Akbar’s views and policies regarding institutional religions evolved throughout his lifetime, swinging from one position to another in ways that puzzled or shocked contemporary observers. Both in his own day and in modern times he has been called everything from a strict Muslim to an apostate, from a free-thinker to a crypto-Hindu, from a Zoroastrian to a proto-Christian, from an atheist to a radical innovator, even a prophet. Each of these assessments contains a degree of truth, depending on which phase of his long forty-nine-year reign one considers. But through it all, the one constant was the emperor’s unquenchable curiosity regarding all things religious. This was abetted by his awareness that the turn of the first Islamic millennium, 1000 AH (AD 1591), would occur in the thirty-fifth year of his reign. Because that year also saw the height of his political successes and the maturity of his courtly style, some of his courtiers viewed Akbar as a millennial figure – as did the emperor himself for a while.
As a youth, Akbar had received a sound religious training by both Shi‘i and Sunni tutors, but as an adult he looked back with regret on his life before the age of twenty-one, confessing that in those days he had ‘persecuted men into conformity with my faith and deemed it Islam’.48 But after his twenty-first year he experienced what he called an internal bitterness, acknowledging that his soul had been ‘seized with exceeding sorrow’.49 Thus began a rocky spiritual ride. This was also when he began marrying the daughters of Rajput chiefs and placing those women on a social par with other women of the court, contributing to the growing diffusion of Rajput values in Mughal culture. Changes in official policies regarding non-Muslims soon followed. In 1563, also when aged twenty-one, he abolished pilgrimage taxes on non-Muslim institutions. The next year he abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims, a measure to which earlier Muslim rulers had paid lip service but seldom enforced. The effect was to treat all Mughal subjects, regardless of religion, on a basis of legal equality before the state. He also banned the killing of cows and peacocks. In 1565 he went further by actively supporting Hindu institutions, establishing a grant that maintained the Govinda Deva Temple at Vrindavan.50 On the other hand, his bloody conquest of the Rajput fort of Chittor in 1568 was immediately followed by a ‘victory declaration’ (fath-nama) in which the emperor, flushed with victory, boasted of engaging in jihad, of occupying a fort belonging to infidels, and of ‘establishing Islam’ there.51
However, just a few years later, around 1571, Akbar fell under the influence of the Spanish-Arab mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi, whose pantheistic doctrines seem to have led him to reject the narrow, scripturalist understandings of Islam as promoted by his own state-supported clerics. His commitment to the more liberal-minded Chishti school of Sufism also deepened. Ever since 1562 he made annual pilgrimages to the shrine of the founder of the Chishti Sufi tradition in India, Shaikh Mu‘in al-Din Chishti (d. 1236), located in Ajmer, 350 kilometres west of Fatehpur Sikri. Some of those visits he made by foot across the scorching sands of Rajasthan. By 1577 he was practising arduous physical austerities unique to the Chishti order. It was at about this time, too, that he established in his court a so-called ‘House of Worship’ (‘ibadat-khana), in which he presided over formal debates between Muslims, Brahmins, Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians. Lasting late into the night, these soirées often saw Jesuit Fathers pose knotty theological questions to Muslim clerics, with the emperor apparently enjoying the spectacle of those clerics being discomfited.
These inter-faith debates led Akbar to conclude, however, that all religions were either equally true or equally false, a position that provoked condemnation among Muslim clerics and dismay among the delegation of Jesuit Fathers at his court, who had been hoping for his conversion.52 Matters came to a head in May 1578 when, in the midst of a hunting expedition in the Punjab, the emperor suddenly fell unconscious, which his friend and adviser Abu’l-fazl attributed to some spiritual experience. Upon recovery, he halted the hunt and freed the animals that had been caught by the beaters. At about the same time he adopted a vegetarian diet and shortened his hair in the manner of religious ascetics.53 But then, about a month after the hunting incident, informed that his ancestor Timur had occasionally read the Friday sermon in the Samarqand mosque, Akbar mounted the pulpit of Fatehpur Sikri’s royal mosque and began to do the same. In the midst of the sermon, however, he suddenly broke into a fit of stammering and trembling. Unable to continue, he stepped down and handed over the duties to a cleric.54
The problem evidently shadowing Akbar in those tumultuous months was how to reconcile imperial and religious authority, and perhaps, ultimately, how best to articulate his own sovereign identity. Several issues were now forcing a break with Sunni opinion. One of these was his multiple marriages, for which his Muslim jurists believed there was no legal basis. A particularly bitter controversy arose when one of his judges ordered the execution of a Brahmin who had allegedly cursed the Prophet of Islam. Akbar was infuriated when he heard of this, especially when advised that Muslim rulers were legally obliged to protect their non-Muslim subjects, even if they committed the act of which the Brahmin was accused. In response, the emperor exiled the judge to Mecca. In August 1579 he went further by issuing an order proclaiming his own ultimate authority in interpreting all matters pertaining to Islam, adopting for himself such grandiose titles as ‘commander of the faithful’, ‘shadow of God’ and ‘king of Islam’.55 Later that year, he even considered substituting his own name for that of the Prophet Muhammad in the Islamic credo, but he abandoned the idea when it caused commotion.56 For many of his Muslim subjects this was simply too much. In 1580, with rumours of Akbar’s religious excesses circulating throughout the realm, one disgruntled cleric urged the emperor’s half-brother Mirza Hakim in Kabul to seize the throne, which triggered the emperor’s long and eventful expedition to the north-west frontier.
