Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
59. Akbar, the Great Moghul - Part 2 of 5
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
To augment the standing army, and to reward his cohorts, Akbar instituted a system of mansabs and jagirs. Jagirs were land grants given to courtiers for meritorious service. Mansabs were lands allocated to nobles in proportion to the number of mounted cavalry that the mansabdar would supply in times of war.
The number of mounted horsemen requisitioned in time of war ranged from ten for a mansabdar to ten thousand for a prince or an Emir ulOmara. The Mansabs served the empire well during the period of its expansion. But once decay set in, they also compounded the process of decay. The larger mansabdars acted as feudal lords over their peasants. When the central power of the empire weakened (1707-1740), tax collection could not be enforced, and the Emperor’s treasury was drained, further weakening his authority.
Thus, India entered the age of feudalism just as England was working its way out of it. The mansabs and jagirs stayed on during the British era. They were abolished in independent India through successive land reforms. In Pakistan, they have continued to this day, and exercise a large influence on the politics of the country.
Akbar was one of the foremost reformers in India’s long history. He divided his vast empire into subas (provinces), each one governed by a trusted emir or a prince. The governors were rotated to minimize corruption and were made responsible for their decisions. The subas were subdivided into sarkars (districts), the sarkars into parganas (sub-districts). Each city had a kotwal (mayor), and the surrounding countryside was administered by a foujdar. Tax collection and fiscal affairs were rationalized.
Akbar abolished child marriages, forbade sati (the burning of a widow with her husband’s funeral pyre which was practiced in some Hindu circles), built roads, reduced taxes on farmland to one-third of the yield, and made justice for all his subjects a cornerstone of his realm. Farmers were encouraged to bring more land under cultivation, guilds had official blessing, and both internal and international trade prospered. He treated the Hindus as people of the Book, abolished the jizya, bestowed on them religious autonomy, and allowed their own law, the dharma-shastra to be used in internal disputes. To the newly emerging community of Sikhs, he gave the area of Amritsar as a land grant, and promoted peaceful coexistence. His philosophy of sulah e kul (peace between all communities) embraced all of his subjects with himself as a father figure.
Akbar, the empire builder, was aware of the geopolitics of the age. With the Ottomans, who were the dominant land power in Eurasia, his relations were close and cordial. Akbar acknowledged the Caliphate in Istanbul as one “in the tradition of the four rightly guided Caliphs”, while maintaining the independence of Hindustan. Relations with the Safavids of Persia were strained because of warfare over the control of the important trading center of Qandahar in southern Afghanistan. Qandahar was captured by Akbar but was lost to the Persians during the reign of Jehangir. Akbar had a working relationship with the Portuguese who saw in him a possible convert to their faith. The Portuguese dominated the Indian Ocean, and their goodwill was required to guarantee safe passage for pilgrims to Mecca.
Akbar’s method of managing geopolitics was through matrimonial politics. Of Akbar’s wives, one was a Rajput; one was a Turk, and one a Portuguese. In 1562, at the age of 20, Emperor Akbar married Princess Jodha Bai, daughter of Raja Bharmal of Amber, Rajasthan. This was a benchmark not only in the administration of the Great Moghul, but also in the larger global history of the Muslim people. Jodha Bai was the mother of Emperor Jehangir and was the Queen Mother of Hindustan during the reign of the Great Moghul.
From a political perspective, the issue before the Delhi Sultanate since its inception in 1205 was its relationship with the people of Hindustan who were predominantly Hindu. The first invasions had brought but a few Turkomans and Mamlukes into the subcontinent. Their presence was a thin veneer, which masked the gigantic edifice of India. There was little participation in the imperial administration from people of Indian origin, either Hindu or Muslim. AlauddinKhilji (d. 1316), who was perhaps the most far-sighted Sultan in pre-Moghul India, opened the doors of employment to Indians. However, the empire still suffered from a basic flaw in that it was ruled by coercion rather than by consensus. The Khilji Empire, which embraced the entire subcontinent, lasted only a generation (1290-1320), followed by the Tughlaq Empire, which had a similar brief tenure. During the rule of Muhammed bin Tughlaq (d.1351), the empire disintegrated, with independent kingdoms emerging in Bengal, Gujrat, Vijayanagar and the Deccan. Subsequent Sultanates of Delhi, such as the Lodhis (1451-1526), were mere shadows of the great empire of AlauddinKhilji and were limited to Delhi and its surrounding regions.
