How Shaikh Mubarak’s Persecution Shaped Abul Fazal’s Intellectual Journey

Abul Fazal, one of the most influential intellectuals of Mughal India, did not arrive at his radical ideas by accident. His commitment to reason, religious tolerance, and a state freed from clerical control was forged in the fire of a deeply personal experience: watching his own father hounded, humiliated, and driven from his home by the orthodox religious scholars of his day. To understand why Abul Fazal became such a fierce critic of conservative religious authority, we have to start with his father, Shaikh Mubarak Nagori, and the years of persecution that defined the family’s early life.

The scholar who would not conform 🔗

Shaikh Mubarak Nagori was born in 1506 at Nagaur in Rajasthan, into a family with deep Sufi roots. His ancestors had settled near the tomb of a Chishti saint, and Mubarak grew up steeped in mysticism, philosophy, and theology. He eventually migrated to Agra, where he set up a madrasa and built a reputation as a brilliant but unconventional teacher whose special field of instruction was philosophy.

This was exactly the problem. Mubarak was a free-thinking scholar in an era when the religious establishment prized conformity above all else. He engaged openly with diverse philosophical and mystical traditions, and he refused to limit himself to the rigid interpretations favoured by the dominant clergy. His independent mind made him magnetic to students, but it also made him a target.

Why the orthodox scholars turned against him 🔗

The trouble came to a head over Mubarak’s sympathy with the Mahdawi movement, a messianic sect that the religious hardliners considered heretical. Mubarak had publicly defended a member of this sect, and that was enough to mark him as dangerous. The leading members of the Mughal religious establishment mounted an intense campaign against him, accusing him of being both a Mahdawi and a Shia.

The campaign was led by two of the most powerful clerics of the age: Abdullah Sultanpuri, known as the Makhdum-ul-Mulk, and Shaikh Abd-un-Nabi, the chief judicial officer of the empire. These men were not minor critics. They held enormous institutional power, and their hostility could end a scholar’s career and threaten his life.

Years on the run 🔗

The persecution was not abstract or merely academic. It had brutal, real-world consequences. Accused of heresy, Shaikh Mubarak was driven with his family from home to home in search of refuge, even living for a time in Delhi. The family effectively lived as fugitives, and by some accounts this fearful, unsettled existence stretched on for nearly twenty years.

The matter grew worse when the young Abul Fazal, never one to stay silent, publicly challenged the views of one of the leading scholars around 1569-70. This act of defiance only sharpened the establishment’s anger and made the atmosphere at court even more tense. The family’s social standing collapsed, their writings were dismissed, and they faced the constant fear of arrest or worse.

The making of a witness 🔗

Abul Fazal was born in Agra in January 1551, the second son of Shaikh Mubarak. He was educated by his father from an early age in the Islamic sciences, Greek philosophy, and mysticism, so he absorbed both his father’s learning and, soon enough, his father’s troubles. He grew up watching the people who claimed to be guardians of religion use that authority to torment a learned, sincere man whose only crime was thinking for himself.

This experience left a permanent mark. The events surrounding his father’s persecution made such a profound impression on Abul Fazal that he later devoted a major part of his autobiography to describing them. The humiliation of the family became the central political education of his life. It taught him a lesson he would never forget: religious authority, when it goes unchecked, can become a weapon of oppression rather than a source of enlightenment.

From victim to intellectual rebel 🔗

Abul Fazal’s response to all this was not bitterness or retreat. It was a deliberate, lifelong intellectual campaign. He dedicated his subsequent career to exposing what he saw as the narrow-minded bigotry of the orthodox clergy. The persecution that could have crushed the family instead produced one of the sharpest critics the religious establishment had ever faced.

Scholars have described how these circumstances turned Abul Fazal into what one account calls an intellectual rebel who repeatedly strove for intellectual freedom. His hostility to the clergy was not a pose or a courtly convenience. It was rooted in something he had lived through, and that authenticity gave his arguments real force.

Reason over blind imitation 🔗

The heart of Abul Fazal’s intellectual project was a sharp distinction between reason (aql) and blind imitation of tradition (taqlid). The orthodox scholars derived their authority from taqlid, the uncritical deference to inherited rulings and precedents. Abul Fazal attacked this directly, arguing that the case for pursuing reason and rejecting traditionalism was so obvious it barely needed defending. If mere tradition were the measure of truth, he argued, then every prophet would have simply followed the old customs instead of bringing something new.

It is worth being precise about what kind of rationality this was. As the historian Harbans Mukhia has pointed out, Abul Fazal’s reason was not the secular, scientific rationality of the European Enlightenment. Instead, it was a rationality immersed in religiosity, built on a new distinction between a universal, all-embracing religiosity and the narrow denominational religions that divided people. For Abul Fazal, the squabbling sects had lost sight of the universal God in their obsession with sectarian rules.