During that march to Afghanistan, launched in early 1581, Akbar’s religious thinking made another sharp turn. When his army reached Peshawar, at the base of the Khyber Pass, he assured the son of Shaikh Bayazid, founder of the militant illuminationist Roshaniyya cult in eastern Afghanistan, that he was perfectly free to practise his religion. Learning of this, Father Monserrate, a member of the first Jesuit mission to Akbar’s court who was accompanying the expedition, remarked that ‘the King cared little that in allowing everyone to follow his religion he was in reality violating all’.57 Yet Akbar was still seen publicly offering prayers in a mosque in the Khyber Pass, and he still maintained his white tent where he supposedly performed his prayers in private. But on the return trip, after having driven his brother out of Kabul and reasserted his authority there, the white tent was nowhere to be seen, an absence the emperor pretended not to notice.58 This was also when he confided to Father Monserrate that he was not a Muslim, adding that he would allow his sons to follow whatever religion they might choose.59 The timing of this notable confession suggests that, with his brother eliminated as a potential focus of Islamic revolt, the emperor felt free to follow his own religious instincts. Moreover, it was clear to him by now that his earlier claims to Islamic leadership had proved fruitless: to pious Muslims they were deeply offensive, while to his non-Muslim subjects they were meaningless.
All this was happening while powerful millennial currents regarding an anticipated End of the World and Day of Judgment were roiling in Christian and Muslim societies.60 People in both faith traditions had been looking expectantly for signs of the apocalypse, or even claiming to be personally heralding a new age of justice that would follow the present age of injustice and chaos. In 1501, nearly a decade after millennial expectations had helped drive Christopher Columbus on his famous voyage westwards from Spain, Shah Isma‘il had launched Iran’s Safavid dynasty, claiming to be a messiah figure and identifying himself variously with Alexander, ‘Ali and even God. His Turkoman tribal followers, members of a rustic Sufi tradition of which Isma‘il was leader, believed him to be invincible, even immortal. Such potent beliefs propelled him and his ardent followers to embark on a vast campaign of ‘world conquest’ that would include the entire Iranian plateau, eastern Anatolia, Iraq, western Afghanistan and much of Central Asia.
Instead of first proclaiming himself a millennial sovereign and then embarking on a programme of territorial conquest, as Shah Isma‘il had done, Akbar projected himself as a saintly and messianic figure only after having conquered much of northern India. Apocalyptic ideas were clearly on his mind when he marched to Kabul to confront Mirza Hakim. In conversations with Father Monserrate during that march he made detailed inquiries about the Last Judgment, whether Christ would be the Judge, when it would occur, and what sort of signs would precede that day. Monserrate replied that such signs would include wars and rebellions, and that ‘these things we see happening very frequently in our time’.61 Upon returning to his capital, Akbar once again overhauled his sovereign identity, combining a saintly and a messianic persona in ways that recall what Iran’s Shah Isma‘il had done earlier in the century. According to his courtier and private critic Badauni, the emperor believed that Islam would last only 1,000 years – until 1000 AH, corresponding to AD 1591 – at which point he would be free to abjure the religion altogether. His chronicler Abu’l-fazl, on the other hand, asserted that Akbar had been born to inaugurate the second Islamic millennium,62 a claim the emperor evidently acted upon ten years before its arrival. In 1582, or 990 AH, he decreed that for the next ten years all coins of the realm would bear the same date, 1000 AH.63 In 1585 he ordered the minting of coins bearing only the words Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu, or ‘God is great, splendid is His Glory’ – an ambiguous legend that could also be read as ‘Akbar is God’, with the word for glory also matching part of the emperor’s given name, Jalal.64 But in 1591, when the Islamic millennium actually did arrive, his coins ceased referring to the millennium altogether and began using instead a solar calendar based on the date of his accession.
