is substantial. Abul Fazl gave India one of its clearest theoretical defences of a pluralist, merit-based, centralized state. His concept of Sulh-i-kul continues to be invoked in modern discussions of religious tolerance, interfaith dialogue, and the management of diversity. In an age of renewed debate about pluralism and the relationship between religion and the state, a courtier writing four centuries ago still has something to say.

What do you think? Was Abul Fazl’s vision of the divinely illuminated king a genuine political philosophy or an elaborate justification crafted to flatter his emperor? And how much of the relevance we find in Sulh-i-kul today depends on separating the ideal from the political compromises that produced it?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84771/1/Unit-11.pdf
2. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/ba-honours-political-science/abul-fazl-theory-of-kingship/17540014
3. https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/ncert-notes/mughal-kingship-and-their-authors/
4. https://memorients.com/articles/the-radiant-kingship-abul-fazls-mughal-theory-of-sovereignty
5. https://www.scribd.com/document/516186531/abul-fazl-and-barani
6. https://www.iasexpress.net/submodules/20-6-akbars-evolution-of-religious-and-social-outlook-the-theory-of-sulh-i-kul-and-religious-policy/
7. https://www.iasexpress.net/submodules/20-3-mansabdari-system/
8. https://banotes.org/admin-system-union-level/mughal-empire-centralized-governance-model/