The architect of Akbar’s reforms 🔗

This is where Abul Fazal’s personal history connected with the great political project of his age. When he first appeared at Akbar’s court in 1574, encouraged by his father and his elder brother Faizi, he found a ruler who was already looking for ways to escape the control of the same orthodox clergy that had tormented his family. The match was almost perfect. Akbar wanted philosophical and theoretical justification to consolidate his power against rival centres of authority, and Abul Fazal had spent his whole life building exactly that case.

Abul Fazal quickly gained the emperor’s favour and became his closest confidant, court historian, and ideologue. His monumental works, the Akbarnama and its administrative volume the Ain-i-Akbari, became the official record of the reign and, just as importantly, the manifesto of a new theory of kingship.

A sovereignty not built on Shariah 🔗

In the Ain-i-Akbari, Abul Fazal did something genuinely radical for his time. He constructed a theory of sovereignty based on a social contract rather than on religious law. He painted a picture of a pre-state society sliding into lawlessness and rebellion, and argued that a strong ruler was necessary to protect his subjects. In exchange for obedience, the emperor safeguarded the life, property, honour, and faith of his people. This logic placed the foundation of the state in a worldly bargain between ruler and ruled, not in the dictates of theologians, and in doing so it quietly stripped the clergy of their claim to supremacy over the king.

This idea echoes, in a medieval Indian setting, the kind of reasoning that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes would later make famous in Europe, where a grim vision of life without authority justifies the creation of a powerful sovereign.

The Mahzar of 1579 🔗

The most dramatic expression of this thinking came with the famous decree of 1579, often called the Mahzar or the Infallibility Decree. By this document, Akbar was recognised as the Imam-i-Adil, the just and final arbiter of disputes among the religious scholars whenever they disagreed on a point of law, provided his ruling did not contradict the Quran. It elevated the emperor above the jurists and gave him the authority to settle religious controversies himself.

Crucially, this decree was reportedly drafted by Shaikh Mubarak himself, with his sons playing an effective role in getting it approved. There is a striking symmetry here. The same family that had been hunted by the clergy now helped author the document that weakened the power of the clergy over the state. The decree was a deliberate step in Akbar’s broader strategy to curb the dominance of the orthodox establishment and assert imperial control over religious affairs.

Sulh-i-kul and the vision of universal peace 🔗

The principle that tied all of Abul Fazal’s thought together was sulh-i-kul, usually translated as universal or absolute peace. This was the idea that the ruler, as an agent of the divine, could not discriminate between the various faiths of his subjects. Under sulh-i-kul, all religions and sects enjoyed freedom of expression, on the single condition that they did not threaten the monarchy or fight among themselves.

For Abul Fazal, sulh-i-kul was the very foundation of enlightened governance, and it flowed directly from his rejection of sectarian narrowness. The doctrine became the bedrock of Akbar’s policy of religious tolerance, supporting measures the emperor had already begun, such as alliances with the Rajputs and the abolition of taxes on non-Muslims. The man who had watched his father persecuted for his beliefs now helped build a state in which, at least in principle, no one would suffer that fate again.

A legacy shaped by struggle 🔗

It is hard to imagine Abul Fazal’s philosophy existing without his father’s suffering. The persecution gave him a clear enemy in the form of clerical bigotry, a clear value in the form of reason over blind imitation, and a clear political goal in the form of a tolerant state freed from the grip of the orthodox establishment. His ideas on rational governance, religious harmony, and the moral responsibility of rulers left a lasting impression on Mughal statecraft and on Persian historiography.

His radical approach was admired by many later historians, even if, as Mukhia notes, there were few takers for it in the centuries that immediately followed. Abul Fazal himself paid a heavy price for his closeness to Akbar. In 1602 he was assassinated on the secret orders of Akbar’s rebellious son, the future emperor Jahangir, who saw the loyal minister as an obstacle. The intellectual rebel who began life as a hunted child died as a victim of court politics, but the body of thought he left behind remains one of the boldest defences of reason and tolerance in pre-modern Indian political thinking.

What do you think? Does personal suffering produce sharper, more authentic political ideas, or can it just as easily distort a thinker’s judgement? And if a powerful ruler is the one protecting religious freedom, as Akbar did through Abul Fazal’s vision, how secure can that freedom really be once the ruler changes?

References

1. https://www.gktoday.in/abul-fazal/
2. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-fazl-allami-historian/
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84185/3/Unit-14.pdf
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0971945820907406
5. https://indianhistorycollective.com/abdul-qadir-badauni-abul-fazl-two-mughal-intellectuals-in-king-akbars-court/
6. https://lotusarise.com/abul-fazls-concept-of-monarchy/
7. https://www.historymarg.com/2023/10/a-critical-analysis-of-akbars-religious.html