His ten-year flirtation with millennial sovereignty having passed, Akbar now reverted to his predominant identity as a sacred king. In the early 1580s he had propounded a religious concoction, dubbed the Din-i Ilahi, or ‘divine faith’, which the Jesuits at his court judged an eclectic brew drawn from all existing systems. At its core was the emperor’s self-fashioning as the spiritual guide for his subjects. Despite what his Muslim adversaries or Jesuit interlocutors might have thought, Akbar’s principal ideologue, Abu’l-fazl, implied that his patron did not oppose Islam or any other religion, but rather that, as the most sacred sovereign on earth, he was simply above all religions.65 He had fashioned himself not as a Muslim ruler, but as the ruler of all humanity.66 In addition, the Jesuits noticed that the emperor had begun showing increasing favour to Hindus, and that he was venerating the rising sun every dawn from the highest point of his palace roof.67 He had also memorized the 1,001 Sanskrit names of the sun.68
As a result of these shifts in Akbar’s religious ideology, the Jesuit delegation, now very discouraged, gradually withdrew from participating in the emperor’s debates in the House of Worship, grudgingly concluding that he would never accept baptism. This, in turn, left the field open to increasing Hindu influence, not only in the debates in the House of Worship, but throughout the court. Some twenty Hindu chieftains, mainly Rajputs, were now admitted to the innermost parts of Akbar’s palace, a privilege not allowed even to Muslim courtiers.69 Meanwhile, the emperor adopted the political rituals of a traditional Indian raja, presenting himself to both public and private audiences seated in a jharokha. Finally, in view of the many peoples and cultures encompassed in his sprawling realm, Akbar and Abu’l-fazl promulgated a policy of sulh-i kull. Variously understood as ‘perfect reconciliation’, ‘universal toleration’, ‘peace with all’ or ‘complete civility’, this appears to have been a product of Akbar’s inclusivist religious outlook, which not only acknowledged the presence of cultural diversity in Mughal India but challenged his subjects to engage with new sources of knowledge, even if they conflicted with the traditions of their own community.70 There is even indirect evidence that, with the coming of the Islamic millennium in 1591, Akbar’s adventurous leanings led him to order the suppression of formal Islamic rites, including the prohibition of public prayer and the destruction of at least one congregational mosque. But these decrees do not appear to have been carried out. By 1601, just four years before his death, he had evidently backed off from authorizing such destabilizing measures. In fact, he seems to have resumed practising the external rites of Islam, if only to silence his conservative critics.71
If Akbar’s stance on religion shifted over time, his governing policies remained more stable. Early in his reign, he replaced the Delhi sultanate’s notion of a single, all-powerful minister, or vazir, with four central ministries: finance under a chief diwan, army under a mir bakhshi, the royal household under a khan-i saman, and the judiciary under a qazi al-quzat (or sadr-i jahan). These four offices were replicated in each of the empire’s fourteen provinces, co-ordinated by a governor. To maximize control over state revenue functions, towards the end of his reign he made provincial diwans answerable to the imperial diwan, instead of, as formerly, to provincial governors. Unlike territories governed by tributary vassals, territories under direct rule were administered by the zabt system, according to which land revenue was collected in cash at rates calculated according to which crop was sown, the size of cropped land and soil types.
For administering justice, provincial judges appointed district-level judges (qazi, shiqdar), who judged civil and criminal cases on the basis of the Islamic shari‘a. Cases involving non-Muslims were normally decided by village councils (panchayat) according to local custom, although Mughal judges also adjudicated such cases on the basis of local custom, not Islamic law.72 All this testifies to the care Akbar gave to upholding the principle of justice, an ideal inherited from centuries of Persianate discourse and practice.73 Capital cases and important civil cases were normally conducted by the emperor himself, who alone could issue a death penalty. Punishments, moreover, were not meted out until he had given his orders a third time. Even in such cases, Akbar was capable of compassion. On one occasion, a prisoner who had been convicted of desertion from the army was handed over to him for an order of execution. The prisoner pleaded that his life be spared on the grounds that he possessed marvellous powers of a certain nature. When the emperor asked what those powers might be, the prisoner replied that he could sing beautifully. So Akbar commanded that he sing. ‘The wretched fellow’, writes a European observer:
then began to sing in a voice so discordant and absurd that everyone began to laugh and murmur, and the King himself could scarcely control his smiles. When the guilty man perceived this he put in, ‘Pardon me this poor performance, O King. For these guards of yours dragged me along so roughly and cruelly, on a hot and dusty road, and pummelled me so brutally with their fists, that my throat is full of dust, and my voice so husky that I cannot do myself justice in singing.’74
Appreciating the man’s wit, Akbar pardoned both him and his companions.