Akbar was cognizant of this terminal defect and sought to redress it. Sher Shah Suri (1540-1545) had provided a good example, and Akbar sought to build on it. The highest posts of the government were opened to all of his subjects, whether they were Hindu or Muslim, or came from Afghan, Persian or Indian backgrounds. His empire was a meritocracy and he promoted men of talent wherever he found them. While the two brothers Faizi (1545-1595) and AbulFazal (1551-1602) were prominent courtiers, so were Raja Todarmal and Raja Man Singh. Todarmal’s organization of the fiscal affairs of the empire lasted well into the 19th century, until the British replaced it. Man Singh served as the commander of the armies during several missions, and also as governor of the predominantly Muslim provinces of Kabul and Bengal.
Akbar, a product of folk Islam, had no difficulty with classical Indian arts, and became an avid promoter of Hindustani music, classical dances and Hindustani literature. The celebrated Tan Sen, perhaps the greatest of Indian musicians, lived at Akbar’s court. Hindustani music styles, classical dances, the Urdu and Hindi languages, went through a profound transformation in Akbar’s court.
The Emperor’s reach to his subjects transcended the mere affairs of state. Through his marriages to a Rajput Hindu princess, a Turkish Muslim noblewoman, and a Portuguese Christian, he sought not just to lay the foundation of an Indian empire, but also to transform the very essence of Muslim interaction with non-Muslims. Not until the Turkomans entered India (1191 onwards), did Muslims face the gut-wrenching issue that millions of Muslims face today: What does it mean to be a Muslim in a predominantly non-Muslim world? During its classical age, Islam had come into contact with the Jews and the Christians. But interactions with these two faiths were relatively easy; they were accepted as people of the book. Interactions with Persia were also comparatively easy, because most Persians accepted Islam early in Islamic history, and were absorbed into the mainstream. In India, they met up with the ancient Vedic civilization, and the answers were not that easy. During the zenith of classical Islamic civilizations, in the courts of Harun (d. 809) and Mamun (d. 833), Hindu scholars had arrived with their books of astronomy and mathematics and had participated in the translation of these books into Arabic. But these interactions were academic and limited to the learned men of science and culture.
When the Turkoman territories extended to Delhi, the question of interaction with the Hindus was not merely academic; it became the central political issue. The difficulties of accommodating the ancient, non-Semitic religions of Hindustan were compounded by the disaster of Mongol invasions. Genghiz Khan’s invasions produced a sharp discontinuity in Islamic history. The great centers of learning, which had housed scholars of repute, were no longer available to provide answers to pressing issues. Cultivation of the sciences of Fiqh had essentially come to a halt sometime after the death of Imam Hanbal (780-855). Indian Islam thus grew up and matured in the post-Mongol era, guided not by the great fuqaha who had dominated the Abbasid era, but by the Sufis who preserved the spiritual dimension of faith.
The initial response of the Turkomans to the Indian question was one of rejection. Indians were treated as non-believers, accorded the status of protected people (Arabic word: dhimmi or zimmi), made to pay the jizya, and in return were exempt from military conscription. The issue of whether or not they were at one time “people of the book” was not raised nor was it answered. The arrangement served the Delhi Sultans well because in their perennial warfare, they needed cash and jizya provided a source of ready cash. This also explains why the Sultans made little attempt to propagate Islam, since that would reduce their tax revenues. The attempts made by Emperor Alauddin to bring Indians into the realm were purely administrative; the fundamental issues of religious compatibility were not addressed.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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